The Inn of the Four Winds

Neverwinter: Open Beta

Screen Shot, Alaryn and his clerical companion 

So I got into the open beta this last week for Neverwinter, the much heralded Free-to-Play game from Perfect World Entertainment and Cryptic Studios.   This game has gotten a lot of good press so far, and justifiably so.  It has a smooth play style once you get used to the slightly arcady feel to it.  For older fingers like mine it took some time to get used to using W,A,S,D and tab, and Q,E,R and thankfully my mouse has the 1-5 keys on it, so can do it all with two hands.  For those unfamiliar with the game, it is set in the Forgotten Realms city of Neverwinter during the 4th Edition D&D rules set, ie post Spell Plague.  For those of you who played Neverwinter Nights, and it's sequel NWN2 I know most of us wanted more of an MMO style game. Well this is it. :)  Bioware, who made the first NWN is busy with their project Star Wars: The Old Republic, so they are not involved. In comes Cryptic Studios and Perfect World Entertainment who runs a number of F2P games.  The fact that they have run several of these now helps Neverwinter have the feel of a game that will be around a long time.  

To start with, you are limited to two characters unless you buy more slots through their Zen Market.  Other than that, however, I've seen no limitations on play that require real money.  Most of the real money options currently are minor buffs and some things to open up other things. Most likely at somepoint that will change, but at least during the beta, it's relatively limited in my experience, which is a plus in my opinion.

Alaryn, my alter-ego, is as he should be, a trickster rogue.  That is, he is a dual dagger wielding elf with a habit of tumbling into trouble and poking things in the back with small sharp objects until they expire and shower him with lewtz.  I have found a number of places where the rogue is very handy to have a there are a number of traps in most of the crawls I've done.  The story line starts out pretty linear, as it has to I think, to teach you the game. Soon after it branches out some and you have many options to pursue.  

There is the Foundary, which is player created content.  Like the original NWN, the MMO version allows players to create content for other players to play and rate.  And through the Daily Foundary quest, encourage players to try the content out.  I tried one out today, and was pleasantly surprised with the effort and story work put into it by the author.  The rewards are set by Cryptic, so they aren't unbalancing compared to normal content.

There is Dungeon Delves.  The stock five player dungeons just like most other MMOs.  I did the first one today, the Cloak Tower (not to be confused with the Clock Tower as many players seem to call it).  It's a pretty straight forward crawl against the Many Arrows Orc Clan which is embedded in the city and making a fuss.  While I found the Need/Greed system slightly clunky in it's execution, it worked well other than the unguilded guy rolling need on everything (one in every game isn't there?)

There are skirmishes, which I have yet to try though it sounds like larger scale battles versus orcs and such.  I will try one, but just haven't gotten to it yet.

And of course, there is PVP arenas.  Not my thing, sorry.  I do understand it is a necessary part of the game, as there are many many people who like it, and it makes money, but well just not my thing.

Leveling through the first part of the game is pretty easy, your starter quest line will take you to level 4 and into the city itself. And another quest or two will get you to level 6.  After that it slows a bit, but not excessively so.  After a weekend of pretty steady play, I have Alaryn to level 17 and have cycled the second slot through three other toons to level 5 just to get a feel for the other classes.

The rogue plays a bit like a fighter early on, as you don't get stealth until level 10.  So while it fits Alaryn, it may frustrate some purists and those who are familiar with the stealthy rogues from other games.    They do dish out pretty effective damage though, from what I can tell, though I clearly need work. In my dungeon delve, I was the lowest kill count of anyone but the controller.  Meh, I am learning and I was busy trying to get the feel of things so I had something to write about.

Riding comes at level 20, and the mounts look cool from what I've seen.  Both the ones they give you with the Founders packs and those that you can buy from the traditional mount vendor. 

I've not gotten there yet, but I see a lot of mounted characters in game.

The servers are packed, which if you've played games like some of the other games I play is a nice change.  The graphics engine is smooth, and doesn't seem to hiccup much.  They are working hard on server stability, something that has yet to be adjusted for the player load, but it's the first weekend so that's to be expected.  All in all, So far so good. :)