Tales of Old

My husband and a guildie have spent the last week going on about this event that's going on right now called "Tales of Old" and yesterday I finally gave in and agreed to take part. Apparently it centres on a selection of old dungeons that were previously removed and are selectively being returned for this event in a sort of challenge mode.

The framing for the event is that your party is working with a bard called Nipsy to spin an epic tale of how you supposedly once conquered a particular old dungeon, and you re-tell/re-run it several times to embellish your exploits. The first time you just do/did it without using any consumables, the second your artifacts didn't work either, the third time around you were hurting yourselves with every at-will power you cast, the fourth time all the enemies were doing poison damage on top of their normal abilities, and the final time you also had most/all(?) of your stats halved and are shrunk in size.

There are limitations both in the form of a timer (though it's not too tight and can be extended) and a death counter, which work together quite nicely to keep you going at a decent pace but without getting careless, as running out of "lives" ends the adventure just as prematurely as letting the timer run out.

We only did the first three difficulties in our run of Lair of the Mad Dragon as it was coming up to the event's reset time and my husband found out first hand that being in the instance when it resets leads to nothing but a very bad time. These were all fairly chill, though I'm told that the difficulty ramps up considerably at stages four and five.

As someone who's generally not super keen on Neverwinter's dungeons I was pleasantly surprised by how much fun this was, though I can imagine the required repetition becoming quite tedious in the long run. Still, now I want to try some of the other dungeons in the rotation before the event ends in a few days.

Chicken Farm

During one of our first visits to Avernus I saw a player talk in general chat about soon being able to open a chicken farm, and I remember wondering what that was all about.

As it turns out, one of the reward mechanisms in Infernal Descent is that you can use the currency acquired from repeatable quests and heroic encounters to buy "surprise bags", which have a chance of containing good gear, astral diamonds, or a random companion, vanity pet or mount. As it happens, by far the most common drop from them is the "infernal chick" vanity pet, and after a few weeks of buying these bags I, too, am up to owning 24 of the little things.

Unfortunately you can neither trade nor sell them, not even to a vendor, so they've just been accumulating in my vanity pet inventory. As of now there's still plenty of space in there, but I do wish Cryptic would let me do something with them other than delete them. As I generally hate deleting things in MMOs, I'll stick to the chicken farm in my bags for now.

Shorthand

In-game shorthand can tell you a lot about new content even when you don't quite know yet what all the acronyms stand for.

For example, when we first started questing in Avernus, we quickly noticed that chat was full of "+siege" and "+ape". This indicated that there were at least two big heroic encounters (BHEs, or "beehees" as my husband likes to call them) on the map that people liked to run for the rewards.

"Ape" seemed like a bit of an odd name, mind you, but we soon found out that this was because while the encounter was technically called "Demonic Summoning", it involved killing a giant Barlgura, a type of demon that looks like - you guessed it - some kind of ape. Why waste precious syllables when a simple "ape" will do it?

In Hell

Infernal Descent takes place in Avernus, the first circle of hell according to D&D lore. Players are provided with a safe haven there in the form of your base of operations, a stronghold that was pulled down into hell due to a curse or something, but otherwise the environment is (understandably) very hostile.

I think it's always challenging to make players spend extended amounts of time in zones that are by their very nature extremely hostile and unpleasant, because if the environment truly lives up to its reputation, no amount of rewards will make people want to hang around.

Avernus, too, largely manages to deliver on what you'd expect from a circle of hell, with a slightly grating soundtrack and everything being tinted in unpleasant shades of red. Even the mobs contribute, as the Erinyes' screeching for example is a proper pain in the rear. It's bearable for the duration it takes to get your weeklies done and the gameplay is fun, but unsurprisingly the first circle of hell is not a place where I'd like to spend more time in the long run.

April Fowls

In the past, Cryptic impressed players on April Fools' Day by creating a whole new, lovingly crafted joke campaign for the event, which became so popular that they just turned it into a generally recurring event after a while.

Since then I don't recall seeing anything new for April Fools, so I was pleasantly surprised to see them come up with something new this year: "April Fowls".

This silly event is chiock-full of bad chicken puns and mostly consists of a few daily quests that involve you turning into a chicken and using unique combat abilities. The currency you earn from them can be used to buy a giant chicken mount or a couple of vanity pets.

There is also a chicken themed PvP brawl that involves you taking on the same chicken forms and abilities as in the daily quests while pecking enemy players to death. I've only done it once so far but couldn't stop laughing pretty much through the entire thing.

It's not the most sophisticated event ever, but the light-hearted silliness of it all is just right for the current climate in my eyes, and for a limited-time event it's been great fun. It's on for a few more days if you haven't had a chance to give it a go.

Also amusing: guards continue to salute me while in chicken form.

Infernal Descent

As much as Uprising was a letdown, fortunately the newest module seems to be a good one again. In fact, my immediate impression was that after something like three lacklustre modules in a row, someone at Cryptic must have sat down to check which one was the last module that players really liked (Ravenloft) and decided to simply copy that.

Infernal Descent doesn't feature as iconic a setting, but it also has an introduction with some neat-ish cut scenes, interesting NPCs, and the way the overall campaign works is almost a straight copy and paste from Ravenloft: a map with a mix of big and small heroic encounters, endlessly repeatable quests on a randomised rotation and some very rewarding weeklies.

Uprising Letdown

Having just completed Uprising at the time of writing this post, I have to say that it has to be the laziest campaign that Cryptic has ever released, and lazy is not a word I use lightly in a context like this. It literally adds nothing but a tiny new quest hub where an NPC gives you a mission to fetch four whatsits.

To get a whatsit, you first need to gather thingamabobs. To get thingamabobs, you need to run more of the same expeditions that you've been running for all of Undermountain, only without the relics and with some different boss mobs at the end.

To get access to those ever so slightly different expeditions, you first have to get doodads. To get a doodad, you have to do a daily quest to kill mobs in the exact same zones that you used to level through Undermountain, only now they have some different mobs in them.

So basically, aside from the quest hub and a couple of new boss mobs, there were no new zones, story or content in Uprising. Worse, what I explained above isn't even properly conveyed in game either - you're just given the quest for the four whatsits and then two daily quests to get doodads, with no indication of how the two are connected. For some reason Cryptic couldn't even be bothered to create an actual campaign screen for this one to track your progress. You'll just have to google it to figure it out.

It's not that I hated the content (mob grinding is a big part of Neverwinter and doesn't need to be particularly inspired as far as I'm concerned), but I'm stunned that they officially labelled this as module 17 considering that there've been sub-modules in the past that had more than this to offer.

Neverwinter vs. STO

There is a little chart called "weekly top games" on the Arc launcher, and for as long as I can remember, Neverwinter has held the number one spot on it, followed by Star Trek Online in second. Ever since I came back though, I've noticed that STO has been in first place some weeks. Has Neverwinter really decreased in popularity that much?

I consulted the Steam Charts once again, just to get a gauge on the relative popularity of the two games, and they do indeed show more people having played STO than Neverwinter for most of 2020. The last time that happened was back in 2016! Then I realised that STO recently celebrated its 10th anniversary though, which I'm sure helped it garner some extra attention, and activity does appear to have been dropping off again since that event ended on PC.

That said, the Neverwinter chart has definitely seen better days too. The game's last major peak appears to have been in July 2018 with the release of Ravenloft (understandably), and after the release of Undermountain in particular you can see a noticeable decline in interest (also understandably if you ask me - people don't like having to relearn the entire game!). We'll see if the current climate encourages more players to give the game another chance, like I have.

Keeping Up Appearances

At launch, Neverwinter had no real cosmetic system at all, only the option to display a "fashion set" instead of your regular gear, which was extremely limited. Later on they added dyes and the ability to "overwrite" an item's appearance with that of another item, but doing so destroyed the latter, which was annoying e.g. when you got a new weapon and had to choose between either salvaging the old one for currency or destroying it to preserve the appearance. It could also get quite expensive if you replaced your gear frequently but wanted to keep the same look.

I was pleased to see that with Uprising the devs decided to make an attempt at getting Neverwinter caught up with more modern MMOs in regards to cosmetics. There is now a dedicated appearance tab where you can set a look you want and it stays on even if you swap gear around. You still need to destroy gear that you want to "add to your appearance library" once, but after that you can re-use the look forever. Likewise dyes only need to be unlocked once and are re-usable after that.

I felt vindicated for actually having kept some old gear pieces that I liked the look of in the bank for a rainy day - now I just needed to convert them to appearance library items and they were ready to be worn again!

The system's still far from perfect, mind you - for example there is currently no way to save multiple outfits for easy swapping. Also, the old fashion system still exists and now just feels weird and confusing in the way these things tend to go in older MMOs when a newer system effectively replaces an older one but the old one doesn't get removed. Still, it's a step in the right direction.

Life Steal

The life steal stat in Neverwinter has long been my go-to example of why allowing too much self-healing is bad, at least in a game that's supposed to have a trinity system. People were healing themselves so much that dedicated healers quickly became redundant, and since it scaled with damage output, characters also became increasingly unkillable the more damage they did.

It received a big nerf at least once (possibly more often than that) but it was only with Undermountain that Cryptic decided to remove the stat altogether, while also all but eliminating abilities that used to do both damage and healing simultaneously.

And I've got to say, even though I agree that it was bad... suddenly being without it after years of playing a certain way sucks too, as my characters now have to consume potions/health stones like nobody's business. Considering that regular potions barely heal you at all and the actually useful health stones are sold in the cash shop, it's also hard not to suspect Cryptic of having made this move to encourage cash shop purchases rather than out of any actual gameplay concerns.