Ragar gives his thoughts on two weekends with Cryptic's new D&D MMO

Conclusions

There are some areas of Neverwinter that could use some work. NPCs should have a little more emotion during dialogue - it doesn't have to be extreme, but the face/body should at least try to line up with the voice acting. For the Skirmishes, I only saw the first two, but both were "fight waves of guys, then more waves, then a boss wave". I understand these are built around a bit looser party structure, but I hope there's a bit more variety to the rest of the Skirmishes. In addition I'd also like to see more branching in questing options. More than likely this is just due to controlled beta testing, but right now the questing is very much "finish zone A, then B, then C". That's fine for your first character, but people who may not care for a zone or people rolling alts want options - I may not really feel like doing the Tower District yet again on my third character.

Speaking of alts, my main area of concern is the character class selection. Five is fine to launch with, but this is D&D - player choice is extremely important. The five character classes at launch (Great Weapon Fighter would be the fifth) make up most of the archetypes, but we're missing others like the archer/ranger, the unarmed monk, the bard, etc. Most of my old D&D characters were fighters, but there were many variants just within that one character class. Getting the game out is the first step, but Cryptic needs to be ready to come out with additional character options as we move past launch. Be it through new Paragon paths or new base character classes, the options available to the players need to increase on a regular basis. Given Cryptic's history with other MMOs like Champions Online, I'd imagine they've thought of this already. All that's left is to see if they can keep pace with the demands of the players. I'm sure there’re plenty of paladins, warlords, druids, etc. looking at Neverwinter right now and wondering, "Where's my class?"

There's still plenty more to talk about with Neverwinter, but I think I've covered the bases enough to give my impressions. Overall, I think the game's awesome - it impressed me enough at the first PAX that I spent my own money on one of the Founders Packs and the last two beta weekends have not disappointed me. They make great use of the Forgotten Realms setting and Neverwinter is the perfect city to focus on for that world. When I say the combat feels like Tera, I consider that high praise since that's probably my favorite combat system. The dungeon skill system is a nice way to bring in more of that D&D flavor by interacting with dungeons without the problems faced by min-maxing a full skill-point system. The game's not perfect as I've mentioned, but even with those issues it's still a very fun MMO and I look forward to spending quite a bit more time in the land of Faerûn whenever the game goes live.

Michael "Ragar" Branham