Neverwinter Online from a DDO player's perspective

[TeacherSyn]

I'll wait for the monasteries full of Shaolin and Ninja to show up, personally.

The one thing that attracted me to DDO immediately was the Monk class, which I played heavily in NWN and NWN2 (bet that's not a surprise to you).

I know that, being beta, this game can't accommodate everyone's tastes and desires. But based on comments here, it seems that, while it's a good game. NWO isn't going to pull me from DDO as DDO did for me for NWN and the Diablo games. I really appreciate DDO's customization and community. I guess I'm not into a lot of variety of games--your mileage may vary.

[Uska]

Gamemaster made and driven events, with live Gamemasters ( you know the +whatever guys ).
I'm not talking about toggle on, toggle off events where there's no live people involved.

I may be wrong but I doubt if they keep up the live events long at least at that level it's likely easy to do for the beta weekends but once it goes live and they have even more players I don't see it happening and there is no way it will ever equal the events we use to have in SWG and no game will ever equal the great pvp there was between Anchorhead and Bestine before vehicles were added to the game.

[Uska]

I'll wait for the monasteries full of Shaolin and Ninja to show up, personally.

The one thing that attracted me to DDO immediately was the Monk class, which I played heavily in NWN and NWN2 (bet that's not a surprise to you).

I know that, being beta, this game can't accommodate everyone's tastes and desires. But based on comments here, it seems that, while it's a good game. NWO isn't going to pull me from DDO as DDO did for me for NWN and the Diablo games. I really appreciate DDO's customization and community. I guess I'm not into a lot of variety of games--your mileage may vary.

Monks are my fave in ddo and I enjoyed in NWN's as well but a 4E sorta of monk still won't attract me to NWO if ddo dies I will go play a Terakasi on the SWG emulator

[LeslieWest_GuitarGod]

Well put Syn. DDO is safe for years to come in the D&D character customization department (excluding other non d&d mmos because they dont count!). I still love all my DDO characters and will continue to play them for years to come. I recognized early on Neverwinter wasnt being marketed as a DDO killer. I knew they were both working hand-in-hand with WotC, and it was the deciding factor to take Tyrs Paladium to Neverwinter. They are vastly different games, yet share some interesting similarities.

Looking back, I can honestly say it's been a great ride for our guild. We have those excited to play Neverwinter and DDO. We've had some Neverwinter recruits that found a home in DDO, and some long time DDO guildies playing Neverwinter. Both player bases are getting along really great.

Some guild leaders have asked me what I thought of our experience. As I told them, its been a net positive for us to be firmly planted in both games, as our D&D community has been enriched with some great "new" personalities. Just as Syn put it in his case though, mileage will vary for others.

[dunklezhan]

I forgot to include:

UI


NWO interface is currently a bit buggy, but is slightly more customisable than DDO (though I doubt you can do skins), you can reposition all main elements independently and you can hide/show a bunch of stuff I didn't bother with. You can also scale the UI - however this scaling is applied to all elements together, you can't scale individual elements like you can in say, LOTRO (surely the best UI interface of any game, ever).

The ui is also very fast to respond (as is the game itself in terms of load/shutdown times but that could be an artefact of the lighter population on the beta, not that it felt like a 'light' population.

You can turn on or off a 'golden thread' which will lead you by the nose to new quest objectives - its an immersion breaker in quests but a useful tool in cities looking for quest entrances. It's on by default. Won't take you long to figure out how to turn it off with a keypress (z I beleive)

There's a ton of menus, like quest logs and a lore book and such as well as the usual for mail and so on.

You can access mail anywhere via the menu, but there doesn't seem to be a mail notification icon. Maybe its in one of the elements I didn't bother to add.

Buying more 'zen' (TP equivalent) dumps you out of the game to your web browser.

You cannot zoom in and out - the camera distance is fixed. Press B to go to inspect mode and you can zoom the camera around your character and zoom in and out but if you try to move you'll go out of that view straight back to normal view with the camera behind you.

This takes some getting used to. Seems a silly restriction to me.

Mouselook

This needs it's own heading. The game is like Tera. If you don't know what that means it means you are on forced mouselook if you want to move or fight. You press alt to use the mouse independently which prevents your character from interacting with the world (say, combat, movement) and you can then click on the various icons and menus and things, but not use any abilities. Opening interface screens like your inventory for example puts you in this mode so you don't want to be doing THAT in combat! Everything in the gameworld is mouselook and hot/mouse keys. No option to do anything about that.

This takes some getting used to but is fine once you do and gives it a real action arcade feel which is lots of fun - but again won't appeal to a broad cross section of the DDO audience. I don't mind it, but I also can't believe this is totally necessary, I can't see why a simple key press couldn't free up the mouse to let you steer with the WASD keys as normal or click on NPCs rather than using the hotkey for it, but maybe they can look into this. It never got changed it in Tera though.


Doesn't change my own conclusions, just stuff I forgot to add.

And also - I agree it's not a DDO killer, not at all. There are a couple of core things that will put off a broad cross section of the hardened DDO player base, and a couple of other things that will put off yet more people with experience of DDO & Turbine's approach with the cash side of things, if Perfect World/cryptic don't make some pretty serious tweaks.

Doesn't change the fact that it is a fun game for me though, I'm very taken with it - as experienced in the beta - actually.

[Jay203]

up to lvl 20 the lvl'ing is a breeze
not to mention you get out of the tutorial as a lvl 4 anyway. that and you pretty much will be level 6/7 in 2 to 3 quests

when you get to the 30s, things hit much harder and you really don't want to stand in the middle of a mob, not to mention the mobs now have cc abilities and heavy hitting stuff as well

the dragon fight was beastly

[psteen1]

up to lvl 20 the lvl'ing is a breeze
not to mention you get out of the tutorial as a lvl 4 anyway. that and you pretty much will be level 6/7 in 2 to 3 quests

when you get to the 30s, things hit much harder and you really don't want to stand in the middle of a mob, not to mention the mobs now have cc abilities and heavy hitting stuff as well

the dragon fight was beastly

Goes to show that the haters here honestly haven't had the time to give the game a fair shake. If I judged DDO after a single weekend of playing, that wouldn't have been an accurate perception either.

[Grosbeak07]

Goes to show that the haters here honestly haven't had the time to give the game a fair shake. If I judged DDO after a single weekend of playing, that wouldn't have been an accurate perception either.

If a book is boring for the 1st 3rd of the story, do you keep reading? If a movie is terrible in the first few minutes, do you keep watching? If the milk tastes bad, do you keep drinking it and hope it gets better?

Games are the same way. Those first few levels are critical to getting and keeping players. I never saw that hook while I played through the 1st 10 levels, nothing that made go...huh that was "cool" or "fun" to keep me around and wonder what happens next.

I feel I would have had a much more favorable view of the game, if there was no rooting. That just kills its for me.

[Ape_Man]

My first weekend of DDO was compelling because it felt like DnD . . .

[Karavek]

If a book is boring for the 1st 3rd of the story, do you keep reading? If a movie is terrible in the first few minutes, do you keep watching? If the milk tastes bad, do you keep drinking it and hope it gets better?

Games are the same way. Those first few levels are critical to getting and keeping players. I never saw that hook while I played through the 1st 10 levels, nothing that made go...huh that was "cool" or "fun" to keep me around and wonder what happens next.

I feel I would have had a much more favorable view of the game, if there was no rooting. That just kills its for me.

thats so cute, but do you know how tired you get fighting with blades and the like it can wear one out very fast especially if they also do alot of wasteful needless movements. A real sword fight is often fast, close, but rarely involves alot of running around.

A good example that comes to mind some may be familiar with is in season 1 of the game of thrones when jamie lannister attacked ned stark outside of little fingers brothel. That is about how a typical real close quarters sword fight would flow. No running, just quick purposeful strides to close distance that in the case of neds bodyguard closing with Jamie had very negative effects as Jamie employed a sneak attack using quick draw and flick of the wrist to instantly remove a potentially worthy foe from the fight asap.

[Karavek]

My first weekend of DDO was compelling because it felt like DnD . . .

man then i am glad I never played your idea of D&D because of DDO reflected it even abit id of never taken up the dice in the first place. Elder Scrolls 4 oblivion now that game felt like i was playing table top D&D alot more. Its not about the rules but the feel. and in that game we actually wandered, explored, stalked, stole, murdered, and in general got to actually play the character you wanted to be rather then be forced to play a so called good person who inspite of being anything but evil often is only driven by evil things like greed and a lust for power. If the game is going to force me to live like a nuetral evil SOB the least they could do is let me take the alignment.

[Missing_Minds]

thats so cute, but do you know how tired you get fighting with blades and the like it can wear one out very fast especially if they also do alot of wasteful needless movements. A real sword fight is often fast, close, but rarely involves alot of running around.

A good example that comes to mind some may be familiar with is in season 1 of the game of thrones when jamie lannister attacked ned stark outside of little fingers brothel. That is about how a typical real close quarters sword fight would flow. No running, just quick purposeful strides to close distance that in the case of neds bodyguard closing with Jamie had very negative effects as Jamie employed a sneak attack using quick draw and flick of the wrist to instantly remove a potentially worthy foe from the fight asap.

So you agree, the critical decisions are done in the first few moments.

And what is critical is for any game to hook a player at the start, not hours/several game plays later.

[Jay203]

thats so cute, but do you know how tired you get fighting with blades and the like it can wear one out very fast especially if they also do alot of wasteful needless movements. A real sword fight is often fast, close, but rarely involves alot of running around.

unless you're asian
then you fly all over the place xD

[Postumus]

Goes to show that the haters here honestly haven't had the time to give the game a fair shake. If I judged DDO after a single weekend of playing, that wouldn't have been an accurate perception either.

That's not hate, that's life. I judged DDO on a single weekend of playing, and got hooked for years. Even though my first character, a con dumped Drow wizard was a death magnet I knew this game was a blast.


If a video game that takes millions of dollars to design AND has any relation to DnD doesn't compel me to play it 30 hours straight - dogs, kids, wife be dam*ed, then it is not a very good game and no amount of 'well it gets better after level X' is going to make me want to play it.

[Uska]

Goes to show that the haters here honestly haven't had the time to give the game a fair shake. If I judged DDO after a single weekend of playing, that wouldn't have been an accurate perception either.

Disagree I fell in love with ddo and the original SWG right away I hated wow, swtor, NWO fairly quickly to be fair I wasnt really expecting to like NWO due to who was behind it, 4E and the fact it's in the realms but game play graphics and lack of customization were the final nails in its coffin it's just zero fun for me.

[Uska]

That's not hate, that's life. I judged DDO on a single weekend of playing, and got hooked for years. Even though my first character, a con dumped Drow wizard was a death magnet I knew this game was a blast.


If a video game that takes millions of dollars to design AND has any relation to DnD doesn't compel me to play it 30 hours straight - dogs, kids, wife be dam*ed, then it is not a very good game and no amount of 'well it gets better after level X' is going to make me want to play it.

Well said I got hooked in late beta by ddo only other MMO to do that was the original format of SWG. +1

[Uska]

man then i am glad I never played your idea of D&D because of DDO reflected it even abit id of never taken up the dice in the first place. Elder Scrolls 4 oblivion now that game felt like i was playing table top D&D alot more. Its not about the rules but the feel. and in that game we actually wandered, explored, stalked, stole, murdered, and in general got to actually play the character you wanted to be rather then be forced to play a so called good person who inspite of being anything but evil often is only driven by evil things like greed and a lust for power. If the game is going to force me to live like a nuetral evil SOB the least they could do is let me take the alignment.

I have played with a few hundred gm's over the last 38 years and with 99% of them you would had to play a good or neutral character as well if you didn't like it you were welcome to play elsewhere! As I did when evil was allowed!

[psteen1]

Disagree I fell in love with ddo and the original SWG right away I hated wow, swtor, NWO fairly quickly to be fair I wasnt really expecting to like NWO due to who was behind it, 4E and the fact it's in the realms but game play graphics and lack of customization were the final nails in its coffin it's just zero fun for me.

I liked SWTOR and LOTRO both initially too but got sick of them pretty eventually. Maybe the same thing will happen with NWO. But I still believe you have to give something more time to judge it. That's fine if you don't agree. I'll agree to disagree. (is that allowed on the DDO forums, or will this get me an infraction?)

[Thrudh]

I feel like the action is more compelling. You can't attack while moving

As a FPS player who came to DDO BECAUSE of ability to move and attack, no thanks to that. Does Neverwinter have real-time physics detection? Or is just a roll to see if you get hit or not?

Also your little teleport move sounds great for a wizard. What does the fighter do?

I like being able to cast without thought of conservation of SP. I thought I wouldn't like this initially, but I gotta say, there is nothing more annoying than running out of SP in DDO and either carrying around a stash of pots, paying real money for pots, or just being deadweight on the team.

So are wizards weaker than fighters? I mean, in D&D 3.5 and DDO, wizards are more powerful, but limited spells per day is the balancing factor... If wizards in Neverwinter (4.0) get unlimited ranged attacks, they must be weaker than a fighter attack, otherwise why would anyone ever play a fighter?

I like the SP mechanic in DDO... I rarely drink a pot, and when I do, I consider it a semi-failure. Part of the game is smart resource utilization. Use my limited haste boost now or save for later? Blow 70 SP on a fireball now or save it for later?

[psteen1]

As a FPS player who came to DDO BECAUSE of ability to move and attack, no thanks to that. Does Neverwinter have real-time physics detection? Or is just a roll to see if you get hit or not?

I'm not sure. I do know that I thought I would hate it, but it turned out I appreciated this mechanic after I played it a bit (kinda like shrining and SP).

Also your little teleport move sounds great for a wizard. What does the fighter do?

I think- thought I didn't play them- that the guardian fighter doesn't dodge, but simply blocks. A block takes away all damage, but reduces stamina. You can't block when your stamina is gone. A two-handed fighter can sprint left/right/forward/back. It's not as effective as a wizard, but I don't think it is supposed to be since they can take the hits better. Rogues also have a teleport ability. I'm not sure what clerics do.

So are wizards weaker than fighters? I mean, in D&D 3.5 and DDO, wizards are more powerful, but limited spells per day is the balancing factor... If wizards in Neverwinter (4.0) get unlimited ranged attacks, they must be weaker than a fighter attack, otherwise why would anyone ever play a fighter?

Wizards sure are squishier. I was doing all lot of damage in PVP but when fighters decided to target me I would go down fast. So there is the defensive thing to think about. I can't comment on the offensive part since I don't know the answer.

I like the SP mechanic in DDO... I rarely drink a pot, and when I do, I consider it a semi-failure. Part of the game is smart resource utilization. Use my limited haste boost now or save for later? Blow 70 SP on a fireball now or save it for later?

I understand your point. All I can say is that I didn't miss spell points one bit once I was playing the wizard.