Awesome Level 9000 is the first of hopefully many expansions for AEG’s new hit game Smash Up, if you haven’t already checked out my review of Smash Up you’re really missing out. I’ll give you a few minutes to go read it and check out the video, go ahead, I’ll just be here tapping my foot impatiently. Alright, back now? Good. Now let’s check out what’s inside the box.

[Link to video for those using alternate reading methods]

Not only does AL9K add more to the game in terms of factions and options, but it also adds in a few touches of polish the original lacked. The new base cards are much easier to read because of their enlarged text and they’ve also provided a nice victory point tracking method this time. You can recycle the box and toss the added cards into your original Smash Up box if you’d like to, which is nice for those of us with overflowing shelves of games.

New Factions

Aside from those goodies, the game adds 4 new factions for mashing up. I’m going to give you a run down of how each one feels in play and then we’ll do a quick wrap up!

• Steampunk – This faction is really a grab bag of mechanics, which feels appropriate for the hodge-podge cobbled together nature that steampunk seems to invoke. Whirring gears, zepplins, and lots of other gizmos focus big on recycling your own actions, minion manipulation, as well as both escaping and negating your opponents actions. Steampunk feels like a welcome addition when paired with almost any other faction, especially more headstrong ones like pirates or ninjas.

• Bear Cavalry – Strong. Like Bull! This faction has a very soviet feel, including a card entitled “Bear Rides You”. The cavalry focus on both destroying and moving opponents minions, granting invulnerability to your minions and buffing up their power levels as well. Lots of fun to play with robots and zombies I’ve found.

• Ghosts – Perhaps the most unique new faction are the ghosts, the essence of their play style is very incorporeal indeed in that you should find yourself emptying your entire hand very often. The ghosts focus on playing from discard pile, emptying your hand via many discard mechanics built into the minions and actions, bonus actions & minions, as well as some direct VP gain. The ghosts are really a treat, and have a bit of a learning curve at first until you know how to play them. Try pairing them with zombies for tons of grave shenanigans, or with aliens for a bunch of straight up victory point gain.

• Plants – The feelings of constricting vines and power creep are definitely a big part of the plant peoples. They focus on pure destruction, and slightly delayed results as plants “grow” to bigger effect one turn after they are played on a good chunk of the cards. There’s also a fair share of drawing extra cards, searching your deck, and weakening opponent minions. I think plants work well in horde scenarios such as with robots, or the tricksters.

Best. Bases. Ever.

The 8 new base cards in the set here really take the theme from the factions they are tied to and reinforce them very strongly. I think that this was a really nice touch that was done well in the base version of Smash Up, that they’ve just further improved upon with this expansion. You’ll really want to be fighting to score your own bases here, and it’s a lot of fun. Not to mention, they’ve included the best base card possible ever, in any game: The Dread Gazebo. Call me biased, but this sets the game somewhere at least around ‘awesome level 18,000‘ in my book.

Final Thoughts

Smash Up, Awesome Level 9000 is a welcome expansion for anyone who owns the game or is looking to get into it. It’s not going to set you back much at $15 and it’s going to add a lot of variety to your game, along with the possibility to play with more players. Though playing with more than 4 might be outside of the game’s rule book it’s totally possible and is a lot of fun. I should also mention that even though the artwork contains some stuff like ghosts, it’s all very safe for family game nights. I’ve found myself playing a lot with my wife and my son. Smash Up is a hit, and this expansion is no exception, do yourself a favor and grab yourself a copy! Thanks for reading!

Guildhall, also known as Guildhall: Old World Economy is a wonderful little gem of a game from AEG that I recently had the pleasure of checking out and playing profusely so that I might bring you a solid review. Guildhall is definitely a euro style card game but it’s not a cube pusher about planting crops or, contrary to its cover, the highs and lows of being a creepy pig farmer. Not that there’s anything wrong with farming, or pigs, or cubes, for the record.

However Guildhall does a good job of being a euro that also gives you a sense of espionage and skullduggery as you try and manipulate your way into the prefect scenario for acquiring gold coins, AKA victory points! Not a lot of euros allow for player interaction of any kind, let alone the kind that lets you directly screw over your opponent.

More Than Meets The Eye

Now, Guildhall might not look like much at first, but after your first play though you’ll start to realize that the simple ‘set collecting’ mechanic of the game goes much, much deeper than you might think. There are so many angles to play when trying to overcome your opponents, so many in fact that it will take you a few games to pick up on all of them. You need a set amount of victory points to win the game, and when there are so many ways to get them, coupled with ways to stop your opponents from getting them it all adds up into this very slick, savvy experience.

The game plays in about 30 minutes but your first play though will probably take around 45 minutes due to the lack of succinct explanations for each card, though hopefully this review can help shorten that.

I’m going to let the video review I did speak for itself instead of repeating myself in text form here. So watch the video and then hit my pros and cons list below and tell me what you think!

[Link to video for those using alternate reading methods]

Players: 2-4 Ages: 12+ (I’d say 10+) Setup Time: <5 min Play Time: ~25-35 min Price: $24

Production Values: Great quality card stock which seems to be a standard with AEG’s products. The box is just completely unnecessary in every way, but is solid and durable.  The cards are colorful and very iconic, nice that there are symbols for colorblind folks. Fun fact: I accidentally spilled this beer (which drinks like motor oil) all over the box and the cards, but looking at the game right now you’d never know.

Pros:

• Quick to learn, harder to master. Gameplay is extremely satisfying.
• It plays fast, but you can stretch it out if you want it to. Making this one great for filler, or focal point during game night.
• For a euro, you can interact a lot with your opponents which is something I love!

Cons:

• The Rules could use another page, just one more to explain each card briefly!
• Gratuitous misuse of packaging, zero extra room and the cards barely fit as is. Also, no room for the upcoming expansion pack!
• Would be nice if it could accommodate more players (2-6) but not a huge issue

I normally don’t let my flip throughs exist outside of YouTube but I really wanted to bring you guys the quick overview I did of the new Dungeons of Dread book. I’m a really big fan so far and I’ve already begun putting it to good use for an upcoming D&D Next session (conversion is damn easy) so there’s definitely a lot of value here for gamers old and new.

With that I’ll leave you with the video, consider this my apology in advance for using the words “vagina tree“. Classy, I know.

[Link to video for those using alternate reading methods]

In case you haven’t been following my Neverwinter coverage, you should go and do that now – if you’re a video game player at least. If you’re not and you just came for the D&D editorial then hey, that’s alright too.

Over the years tabletop D&D has been compared to many things, and there always seems to be a hot button issue when you compare it to a video game. Mainly because of the disparity of generations spanning D&D players and of course the inevitable comparing of everything to everything else all the time syndrome caused by internet usage. Of course there have been many legit comparisons of Neverwinter, it seems especially related to 4th edition. Let’s keep in mind that there have been numerous D&D video game titles both legendary and awful, (The 01′ Pool of Radiance was Power Word Death to your OS, among other things) and of course D&D has served as the inspiration and basis for thousands of games for nearly 40 years now. You’ve got to analyze each one based on its own merits, which I’m hoping you’ll do for Neverwinter because people (including myself) have been notoriously unkind regarding their expectations of the game.

I don’t feel that directly porting over D&D rules into a video game always works out well, mainly because at some point you stop trying to make a game that’s fun and you’re just trying to simulate a game that’s already simulating something. It is the crap-ception of video game design – tabletop and electronic are two very different mediums and I think all too often people lose sight of that. Don’t get me wrong a lot of analog games move over well to video games - especially board games, but I think that the perfect blend of crunchy mechanics and open storytelling that tabletop RPG rules are, aren’t one of them. The pure organic basis of why we play tabletop RPG’s doesn’t convert over well is what I’m saying, especially not with tools so we can tell our own stories. This is why the original Neverwinter games were such a hit, because of the DM toolbox, it gave us the ability to tell our own stories, albeit there were more limitations than pen and paper, but there were a lot less than conventional D&D video games. So hooray for Neverwinter’s foundry (which I’m currently playing with but cannot tell you anything about)!

Keeping It In Perspective

Anyway, in short I think games like the Baldur’s Gate Series and Planescape: Torment were pulled off wonderfully because they focused harder on narrative than the mechanics behind them, although the mechanics were definitely there (see: full minutes full of swings and misses in melee combat at low levels) but all D&D video games don’t manage to do it quite as well. Would those button smashing console titles have been as fun if the combat were turn based? Was it really “fun” to measure out your movement with as much granularity as was presented in Temple of Elemental Evil? To each their own of course but I wasn’t a fan. Let’s keep in mind that Neverwinter is an MMO so you’re going to get a lot more fluctuations in the “D&D-ness” factor of the gameplay than a title focused solely on telling a single story.

There have been dozens of D&D games, some great and some awful but let’s not list them all, I’m sure you already know your favorites are. For the sake of not starting any fires or turning this post into troll bait I won’t be comparing Neverwinter to raw tabletop D&D rules, I don’t think that’ fair…or sane. If you want a fluid game that is fun and fun to play as a video game, you’ve gotta make changes for the sake of playability. Neverwinter does that very very well. Alas before I move on to talk about its awesomeness I’ve gotta tackle one more ugly, unavoidable tidbit before we can finally get to the good stuff.

The Inevitable Comparison to DDO, Let’s Get It Over With

Ah Dungeons & Dragons Online, the other D&D MMO. One that’s currently breaking out of it’s Eberron box to bring Forgotten Realms content, to compare with Neverwinter perhaps? Who knows. Anyway, if you’re wanting to know about how Neverwinter compares to DDO, I’m going to try and be as tactful as possible, so here I go. DDO is a beautiful game, the DirectX11 shinies make it look great for being as old of a title as it is but I still don’t think it stacks up to Neverwinter in the aesthetics department. I played DDO on and off for a while with my wife and a few friends but none of us could ever really get into it. It’s not for the lack of options or content, or most of the freemium aspects. It was mainly because we just found the game made us feel very claustrophobic and tedious   Nearly everything in the game is a tiny, uneventful dungeon crawl and the entire scope of the game’s landscapes feel very limited. Granted this is only up to about level 5 which as as far as I could stomach DDO’s gameplay. Keep in mind I bought this game at launch, and have also played as recently as about 6 months ago – things have certainly changed for the better but the overall ethos of the game is still the same stagnant waiting pool of 3rd edition fumbly bits.
Of course DDO’s near verbatim use of the 3rd edition ruleset causes the game to suffer, keep in mind this actually has very little to do with the fact that 3rd edition is one of my least favorites. As I mentioned above, directly porting over a finnicky tabletop system into a video game where the crunchy bits should be as concealed as possible isn’t a great idea – and unfortunately that’s exactly what DDO does. In DDO you’ll see extremely high level characters walking around without armor on because of the DEX mod cap and other oddities that the 3.x rule system generates when players are trying to get the most of their characters.

Neverwinter Does It Right

Neverwinter avoids shenanigans like this, yes the game is modeled after 4e’s art style, and the initial 5 classes are very much a resemblance of the D&D Essentials line but that doesn’t mean that Cryptic copied things verbatim and slapped them into their game. When you’re making a game, especially a D&D game, you have to make it accessible. More people play video games than Tabletop games, especially pen and paper RPGs and sure it sucks but it’s the truth. We as tabletop gamers have to accept that. Cryptic has taken liberties with making the game fluid and attractive to many different play styles and commitment levels. For these reasons (and quite a few more I imagine) some people will say that Neverwinter is “not D&D” and to those people I say, honestly, why do you hate fun?

As far as other aspects of the game go, the freemium model of Neverwinter doesn’t involve teasing you with content and then going “oh wait, do you want to run this dungeon? Better buy the adventure pack now!” There are barred doors and dungeons behind a paywalls all over DDO, and that’s not even a factor in Neverwinter. DDO also has no real form of PvP that is even remotely interesting or relevant, it feels tacked on. PvP is a big factor for me personally because I am a huge fan of the fact that you’re not going up against a programmed AI and that it’s constantly changing and (relatively) unpredictable. Neverwinter’s PvP is structured and far from pointless, it earns you several rewards and is a total blast (I actually just did some alongside one of the Neverwinter devs Joe Garhan and we got to chat about lots of stuff, timing didn’t line up for me to fit it into my wrap up earlier this week so be sure to check it out). One last thing I wanted to touch on was the fact that both of these games are instanced isn’t even an issue, lots of games are these days and Neverwinter is no exception, but its the sheer fact of how ‘walled in’ DDO feels compared to Neverwinter. Turbine, who makes DDO, also does LOTR online and that game feels very different (and much more open and well done) than DDO. Overall Neverwinter is just a more playable and cohesive game than DDO is. So there’s my two cents, but keep in mind that I’m also not really a fan of Eberron or 3e so take all of this with a grain of salt I suppose. Now, finally moving on to the good stuff!

Neverwinter Is Great

Honestly, playing Neverwinter has somehow reignited some small part of me that really wants to play 4e D&D again. I’m not sure if its the simplicity of the player character power setup, the look of the tieflings, or just because I’m on my love/hate roller coaster ride with Vancian magic and we just took a huge dip off the top of a very high crest.

As a tabletop player I can honestly say that contrary what grognards and grumpy edition warrers will say, Neverwinter is very “D&D”. The combat is furious and deadly, it has all the accommodations of modern MMO games at zero cost. You can jump in with your friends and get playing immediately, granted the class selection is a bit limited right now and will be at launch but sometimes less options are better, like the essentials line. I know I know, let’s not get started on that but honestly, if you were considering not giving Neverwinter a shot I highly suggest you change your mind and at least try playing it for a week and see what turns up.

You’re going to roll for your ability scores, increase them as you level, weigh the pros and cons of which powers to use in battle, roll with your teammates across a wide range of playscapes disarming traps, smashing bad guys, and helping fallen comrades from the brink of death’s door. This game is D&D in the truest of forms, you don’t need THACO or weird ability score caps to tell you that, action point and spell mechanics don’t have to be carbon copied from a book on your shelf for you to have fun.

A List, For Lists Sake

Maybe you like lists, maybe you need a list of things/reasons for you to try Neverwinter. I can give you that, I’ll give you ten actually, ten reasons you totally wouldn’t expect.

• It’s free, as in free beer. Download the game, play it, that’s all there is to it.
• It’s got dwarves, and dwarves with mohawks.
• You can get companions and train them to fight at your side and give them cool names like “Zero Cool” and “Healbot 9000″.
• The PvP is fucking amazing.
• The devs really care about the feedback they recieve, it shows more and more with each patch.
• There’s Mimics, holy shit!
• If you’re actually reading this you’ll notice that there are in fact 11 bullet points, I might give you a beta key too so keep reading.
• It runs on just about any modern PC, even the shitbox I have at work with onboard graphics played it smooth (with graphics turned down) at 1920×1080. No I wasn’t playing during working hours, I’m not a slacker. You can even move the UI around to your liking without installing a billion mods.
• There’s built in voice chat, come smash things with your friends and laugh and make dick jokes, just like you would around the table.
• The Foundry is going to produce awesome content, even if the people at Cryptic fall through (they probably won’t, did you see me fighting that pit fiend?) you can just make your own.
• The chance to poke fun at literally hundreds if not thousands of people who have named their character some variation of “Drizzt” and have panther companions.

Wrap Up, Time to Crack Some Skulls

It doesn’t matter what edition of D&D is your favorite, Neverwinter is a blast. Games like this are what I’d rather do than attempt to play tabletop games online. Roll20 and other online tabletop tools are great but the whole online gaming experience just isn’t for me, give me tabletop or give me death, and by death I mean video games.

I’m not sure when the game is actually launching but I’m sure it can’t be too far away. I hope you’ll give it a shot at least, I know I was fully prepared to completly disregard this game and let my assumptions and reservations guide me in a completely different direction. I’ve been playing D&D since I was a teenager and I don’t plan on stopping any time soon, I’ve played a lot of D&D licensed titles and I can honestly say that Neverwinter is one of the few that does the brand good.

If you’re interested in playing this weekend and haven’t managed to grab a key from the various promotions going on online that I’ve been tweeting about then I have some good news for you. I have several Neverwinter keys to give out, give me either A) your biggest sob story as to why you need to play Neverwinter this weekend, B) your testament as to how much you’ve loved the Neverwinter series and/or Forgotten Realms for your whole life, or C) a rant about how much you can’t stand assboats who sit around in general chat of MMO’s complaining about them and should probably just log off and go drink bleach.

Hope to see you in game this weekend!

Alright let’s pick right up from where we left off last week. As I said there the first 20 levels felt very linear as far as the story and the world go, though the sheer amount of things to play within within your character are the exact opposite. As you climb in levels you gain new abilities, most of which you’ll automatically jump on using but right around level 15 you have to start making choices. The choices are great because you want to be able to use all of your abilities but you can’t so you’re really trying to pick and choose the best one for the job at hand. Partying with friends? Pick a set of powers that is going to benefit your strengths/weaknesses the most. Are you fighting lots of monsters that are quantity over quality? Maybe it’s time to break out that AoE power you have. Soloing? Bring your companion.

As you go through those 20 first levels the game presents itself to you in bite sized amounts of nuance – teaching you about the UI, different types of resources you can use and expanding your possibilities within the game world. The story starts to branch out it seems toward levels 19-20 and starts introducing some of the spell plague plot elements but I honestly can’t say more than that because I didn’t get to play much farther.

Let’s drop back a bit to the character creation and discuss the races, classes, and all of those other great D&D bits we all know and love.

Character Creation

Races

So the beta gave us access to humans, elves, dwarves, halflings, half elves, half orcs, and tieflings. Of course the founders will have access to the Drow race and more will come down the pipeline after the game launches. I will say that the level of customization for each race was beyond what I expected, more comprehensive than most MMO’s I’ve played. I’d put it on par with Elder Scrolls or Bioware level of detail tweaking. If that’s what you’re into there is plenty of that here. Each race definitely feels very distinct and has a solid look carved out for them, though I can’t speak for the half elves because I didn’t poke around with one but c’mon and use your imagination there – It’s part elf, part human.

Each race has a set of racial bonuses ala tabletop D&D, where you’ll be able to get a +2 to one stat and an optional plus two in a selection of two others. Unless you play a boring human of course. You “roll” for your ability scores and can roll them as many times as you want but it still seems like it’s set up to produce results from an array, no matter how many times I rolled I couldn’t achieve more than one score of 18 in a stat. Not a big deal, there would be huge balance issues if it was purely “organic” like the 4d6 method of making characters in pen and paper D&D. I believe each race has a skill associated with it but I could be wrong, that might have just been the classes, which would kind of make sense I suppose.

Skills

Speaking of the skills – allow me to explain how those work in an MMORPG. From what I can tell certain skills are given interactable objects within the game world. Little tables full of ancient books and baubles give way to caches of items for those with Arcana, Shrines and statues for religion, Gatherings of moss and mushrooms for nature, and discarded satchels/backpacks for thievery. Not sure why you’d need thievery to steal someone’s backpack but hey, whatever. I was not entirely sold on this to be true, it just seems like a topical way to plug in more things to loot and tie it to a D&D trope. There are also “kits” which are consumables that give you a chance to interact with one of these items if you don’t posses the needed skill, depending on the situation you have a certain % chance to fail and your kit will “break”, consuming it.

However as I played more I did learn that skills also come in handy for things like disarming traps (traps in this game are legit), and sometimes the skills will allow for the manipulation of a door or lever that will gain you access to a separate area, which usually results in a treasure chest of some sort so it’s more of just a roundabout way of doing the same thing. Then again, the core of MMO’s is about killing things and taking their loot, or getting loot from treasure chests so take it as you will. It’s not a complaint but I do think there’s a lot more they could do with it, and perhaps they have and I just didn’t get that far.

Classes

Anyway back to character creation. After you pick your race, you’ll obviously pick a class. During the beta weekend that I played there were 4 classes available: Guardian Fighter, Trickster Rogue, Control Wizard, Devoted Cleric. Each has a very distinct feel to them and I think they will be releasing more classes post launch and it seems they are going the D&D Essentials route of [Type]Class. I suspect we’ll see some kind of striker (DPS) wizard or sorcerer, and a cleric that is more melee oriented than the “laser cleric” that is the devoted one. I played all 4 classes at least to level 10 (sans Cleric) but I played the rogue to 19 so I’ll give you my quick breakdown of how they “feel” and comment on how they feel as part of an adventuring party. The solo capabilities of each class is quite good so there’s no need to comment on whether they can solo, but rather how they do it.

• Rogue – Very strong solo capabilities, though the game tends to throw bad guys at you in groups of at least 3 or 4 at a time. Depending on the situation and the level of your enemy you’ll likely chug down a health potion or two when faced with 4+ opponents by yourself. As the member of a group you’re great at focusing down a single target at a time and are very mobile so you can dart all across the room with your various encounter powers picking people off and helping peel bad guys off the squishy wizards. Playing the rogue was very very satisfying and combat never felt like a bore, the active maneuvering is very fun to play with by dodging enemy attacks and just being all over the place in general.

• Wizard – The wizard can pew pew magic missiles quite quickly usually in a one, two burst followed by a third triple missile assault which feels very weighty as they sink into your foes. Their control abilities work quite well, perhaps too well! While playing my rogue I kept having to chase after monsters the wizard would knock around the map, so controlling really is a thing they excel at, as well as AOE damage. Their teleport ability allowing them to swiftly avoid incoming attacks or bamboozle a foe who is charging at them head on is very nice, I can’t wait to see this play out in PvP

• Fighter – The fighter plays like the tank it is supposed to be. I played a dwarf and boy oh boy did I feel like my little dude could take some punishment. The fighter doesn’t have any active abilities to dodge out of the way like the other 3 classes (which is good) and instead has an active block. You hold shift down and he raises his shield, while in this mode you can’t attack but you take considerably less damage. This pits the fighter against huge foes and really enforces the damage sponge mentality of the guardian fighter, it’s great. To choose to block or to build more aggro or to just get another sword swing in again? Decisions! They have a cool intercept style ability too which makes for great ways to leap into a bundle of foes to get their attention, or to save one of your other party members’ asses.

• Cleric – The cleric was the first time I’d ever played or heard about people playing a healer in an MMO that were actually excited about it. You don’t just sit around and stare into whack-a-mole health bars and fall asleep at your keyboard. The devoted cleric actively participates in battle by tossing out seals to heal the party, obliterating undead, and slinging lances of faith into enemies at a constant rate. It’s pretty fun, but I won’t say much more because my cleric actually only got to about level 6.

Everyone in Neverwinter has the same shoes. EVERYONE.

I do have some small gripes about all the classes though, it seems there was only 1 weapon each one could use. Though my rogue did get an axe toward the end, wizards use orbs, fighters use swords, etc. It felt very limiting but it could be that it’s still a beta, or I wasn’t looking hard enough, or I just got unlucky with drops. I think that the weapons you wield have something to do with your character’s general animation, which can get annoying.

The wizards all constantly walk around with their two fingers up (controlling the floating orb? scouts honor?) and the clerics are always holding an arm out dangling their holy symbol around. Looking at them just makes my arms tired. The rogues do this little jump back and forth the way boxers do when preparing for a fight, which is actually kind of cool. Minor gripe but yeah, I wish they’d just stand still!

Each class does have a build system too. As you advance in levels you get “feat points” to spend on passive perks for your character, about midway through you’ll gain access to a “paragon path” where you’ll pick to further specialize your character’s already specialized role. I think when the game finally launches this level of granularity is going to be great. You’ll have a defending fighter, and an offensive one, each with 3 separate paths they can go down, should make for some varied groups and even more dynamics in PvP. I’m a big fan of PvP in case you can’t tell

Speaking of PvP, there’s an exclusive press only PvP event going on in Neverwinter tomorrow the 19th and I’m going to get to be part of it! We’re being leveled up to 31 and being shown around the PvP scene! So I’ll be streaming between 3 and 5 pm PST if you want to check out the coverage over on my twitch channel, be sure not to miss it!

Questing and Leveling Up

So, what is leveling and questing like? It’s pretty streamlined, as noted before it may be a bit too streamlined for some people but to each their own. The questing system has a built in tracker. You can make notes on your map, flag areas on your map, and each quest has a highlighted quest zone so you know exactly where to go. There’s also a trail of rainbow sparkles ala Fable that will lead you by the nose to your next objective. You can easily disable this stuff with the stroke of a single hotkey if you like to explore more than you like to be caught up in an endless tutorial. I will admit though I did have it turned off 90% of the time it was great for when you got in a pinch and had no idea what/where the hell it was you were supposed to be doing/going.

Getting a level up brings about a pop up for you to basically go through a check list of all the things you can do for that level advancement. The whole game has an overlay that can be triggered via mouse click or key combination, which is an elegant solution for a game that involves a constant use of mouselook. It might take a little getting used to for the first 10 minutes or so but after that you really start to appreciate the UI.

Fiddly bits about the game are always a point of contention for me. Am I going to be playing inventory tetris? How quick do I run out of bag space? How easy is it to split stacks of items, trade, converse, manipulate objects, etc. In Neverwinter most all of the things I just mentioned are handled with the F key (rebindable of course) you use it like an action key in other games. The same way E does most actions in a FPS, F does the same in Neverwinter. It may sound awkward but it felt really really ergonomic during gameplay. I got some footage of inventory management, if you’re as boring as I am you may enjoy it.

Dungeon Instances

The dungeon queuing system is really slick. You put yourself in the queue and right there on the screen it tells you the ETA on running the dungeon and an estimated wait time for when you’ll be entering. It uses a system similar to WoW where if a party member drops you can look for someone to fill in on the fly. During the beta I got to run The Cloak Tower and our group had no true tank actually, we used the wizard’s fighter companion as a tank and it did a decent job up until the final boss. Our cleric admitted that they did not know how to heal (I died a time or two) but we managed to get through it.

Our party composition was 2 rogues, 2 wizards, and a half cleric and we managed to make it through in about 35 minutes so I’m not sure what that says for the difficulty of the content or if we just got lucky or if since it was an intro dungeon if it wasn’t really meant to be much of a challenge. Regardless, the experience was fun, the run was quick and colorful. That’s one thing I’ll say about the game over and over is that the environments are really varied and it doesn’t just feel like its all open fields and boar slaying. This is a good thing. If you want to watch the whole dungeon run in its entirety, you can do so right here.

Enough! Just Grab This Beta Key and Find Out For Yourself!

I could go on and on about so many more things, the more I write the more I realize I could be writing about right down to the keybinds and quest givers themselves. I’m not going to press into 2500 word territory though. I’m sure you’ve heard enough of my babble and want to try the game yourself anyway? Logitech is giving away keys for this weekend so go grab one and find me in game. Check back later this week as I have my final wrap up regarding who Neverwinter feels to a D&D player, and perhaps to a DDO player.

For a precursor to this post, and what lead up to its writing, be sure to check my this post first, then jump back here. Okay, so I was once a huge MMO gamer, my World of Warcraft days were the only way to get my ‘RPG fix with other actual living people’ before my re-induction to the tabletop world. I played long hours and ran a hardcore raiding guild for 2 straight years, disregarded schoolwork, relationships, shaving, and overall missed out on a lot of things real life had to offer. Thankfully those days are over and so what I look for in an MMO is a lot different. To be honest I don’t look for MMO’s at all anymore because of the time constraints and obligations they inter, and also my habit to become wildly addicted to them. That being said I may not be the hardest of the hardcore anymore, and if you’re looking for thoughts on the game from that vantage point you may as well stop reading now.

Recently I picked up Guild Wars 2. Yes this piece is about Neverwinter but I’m going somewhere with this so just sit tight. I picked it up on a whim to relive some old memories with a few buddies and spend more time with a friend who had moved away, also it seemed just too hard to pass up being that there was no subscription fee. The game is great, I played for a few months but have since fell out of love with my class and been too preoccupied with a glut of other great games to play. I have coined Guild Wars 2 “the MMO for adults who have jobs and/or lives” because of its ease of entry and non-committal nature. You can log in and play for a bit and hop right back off and still feel like you accomplished something, which I find greatly important between having an amazing wife and 2 kids who deserve my attention, 2 and a half jobs, and a social life away from a computer monitor.

“Pay To Win”? Nope

My only minor issue with Guild Wars was the 60$ bar to enter. It wasn’t bad, but it was still a bar. Here I was paying $60 for another MMO which I may or may or may not still want to play within a few months. With Neverwinter I feel that you’re getting all of the “gamer with a life” benefits of Guild Wars 2 and also waiving the entrance fee, because there’s none of that, the game is free to download and free to play. Yes there is a cash store “freemium” option for things but from all I can gather it is not “pay to win”. It is actually somewhat similar to Guild Wars 2’s setup for their cash store. It may be “pay to save time” however, which I’m totally okay with. Why? Because I’m an adult who can’t spend a ton of time raiding/grinding/questing to get the cool bits that I want out of a game. I’ve dropped a total of 30$ on other “freemium” games like Tribes Ascend and I’m very, very happy about it. That’s half of what I’d have spent for a major release AAA title video game and I’ve gotten at least 35+ hours of gameplay out of it so far and look forward to a lot more, that’s a pretty cheap entertainment/dollar ratio if you ask me.

With Neverwinter’s “zen” (real cash) store you can get mounts, bags, consumables, companions (which are like pets, but they actually help you fight, especially helpful for solo adventuring) and more, though you can earn all of these items in game without ever spending a dime. There’s also a thing you can do hourly by sending a prayer to your deity which grants you a short buff and some kinds of tokens that are redeemable for other goodies too, including a unicorn mount which someone I know is awfully excited about.

Apples, Oranges, and Eyestalks

Let it be known that I’m not a fan of saying “oh it’s just like X but with Y” when it comes to games, at least not on a cynical level of merely writing them off. Almost every creative work is a derivative of various other creative works so let’s just get that out of the way right now. At this point though, calling any game a “clone” of something typically isn’t fair unless it is obviously a blatant clone of another title. (see: Runes of Magic)

If I had to compare Neverwinter to another single game, I wouldn’t.  I’d say that it was honestly a large blend of things with one big unique twist – the gameplay is all action oriented. The combat reminded me of a hybrid between Diablo and the old console D&D games of yore where you go around smashing barrels and racing to run over the little piles of gold and potions before your buddies did (though that’s not actually the case in Neverwinter, loot isn’t shared).

The action economy reminded me of something between classic MMO “cooldowns” (at will and encounter powers) and limit breaker abilities that you build up ala Final Fantasy (daily powers, which are over the top awesome). The grouping system is simple and easy to grab friends and go, the built in voice chat is wonderful (when it works, I had to relog a few times to get it to “click”), you share gold when in a party and items aren’t shared so there’s no fighting over loot. You will obtain items that you can’t use though, which is a good thing because it helps you gear friends, alts, or at the very least make some coin selling the stuff. Each dungeon and most quests have a chest at the end that holds an item just for your class which is a nice touch.

However most likely though, people will compare Neverwinter to Guild Wars 2. There are scrying orbs that are like GW2’s vistas -allowing you to see a large overview of the map via some awesome aerial camera angle, as well as a few other minor aspects that will prompt the comparison of the two games. It’s unavoidable and I’d rather not get into any pissing matches about it, so let’s avoid that if we can. All this being said let’s move on to actually talking about now Neverwinter plays and feels on its own merits instead of playing the name game, shall we?

Look & Feel, More Coming Tomorrow

Let me first just say that I had an absolute blast playing every moment of Neverwinter this past weekend. I really didn’t want to put it down, I even woke up thinking about playing it both days of the beta weekend. To top that off each time I woke up thinking about it, my wife had already beat me to the punch because I was woken up by the sounds of frantic clicking and spells being thrown about. Anytime a game does that to me, I know it’s doing something right.

Neverwinter feels very fluid, I thought at first that the action “mouselook always on” feel would be too twitchy for an MMO. This didn’t work very well in Conan so I was not sure what to think. After my very first combat interaction though I was glad to be wrong, the lock on features are great and everything just feels smooth and super playable. Combat in this game is addicting. Speaking of smooth though, the graphics themselves are very “D&D” and work wonderfully for the setting of the game, environments are very varied and look beautiful in a lot of places. Although they do feel somewhat dated in other aspects (especially the character models), and the animations, particularly those of your enemies are still very rough in places but it is a beta after all. Honestly though I don’t really give two shits about the graphics because I don’t play games for the visuals, they’re just icing on the cake. For those of you who are PC hardware nerds I’m running an Athlon II X4 630, 8GB of DDR3, and a Radeon HD 7850 2GB, I ran the game on maximal settings with zero performance issues when I wasn’t streaming.

Tomorrow I’ll be covering what the game’s first 20 levels felt like, classes, races, skills, character creation, leveling, builds, the dungeon I ran along with the queue’ing system, questing, and more. If you want a sneak peak or some insight into what I’m going to be talking about you can check out my live streaming coverage of day 1 that includes the aforementioned topics for tomorrow’s post. The stream is also full of commentary and questions I was taking from d20Monkey and some other people from the internet! After the gamer perspective commentary, I’ll be writing up an entire blog from the point of being a tabletop D&D player and the possibilities behind the game’s foundry. Expect that early next week.

Watch The Stream, Neverwinter Gameplay In Action

Bonus Clip: “HOLY SHIT IT’S A MIMIC!”

Foot In Mouth Starts Here

If you remember a long while back I made some pretty boisterous predictions about the new Neverwinter title. Now I know some of you are going to think I’m just hopping on a bandwagon here or that someone from WotC has their hand firmly wedged up my ass and is puppeteering my mouth to promote this game. That’s fine. However if you are one of those people please refer to this Venn diagram and don’t bother writing me any nasty emails. Things change, people change, ideas change, and this game certainly has changed quite a bit since I first investigated it.

I am happy to admit that a lot of my expectations (or lack thereof) have been squelched after reading up more about the game’s development, playing a demo at Gencon last year, and now all of the media being revealed for the game really entices me. Free to play, action RPG centric (instead of just tab target and spam a few abilities), slick graphics and a true to D&D (4e especially) ethos, and most importantly player created content. I may not be a huge Forgotten Realms fan but the city of Neverwinter is a phenomenal place and there’s a lot to offer there. I’ve also gleaned from a dev interview/live stream from the last beta weekend that it seems the folks at Cryptic have learned some valuable lessons about creating games and so I appreciate their candidness and will keep my optimism high.

So, with my new found excitement I would like to formally announced that if you haven’t been paying attention or giving a crap about this title, now may be the time to reconsider.

Come Kill Things With Me!

So, you came here to win a Neverwinter key right? Not to listen to me ramble on about my nerdy expectations about a video game. I understand, so let’s jump to it! That’s right folks, I’ve got a crew lined up to game with during this upcoming beta weekend and if you’d like to be part of it (or not, whatever, I’ll play by myself. Jerks.) I’ve got a key (possibly 2+) to give away that will grant you access to the game this weekend (March 8th-10th) and during the next upcoming beta weekend (March 22nd-24th)!

I’ll also be live-tweeting and streaming some coverage of the game this weekend via Twitch TV if you’d like to partake in checking out the game and chatting with us as we explore Neverwinter. I’ve also been given the opportunity to interview some of the devs and aks them some questions I pulled from the D&D twitter community so stay tuned for the results of said interview!

How Can I Win A Key?

It’s simple, all you have to do is leave a comment on this post here stating you want a chance at a key, if you’ve got a question for the dev team you can leave that in your comment too! One entry per person please and entries with questions won’t have any increased chance of winning or anything, I’m going to use an online randomizer to pick the winners tomorrow afternoon. You should probably also follow me on Twitter and become a fan of The Dread Gazebo on facebook, you know…because I asked nicely and all. Good luck to everyone and I hope to soon be slaying creatures and taking their pocket treasures from them alongside you in the very near future!

It’s more than just this stuff. Lockpicks, saws, crowbars – all that stuff is great but there’s a lot more to love about a well equipped guild rat. Be sure to check out the final snippet of my Menagerie of Mischief series over at KQ. I recently took to Reddit with these articles and got a LOT of great feedback, and a hell of a lot of book recommendations.

Since then I’ve picked up Fritz Leiber’s Swords against Deviltry, Brent Weeks’ The Way of Shadows, and Scott Lynch’s The Lies of Lock Lamora so I’ve definitely got my reading cut out for me. Apparently a lot of the characters and things that I hold dear remind people of  Fritz Leiber’s work, so I figure I owe it to myself to read his work.

Got any feedback for me on this series? I’d appreciate any of it you’d toss my way. Book recommendations too!

Check out the video for my quick run down of the box contents, each mini up close and personal and a quick run through the order and creature cards for the faction. If you want to skip straight to the good stuff and not listen to me preach to fellow game masters about buying these sets for the minis alone, then skip to 1:45!  Honestly though, at a twenty-some dollar price point on amazon it almost seems silly to pass up especially if you need a bundle of a certain type of mini. Online resellers charge an upwards of 5$ each for uncommons, and that’s if you’re lucky since they are all out of print nowadays. Anyway, on with the video!

Players: 2-4 (or more) Ages: 12+  Setup Time: 5-10 min Play Time: 45min-2hrs

Production Values: Great miniatures, quality card stock, order and monster card quality is good but you still might want to sleeve them.