Neverwinter

So, we meet again. We must stop meeting like this.

Bad jokes aside, this shall be my first installment in my daily blogging endeavour. We'll see how it works out, but here goes.

Today has been relatively uneventful. I woke up, I ate lunch, I went to bed.

Again, bad joke. I actually started playing Neverwinter yesterday with the opening of the third closed beta weekend. I didn't manage to play too long yesterday - had to download a patch and then I had to head into work so I had to start playing around midnight - but it gave me a good feel for the gameplay and I feel I understand how it works a bit better now.

From what I've gathered in the story, Neverwinter (the city in Faerûn, not the game in question) was attacked by a lich named Valindra, possibly the same Valindra in Neverwinter Nights and you, the player, are a traveller that was entering the city by ship. You awaken on the beach after your ship is attacked by a dracolich, and the story moves from there.

It eventually progresses into the city proper, and you begin doing quests revolving around the Crown of Neverwinter. The game plays much like a third person shooter, with the camera locked behind your character and controlled by the movement of your mouse.

At first, I thought it would be hard to adjust to this control scheme, but it's surprisingly responsive and intuitive. The mouse buttons control your main attacks, and various buttons on your keyboard control your other attacks (WASD still locks to your actual character movement, but many of the buttons immediately above those control your time-locked abilities.)

I'm currently running a Control Wizard, and despite being what many games treat as a glass cannon, my wizard is capable of taking far more damage than I expected. That's when the mob gets *to* me.  Most of the time, the main threats are dead before they get to me, and only the cannon fodder survives to touch me. With the liberal placements of campfires - similar to campfires in WoW, these allow you to heal substantially (not sure if the healing effect is persistent in battle or not), appearing to heal a tenth of your health every second or so.

My other character is a Great Weapon Fighter, which looks fantastic while fighting - the character model appears to dance around the 2-handed greatsword they start you with. I'm hoping it supports dual-wielding when you get higher in levels, but I can't say.

The leveling experience feels superb. It appears like the designers at Perfect World are trying to break the mould of MMO questing, and are doing rather well at it. You still have the fetch quests (and killing quests appear to have returned in the form of achievements; I've gotten multiple popups saying 'Kill 50 Bandits Achieved!') but they feel more natural. In one quest, you have to retrieve some stolen jewelry from the nearby sewers, and find yourself moving through a nest of kobolds looking for the jewelry; the jump to kobold killing was alluded to in the quest description, but the way it transitioned felt superb.

This post is getting rather long, so I'll end it here by saying that Neverwinter is an MMO that doesn't feel like an MMO, and there are many things within it that MMOs should take note of.

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