The Paragon Path in Neverwinter

Posted by araxes on May 6, 2013
Posted in: MMO, Neverwinter. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , . Leave a Comment

So, although I had participated in all 4 beta weekends, it was only just yesterday, when I finally reached level 30, that I came to fully grasp the Paragon pathway mechanic in Neverwinter.  While this might be familiar turf to players of D&D, the last time I played table top times were quite a bit different, so this was new to me.

I think it’s a fairly important, and also rather nifty, design choice, and frankly I was really surprised that it arrived with relatively no prior fanfare — no mail, no announcement, just a new window asking me to choose my Paragon path when I went to view my Powers after hitting level 30.  In fact, it was so innocuous that I think maybe Cryptic should taut it a bit more, because it’s actually a huge component of the character building process.  I was genuinely surprised to realize that at level 30 I was making a huge decision about what direction to take my character!  It reminded me of the old days of EQ2, when you started first as a fighter, then a warrior, and finally chose either berserker or guardian (at level 20.)  This works much the same way … for 30 levels I’m a Great Weapon Fighter … and then at level 30 I suddenly become a Swordmaster.  Is that like what a Wizard is to a Spellspinner, now?

The primary component I failed to understand was this: your paragon tree is not only that set of skills you see from level 1, staring at you on your Feats panel, which looks like just some more bonuses like what you’ve been doing all along  – at level 30 you actually choose a paragon “role” — in other words, it’s a subclass.  This subclass has its own unique set of powers.  Basically, it’s a specialized version of your generic archetype.

Once you hit level 30, and you choose your paragon path, the rest of your powers fill in; prior to level 30 when you look at your Power panel, it will say, starting at 30 points and going from there: “Paragon Power” — these are generic placeholders.  Once you make your Paragon choice, then they appear.

Right now, I could only choose one, Swordmaster, for my Great Weapon Fighter.  But clearly, as the left side of the window indicated, there are meant to be more.  How many more is a guess, but I would venture 3 or 4 each for the main archetypes.  I wondered at this because it’s evident that even NPCs have variations of the same types: for example, Hexers, Witches, and Warlocks all seem to be of the same, but slightly different, varieties of “Wizard.”  I suppose the very curious could go to Barnes and Noble or their local comic shop and peek at the 4th Ed. D&D rulebook to find out the exact hierarchy.  In AD&D 2nd Ed.  these were called specializations, or, in the case of mages, “Schools” of magic that you could choose to study (necromancy, conjuration, invocation, etc.) and for the rest there were “proficiency” slots to round out development.

So bear this in mind as you play: at level 30, not only will you choose your Paragon tree (one of those three paths you see on your Feat panel) but you will also choose your Paragon role, i.e. your subclass specialization, which then opens up a whole new set of powers to put power points into.

I don’t really know why Cryptic was so obtuse about this mechanic — perhaps because it is still open beta and therefore not many paragon classes are developed, yet.  It is certainly a feature I think they should exploit in the future, though.  Players like to feel unique, if anything, and players usually like choices that make them feel like they are really growing their character and really feeling like they are becoming “heroic.”  This is the whole point of the Paragon system, so far as I can tell.

Also, for your enjoyment, some more screenshots:

Neverwinter Beta Weekend 4

Posted by araxes on April 16, 2013
Posted in: Neverwinter. Tagged: , , , , , . Leave a Comment

This weekend I was able to devote some substantial time into Cryptic & Perfect World’s Neverwinter Beta Weekend 4.  This is, as far as I can tell, the last closed beta weekend event before the Open Beta officially begins at the end of this month.  (Purchaser’s of either of the Founder’s packs get early entrance into the open beta; no character wipes take place after the start of open beta – essentially, it’s a soft launch.)

Highlights of the weekend included trying out the skirmish system and exploring two dungeons, using the queue tool to accomplish each (with very good results, more down further) and leveling my Great Weapon Fighter up to level 23 to experience some of the content outside of those first areas.

Cryptic spent some time tweaking the power system. The end result is that players can choose their powers from a defined set now, at each level, using power points.  Then, they can choose where to invest points when upgrading ranks (each power has 3 ranks, and ranks unlock depending on how many points you’ve spent overall.)  Although they’ve given some choice, there is still a sense of gated progression — and that isn’t a bad thing.

During my first two forays, powers were granted automatically as you leveled.  It’s an old-school idea, but it was in line with standard D&D practices.  During my playthroughs, I found it to be a welcome relief from the burden of having to make decisions every single time I level up, and also spoke to the designers confidence in creating well-defined and structured classes that could interact well with one another.  It would seem that it was felt the better choice was to follow suit with more modern conventions, and give players the feeling of being in control – to a small degree, you are.  I can choose to invest a point into Slam rather than Avalanche of Steel — but it’s really only a small deviation from what existed before, so it makes me wonder why they bothered to change it at all.  Additionally, to unlock your class “super powers” (my term) you are required to upgrade all previous skills to a certain rank, anyway.  So even if you felt a skill was useless and invested 1 or no points into it, if you want that uber skill, you’re going to have to blow points, either way.

I would have preferred that they left the system as it was.  Just hand me my skills and my ranks automatically, and let me be on my way, thanks.  Alas, not to be.  A suggestion would be to offer players the option to have the game build out their character for them based on Cryptic’s pre-defined role, while still offering other players the free-form option.

This sort of change concerns me; Cryptic did something similar during the beta period for Champions Online, and after launch they further altered it.  The resulting power system was confusing, and they ended up offering the pre-built role option, anyway.  My observation over years of watching the ebb and flow of this genre is that people think they like total freedom in creating their characters and choosing skills and abilities, but what they actually like is a defined structure with the illusion of freedom.  What happens when you have total freedom with choice of abilities?  You get confused players seeking guidance, and see long-winded decomposition posts on message boards in threads named “Best Builds for My Class” – and everyone uses some variation of 2 or 3 builds, at the end of the day.   So, ultimately, I am glad that Cryptic has opted for its current state, as far as powers are concerned, but I would not want them to go further down that road.

Moving on from powers.

Neverwinter is a really fun game.  I’ve enjoyed it more with each successive weekend.  This time around, I decided not to roll a new character, and instead focused on some of the group content and other things.

Starting out, I ran the Cloak Tower dungeon.  I wanted to see how well the queue system worked, so I used that rather than the chat channels to find a group.  Out of the three groups I was part of, all were well balanced, with two being exceptionally well balanced.  All three contained a Guardian Fighter, a Trickster Rogue, a Control Wizard, a Devoted Cleric, and me, a Great Weapon Fighter.  One of the groups had 3 Great Weapon Fighters, a cleric, and a mage which still would have been doable — but when one of the fighters dropped the spot was immediately filled with a rogue.  Even better.

Group play is fun.  It’s fast, although mobs have huge amounts of HP so boss fights actually feel satisfying, and usually there is some element of strategy — mages are particularly aggravating as they can not only drop long-lasting splats of area effects like flames or gas clouds that you have to avoid, but they also have knockbacks, stuns, and other radial AE damage spells.  Melee NPCs have their own unique attacks, usually in cones or arcs around them.  Part of the fun is learning to dash out or quickly evade these attacks.  It takes a short while to get used to, but once you’ve got an understanding, it quickly becomes easier.

The Cloak Tower took right about 45 minutes for my first group.   The fact that you can bring along a companion was interesting.  In our groups, there were usually 1 or 2 companions present, including my own, a cleric.  While they aren’t overly-powerful, they do have a lot of hit points and can ease situations a little bit with their help.  For example, when my health dropped, I not only could quaff a potion — my companion was there to add a little boost while the real healer was busy.

The second dungeon I ran was the Cragmire Crypts.   The phase spiders in Cragmire were particularly awesome.  I have to say they moved around like nothing I’ve seen before, genuinely living up to their names.  It was a blast to fight two of them at once.

Pacing is frenetic, but not frantic.  The dungeons — at least the two that I ran — are littered with traps and linear, although there was still one maze-like area where the group got lost and turned around, so it will still be important for players to slow down and wait for the others, at times.  At the end of every dungeon run, a box pops up showing statistics like most points healed, most damage done, most damage taken, and most mobs killed.  This was an excellent addition and thankfully removes the need for third-party parsers, which I find are too easy to manipulate.  It was also just nice to see where you stood.  A player could conceivably work to break their own records, as I’m sure many will.

The other part of group play was the skirmish system.  Skirmishes are short mission quests, one per area, that you can queue for just like dungeons.  The one I played, in Blacklake, with my Control Wizard, involved hordes of zombies, with 3 hulks and a final endboss.  It was a perfect challenge for our group, with lots of waves of mobs and some good long battles in between.  Overall, it only took about 15 minutes, and the same rankings box popped up at the end.  You of course earn rewards — not based on rank but simply for participating.  Then you can turn in the quest, as well (if it’s your first time.)

In terms of overworld exploration and PvE questing, I personally have found the quests to be very enjoyable, and yes, interesting.  It’s a nice touch to be able to turn off the sparkly line, or turn it on, depending on your mood and preference.  if you’re in a rush, turn it on and you’ll be taken to exactly where you need to go — but if you are just playing leisurely, want to explore, and take your time, then turn it off and enjoy the scenery.

That’s one thing I haven’t spent much time discussing, the scenery and art.  While not on the technical level of a single-player game like Skyrim or even an MMO like Planetside 2, the art direction is excellent and well executed.  One step too far into Neverland and this could have ended up being a very cartoon-like, childish looking game; too far towards Westeros and you would have had a depressing medieval world.  Neverwinter falls somewhere in between.  I’m not quite sure if it really captures the high-fantasy setting of the Forgotten Realms as it was designed by Ed Greenwood and company, but it doesn’t stray so far off the path as to be silly, either.

Neverwinter has a lot going for it.  It’s a fun game that I’ve found myself wishing I could play since the beta weekend ended.  I am really looking forward to spending a lot of time in it.

Neverwinter Beta Weekend 2 & 3: The Control Wizard, Great Weapon Fighter, and Half-Orcs

Posted by araxes on March 25, 2013
Posted in: MMO, Neverwinter. Tagged: , , , , , . Leave a Comment

I’ll open this by saying, first, that I wasn’t able to invest nearly as much time in these two beta weekends as I wished I could have.  So I am combining them into one post.

That being said, I’m going to touch first on the things that I immediately noticed as different from the first beta weekend.

The new classes introduced were the Control Wizard and Great Weapon Fighter.  No surprises, there.  The new race was Half Orc, which I was marginally more excited about, since I am a fan of all things ogre-like.  Or in this case, orc-like.  Plus, you can’t be a hulking melee class without a hulking brute race.

I began the character creator by trying my hand at drafting said half-orc.  Being half human, they didn’t seem to be terribly different from humans in appearance except in size, facial features, and tusks.  They are somewhat taller, a bit wider in general, and have larger hands and feeet.  The character creator itself has not changed since the last time around, containing an array of basic presets, or more in-depth sliders.  I will make note, here, of the lack of different eye shapes across all races.  You can’t slant, tilt, deepen, bring forward, or otherwise change the overall look of your eyes, except to make them larger or smaller, further or closer together, or to add strange features like blindness or what looked to be something close to “pink eye.”  While the ability to slant or tilt eyes may seem a strange and minor detail, it can often make a drastic difference in appearance, even from a distance.  Moving on, though, other features were the same as in the previous beta. So, nothing new here.

I have to say that, overall, I don’t really care for the chunky appearance that seems to be in place by default on all of the racial models.  They seem to be designed as a general rule to be squat and thick.  I don’t mind that in a dwarf or halfling or even in a fat human, but my overall impression going through the character creator is that unless you choose an Elf, all fo the races half a sort of “stumpy” look about them that’s none too flattering.  Worse, this carries over into the animations of running and walking, even once you are in the world, all for the characters sort of lumber along.  It works well on the half-orc, of course.

I went with a standard human for my go-at with the Control Wizard.  Unfortunately, but understandably, all previous beta characters were wiped, and I have to admit that the prospect of starting over again and running through the same set of missions is really what kept me from devoting more time, this weekend.  So my wizard was starting anew.  There were a few notable changes from my previous foray, though.

First, unlike in the first round when I was unceremoniously dropped into a battle on a bridge with no rhyme or reason, this time, I started out on the shore, after a very short intro showing a boat crashing.  Ok, not the most original of ideas.  After all, I had chosen to be an adventurer hailing from the Gray Vale, raised as a heroic scion on the stories of my parents.  How did I end up on a boat?  Why did I take a boat to Neverwinter?  None of that is explained.  Ah, the life of adventure!  However, I was pleased that there was at least an attempt made at some kind of introduction, rather than just being tossed onto the bridge like the first time, with even less reason given.  Hopefully in a future beta this little intro will be fleshed out further.

I immediately noticed that more voice over had been added to the main NPCs.  This is good.  I like voice over.  Unfortunately, the NPC animations while you hear the voiceover are so pitiful.  In fact, other than their mouths moving, they tend to stare off in some vacant direction without even looking at you.  They don’t move their hands, they don’t change their stance, and their faces have zero expression.  I know that this could be a result of a desire to keep the rendering engine basic enough to allow lots of different hardware to easily run the game, but really – if you are going to put voice over into your game, then you do need suitable animations to go with it!

There was also a rather crazy-sounding man doing tutorial voiceovers.  I am not sure if they meant this person to make me laugh out loud, but he sure did.  I felt like I was going through boot camp, being shouted at: “PRESS F NOW TO SEARCH FOR YOUR WEAPON!” .. “LOOK AT YOUR SKILLS NOW!” — it was actually really, really funny.  It could only have been better if Mr. T. was doing it.  Unfortunately, I don’t think it was intended, and that’s the problem.  However, if it stayed as-is, it sure wouldn’t be a deal breaker.  Someone will have posted a YouTube video spoofing it and started a meme by the time launch day is over.

Skipping along the shore completing quests hither and thither, I was reminded of how much I loved the idea of “campfires” — campfires in Neverwinter are where adventurers can rest to regain HP.  It’s not that they are super useful but the idea is so simple and seems to fit so naturally into the overall idea of adventuring.  Remember playing Final Fantasy IV (II if you grew up playing the SNES) and Tellah saying “We can camp here, tonight.  Rest in my tent.”  Yeah, it’s something kind of like that.  Except you don’t get any jingle indicating night has descended and you are recovering.  Sorry.  It takes about 5 seconds to recharge and be on your way.  There are no spoony bards in sight, either.

The Control Wizard, which was basically your standard elemental caster type, was fun to play, with some cool spell effects like giant ice spikes and whatnot, but not as fun the Great Weapon Fighter.  I like playing melee AE front-line types that do a lot of damage, so this was right up my alley.  Far and away the most fun class of the three I’ve tried.  He could leap into the air and come slamming down in a position of my choosing; he mowed down mobs of enemies in a few swipes of his giant sword, and had a great 360-degree charge ability, as well as a dash maneuver that had a fast recharge and made it easy to get into the thick of things quickly … so he could unleash all that AE awesomeness.

I am starting to really enjoy the way the combat is handled.  At first the interface and key setups threw me a little bit, but I now think they are quite intuitive and make for a very fun, fast paced way of doing things.  I also really enjoy that my skills are limited to a select few at a time. Left-mouse, right-mouse, Q, E, R, Tab, and 1.  Plus two passive slots, and 3 belt slots (where potions and the like go.)  I think it adds an extra amount of strategy, having to choose abilities to use.  You may swap them out differently depending on need — although honestly I think they did a good job of balancing them out so that any can be useful all of the time.  Different player types will use different skills no doubt.  For myself, I liked dashing in, charging my 360 swipe, doing a roar, turning on my super awesome mode (I forget what the skill was called but it basically gave me a turbo everything for a few seconds) and cleaning house.  The air jump / slam was awesome, too, as a means to literally jump right into tougher battles with lots of adds.  It used a splat positional to determine landing area.

Neverwinter still holds my interest strongly.  I have read some items remarking that it’s “too much and more of the same old” insofar as MMOs go – but I have to be honest, it’s action oriented combat, Diablo-esque ability slots, and depth of character development taken from its D&D roots, really makes it stand out of the crowd.  The graphics are pleasing, neither overly demanding nor too cartoonish, and although the level of hand-holding can be high by default (sparkly lines telling you exactly where to go — although yes they can be turned off and so can every other helper item) if I’m really being honest with myself, there are definitely days when I don’t have enough time to spend an hour running around a large city looking for an NPC.  Even if it errs a little bit on the side of being too close to the traditional theme park MMO model, I don’t think that’s a bad thing.  There’s enough that’s different going on, here.

As a closing note, I am really very anxious to try the Foundry.  Unfortunately it’s been closed to beta weekend players, so I haven’t had a chance to try out the design tools, yet, but it sounds like it could be very promising.

Neverwinter: First Impressions, Levels 1-17

Posted by araxes on February 11, 2013
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This weekend I spent some time playing in the Neverwinter Closed Beta Weekend event.

Neverwinter is an upcoming game, developed by Cryptic Studios (City of Heroes / Villains, Champions Online) and being published by Perfect World.  It’s based around the Dungeons & Dragons city of the same name, in the Forgotten Realms campaign setting, and takes place after a series of 3 books by author R.A. Salvatore — for those curious: Gauntlgrym, Neverwinter Wood, and Charon’s Claw are the titles, and they feature Drizzt Do’Urden and quite a few pivotal changes to the lore of the Forgotten Realms, for those who’ve read the Drizzt books or follow other FR novels.

Events of the novels have left Neverwinter in total disarray, quite a number of years have passed since it was destroyed by a volcanic eruption, overrun by orcs and undead, and the city is completely different than the Neverwinter of ten years ago in Atari’s Neverwinter Nights.  Tieflings, a race of demi-humans with demon blood in them, have moved into the city along with all the other races, and adventurers have been tasked to answer the call to help rebuild Neverwinter.  This is the premise for the game.

Character creation first starts with choosing your race.  Races available right now are human, elf, half elf, dwarf, halfling, and tiefling.  One race is hidden, and there is a special unlock for the dark elf race, so it’s assumed that at least two other races will be playable.

After choosing your race, you pick your class.  This is D&D, so although it’s tempting to say this is an unoriginal character creator, it’s actually staying entirely true to the original D&D premise that’s existed for 40 years.  For my adventurer, I rolled a Guardian Fighter.  There were three classes available to select, with a fourth hidden.  The three available were: Guardian Fighter, Trickster Rogue, and Devoted Cleric.  Through in-game item drops, I can also confirm at least two other classes: the Control Wizard, and the Great Weapon Fighter.  I would imagine that this means there will be variations on each of the four classic D&D archetypes that match typical roles.

The creator uses D20 dice rolls, familiar to anyone who has played a D&D game, pen and paper or otherwise.  The rolls are skewed towards your class prerequisites — for the purposes of providing new players with something viable, I assume.  My guardian fighter relied upon stamina primarily, with secondary dependencies on strength and dexterity.  There are also two bonus points to allocate to any of the 6 scores.

I’m one of the players who really enjoys a complex character creation system, and while Neverwinter wasn’t quite as expansive as Cryptic’s other titles in this regard, it didn’t disappoint, either.  After choosing your character’s overall physical appearance, you can then customize facial expression, body size and muscle mass.  The morph options weren’t quite as numerous or diverse as those in Champions Online, but considerably moreso than in other MMORPGs.

The name generator mixes and matches prefixes and suffixes to come up with suitable names, or you can use your own.  I found the names to be quite good, but was disappointed to see about 3 other “Coilbone” last names once in the world, so the random generator isn’t entirely original, either.  The name is allowed to have spaces, and I saw characters running around 3 word names in some cases, and numbers.  This opened the door to a lot of really out of context names, though, so I’m hopeful that at least one launch day server will be RP-enforced and restrict names or allow player reporting of inappropriate names.  It’s one thing to name your dwarf something like Gimpy the Rockbreaker, which is both humorous and in context, but it’s quite another to name it Baconator 9000, Dood, or Dooby – all names I saw over the weekend.

Finishing character creation, my adventurer was tossed into the fray.  This I did find somewhat tiresome, only for the fact that it is done in just about every single AAA title I can recall being launched in the past several years.  Once you get past the racket and adrenaline of this 10 minute semi-tutorial that takes place on a bridge, you then are plopped into the city center, called the Protector’s Enclave, and you begin your storyline quest.  I would have liked a more serene introduction, something a little more paced, with some lead-in and build up to the bridge battle, but taken by itself, the bridge battle wasn’t a bad introduction, just not my preference.  I suppose I’m spoiled by my memories of EQ2′s Isle of Refuge.

I was pleased with was the lack of needless side-quests.  Although there were side-quests here and there, almost all of them wove together.  There was no rubber-banding — my own phrase for the type of design which makes you run far and wide when the quests don’t align to the same geographical area and are particularly tedious, only to have you return to the same NPC for more of the same.  There were quite a few quests, but they seemed to flow nicely into mutually shared territory.  I did not feel that the quests were tedious, or repetitive.

As for the storyline, I can’t say that I found the main questline to be dull, but I also don’t really remember what the overall point of it was, except to say that, in general, the goal was to help clear the streets of rebels.  Eventually this  led to a large orc encampment, and by the time I hit level 17 I was ready to enter the game’s first dungeon, the Cloak Tower.  Cloak, not clock.  My distraction may have partly due to the nature of my playing — I was trying to get through as much content as possible in a fixed timeframe in order to give this review, but if I’m being honest, there wasn’t anything about the story that sticks in my mind particularly.  17 levels is a short time to make that judgment, though, so I’m looking forward to picking it up, again.

Combat and abilities are quite a bit different from other MMORPGs.  The biggest difference is that action takes place real-time.  You don’t click on an icon and watch the skill animation play out, you actually press a key and swing your sword.  You can tell this game was designed to be played on a console as much as on a PC, and in fact it gives the option to use a console controller layout if you have one connected to your PC. With a mouse, though, movement in the game in general is done with the WASD scenario while the player uses the mouse to look around and aim at targets.  The mouse cursor itself does not appear on the screen unless you press Alt, at which point the scene will darken and you can manipulate the UI — however, all main UI elements can be controlled by intuitive hotkeys, so you needn’t press Alt every time you want to open your bag, just use the keyboard shortcut – and these are labeled on everything.  It’s very organic and doesn’t take long to get used to, although it may be off-putting to some at the very first.

Much like Diablo III, abilities, once learned, are slotted to a fixed number of hotkeys, used during battle.  You can swap abilities in and out depending on circumstances.  There are “At Will” abilities, using the left and right mouse buttons.  Then there are “Encounter” abilities, mapped to buttons Q, E, and R.  Finally, there are “Daily” abilities, mapped to the numeral 1 key.  I wasn’t quite clear on what is meant by “daily” since it seemed that I could use these quite frequently, so long as my guardian fighter’s central meter was full.  Using the daily ability exhausted the meter, but it rebuilt itself over time during combat.  Certain abilities, like my shield bash, called Tide of Iron, refilled the meter.  There are also class abilities, that can be either active or passive.  The active ability is mapped to the Tab key, and the passive appear in smaller slots next to it.  These can all be swapped.  Things like potions and consumables are mapped to the numeral 3 and 4, etc. keys.

Although this style of action combat in an MMO may be a turn off for some veterans used to the EverQuest and World of Warcraft way, it’s actually not as bad as it sounds — you’re not playing an FPS requiring twitch response and precision aim.  In fact, the system does a very good job of latching on to targets as long as you turn the mouse in their general direction.  I have to really commend the design in that regard.  It was slightly more difficult when targets were at a distance, but still very smart — I suppose part of the inherent challenge of playing a ranged class in an action game is that targeting requires at least a modicum of actual skill, and I use that term very loosely, so it isn’t actually a negative that distance targeting should take a player a second or two longer than melee sword swiping.  Overall, combat was quite fun and engaging once I got the hang of using the hotkeys rather than the mouse.  The default key mapping was so intuitive though that once I learned to stretch my index and ring fingers a little further, it was smooth sailing.

As you level, some abilities will be upgraded, in addition to learning new ones occassionally, and you also receive Feat points.  A “feat” is a special skill that is part of a particular subset of class abilities.  Much like skill trees in other games.  Although I didn’t get to explore this in-depth, I earned 7 points.  These were invested into skill traits – for example, my guardian fighter had three primary trait lines I could invest into, one focused on defense, one on offense, and one on utility.  Once enough points were invested into those passive traits, three new skill trees would be available to focus on — I’m assuming only one can be chosen.  These would be special abilities called feats that are unique to that class.  Hopefully I will be able to more fully explore this in a future beta test.  It seemed fairly extensive, at a glance, though and looked like it would offer some unique ways to build out your character.  Surely there will be guides out there saying what the “best” builds are, sooner or later, but to the individual player, variety should be a good thing.

Artistically, the world design was suitably high fantasy in nature.  While it didn’t have the sort of traditional realism that EQ2 has, it also wasn’t quite as caricatured as World of Warcraft.  I found it to be closer to Rift in terms of appearance, leaning towards Warhammer in terms of art direction and scope.  Character art did have more of a realist feel to it — none of the facial or body aspects appeared “cartoonish.”

Graphically speaking, the game ran well and looked good, although it seemed a number of options were not enabled or were not in the game, such as Direct X 11 support and advanced texture filtering.  At times some textures did look flat, but most were well detailed.    My one beef was with the painted-on appearance of grass and greenery on the ground.

The user interface was laid out very well, except the default text was absolutely miniscule at times on my 1920×1080 monitor screen.  I also dislike games that do not allow you to entirely hide the chat interface if you so choose, and I couldn’t find a way to do that in Neverwinter, so I was forced to be distracted by the constant text updates, or to sift through dozens of filters, rather than just simply hide the window.  I may have missed the option, though.

Neverwinter also has a companion system.  I’ve seen this Star Wars and EQ2 also has a system called Mercenaries, which is similar.  In Neverwinter, I earned my first companion at level 16.  There were several more slots for companions to fill, as well.  Companions can be given their own names, and earn experience just like the player, albeit at different rates.  Every so often, they will need to be sent away and trained.  I didn’t have much chance to explore this mechanic, so I am uncertain how training actually works, but the game text implied that training time will vary from a few minutes to several hours, depending on how many levels and how much experience your companion has gained.  My companion also joined me at level 1, so I have to assume the leveling ratio is quite a bit different for companions than it is for players.  I could not control my companion in any way, she was strictly a follower running on her own script, much like EQ2′s mercenaries or Star Wars’ companions.  The companions I was able to choose from were variations on the four main class archetypes.  Being a tank, I chose a healer, and she seemed to be viable for those moments when solo play was bordering on heroic — like when I got swarmed by about 9 orcs during a respawn.

Companions don’t seem to be meant to replace actual players, and in fact I’m not sure that they can be used when grouped.  Unfortunately, I never got the chance to run the first dungeon, but when I reached the entrance, the door presented me with a queue.  It appears that dungeons will definitely be a “grouping required” affair, but thankfully it also looks like there is a system in place to build groups up for you, and quite certainly to take your own groups in if you already have them set up.  This is very nice as I often do not have the time or desire to “lead” a group, but want to do some dungeon crawling or complete a quest.  It does come with the well-known caveat that you may not always get the best experience with random players, but hey, that’s nothing new in the MMO world – PUGs have always been a risky business, and it likely won’t ever change!  I try to look at the bright side — I’ve met a lot of great people by doing pick-up grouping!  One potential issue that can arise with a queue system though is that a low population makes them ineffective.  I have yet to see or hear anything about whether or not this system will be a cross-server system, but that would certainly be a feature for Cryptic to consider building functionality for, even if it isn’t needed for a year or two (or more.)

The challenge level of the game varies, but it seemed generally well-balanced, at least playing as a fighter.  I felt neither overpowered nor underpowered.  Encounters sometimes ended quickly, but bosses had considerably more hitpoints and felt challenging, but not hard.  Respawn times were very fast, so hunting for mobs was rarely an issue, and that is a pet peeve of mine, so I was glad it didn’t happen.  There are bound to be many changes to challenge and mob hit point levels before launch, but overall things seemed very well constructed, so far.