[REVIEW] Neverwinter

(Note - original review was written in  2019, and some aspects of this review are no longer applicable after game updates and rebalances. Please keep that in mind while reading.)

It feels like MMORPGs are a dime a dozen these days. Just take a quick look on Steam and you can find a double handful of free-to-play MMOs without putting much effort in. Some are worth playing. Others, probably not so much.

Lately (and by lately I mean for about the past year or more), I’ve been a bit hooked on Neverwinter — an MMO based on the Forgotten Realms setting that most of us probably know in some form from a variety of Dungeons and Dragons adventures — which was developed by Cryptic Studios. Since I’ve been playing it on and off for so long now, I thought it was worth taking a look at the game as a whole and seeing what makes it different from other MMO offerings on the market.

 
Like most MMOs, you start off with character creation, picking from a selection of presets when it comes to race, gender, class, and facial features. No fine-tuned Skyrim-esque character creator where you can fine-tune the exact height of your character’s cheekbones and neck width; it’s all presets here.

Which is fine, and isn’t a mark against the game at all. It’s probably pretty rare that you’ll see your character’s face at all while playing Neverwinter, with the exceptions of going into the Character menu specifically, or playing around with camera angles. And there are still a fair number of options to choose from, so it doesn’t feel too limiting or too important to get the exact right combination of facial features that you may want for your avatar. Just pick the closest and away we go.

Since this game is based on the stat system used in D&D, he next step is to roll for your character’s stats, determining things like Strength, Charisma, Intelligence, and so on. Your character class will give you certain bonuses to these, and help you figure out which ones to prioritize, but the initial determination is random. Luck of the dice.

But here’s the thing: you can reroll. As many times as you want. I haven’t tried it out for myself, but I imagine that if you sit there for long enough, continually rerolling for your character’s stats, you could probably get every single thing very high before you even start playing. There’s no penalty to doing so, aside from taking up your own time. And that’s a bit odd, quite honestly, since it means that people aren’t limited to the luck of the dice so much as how much time they have on their hands to keep rerolling until they get exactly what they want.

INTO A NEW WORLD

 
Once you start the game, though, the stats you picked at the beginning matter, but they’re not nearly as important as you might think. Though you start off with this big adventure seeing battles between armies and dragons, facing down evil and winning, the game is, on the whole, your standard MMORPG. Talk to this guy, get that quest, do it, return, get another quest. Rinse and repeat.

Which isn’t necessarily bad. When it comes to quests and general gameplay, Neverwinter is quite a balanced game, not giving the player much difficulty no matter what character class they pick or what stats they rolled upon creation. Difficulty will increase as the game goes on, naturally, but if you do all of the quests that come your way (and there are a lot in every area, believe me!), by the time you move on to somewhere new, you’ll be at a good level and strength to face what’s coming.

Dying is an irritation, but not a massive setback. Dying results in you being teleported back to your last spawn point (usually a town or a campfire), being injured for a short time (which translates to a debuff in stats, and it can be healed by using an Injury Kit or just standing around the campfire for a while), and then going back into the fray and continuing whatever quest you were in the middle of. So far as I’ve seen, there isn’t any loss in experience points or permanent setback to dying, or even a Diablo-esque need to recover any dropped loot on your corpse. Just a few minutes of irritation at having to walk back to where you were. It makes the game fairly easy, and honestly, from my experience, rather mindless.

You can absolutely play Neverwinter by ignoring the story behind the quests you’re given and just following quest markers and doing tasks your journal indicates you need to do. There are a few quests that have less-than-clear objectives, and a few times the quest marker glitches out and leads you near where you need to be but not directly to it, but by and large, you can ignore every bit of story and just follow the pretty sparkly line to your destination, then hack away at enemies or gather items until you grow stronger.

There is a story that links everything together, but to be completely honest, it’s both easy to ignore and easy to forget. The story is naturally given to you over the course of accepting quests. “Go here and do this thing because the overarching plot demands it.” But you also get so many quests, little side things that involve, “Go here and do this thing because it helps you get experience and loot,” that it’s so very easy for everything to blend together and for you to lose track of the story. None of the quests you’re given have no purpose. They’re all to help out someone’s goals or rescue so-and-so or any number of similar things. Typical RPG quests. But when everything has that kind of backstory to it, it’s easy to forget which quests contribute to the main story of the game unless you actively ignore all of the side-quests. It just gets lost in the noise.

BECOMING YOUR BEST SELF

 
As of the time of writing this, the level cap in the game is 70, meaning you can’t progress any further once you hit that point. At least, you can’t gain any additional levels. Once you hit level 70 and defeat the main game (again, something that can be accomplished fairly easily by following a glittering trail after you get quests from NPCs), the end-game opens up and the difficulty spikes dramatically.

So, however, does the annoyance.

The end-game areas will offer you a great challenge, to be sure, but those areas offer quests that are designed to do little more than getting you logging in and playing the game for maybe an hour a day before you’re pretty much out of things to do. Being able to do questlines for major well-known characters like Bruenor and Drizzt seem really cool, but when you realize that some parts of the questlines involve needing 25 of a certain item, and you can only get 1 per day, you start to get bored very quickly. Or at least I did. The main game, I could breeze through areas and find something new to do or to explore quite often, but once I hit the endgame…

I often say that games like Neverwinter are kind of mindless, because its possible to get through them just by attacking oncoming enemies and watching your experience bar fill up. That is legitimately a way this game can be played, and no judgment to those who do so. But when I hit quests like that? It becomes mindless in a bad way. Do this thing. …Okay, now wait until tomorrow to do it again. Now do that every day for nearly a month. Then you can advance to the next part of that questline, which will probably need even more of those 1-a-day items to complete. It goes from mindless fun to mindless tedium.

Yes, there are other areas you can explore while you’re waiting for the chance to do those quests again. But the thing is, the end-game areas are also staggered when it comes to difficulty. Both games might be listed as needing to be at level 70 to enter, but some are vastly easier than others, and it’s clear they’re meant to be done in order. Try and tackle Barovia before you take care of the threat in the Underdark? HAHAHAHA, have fun getting your butt handed to you on a platter by the area’s most basic of enemies. So it’s not as easy to jump around from area to area, doing all the daily quests there might be.

And even if it was, to be honest, doing the same quest day-in and day-out, knowing I’m getting the same reward, is still tedious after the first few days. I want to move ahead in the quest, not just doing the same task for weeks on end. The most interesting areas open up during Neverwinter‘s end-game, but in a way they still remain very closed off to you.

This is a gimmick that’s designed to do nothing more than get you back every day, playing for just a little bit, so that you register as an active player. You’re probably not having that much fun, especially if you tend to solo in the game and don’t run quests with Guild members and have conversations that can make things more interesting. And getting a couple of those daily items puts this little thought in your brain that you may as well just play for an hour a day, it’s low-investment, and you’ve already made a little progress so it would be a shame to stop playing now, when there’ll be more later. But that gimmick gets old very quickly, and quite frankly, it’s what has made me do the on-again-off-again thing when it comes to playing this game. I will go weeks now without touching it. Because I’m tired of having only the same old quests to do and no noticeable forward momentum being made.

The end-game is pretty much only for dedicated players, people who really love the setting and the game. Everyone else will likely just get bored and move on to another MMO, one that may make them have to start over at level 1 but will at least offer them the feeling of progression and advancement once again.

ON THE SIDE

 
Like any MMO, Neverwinter is more than just a character moving from area to area, killing enemies and getting stronger. There are a lot of things on the side to make it a little more entertaining.

There’s a crafting system, where you can gather ingredients or gems or other items and turn them into better materials for you to sell or use, depending on what you make. The crafting system was revamped recently, and honestly I prefer the old system, but the new one isn’t bad. It’s just a personal preference. The old system could be done on the go, with me telling my various craftsmen to make this or gather that, and it was great. I loved it. The new system gives you a small workshop and lets you hire a number of named NPCs to help you run it, which is cool and makes it feel more like I’m running a business, but it’s much harder to do while on the go. There’s a short questline associated with the new crafting system, and until you complete it, crafting can only be done in the workshop. Sent someone out to gather items and the shipping box is full? Too bad, wait until you get back to town to do anything about it. Completing the questline does let you manage the crafting system on the go, but the cost of doing so is higher than if you took a detour back to the workshop. It’s more like running a business, yes, but I find it less satisfying than the previous system.

Most MMOs have Mounts and Companions, even if they’re not called that specifically, and Neverwinter is no exception. Mounts are things you ride on to move through areas more quickly, and sometimes they just look freaking cool.

Companions are AI-controlled characters that will travel with you and can complement your playing style and add a bit of strength without needing all of that pesky “interacting with real people” stuff. I typically make sure my Companion can heal, because I like staying alive, but for those who prefer brute strength, or offensive magic, there are Companions who can offer that too. It allows you to add an additional level of balance to your playstyle, and even if you don’t actively control them, they serve a good function and are very useful to have around.

And of course, there are lootboxes, called Lockboxes, which can only be opened by keys that you get for spending real-world money. Honestly, I don’t have that much of a problem with Lockboxes in Neverwinter, because at no point do they feel essential. They feel like a bonus, something to enhance the game for those who get them but without causing a degree of unbalance for those who don’t. I didn’t open my first Lockbox until hit the end-game, and I didn’t suffer for it at all. Inside are items like limited edition Mounts, gemstones, Enchantment items, and other things that are absolutely useful to have, but all they do is provide something largely cosmetic (like Mounts) or things you can collect in other ways throughout the game, only in larger amounts of greater power. Nothing in them is essential to enjoying the game.

And quite frankly, they’re useful even if you don’t plan on spending real money to open them. They drop no matter what, so chances are you’ll end up with a few hundred before the game switches to a new Lockbox with different things inside. Can’t open them? Sell them at the auction house for Astral Diamonds, one of Neverwinter‘s premium currencies (yes, there are multiple premium currencies in this game) and use those Astral Diamonds to buy a new Companion or something somebody else is selling through the auction house. There’s a fair amount of flexibility in this regard, and I like that the restrictions aren’t so restrictive that I feel like I’m really missing something. I may not get a cool new Mount, but I can get something.

NOT ALL THAT GLITTERS IS GOLD

 
Naturally, there are going to be some issues with any game, so here I want to talk a bit about game glitches. Honestly, there aren’t that many, and I didn’t really start to encounter them until I hit a lot of end-game sections. And due to the game’s general lack of penalty for death, most glitches are just weird rather than being annoying or game-breaking. I once fell through the world while fighting a boss, and had to find some way to kill myself in order to respawn and finish the fight. Another boss fight resulted in me getting trapped in the boss room while the boss ran out of the room, leaving my Companion to fight the boss alone. Yet another boss fight involved what I can only assume was me getting hit while on an incline, resulting in my character floating in mid-air, unable to do anything but flail helplessly, while again my Companion finished the fight for me.

Seems a lot of glitches happen with boss fights, come to think of it.

As I said, it’s more amusing than frustrating, and I suspect most of the glitches I encountered happened so much further in the game because more people encountered earlier glitches and reported them so they got patched. The fewer people making it to an area, the few people who can encounter and report a glitch. But while I don’t think any game is truly glitch-free, I do think it’s worth pointing out that there is a chance that you too will end up flailing wildly in mid-air for the duration of a boss fight, or falling through the world, or any number of odd things.

Another slight grievance… I play on the PS4, and it’s free. It’s free if you play on the PC. It’s free on the XBox One in name only, because even if the game itself costs nothing, you can’t actually play it without subscribing to XBox Live first. It is absolutely not worth even installing on the XBox One unless you already pay for Live, because you’ll get nowhere. It’s a little bit pathetic, in all honesty, and chances are the fault lies with Microsoft rather than Neverwinter itself, but I wanted to put that out there so that people are aware.

Also there’s no cross-platform play. That’s also worth mentioning.

 
At the end of the day, Neverwinter is like many MMOs. What sets it apart is primarily the setting; if you’re into the Forgotten Realms series, then chances are you’re going to really enjoy jumping into this game and exploring the world, and getting to meet and have adventures with much-beloved characters. It’s still being updated and added to, there are limited-time questlines to keep people coming back every now and again, and it wasn’t that long ago that the devs added Barovia and all of its associated quests, so it’s not like what you see now is all you will ever get. Neverwinter is in active development, and so long as you don’t find the end-game issues too frustrating, chances are MMO fans will have a pretty good time making their way through this one.

Aside from the setting, though, nothing really sets this game apart from about a dozen other MMOs that I’ve tried in the past. The style of progression is similar, the benefits are similar, and if D&D doesn’t mean much to you, then it’s probably not going to stand out too much in your mind. It’s not a bad game, not by a long shot, but it doesn’t do anything to innovate on the established formula, preferring to stick to what works now and not take risks. I still enjoy it, and will likely keep playing it for quite some time.