Many of you will be aware of our ongoing feature "Things You Would Change With..." where we take one of our favourite games, look at the key features and some of the most prevalent issues and say how we would change them to make the game better. We decided to switch things up a little bit and focus more on the positives with our new articles "Things We Love About..." and for our first game we're heading back to the Forgotten Realms with Perfect World Entertainment's D&D themed MMORPG Neverwinter.

Forgotten Realms/Dungeons & Dragons Theme
We simply love the D&D/FR franchise. Whilst we actually got into Dungeons and Dragons quite late in life, only starting our first D&D tabletop campaign four years ago it was the Forgotten Realms that was the start of our groups adventure. Though we never actually played any of the Baldur's Gate series nor the Neverwinter Nights games, we became big fans of the setting and quickly fell in love with the world and the lore. For those unfamiliar with D&D essentially all D&D does is offer up rules (with each edition changing core rules and features) and then players can make their own worlds or run adventures in [now] official settings such as Ed Greenwood's Forgotten Realms (with Dragonlance, Greyhawk and Ravenloft to name some others). Finding out an MMORPG was going to be released in the Realms was exciting to us and still is with every expansion and update that adds more content, famous characters and organisations to the game we constantly lose ourselves in this rich and immersive world.

Available Classes
There is a large choice of available classes. One of the key elements of D&D in general are the classes, every MMORPG that exists essentially took its class-based routes from the original D&D tabletop games. Thankfully with Neverwinter we weren't disappointed and weren't short changed when it came to class choices, now standing at eight with the introduction of the new Oathbound Paladin, the game finally has its core D&D classes available and no doubt with more of the later D&D edition classes to be added over time. Most of the classes do well to stand alone and don't feel much like any of its counterparts, perhaps with the exception of the Paladin who is a classic warrior/cleric, but you can't have D&D without a Paladin (and honestly we're thankful for them because it's a really fun class). Combined with the individual talent customizations and split Paragon Paths that take a class in two very different directions, in reality the game offers an impressive 16 sub classes to choose from.

Character Customization
A variety of character appearance customisation options. As we are quite into the RPG genre character customization is always a big hit with us, with plenty of games that have plenty of options we can spend a long time trying to craft and perfect the look of our characters. With Neverwinter we were not disappointed by the wide variety available to us combined with 13 races to choose from it's very easy to make a unique looking character in the world, further added to by the level of detail and number of customisation points that players can change for their character during character creation. More games could learn from Neverwinter's character creation options.

Combat
Combat is fun and feels strategic. Whether playing PVE or PVP a challenging combat system is always a plus, we hate tab targeting systems that favour ranged classes where it is almost impossible to get them to lose you as a target due to lazy mechanics. The action-based combat is a real positive requiring aiming, timing and skill that brings the challenge level up and evens the playing field a little bit more. We also love the customisation of powers, unlocking them as you level up, being able to upgrade them through talent points and then choosing which ones you want in your arsenal at any one time. As D&D players that actually started their campaign using the 4th Edition (4e) rule set we were impressed with how the developers had incorporated the At-Will, Encounter and Daily spell casting feature into the game and feel it works remarkably well.

The Foundry
A powerful quest creating tool that all games should have. By far the most impressive thing about Neverwinter is the Foundry, the ability to create your own instanced based environments, populate them with buildings and items and twisting them into weird and wonderful angles, combining them with other items to create completely unique looking objects. Adding in all manner of mobs and enemies, choosing their powers, where they spawn and even the path that they walk. Creating NPC's that can talk to players that join your creation, creating your own quests with multiple dialogue options like a real official quest in the game. This was at pre-release the thing that we anticipated the most, as role players and Guild leaders ourselves we've always been keen on creating quests for our players and the Foundry gave us an even more immersive way to do that. Whilst not without its own flaws, bugs and limitations it was a marked improvement on the Foundry system in Star Trek Online. We ourselves have spent hundreds of hours in the Foundry, far more than we ever spent in the official game and some of the greatest content in the game we have ever experienced has been that created by other players, not the actual developers. If we could incorporate one feature into every MMORPG, then the Foundry would be it.

So that's what we love with Neverwinter, but more importantly what are some of your favourite things? What do you think could/should be added to our list that makes the game great? Let us know what you think in the comments below!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 13th, 2015 at 1:05 pm and is filed under Articles, MMO News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Puedes dejar una respuesta, o un trackback desde tu sitio web.