Neverwinter PvP a Highlight of Cryptic's Game

Summer Festival in Neverwinter can be a messy affair

Once more I found myself enthralled by Neverwinter this evening, and it seems to be quickly becoming my No. 2 mmorpg right behind DDO. Currently we are in the middle of the Summer festival and I participated in the water contest which was quite fun.

Prior to doing so I jumped into some PvP in the 5v5 arena and for once it was an evenly matched contest. We lost but only by a few points, in fact it was the closest match I have been involved since becoming eligible for PvP. One of the knocks on this game has been that some perceive it as P2W. 

I am not sure that this criticism is fair, from what I have seen at least in the lower level brackets, some of the matches are evenly matched considering the composition of the teams. It is true that control wizards and other casters seem to be very powerful, but sometimes it is just my fighter against another fighter or cleric and or rogue and it seems as though it is a fairly even contest, especially if we all work together

I really wish I had more experience but I think it takes practice like everything else. Another aspect of PvP I enjoy in the game is that it isn't as dependent on gear as World of Warcraft. In wow, it seems that you may be in the same level bracket but you can still lose because you may not have the greatest gear, but this does not always seem to matter in Neverwinter. 

I won't pretend that it's all easy and effortless, it's an intense experience and there have been many times when I went toe to toe with enemy players who got the best of me one on one, but it's a pretty good thrill and thus far I am enjoying the battles. I think it gets more intense in higher levels, but I will have to wait and see. My friend is still playing RIFT and I have yet to experience warfronts in that game, but for the time being Neverwinter will be the go to game when I feel like pvping because DDO is not designed for PvP.

Shadowfell Conspiracy Causes Dissent Among Some DDO Vets

Well just as I was getting ready to fully jump back on DDO this summer, there appears to be a minor controversy brewing regarding the new expansion The Shadowfell Conspiracy, essentially the game's second expansion (following the Menace of the Underdark) and specifically having to do with Turbine's new DDO iconic characters.

From the Turbine Developer Diaries, here come the DDO iconic heroes!

What the heck is an iconic character you say? Thanks to Youtuber Pr8Dator1 we have a video detailing the new Bladeforged and Owlbear permanent hireling. (See embedded video footage) but according to DDO's developer diaries, there will be four iconic heroes: The Bladeforged, Morninglord, Purple Dragon Knights and Shadar-Kai. These start at 1evel 15 and have their own race and game restrictions. (True Reincarnation etc.) More of their stats and detailed info can be found here, but what I find most interesting is the uproar their introduction has caused in some of the game forums, especially among veterans, with at least one polarized enough to call it quits, and dramatically calling it "the death of DDO"

Essentially this is a seven year old game and in order to compete with the barrage of game options and mmorpgs out there, including that other D&D mmorpg, Turbine is upping the ante on their Forgotten Realms adventures, while re-imagining their game with new character creations, new builds and a host of other features.

Source VG 24/7 had the scoop on all the new features to the game's third expansion due to launch on Aug. 19:

• Two New Forgotten Realms Adventure Packs — Featuring new wilderness areas with new D&D monsters, dangerous encounters and challenging dungeons.
• Wheloon: Horrors from the Shadowfell pour into the prison city where Netherese agents conspire to forge an army out of the Kingdom’s enemies. Players will masquerade as a traitor to infiltrate the Prison City to out the agents, and fight loads of monster.
• Stormhorns: Deep in the Stormhorn Mountains, the Netherese Empire is preparing a secret weapon to use against the Kingdom of Cormyr. Players will need to make it through the griffon laden territory and deal with harpy ambushes along with giants and other creatures.
• Iconic Heroes: New prestige characters that start in Forgotten Realms at level 15 and feature unique looks and skills. Each of these classic D&D characters are a paragon of their race and class and feature custom gear, appearance options and new abilities.
• Level 28: Player will gain new epic feats and spells through three new Epic levels of advancement.

Again, I am more concerned with the community reaction, and not all of it is good. Turbine asked players to discuss and give feedback on the iconic discussion thread of their forums back in October last year, but players were confused about what the discussion should entail as no concrete details about the expansion had been given at the time. "If we are not able to TR, why should we even be interested in them" chimed in one player. Blogger Gamer Geoff in his blog, posted that he thought prebuilt characters sounded like it was "dumbed down" from the existing system and had this to say: "I personally think that this is the wrong direction for the game, I truly believe it has survived and thrived precisely because it isn’t simple and streamlined. There are lots of other MMOs out there that are simple and streamlined but only one clunky, complex, Dungeons & Dragons-based DDO."

Well said, I had the same reaction when I first heard about these characters, but I am willing to give the devs the benefit of the doubt, because as I mentioned already, with so much competition and choice, Turbine has to try to keep their game fresh. Another player said it was sad that they were trying to get away from their campaign setting to focus players into the Forgotten Realms. You would not expect an mmorpg to start you off in Eberron for example, and then shuttle you off to say Azeroth.

What do the rest of you think? Are iconic heroes a mistake on Turbine's part or a good thing for DDO? 

House P adventures for the not so faint of heart

Bogwater Tavern in House P. A lonely place until you have found someone to run hard and elite with you 

Wow has it really been 3 months since my last update? Well since my first year in grad school officially came to an end earlier this week, if my internship does not take too much time away, I may be able to make more progress with my warforged this summer and advance in the ranks of DDO and also update this blog once more with more frequency.

To this end I logged on earlier this evening, determined to pick up some XP and concurrently completing some of the House P quests that I have been wishing to run. I should preface this by saying that I had been trying to log on for days but Turbine's launcher was highly unresponsive, but I attributed this to the fact that the game may have been updating itself in anticipation of the Shadowfell Conspiracy.

So I ran: Rest for the Restless and Purge the Heretics, the latter initially in hard since we had no elite opener and then in elite once we finally found an opener and a trapper. Best part, after two hours of bashing skeletons and running through these House P quests, I found out that my new PUG friend actually belongs to a static along with some Canadians on the Sarlona Server. So this blog may focus on whatever toon I roll on that server from now on, while still occasionally trying to get Doomar (my current main) to level 20.  Wondering if I should bother dual speccing for extra healing? At the very least I will try to continue to improve my WF on Orien, my current server until I get him ready for some prime level capped action.

Playing again on Tuesday, so stay tuned for updates from my new static group adventures, and a lot more.

 

Doomar the Uberstrong WF and his new PUG buddy about to take on the perils of the dungeon.

The eternal question: Sandbox vs. themepark

Lieutenant Morkag-Khor

First, my apologies for not posting sooner, grad school has eaten a large chunk of my playing time. I hope to blog more steadily now and into summertime. Second, I have been following the debate over what elements should be incorporated into the upcoming mmorpg Camelot Unchained by famed DAoC developer Mark Jacobs. In fact, the discussions over whether it's wise that it feature only RvR (3 faction pvp like in DAoC) and gloss over PvE elements has also sparked the old debate of themepark vs. sandbox mmos.

My inbox has been flooded of late from posts and bloggers who have weighed in on the issue, but that's one of the things that I love about playing ddo, Turbine has taken care of making the gameplay radically different than most mmos, but not too different that it won't satisfy a fantasy action junkie like myself. What makes DDO unique in the sandbox vs. themepark debate is that it doesn't neatly fit into any one category.

Since DDO is mostly composed of instanced dungeons with wilderness areas and no significant pvp to speak of, one would be tempted to say that it's mostly a themepark, you do follow a linear pre-designed pattern, i.e. starting off in the Korthos island tutorial and early level content before graduating to Stormreach Harbor. However, DDO has some sandbox elements. For example, you don't have to do quests in order, per se, although I suppose you do if  you want to progress onto capping a character, but seeing as you have relatively more freedom to quest in Stormreach either solo, with a party, or engage in other activities such as collecting, etc, DDO feels less like a linear quest hub to quest hub than World of Warcraft to me.

Last night I decided to finish some of the quests I had not yet completed in both the Harbor and House P. After unsuccessfully going after Lieutenant Morkag-Khor and party wiping in elite in the tear of Dhakaan quest, (we came ever so close) I managed to do a few more quests, including going back to the Harbor to run "Kobolds assault" in elite. Had a blast earning a few more ranks on my warforged Barbarian, which I seem to prefer playing over the spellcaster, mostly because I am still not as adept at wizard game mechanics in ddo. What can I say? I like to wallop stuff in melee.

So say what you will about DDO, but I don't think that I can firmly place it anywhere in the Sandbox-themepark continiuum with absolute certaintity, but I don't think that is at all a bad thing. 

Our party gathers at the Harbor after a long quest chain

My warforged wizard noob toon

I enjoy playing warforged characters as you can probably tell. I wanted to roll a wizard, so I created this one and have been going through all the early level content trying to level this one up.

I was surprised and happy to learn that ddo.com allows you to look up your character, much like wow does on their battlenet site, so here is my current build and state of my toon.

I was hoping some of you more experienced players could take a look and make suggestions, observations. I decided that I would research as much as I could on equipment, stats and try to optimize the wizard in the correct way, but since DDO is based on D&D 3.5, it can get kind of technical at times, so I have decided not to let that get in the way of my enjoying the game. I think that there are opportunities to change out feats and respec, much like I used to when I was playing Dark Age of Camelot, but I may be wrong about that. Still, any suggestions or observations from the community will be appreciated. Last night I ran through Misery's peak once more with a random PUG and had fun earning xp. I had forgotten what a long quest that was. We shall see how much progress I make this week.

DDO vs. Wow- Revisited

The Drow of the Underdark are a new area of exploration in DDO

Recently, while looking online for info on mmorpgs, I came across this old blog post talking about why DDO can never compete with World of Warcraft. This is not a new comparison or analysis by any means, but since I have played both games, and have been doing so again of late, I wanted to address some of the points against Turbine and DDO which the author made so long ago.

He writes, "There are a number of things blizzard got right with WoW that DDO just doesn’t. In theory DDO should be a brilliant online game- it’s got the power of the most popular and advanced RPG fighting system behind it, the storytelling power DnD is famous for and it’s got all this in an online game with enormous character uniqueness and customization capability."

So why doesn’t it work ? scale. He goes on to compare the games in terms of scale:

"In WoW you are questing out in the world – you don’t even enter a dungeon until level 15, as you quest you meet other players, some will help you with quests some will just pass you by but 90% of all the things you do happen outside in the world. You’re interacting with people all the time."
This may have been true 2 years ago when this post was written, but in the post-Cataclysm era, I find that it is simply no longer true. In fact, there may be more players now logging in daily to raid and do PvP content, but for a long time most will sit in capital cities, or queue for a dungeon and battleground, leaving most of the open world barren in comparison.

"In DDO every time you start a quest, you get cut off from everybody who isn’t in your party (so if you solo quite a bit while leveling to get used to playing your class – you may as well be playing diablo – the fact that it’s online becomes irrelevant)."
This is also untrue, well not the part about DDO being mostly instanced, but the fact about it being less mmorpg than wow as a result. As a matter of fact, a lot of the dungeons in DDO are simply undoable or too hard to solo which requires either using hirelings, or other players. Luckily, the social function built into the game by Turbine allows you to easily and quickly find other players looking for groups and looking to run dungeons with you, most of which will be divided by level, making it convenient to find a party. Once you do, it is nothing like a single player dungeon crawl, rather a fun interactive and co-op experience.

This is why, perhaps, I’ve yet to see a mount in DDO (I think they don’t exist) – while in WoW they aren’t just nice – they are incredibly useful. Because you’re traversing the world, what fantasy hero doesn’t ride on his quest ? Well unless you’re Tolkiens hobbits – nobody else wants to walk everywhere. It also means to get between areas you have to fly/take a boat. You can’t walk and explore because the city exits lead to combat zones – that don’t have another exit.

Well this is true, but as a guildie once said to me when I mentioned mounts a while back, "who needs mounts when you can just teleport?" This is really true, Stormreach is a huge city, but to see most of the content would take a really long time playing the game, and to traverse to other parts of the world, all one has to do is join a good guild with a functional air ship and use it to port in and out of places, at least that's what I and many others do. It would be cool to see mounts, but as DDO is based on Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 rule sets and that game is meant to be played as a collective of players in a party, they are not really needed in DDO.

Free to play done wrong
DDO because they don’t have a subscription fee pushes the store in your face all the time. True you can earn store points just from playing but that comes pretty slow and so far I’ve spent mine all on healing potions. If you don’t buy you will soon find you cannot compete with those who do. That ultimately slants the game in favor of those with the most cash to burn instead of those with the most skill – and it annoys the hell out of you – especially as a newer player.

I don't think this was ever true, although it is true that a f2p player would find it virtually impossible or would take forever to achieve the same gear or progress than a p2p using mostly the game's "favor" system, now that the game has more a freemium model, the online store is hardly "ever in your face" it is up to you if you want to buy adventure packs or locked classes, but if you prefer to play for free, there is a lot of free content that is still accessible and you can still have a ton of fun playing the game without dropping a dime into it. Is there a competitive advantage? Since there is no PvP to speak of, except for brawling in the taverns as a diversion, I don't feel that there is any significant advantage accrued by VIP players, they simply get parts of the game that are not available to the f2p, and since dungeons can be ran in different difficulty levels, there is content for everyone to enjoy even the newest of players.

Another knock on DDO is a perceived lack of lore, in comparison to the vast game world and overarching back story, but most of the wow players I know don't really care about lore anyway, don't more than half skip reading quest text in favor of going out to grind? Don't get me wrong, I like Blizzard games and I feel the need to play wow from time to time because it is a fun and polished mmorpg, I just don't feel that DDO is lacking in lore, or development of lore in the game, especially now that the Forgottem Realms have been incorporated into DDO, who knows what other DDO settings and staples Turbine will surprise us with next?

MMO Report No More

I was sad to hear that G4 is cancelling the MMO Report. Though I was often at odds with silly host Casey Schreiner, mostly because he tended to focus on his ego more than on the games he was spotlighting, it's always bad when an avenue for reporting on this often overlooked game genre is closed.

Though the MMO Report used to give more coverage to more big name mmos like wow and Rift and waaay too much coverage to SWTOR before that game came out, and though it often sourced material from massively, it was still a good source of news. I will miss it. Check out the video of the last show.