A Sad Decline

Hearing about Neverwinter Classic got me to re-read some of my old posts on this blog and made me all nostalgic. Damn, I really loved this game for a while, playing it on and off for about eight years.

I decided to have a look at Steam Charts to get an idea of how Neverwinter is doing nowadays, and it was honestly quite sad to look at, especially when comparing its numbers (green line in the screenshot below) against those of its sibling Star Trek Online (blue line), which is also based on a large IP and developed by the same studio.

STO shows only the gentlest decline over time, maintaining a remarkably stable population for more than ten years. By comparison, Neverwinter started out huge and held on to almost half its launch base for a full year, but then you see the first permanent decline around April 2015, when the Elemental Evil module raised the level cap and made an incredible mess of things (there's a reason it was on my own list of least favourite mods).

However, the devs eventually managed to stop the bleed from that and things remained relatively stable for the next three years, with the game even seeing a new peak of active users in July 2018, after the launch of the excellent Ravenloft module (also in my own top 5).

But then! Another permanent drop after April 2019 when Undermountain drastically revamped all classes (again, I agree with this vibe and it was another one of my least faves). The game recovered a bit of population during the Covid bump, but then experienced another permanent population drop at the end of 2021, when unwelcome changes to the enchantment system ended up driving me away as well.

I mostly take two things away from that:

1. As far as Neverwinter goes, I'm no contrarian and it's actually surprising how much my personal opinions seem to align with the masses.

2. It's very much possible to drive an initially successful MMO into the ground with repeated terrible decisions.