A word (or several) of warning about "Defiance 2050"

The open-beta for Defiance 2050, Trion Worlds' MMORPG/Shooter, started in June 22, with the game launching officially on July 6, 2018. I jumped in, played a little and I have a few thoughts that I think I should share.

Full disclosure: I'm a major fan of the Defiance IP. Defiance started out as a game by MMORPG maker Trion Worlds. They got into a deal with the SyFy network to produce a TV show based on the game. The game and the TV show would cross-over with references to events taking place across both media and connected storylines. The deal fell through, but the show ran for three seasons (2013-2016, it was cancelled for budgetary reasons) and the game survives to this day with a small, but dedicated fanbase.

The original Defiance game (much like the show) is a title I whole-heartidly recommend. It's a persistent online shooter with MMORPG elements, Destiny and Anthem years before either of these games were even conceived. It has a low skill ceiling, but it's challenging at the appropriate moments, it has decent-enough gunplay and tons of content backed by interesting lore (the TV show helps in this regard).

Defiance 2050 is a "relaunch" of the original game. This means that it's not a sequel or a reboot, it's literally the exact same game, with somewhat higher-fidelity textures and effects and several gameplay tweaks (particularly in regards to leveling and character progression). This isn't a terrible thing in and of itself, but Defiance 2050 is the laziest, most obscene cash-grab I've seen since the last time Todd Howard tried to sell me Skyrim for the umpteenth time.

“World of Warcraft”, Blizzard and trading off “fun”

(NOTE: This was written before the 7.3.5 patch, which changed the leveling experience in World of Warcraft, went live. I have not returned to the game since then to test the new system)

I need someone to explain to me what the hell Blizzard has been doing lately.

I’m a simple man; I play games to have fun, enjoy myself and experience what they have to offer. I decided, very recently, to restart my World of Warcraft (WoW) subscription. I don’t do this often with any MMORPG; I get bored easily, but in games like City of Heroes or Final Fantasy XIV, I typically have a good amount of fun for about half a month before I cancel again. With World of Warcraft, not so much .

Quick history for context; I bought WoW around 2007; it was full price then, which means I paid 60 Euros for it, including a two-month game time card at 27 Euros. I installed the game and played for literally two hours before forgetting it ever existed and returning to City of Heroes. That’s right; 87 Euros for two hours of play. 

[GAMES] The devil in the detail (Final Fantasy XIV & MMORPGs)

- Video version of the following post HERE-

As I finished the Final Fantasy XIV review, I realized there were a few things I didn't quite cover. The problem with MMORPGs, the good ones at least, is that they offer so much and so diverse a content, it's hard to pin down when reviewing. The MMORPG scene is a fairly rich one and also one with great variety that doesn't often get recognised as such. The reason is, largely, because after the success of World of Warcraft, the majority of companies tried to copy Blizzard's formula and become the "WoW killer". The result of that was a market saturated by essentially the same game with a different skin on. It didn't help that practically all the terminology and basic mechanics of current MMOs are based on WoW. Though free-to-play did create a market within that market of poorer, half-finished and imbalanced games, many people tend to forget that the model also bolstered creativity out of necessity. Without the same massive amount of financial investment in the games, developers had the chance -and often the obligation- to try out new formulas with less of a risk.


This isn't to say that the f2p market offers better games or that it hasn't had failures. The nature of the beast allows it long-term survival even at moderate-to-low numbers of concurrent users and even the ones that don't survive at least try out new ideas; that's not counting the many formerly-subscription-based games that turned to the model to survive themselves.

FFXIV truly is a gorgeous game, for the genre's standards.

I did this long introduction to provide some context, especially to those not particularly well-versed in the genre. The reason why I found Final Fantasy XIV hard to review was because while I enjoyed the game as a whole, at the same time I felt like I couldn't possibly get the most out of the money I was paying for it on a monthly basis.

I'm not begrudging Square for using the subscription model; even for the consumer, it ensures good service, quick updates and a steady influx of content. This also means greater investment for the company and an aversion to wildly veering off the tried and true and for good reason; there are countless MMORPGs that innovated and either shut down (e.g. Tabula Rasa) or switched to the free-to-play or buy-to-play models to survive (Age of Conan, Wildstar, RIFT etc). However, it also creates a subconscious obligation for the player to play as much of the game as they can, because they literally pay 50 cents a day for it. This in itself is an investment for the player, as the trial month of a game may not be representative of it in the long term; and MMOs are long-term investments.

So, it comes down to what a player looks for in a game. Though this is the case with every game, within the MMO genre, the subtle differences are key. Lineage II became free-to-play a few years ago, but outside of WoW and Final Fantasy XI, it was the longest-running sub-based MMORPG and it was one that offered a completely different experience to WoW and its competitors/copy-cats. But when looking at a game like FFXIV (and, presumably, FFXI before it), the distinction is harder to make.

What makes FFXIV work, when AION or RIFT -both of which are clones of WoW- didn't? Wildstar may have come at a bad time and was forced off the stage, but City of Heroes survived for a very long time and it was the only MMORPG, to my knowledge, which was killed at the hands of its parent company despite a strong user-base. The Secret World innovated a lot and found its loyal audience, but not before dropping the subscription and switching to Guild Wars' buy-to-play model; just like The Elder Scrolls: Online.  The Old Republic may not have innovated much, but it's a solid game with the Star Wars license and yet, it had to resort to the f2p model far too soon in its lifespan.

Outside the obvious (like company loyalty to the product) and the inarguable boost that its console release provides (FFXI survived largely because it held a near-monopoly in console MMORPGs back in its day), I can't answer this question. I don't think many, not involved in the industry in some capacity, can. I do know my experience, though and how important the subtle differences between the games are.

As I was playing FFXIV (at the time of writing, I still have about a month of game left), Blizzard gifted me a week of World of Warcraft, including the latest expansion (Warlords of Dreanor, not the upcoming Legion) to get me back into the game. It was not the first time, as I rarely pay for that game, Blizzard often tries to entice me into returning. I was never a huge fan and when I played in a previous free-week, I ended up wasting too much time accomplishing very little. I had decided it wasn't my kind of game.

But even so, as I was playing a little bit of my free time in WoW, I felt a lot more absorbed than I ever did in FFXIV. That was the primary point of difficulty when reviewing Square's latest MMO entry; I find FFXIV the superior game, but I lost myself in WoW. One of the issues, for me, is linearity. FFXIV is a very linear MMORPG; it relies on an expansive storyline, it doesn't offer much in terms of RPing (like different dialogue options) and the side-quests are a distraction that appears right when you're about to tackle the next step of the storyline. As I said in the review, these side-quests do help a great deal with fleshing out the world of the game; most of the quest-givers have several lines of dialogue and they're very colorful.

Really, really interesting NPCs for the side-quests. Disturbingly so.

Don't take this compliment lightly, either; I just sat through three paragraphs of a non-essential quest-giver telling me of the trauma of losing his company in battle 3 decades ago and it was absolutely glorious. The writing in this game is stellar. But the way the system is set-up, it gets in the way of the storyline and after the first several levels, the side-quests only end up reinforcing that aftermentioned feeling of duty to play the game and do everything that's offered, even if you're not actively having fun with it.

RIFT also suffers from this, because it operates on the same principle. There is a main story-quest and the moment the story sends you to a new area, another bundle of side-quests, irrelevant to the story, pop up around you. The Old Rebublic does the same, but perhaps it gets away with it, because of the voice acting and the dialogue options radial key, which at least provides some RPing atmosphere, however basic. The problem with this system is that, for one thing, the linearity makes the game almost automated. From some point on the player stops reading the quest descriptions and just goes ahead to complete the objectives time and again, ad nauseum. When you enter a new city or village or camp and you get bogged down with five new side-quests, all of which involve engaging with the same formulaic, unimpressive, boring combat mechanics and for reasons that outright distract you from the main story, the game stops being something you play and it starts being a routine desk job.

FFXIV is driven by a very interesting story, but the player remains passive in it.

This process is a given for all traditional MMORPGs and even WoW does it; but where WoW and Lineage II get away with it is the huge, open world that draws you in. In the end, that's what turned me off from FFXIV, as well as other games before it (like Neverwinter). The locales in the game are very diverse, but the maps are all fairly small hubs. Planning routes and methods to travel as part of the game is far less enjoyable than just putting on your boots and hiking a mountain to your objective, in the way for which you may encounter gorgeous vistas or terrifying abandoned fotresses or quirky little side-quests. In FFXIV, the roads are too narrow and the mobs are all around you. Rarely will you leave the paved street during travel, just because your eye caught something interesting in the distance; for one thing, your eye will likely never catch any such thing and for another, it's not worth dealing with the mobs that are too close to one another for comfort. Even the ones that aren't aggressive (and there are a lot of them) are so many and so concentrated in the same area that the illusion of a breathing world breaks apart and the incentive to just look around flies out the window. It's at that point that you are no longer an adventurer living in Eorzea, but simply someone passively carrying out tasks for others in a virtual box.

In WoW and Lineage mobs roam the streets and valleys and they feel like part of the natural habitat. Their population is never too dense and they rarely become a hindrance in exploration. Because of this set-up and because of the art-direction that makes the aesthetic timeless, the environment becomes absorbing and immersive; Azeroth becomes real. FFXIV's Eorzea is gorgeous to look at, but the somewhat jarring switch between the various levels and its somewhat bare backstory, as well as the small spaces that serve for the maps, make the world feel fake; manufactured. A good place to start understanding this comparison is City of Heroes. The game world was split in hubs (much like FFXIV), but not only were they huge on their own right, they also felt alive; both because of the friendly NPCs that roamed the streets of Paragon City, but also because of the enemy mobs, most of which were some variant of human. When City of Heroes threw you in an abandoned area (like the Hollows or Overbrook), the tonal shift created much-needed juxtaposition, a change of pace that made the world of the game feel layered and injected the game with life far more effectively than most other MMORPGs.

As a counter-point, RIFT actually does offer a huge map with a number of world events to participate in (the titular 'rifts'). This game, however, often fails to embue Telara, its own world, with life, because the questing system is just as automated and its overworld feels awfully manufactured. So, looking at the various titles in the genre out there, we can see that success (either for the developer or the customer/player) doesn't rely on a single directorial decision, but rather the sum of them and how well the ideas gell off of one another.

For all its beautiful, diverse environments, FFXIV offers very little space for exploration.

A huge, immersive world with continuously changing and diverse environments, which feel alive all contribute to the one thing that FFXIV failed to do for me: role-playing. This is largely, I find, the reason why even though I really like Square's game, I'm finding it hard to convince myself to renew my subscription again. The best reason to play a subscription-based game is to lose yourself in it, to pay for the privilege of perpetuating a fantasy existence outside this mundane world. Gameplay is important, obviously, but in this stage and with this wealth and variety of titles in the genre (many of which don't require the player spends a dime on them to try out indefinitely), the focus often needs to shift elsewhere to maintain a strong, consistently paying user-base. That 'elsewhere' may be a community, friends that just hang out and occasionally partake in sports together; only they do it under the mask of a Night Elf and that sport is killing critters in a dungeon.

It's the classic "adventurer" trope; you are required to do tasks, but your primary goal is to see the world around you, to take it all in, to get rich and to make new friends. This works best within the context of WoW or Lineage II than it does in FFXIV. In FFXIV you are an adventurer (people remind you of that all the time), but you're a passive recepient of everybody else's whims and desires. Single-player RPGs tend to be linear as well, but they rely on other tropes of the genre to assimilate the player into their world. Ultima Online and Runescape provide the blueprint for the wandering adventurer, as they are MMORPGs without direction, where the player is required to go out in the world and discover things for themselves. The starting villages that used to be provided in older MMORPGs helped differentiate between the races and classes and gave the illusion of uniqueness to the player's avatar. Most MMO characters don't have dialogue, so it's best to let the players speak directly, which is hard to do when the player needs to be directed from point-A to point-B constantly without the freedom to just stop and do something else.

WoW's huge world feels lively at every turn, despite the occcasional stillness of its NPCs.

Furthermore, exploration leads to nice little discoveries that promise XP and coin.

When everything moves too fast into a single direction, even the travel time is a chore. This is what characterizes FFXIV, which has you walk back and forth or even in other maps simply to talk to a single person and then requires you to return. This is clearly artificially lengthening the game, which in a game like this can seem like wasting the player's time. WoW does a lot of the same, but the downtime in its huge, open environment adds to the immersion.

Despite its massively rich content, in the end FFXIV requires you to pay for menial, repetitive tasks that fall into a routine far too early. You may eventually guild up and do one of its many dungeons, levemetes, guildhests and whatnot, but probably not before you cap your first character, which boils down to entire months of playtime.

WoW does a better job at convincing you to pay the subscription, because while it's no stranger to the same menial tasks, it provides a level of freedom that FFXIV doesn't. Lineage II does the same. So does Lord of the Rings: Online, which is the closest I've played to an actual WoW-clone with a different skin and it's a game that would have done better, if it either came out earlier or turned to the buy-to-play model, instead of its current f2p. If anything, Lord of the Rings: Online is a great example of a game that did everything WoW did, just as well, but failed to draw players to it, because it offerred nothing new. FFXIV dodged that bullet with its setting, its name recognition, as well as the influx of players from FFXI and an overall stellar product at a time when WoW has started losing players.

Even though it faced difficulties, LOTRO successfully copied WoW's huge environments and focus on art-direction over visual fidelity.

I realize all this is hard to explain and it's all very subjective; I'm not making any definitive statements within the context of "do's and dont's". This is purely down to looking into the nuances that define my experience with these games. After all, FFXIV has a very big user-base; I have yet to log in and see the servers empty, even in the slow times of the day there are several people playing and the chat is constantly active. This means that the game has found its audience and that, in the end of the day, perhaps a solid, polished game is more important than the small details that set it apart from the others.

Coming full circle, that's really the point I was getting at; if FFXIV was buy-to-play, with a small cash shop for some expansions and/or items, I would be lauding it as the pinnacle of the genre. The high entry-point that the subscription imposes, however, creates conditions and requirements that cannot be satsified by and satisfy all the players that happen upon it. When something gets tiring, exhausting, overly repetitive, you'll need to take a break. It usually just sucks if your break results in costing you money. For me, FFXIV doesn't offer enough of what I look for in a game to renew my subscription right now. It offers just enough to reconsider in the future, though. It's a great game, but like with all of its competition, the devil is in the details.

Oh, if only I could go to that monstrosity, explore it and find something interesting...

"City of Heroes" May Be Returning

In an unexpected bit of news that hit the Internet earlier in the month, it turns out NCSoft's legendary super-hero MMORPG, City of Heroes may be making some sort of return. City of Heroes was originally developed by Cryptic Studios and published by NCSoft in 2004 and for a while held the market for super-hero-themed MMORPGs. Part of Cryptic split off and went to create Champions Online (originally scheduled as a Marvel Comics MMO), while the remaining team reformed as Paragon Studios and maintained the game.

Though for the bulk of its existence the game remained subscription-based, it adopted the free-to-play model in September 2011. Despite the competition by Champions Online and the then-newly-released DC Universe Online, City of Heroes (as well as its Villain-themed segment and the Going Rogue expansion) managed to maintain a strong user base, which allowed for frequent updates.

Despite the fact that the game was still making money, NCSoft decided to shut down the servers and the game went permanently off-line in November 2012, with barely three-months notice.

The news of a possible revival came in the form of a post by the President of Missing Worlds Media Inc, Nate Downes on September 1st, in the Titan Network's forums. The Titan Network is one of the oldest and biggest City of Heroes communities, which stood at the forefront of the campaign to rescue the game when its publisher decided to pull the plug. Their attempts failed, but the community remained strong and from its members, various projects meant as "spiritual successors" to CoH were spawned.


Downes and his company are at the helm of such a project, City of Titans, which was easily funded during a Kickstarter campaign and it's currently in production. It's because of Downes' project that the news came completely out of left field: as it turns out, Downes has been in contact with people from NCSoft for a while now and trying to negotiate the purchase of the City of Heroes license by a third party, as well as a binary copy of the game files, which would then allow them to put it back online without NCSoft's involvement.

It is of note that, according to Downes, this has already been a long negotiation and there is still the very real possibility that the deal will not go through and the license will remain with NCSoft, who will not revive the game.

But if it does go through, what does it mean? For one thing, City of Heroes will be playable again. Downes says that the available binary they are offered is patched up to Issue 23, the last live update (Issue 24 was in development). Everything about the game up to Issue 23 should be playable exactly as it was before the game was axed.

Downes clarifies in his post that character databases have not been offered, which means returning players would have to start over, but most importantly the source code for the game is not on the negotiating table either. Later in the forum thread, the Missing Worlds Media president suggested that this is because part of the source code may be shared by multiple games published by NCSoft and opening up the code to 3rd parties could be problematic for them.

What this means in practice is that, even if the game returns, the new host will not be able to patch or update it. This is obviously a problem in the long term: new content is vital to the survival of an MMO (unless they're owned by Perfect World Entertainment) and any technical issues that may arise with individual players or compatibility issues down the line will be practically unsolvable.

For all intends and purposes, this "Legacy" option would be set up temporarily. What's genuinely intriguing about Downes' post is that, if the deal goes through, the IP would have an actual future ahead of it. Downes distanced himself, claiming to only be the "salesman"; after the deal passes -if it passes- he's done. The new IP holder will be responsible.

Even more interesting is the fact that if NCSoft sells the IP, the deal is for all "spiritual successors" currently in the making to become just different interpretations that make use of elements from the City of Heroes mythology/terminology/ideas and can directly reference it.

City of Titans has decided to be its own game instead of a "City of Heroes: Redux", so a lot of the interest regarding this "share" clause is directed toward the Atlas Park Revival project. The Atlas Park Revival (APR) project started after the official game was shut down as an effort to recreate the game's central and starting area, Atlas Park, in the Unreal 4 Engine.

Since then more areas have gone into development and with this news, it seems like Atlas Park Revival could potentially become a full-fledged "City of Heroes 2" of sorts.

All of the above is extremely good news if you ever liked the game, especially considering that the three competing super-hero MMOs have never managed to fill the void Cryptic's original game left behind. However, there is reason to be skeptical, or at least cautious, even if the deal goes through.

There is no guarantee that the new holders of the IP will be able to produce a proper remake/sequel to the original game. In the Titan forum thread that Downes started, most of the attention is focused on APR (and Downes references it himself), but currently APR is headed by a single person, with the occasional input of another. That's it; two people.

I'm not pointing this out to diminish the work they've done; the lead developer Cailyn Alaynn (a.k.a. Irish Girl) has confirmed that there has been significant progress in recreating the maps on Unreal Engine 4 and has posted a few fairly impressive pictures. She also mentioned that very soon she will be "ramping up" the team in size, which is promising.

Still, though, by her own admission not even an Alpha is likely to be ready until Fall 2015, a full year from now, at the earliest.

The point is that, exciting as this news may be, cautious optimism is likely the safest course of action. Even if the IP is sold on the current terms, Alaynn will need to hire a full team to figure this out and will probably not lead to a launch for years to come.

Downes has confirmed that APR will receive part of City of Titans source code to help them build their game, which is definitely reassuring. At the same time, City of Titans itself seems like "City of Heroes 2" in spirit but not a direct sequel in design or mythology, so things are looking up.

It needs to be stated again, though, that all of this is still in a state of flux and nothing has been confirmed beyond hopeful planning by the involved parties. NCSoft may yet block the deal and even if they don't, Downes acknowledges that it may take several more months for it to go through. Even then, the Legacy game will undoubtedly come with problems due to the deal's restrictions and an almost predetermined expiration date, while APR may not be able to deliver, despite the developers' best intentions. City of Titans remains the best bet for fans of the original game and the icing on the cake, should Missing Worlds Media chose to go through with it, is that it will be able to directly reference City of Heroes even if it's not a direct sequel or remake.

This is certainly good news. If all goes well, even the chance to replay the old game for a while is a bonus. Champions Online hasn't seen a significant content update in years and Perfect World Entertainment has reduced it to a glorified ZEN market for cosmetic items across the company's games. DC Universe Online and Marvel Heroes both have their strong points, but they're significantly different approaches to the genre. A return of City of Heroes would be one undoubtedly beneficiary to the genre and gaming in general.

More than that, it would mean not just a win for the Titan Network's great efforts to keep the game alive (even if just in spirit) and a reaffirmation of years of loyalty, but also a positive precedent for the industry. NCSoft are a juggernaut in the MMO scene. They know the genre, they understand their customers and they comprehend how to set-up their pricing models. They are obviously more in-tune with the Asian (particularly the South Korean) markets, but they are good at distancing themselves from newcomers into the scene that miserably fail (see: EA with The Old Republic, Zenimax with Elder Scrolls Online) and their serial-developer cohorts that fart out a new MMO every other month (like the aforementioned Perfect World Entertainment).

If this deal goes through it means freeing a license from a major company and passing it on to a smaller party that will then have creative control over it (or at least part of it). In an industry that big publishers buy out old studios and put their IPs on the freezer until they can abuse them in the future, this deal would be near-revolutionary.

City of Heroes was a great game and actually a much larger and more popular game than many may have thought. There is some understandable fear that the over-saturation of MMOs may cripple City of Titans, but proper timing wasn't the only reason CoH made it back in the day and nostalgia is not the only reason to follow up with it.

It may take a while until we have more news, but it is an exciting prospect that warrants much-earned praise for Downes and the Titan Network community in general.

[GAME REVIEW] "Dungeons & Dragons: NeverWinter"

Yes, it's time to have a look at MMOs again, particularly of the free-to-play kind and specifically the last big profile title that came out, Cryptic's Neverwinter.

Neverwinter is a name well-recognized to PC Gamers; an expansion of Dungeon & Dragons (DnD), it became popular thanks to the two Neverwinter Nights games, developed by Bioware and Obsidian respectively. The question Cryptic had to answer in developing this title, however, was simple: with Dungeons & Dragons: Online (DDO) already on the scene and well-established, what new could they do with the game?

Apparently the answer to this was to simply not make a DnD game, which isn't as bad as it sounds. The developers decided to make a far more traditional MMORPG that follows most of the conventions of the genre and just wrap it in a nice DnD bow.

So, if players expected this to be DDO 2, it's not. The relationship between DDO and Neverwinter is more akin to that of City of Heroes and DC Universe Online; roughly the same setting, roughly the same feel, but entirely different games.

Neverwinter does away with the dice roll and the dungeon master voice-overs and instead plays it fairly straight. Character customization is rich and features all the major races and classes and their respective perks, from the reliable humans to the devilishly fast and accurate halflings and from warrior tanks to healing clerics and deadly rogues. There are also plenty of cosmetic and lore-related additions, such as religion and place of birth to help with immersion and RPing.

Once the game's intro, which serves as the tutorial passes, the deal is fairly standard: talk to people with exclamation marks over their heads, do some busy-work, fight some bad guys, earn loot. Quests are divided into main and secondary; the main quests tie together in the form of a storyline, that's choke-full of distractions and ultimately forgettable. There is also a noticeable lack of secondary quests, with most of them being just mini-tutorials to new skills or game features.

Protector's Enclave is the main safe-zone where all activities outside combat take place.

 

Party-questing, while rare outside of special dungeons, works surprisingly well and makes all members feel organic to combat. Sadly the same can't be said about dungeon exploration, as in its effort to balance out teaming and soloing, the game almost eliminates traps and door switches and loot chests. They exist, but can either be opened by non-specialized classes using "kits" or don't impact the game as much as they should.

On the bright side, it's one of the few newer RPGs where the various potions matter and can impact gameplay significantly, while the addition of portable altars is a genre staple I haven't seen in a while. The portable altars are necessary for creating rest zones to heal in the midst of the bigger dungeons and make a great and helpful addition, as Neverwinter is also the first RPG in a while not to feature regenerating health in or out of combat. 

 

During the sixty levels leading up to the endgame, the players will fight thugs and beasts, clear plenty of dungeons, hunt for loot and travel to the various districts of Neverwinter. As they grow more powerful they will gain access to more features, such as professions, pets and later mounts to make traversing the bigger maps easier.

Using a Portable Altar to rest before a tough battle.

What really stands out in all of this and it's where Cryptic really takes heavy liberties with the title is the combat system. Cryptic has a knack for a more direct, action system (also see: Champions Online) and they implemented one in Neverwinter as well. This is what most DnD fans will find jarring, but it'd be unfair to simply write it off as "casual-friendly".

It's a system that demands constant player involvement and attention, as encounters rely on the proper use of different attacks, dodging and blocking. Other action-oriented MMOs also feature similar block/dodge functions, but they are usually to guard specifically from heavy enemy attacks.

Where Neverwinter differs is that timing is of the essence, as is choosing whether to sacrifice a guard for an attack and vice-versa, which actually makes it possible to leave any encounter completely unscathed and victorious. As blocking relies on stamina/mana (depending on class), it's not a magic shield button and fights are both exciting and present a genuine challenge, especially since the player can't auto-heal in-between encounters.

Combat relies heavily on timing attacks and senseless button mashing is guaranteed to get you killed.

There are three types of actions: basic, heavy and "super". The basic attacks are assigned to the mouse buttons and do most of the hack and slash. The heavy actions are more traditional RPG attacks and buffs, slotted in the hotbar and with a cool-down time. Finally the "super-moves" can turn the tide of an encounter and rely on action points that need to be accumulated by defeating enemies.

The hotbar has a limited number of slots and as such players will need to choose what actions fit them and their roles and make the best builds possible for their play-style.

Cryptic has done an admirable job delivering on the aesthetics of Neverwinter. The look and feel of the game, the music and the sound all fit the theme and setting perfectly, while the developers clearly know and care deeply about DnD, with pages of lore noted down on the journal for creating context and helping the players understand the world they play in.

Having said that, my biggest problem with the game comes from the lacking content. Calling it meager would be an exaggeration and there's definitely a lot to do until one hits end-game, but the problem is that most of it is just the same thing.

The way the game progresses is extremely formulaic and becomes repetitive fairly early on, but the thing that's sorely missing is the sense of an open-world available for exploration. Neverwinter, the region, feels small and completely staged by some unseen god that decides who should stand where and what they should be doing.

There are well-written journal entries to flesh out the game world.

Perhaps there is a technical justification behind this recent trend of fragmenting the game-world of MMORPGs into zones. However, one of the biggest appeals of any fantasy-setting and especially a slow-building RPG is the option to explore that setting.

That's the reason why I can play a vacuous game like Perfect World International or why I kept going back to that grind-fest that was Lineage II back in its prime. I loathed the game mechanics, but taking a wrong turn I could end up walking for hours on-end on new and exciting areas without the game spitefully directing me to them. That's also why every now and then I pop in Skyrim, even though I'm a fairly outspoken detractor of the game.

The only MMO I remember working Zones properly was City of Heroes and that's because every zone of Paragon City was designed as its own mini-game world, complete with NPCs and enemies interacting with one another, making it feel like an actual living city instead of a theater stage where everyone had their role.

The mini-map is the sole means of moving from district-to-district, making the game-world feel small.

Considering that Neverwinter also suffers from fairly unimaginative dungeons, which is a problem for a game with the Dungeons & Dragons monicker, the zones just shrink the scale of the game and make it feel a lot less impressive than it should.

But speaking of dungeons, special nod has to be given to the Foundry. The Foundry is a collection of quests made by the players themselves using the game's mission architecture tools. It's a great idea very much in line with the title's DnD origins, as it puts the players in the role of the Dungeon Master and lets them shape their games as they see fit. Its importance isn't just theoretical either; two months into the game and the Foundry features several excellent quests by a very imaginative community with knowledge of and love for DnD lore and beyond. They stand tall above the official dungeons and have unofficially tasked the community with providing new and exciting mission content for the endgame portion, making a good deal of the game self-sustained.

Neverwinter is not original, for the most part anyway. But that doesn't mean it's lazy or generic. By its very nature, the game is a double-edged sword, because of the legacy it carries. Most western PC RPGs have been defined by classic DnD and most of their mechanics and design philosophy are a direct adaptation of the table-top game.

Let's not forget that major RPGs today, such as the Ultima series and even The Elder Scrolls were originally custom DnD games the original developers used to play in their free time. Any electronic RP experience with the DnD monicker is doomed to live in the shadow of its imitators, while at the same time being unable to innovate in fear it will stray too far from the source material.

Add to that the existence of DDO as a "proper" MMO DnD and the burden of accessibility for new-comers; a major concern for a free-to-play title like Neverwinter which can only survive via a large player-base that will invest in microtransactions. As such, it cannot be judged too harshly for its deviations from standard DnD mechanics.

The user-friendly Foundry menu, where user-made quests are listed.

Its combat system is engaging and its world well-realized. The lack of content, which may be countered with expansions, is an issue and while it's not terrible at it, the game also doesn't feature the best microtransactions system I've seen either.

But for all its problems, there is great potential. The real question that remains to be answered is why would anyone pick Neverwinter over another fantasy MMORPG they're more familiar with and currently I don't think the answer is in Cryptic's favor. But at the same time, if one gets into it, there's not much reason to leave Neverwinter either.

The vanilla game is available for free and no purchases are required to genuinely affect the gameplay experience. It's well-worth trying out, if you're hungry for a free, high-fantasy RPG online experience with some legacy behind it. Cautiously recommended.

A rest zone amidst the haunted Neverdeath Graveyard. Lots of quest-givers, too.

"D&D: NEVERWINTER" was developed by Cryptic Studios and published by Perfect World Entertainment.

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