05/06/2021

New Class + Surprise NGE!

Apparently Neverwinter is going to go live with some huge changes next week, and they announced them... only two days ago.

The addition of bard as a new class is the least surprising bit of news, as this was already hinted at some time ago, and is very welcome (though I'm surprised they are dropping it on such short notice and with no real hype). Everything else, however...

  • To be more in line with tabletop D&D, the level cap will be squished from 80 to 20.
  • XP in the classic sense will go away; instead you will gain a level every time you complete a set piece of content called an "adventure".
  • Some existing content will be re-tooled for this, but other zones will simply be removed. Officially they might come back later, but Cryptic has a bad track record on that front, so I'd advise anyone not to hold their breaths.

And those are only the most major of the changes.

I have no idea what to think of any of this; it just feels completely out of the blue. I only know that I struggle with it when a game that I've been playing for years decides to make major systems changes like that, and it's only been two years since Undermountain turned my Neverwinter world upside down and actively turned me away from the game for the better part of a year.

2 comments:

  1. I read that announcement with something close to disbelief. When was the last time something like went well for an mmorpg? In a way, if you're going to completely change the game you might as well do it without warning because flagging it up in advance just gives people time to organize against it but there's never really going to be a good way to sell something like this to an embedded customer base.

    Cryptic do seem to mess with NWO far more than with any of their other games. I wonder why? It always seems pretty busy when I play, which suggests it isn't desperation. Also it must take a lot of work, changing whole systems and mechanics the way they do. You'd think it would be more economic to just manage the ones they have.

    This sounds as if it will turn NWO into something very similar to DDO, too, which is weird. Is DDO doing so much better that NWO needs to copy it? I doubt that. As a D&D mmorpg I would have thought NWO would be better positioned, as it has been, as a very different proposition to its main rival, not something much the same.

    I'll have to log back in and see what it's like when the changes happen. Not sure how I'm going to fit that into my already over-full schedule...

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    Replies
    1. I had to think of DDO as well, and I've never even played that!

      I can only guess, but this revamp certainly feels like a very "top-down" affair, either due to pressure from Wizards of the Coast to bring the game more in line, or some lead dev's vanity project to change the game into something else. One of my guildies who tends to follow these things more than me said that on a Twitch stream some months ago the lead dev present sounded quite proud about how they were going to turn Neverwinter into a whole new game.

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