The Greatest Thing You'll Never Play

Perfect World. Producers of some of the most well known free-ish games. Blacklight: Retribution, Torchlight, Champions Online, and now Cryptic Studio's Neverwinter. Yeah, it's a D&D game, which is am immediate "fuck that" from me. Sorry guys, but there's only so much birth control I can use, and abstinence because my wife is holding her goods hostage due to my nerdiness is not going to be one of them. With that being said, Neverwinter is a game that you don't care about. And why would you? The game isn't advertising itself to be the next big thing that every real PvPer will love. It's not about "massive" content and huge world bosses. It's not about gear grinding to do the next tier raid to get the gear to do the next tier raid. Hell, it goes against the tide to bring us just simple features and a simple game with a simple goal: fun.

Dare I say it again? Fun. Dungeon crawling goodness. Oh, and not just their own pre-scripted dungeons or some bullshit randomly generated Diablo crap. Again, one word: Foundry. The-Ultimate-Mother-Fucking-Time-Sink-Fucking-Feature ever. I really believe that they should use that to describe it - TUMFTSFF. Hard to say off the tongue, but people get the point.

So what the fuck is Foundry? Oh, nothing much. Just the ability to MAKE YOUR OWN FUCKING DUNGEONS AND HAVE PEOPLE FUCKING PLAY THEM. For someone like me, I don't feel like keeping track of character sheets and bringing my pewter warrior to my good 'ol buddy Dave's 'bachelor pad' and crack open a few Bud Lights and listen to some stupid fucking narrative where no matter what is happening I'm just going to try to steal everyone's shit until I get someone killed. Honestly, I just was never into that shit. I'll play fantasy sports all day and challenge a mother fucker to some Warhammer tabletop, but god forbid I play some pen and paper games. But I'm getting way off base here. Foundry is a modders dream and a feature that immediately establishes a lasting feature that will keep gamers playing for years. Not months, years. If I may quote directly from their site at http://nw.perfectworld.com/about/foundry :

You've played tabletop campaigns, sketched out dungeons and imagined ancient ruins, wishing all the while that you could make them come to life. Now, you can. The Foundry for Neverwinter lets you build and share the adventures you've always wanted to see.

The Foundry gives you the tools to build dungeons, castles, cities, foreboding woods and everything in-between. Build NPCs the way you see them in your mind's eye and populate your world with tavern keepers and soldiers, Queens and scullions. Lay the groundwork for an epic adventure that takes players into the depths of the earth in search of dwarven treasure, or pits them against near impossible odds to save the city of Neverwinter.

Easy to use, The Foundry also features a dynamic rating system that allows players to rate and highlight the best player-designed adventures.

NOTE: The Foundry is currently in development and due to the nature of games development, information and content found on this website may not be representative of the current gameplay experience.

Tired of the same old quests? MAKE YOUR FUCKING OWN! Tired of shit being too easy? MAKE THE HARDEST FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT FIGHT ANYONE HAS EVER SEEN! JESUS FUCKING CHRIST! According to their Q&A it will be built into the game to access it and you can access other player's published maps and rate them and recommend them and shit.

Now, that's all fine and dandy, but what about the combat? Well, this is where things get muffled because if you were curious about how the game played and looked up a video, you would not be blown away. I will tell you that straight up. However, from watching the individual class videos that have been released to date, I will tell you that the roles characters have are tried and true for the most part and the Alpha animations are a bit lacking (but not all moves are featured yet, so they could just be basic garbage moves we are looking at). The Control Wizard (obvious cc), Great Weapon Fighter (obvious PBAOE DPS), and Trickster Rogue (Obvious rogue) are the currently announced classes. Other reported classes are a Devoted Cleric and Guardian Fighter as well as 6 races featured on their website (Human, Half-Elf, Elf, Drow, Dwarf, and Tiefling).

The fighting is based on left/right clicks on the mouse and also activated abilities making the game more "action-y" than other MMOs. The videos that have been released make it look very basic, though, despite the emphasis on action-based combat. I would assume that once players are in control, you will see a lot more sleek-looking dodges, evades, and ability rotations that all competitive and serious gamers will love. This remains to be seen in the hands of real people and not demo garbage from E3/PAX.

But lets get into something more personal, PvP. At first glance, the game looks like PvP just doesn't fit in here. But I say nay! Well, there's not a lot of info on this matter except that it will be there...eventually at least. Yes, PvP has been a question asked by many towards the devs, but they has said something that excites me more than it disappoints me. It's the fact that they admit that PvP would be an after thought if they put it in the game for launch and it would suck balls. Yeah, they basically summed it up by saying that. The PvPers are picky and Cryptic Studios is well aware of that and they would rather have PvP implemented intelligently into the game after the PvE content is 100% complete. So we won't see RIFT shit where PvP just got thrown in there for shits and giggles and then they advertised it as being the most amazing thing ever when really it was just "Oh yeah, you can queue for this warfront and play our broken shit".

So what's left? Well, what's it going to cost?

Nada. Zip. Nothing. Not a damn thing. Time? I guess everything costs time, basically. So whatever time you put in is equal to money. That's the cost.

Yes, there is a cash shop. Before everyone throws their hands up and goes "UGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHH" it's not that bad. Remember, PvP isn't even going to be there at launch. On top of that, the kewl weapons you can buy with real money are still level specific. While I never will agree with paying for better shit, It's just how business models are now-a-days and I have to deal with it.

I still have yet to pay for a single item from a cash shop in Lord of the Rings Online or Guild Wars 2 or League of Legends, so I don't see myself doing it here either. But what's better is that I said Guild Wars 2 had value because it wasn't a sub based game. I paid $60 and got my money's worth from it and still can be if I choose to at a later date. Neverwinter will be free to download the client and free to play and because you can group with friends or go solo or bring npcs along with you, who cares if Joe Shmo bought the uber-sword of winningestness? He can have fun in his little dungeon, and I'll have the challenge in my own. Plus, user generated dungeons have mobs that drop the same xp as the actual game and the loot chest rewards at the end of dungeons are based on the amount of time it 'should' take to complete. So if your dungeon only takes like 5 minutes to do, you will only get like 5 minutes worth of rewards, as oppose to a stupid ass crazy long dungeon where if you complete it, you can get a lot more. From what I've read, it seems that an hour is what the dev's consider a full dungeon from The Foundry.

This, though, is great for guys like me who are limited on time. If I'm up after work late at night and I'm like "alright, well I guess I can do something for 30 minutes" I can find a dungeon that is advertised to take that long and do it. Sure, it won't be an epic 1 hour or more adventure of crazy shit, but at least the game is giving options and not forcing me to raid for 4 hours a night to MAYBE get that epic chest piece I just need to have to move to the T2 "Dungeon of Same Scripted Bullshit"

So yeah, I can safely say that Cryptic Studios have moved their chess pieces very carefully for this one. They still have a lot of strong pieces, but they haven't quite put the queen in check, yet. We'll see what's up when this game releases in Q1 this year. From there, we'll see if PvP complements a solid game concept or ultimately adds a broken piece of content that will turn away potential customers.