I participated in the Neverwinter beta last weekend, and will participate in the third and final beta next weekend. I also get a five day VIP headstart on the official launch, though no date has yet been announced. I'm really happy with the game so far, though it's obviously no City of Heroes. I've put some of my thoughts below in case anyone is interested in checking it out.



- It will be free to play with a microtransaction model. I've already purchased their goodie packs, which may or may not only be available during before live launch. They haven't said yet whether the goodies will be for sale after launch. They have the Guardian pack for $60 and the Founder's pack for $200, each of which comes with exclusive goodies and items to help your characters on their adventures. However, you will be able to play the game for free forever, should you so desire.

- Neverwinter fantasy instead of comic-book based, set in the city of Neverwinter (of D&D fame), many years after the spellplague. (I think it's supposed to be 100 years since the last neverwinter/baldur's gate games, but I'm not sure.)

- No side-kick/exemplar system yet, and I'm still not sure if missions/quests scale to party size and level. More testing. I am hopeful that a sidekick system will come soon.

- When you die, you respawn at the last camp fire you were at. I think you're supposed to lose progress on your mission, or maybe lose XP or something, but I faced no adverse concequences last beta. I could run through the mostly empty mission to the end and defeat the guy who had killed me. I also didn't find myself facing death very often, so they may end up nerfing the classes or making the mobs harder.

- The quest and journal system are really great. It's easy to know what I'm supposed to do and where I'm supposed to go, the journal is informative without being obtrusive, and if there's a limit to the number of quests you can have at once, I didn't hit it.

- Speaking of "informative without being obtrusive" - that describes the whole UI. I haven't experimented with chat tabs yet, but so far all of the elements are easy to use and make sense. The "sparkling breadcrumbs" trail that leads you places is wonderful. It leads you to the selected mission, or a place you've clicked on the map. Again, informative without being obtrusive, and you can turn it on and off with the Z key.

- As you level up, you get access to more powers. You can't fit all of your powers into the tray at once, but you can switch them out any time, to customize your build for a given encounter. The powers also have added effects or do subtly different things if you are in your class's "special mode", adding more variety and utility.

- Your gear determines your appearance, and right now a lot of the gear looks the same as you level up. However there's a "vanity" screen where you can equip non-combat costumes. I think you're supposed to be able to play in these costumes and still get your armor bonus, but it may not have been working properly last weekend. Also there's not much to choose from for vanity clothes yet. You get woolen peasant top and pants early on, and then there's nothing else in the game. We're all assuming more clothes will be added before launch.

- A lot of the NPCs are voice-acted. It's not the best voice acting ever, but it's still pretty cool, and continued at least until L20 (the highest level I've yet reached). I Will see next weekend how far the voice acting goes in the game, but it seems to be persistent. Again, not ALL NPCs and not all mission text is voice acted, but a lot is.

- The mouse is tied to camera look, and this cannot be changed. I thought this would be a show-stopper for me, but I got used to it pretty quickly. There's no way to target something by clicking on it or selecting it, so single target healing a moving ally can be difficult, but otherwise I didn't run into issues. (Whatever is within about an inch of the reticle in the center of your screen is going to be targeted. If you want to target something, you have to look at it.)

- You can press and hold the mouse button to continuously execute your at-will powers. (one on each mouse button.) So you don't have to repeatedly click the mouse button, you can just press and hold. If any enemy is within about an inch or half inch of your targeting reticle, the game will move your line of sight to be centered on that foe, and that's what you target. When that foe dies, if you're still holding the button down, the game will try to re-center on a nearby bad guy and fire at him. I'm probably not explaining this very well.. but let's just say there's a very slight built-in boost to help you target stuff correctly, but you can't ever actually "select" something (like you would select a teammate or enemy without executing any powers in City).

- Companions (pets) were handled very well, IMO. You get a companion mission when you hit L16, and you get to pick a companion from a limited pool. You can buy other companions in the game's stores for either in-game gold, or real money. All companions are "combat" style, meaning they fight, heal, and buff along side you, depending on what type of companion you get. I'm not sure what they did to let the servers handle the load of every player having at least two character models out all the time. (It's also supposedly going be serverless, all one server, so that's a lot of load!)

- You can only have one companion out at a time. As your companion adventures with you, it gains experience. You then send your companion away for training (they just won't be with you for a number of minutes, it tells you how long it will take to train them). You can also enhance your companions with runes and items.

- Mounts are also cool, though you don't get one for free. Mounts also gain experience, and I think they can be equipped with runes and things too. Not sure yet. You get access to mounts at L20, and I did get one, but I didn't do much with it before hopping on another character.

- Anyone can name their character anything they want, because all characters are coded as "charactername@handle". So every player can roll up a toon named Bob, if they so desire. You send emails to charactername@handle, and you can attach up to five items per email. Unfortunately to send or claim emails with items, you have to be near a courier. I wouldn't mind so much except I've only found one courier in the game so far.

- The Foundry (Neverwinter's version of Architect Entertainment) is heavily tied into the rest of the game. Job boards posted in every zone, as well as "Well Informed Harper Agents" give you access to foundry quests, and several in-game quests have you go check out the foundry too. You get real in-game rewards for foundry content (instead of the equivalent of tickets). I haven't played any foundry missions yet, but I've heard there are some really good ones already.

- The event queue system is great. You bring up the event/queue screen (K), browse through available content (including foundry missions, raids, and so on). Every time I entered a queue in beta last weekend, I was on a team and entering the mission in under a minute. It's easy to use, fast, and fun.

- Some of the rewards are bugged, but that's being worked on. I really like how rewards are handled. As you run around in a team-based raid event, anyone can loot a dropped item. Then a window appears asking everyone: NEED, GREED, PASS. The item icon is red if you can't use the item, so I personally usually pass on those. The norm seems to be to GREED everything, for most people, though. Mobs also drop gold. If you're solo, no one can pick up your gold, in fact they don't even see it. (or your loot drops.) They can literally be standing on your gold pile and they won't get it. When you're on a team it's different - anyone can run over the gold and get it. But someone on the forums said it looked like the gold was being divided among teammates, so that too is cool. Then at the end there's a chest with something cool (supposedly), and this is also supposed to be a NEED/GREED/PASS roll. But right now whoever gets to the chest first, gets the item. They're working on it. There are also some raids where EVERYONE gets the item in the chest at the end, and in those cases, everyone is able to open a different instance of the chest and get their item.

Overall I am excited about the game, and I'm ready to invest my now-free COH time into NW. It's definitely not going to be everyone's cup of tea, but hopefully NW can fill the hole for a few other CoH folks too.

The whole look and feel sounds very much like a mix of The Secret World and Age of Conan (both by Funcom) to me. Swapping powers out due to the small power bar is annoying at times. I'm also torn about the need/greed/pass looting, but after all the time getting to good items is not longer than getting recipes in CoH.

Hope you found your new home, but nothing will be like CoH.

I was afraid I would be turned off by the relatively small power tray too, but in the end it doesn't bother me at all. For example, in City of Heroes you had probably two or three blasts that you used in your rotation, all three the same power, with a couple of tweaks to range or damage numbers. Instead, Neverwinter doesn't have the repetition of utility, so instead of 3 blasts you have 1. And while there are always powers I can't fit in my tray, I don't need most of them in most situations. I put the ones I like best or want to use the most in my tray, and if I find I need a different one for a given situation, it's easy to swap out.

I love that you're not locked into a build, in this sense. (When you spend points on feats, that's locked in unless you respec, but you can hot-swap your powers.) You can determine if powers work for your play-style, and if not you haven't "gimped your build", you just swap it back out of your tray.

I know the game won't do it for everyone, and you're right, nothing will ever replace CoH. And maybe I just really want to like this game, because it's Neverwinter and I love the Forgotten Realms universe. But honestly a lot of the things that I thought would bother me, aren't.

I'm torn. It's being published by Perfect World and after seeing what they pushed on Crytpic for STO (and CO) I'm really leery. Which is a shame, because I played a lot on persistent RP servers in the NWN days and I'd really like to play that again... but I don't think it's going to be from Neverwinter. :(

Try their Perfect World and Jade Dynasty. Those games are better.
They've been getting better with more experience and practice.

There are definitely a lot of RP guilds popping up, and it looks like the game will be pretty conducive to RP. I would definitely recommend checking Neverwinter out before you dismiss it. I definitely understand being leery of a company who has done things you don't like, but since NW will be free to play, there's no reason not to at least give it a whirl.

I'm kinda excited about NW.

Hopefully I'll see you around! My handle is @kwsapphire of course, and my first toon will be Sapphire@kwsapphire if you wanna drop me a line! :]

I'm looking forward to that as well.
It's being made by one of my favourite game companies (Perfect World International) so it's going to be awesome.

Also it's Drizzt's World! SQUEEE!

I got onto Beta last week and regret I didn't get as much time with it as I would have liked but the little bit I played I enjoyed more than I expected. I'm not much of a high fantasy gamer as I'm sort of weary of the genre but there was something about it I enjoyed, just he same. I am looking forward to trying more of it in the next Beta tests.

As I said in reply to Kin Thalas, I'm not one much to play in fantasy settings either, with the exception of D&D. I've played nearly every incarnation of Baldur's Gate and NWN (including IWD, excluding Torment only, which I do have, I just haven't played yet). I absolutely love the world and everything that comes with it, so this is definitely exciting for me.

My bet is, with everyone always selecting 'greed' [I've had experience with this particular method of handling things both in WoW and Star Wars:The Old Republic] is that if things are getting hectic, there's just no TIME to check out stats to see if it's better than what you have currently. So, 'greed' is the nicest way to handle it, if you're not sure you're going to need it or not. For lack of a better way of putting it. [if you have scavangers/a char that has to break things down for components, both WoW & SW:TOR offer that option as well with the 'need/greed/pass' screen. Is it something that this does?]

Might try to talk the hubby into trying it...he's only sort of a Forgotten Realms fan, but the nephew has been trying to get him into 'Lord of the Rings Online' with little success. He just doesn't like it, and says for a Turbine game it's disappointing. But, it'd give him a fantasy-based game he's more willing to play than 'Perfect World'. XD

You can definitely tell if you can't use the gear though. Everything is class-locked, so the whole icon is red if it's not your class. And while it could be said some people want to pass it to an alt, there are certainly people who just hit "need" on everything, whatever their reason. I didn't feel cheated on loot though to be honest.. so much stuff dropped that my inventory was often near full, and I'd have to go sell off a ton of stuff. I didn't feel starved for drops at all.

I'm going to check it out. I'm really enjoying TSW (I never would have checked it out if CoX hadn't ended, so that's the only good thing about CoX shutting down for me). I'll probably have some sort of "Samiya" username as that's traditionally part of my global handle or first character made on an MMO.

I find it interesting that you had such a good time with it, as my experience was almost exactly the opposite.

The 'At Will' and 'Encounter' powers struck me as well implemented, the 'Daily' ones, not nearly so much. The complete removal of Healing Surges especially struck me as a really bad, and highly limiting, choice on the part of the designers/devs.

In fact, the game as it was during the last beta weekend is highly limiting. You have a choice of 4 classes/roles: Ranged control with some DPS (Wizard), ranged heals with some DPS (Cleric), melee DPS with some (though not much, nor very useful stealth) (Rogue), and melee tank (Warrior).

Also highly limiting was the fact that you only have 2 character slots unless you've bought one of the Founder packs for either $60 or $200. Want to try another class? Delete a toon you've already played or pony up some money.

Actually, the cash-grab is utterly shameless. Especially once you start to get above level 10, the magic items drop so very frequently, and the Identify scrolls you need to use the gear or sell it for more than one (1) copper drop so rarely. And you can't buy the ID scrolls in game, you have to use real-world cash. I hear this was not the case in the first beta weekend, and it may not be the case in the upcoming weekend, but I'd bet they are going to keep them cash-only.

Also: the story is utterly linear, and exactly the same every time. Maybe it gets better in the later levels, I didn't get a character over 11 myself.

And a defining part of each class, the Divinity for Clerics, stealth for Rogues? You don't get access to until level 10. Far too long in my opinion. These should be basic and defining features of the class, but they are held off too long and just feel like some annoying add-on IMO.

Overall, I found Neverwinter to be quite disappointing, movement especially feels low and tedious, with a large chunk of unnecessary to-ing and fro-ing, and it just isn't nearly as fun as Guild Wars 2. I think GW2's 'Pay for the client, and you can micro-transact for some extras' style beats hell out of Neverwinter's 'The client and gameplay is free, but we're really going to pressure you to spend $$$' take.

And yeah, GW2 is published by NCsoft, but I'd pre-ordered that prior to the CoH announcement, and now I need never give them another cent. Neverwinter really felt like I would have to be constantly pouring cash into it to avoid the serious annoyances the game had for me.

Not sure what Healing Surge was, but I liked how the daily powers were implemented. I found building up my action meter to be fairly easy, so I had my dailys when I wanted them.

Also, there were only four classes in the second beta weekend. This weekend will have a fifth class. There are two more classes they want to have done shortly after launch. Yes, content and options are currently limited - but this is still beta. (There were only 3 classes the first weekend. They're releasing them as they can. And remember, City of Heroes only had 5 archetypes at launch too.)

Additional character slots are only going to be about $3, so I hear. Not very much of a cash grab if you ask me.

The GMs mentioned that fewer ID scrolls dropped than intended, and more unidentified items droped than intended. So the ratio you saw in beta was not working as intended. (I personally had oodles of ID scrolls drop, so it was working for me.) I believe you can also buy ID scrolls with Astral Diamonds, which can be earned in game through invocation and other means. I may be wrong though.

The story is still very linear up until L20, but I havent gotten any further than that. However, the developers also stated that the Foundry is meant to be your non-linear content. The built in quests are just to get you familiar with the game, you're supposed to be playing in the Foundry. (They recognized how much content D&D players are willing to create. Neverwinter Nights lasted for years online because people shared missions and mods. PWE is hoping to develop the same kind of culture here.)

I haven't checked out GW2, but I really disliked GW1. I tried it more than once, and just didn't enjoy myself at all. I'm sorry you had a bad experience in NW, but it's still in beta, and a lot of what you saw was aberrent behavior. I ask that you give it another try when it's actually polished, but I know that it ultimately won't be for everyone.