MMOs I've Played

While this blog is about Star Wars: The Old Republic, and SWTOR is the game I spend by the far the most time on these days, I have on occasion tried other MMOs. Sometimes I've even talked about the experience on here, but not always. Either way, I thought it would be interesting to write a little summary of all the MMOs I've tried over the years. It's not that many in the grand scheme of things, because I'm ridiculously picky when it comes to even trying a new game, but there's almost always a funny story there.

World of Warcraft

Alright, so I won't say that much about this one other than that it's where it all began in 2006. My first MMO and I loved it. I played nothing else for several years. I learned what raiding was and enjoyed it. I met people and fell in love. I moved to a different country. Playing WoW helped me find a job. It changed my life.

However, by 2012, I didn't like it all that much anymore and made the move to SWTOR. I went back once during Mists of Pandaria because my pet tank gifted me a couple of months of play time (I think to spite me after we'd had an argument about pandas). In 2015, I discovered private servers and the Vanilla WoW retro experience, something I engaged with on and off again. I'm looking forward to WoW Classic now.

I also have a blog about it, where I wrote about my adventures regularly from 2009 to 2011 and where I also documented the above-mentioned MoP stint and my private server adventures.

Champions Online

In 2009, I still wasn't really interested in playing anything other than WoW, but my then-boyfriend gifted me a copy of Champions Online for some reason, so we tried that together. I created a character called Val(k)yrie and took a screenshot of her. I also created another character, a little green reptile person, of whom I unfortunately never took a screenshot. The character creator seemed pretty amazing.

Unfortunately, the game was utterly unplayable for me. In theory, my old PC met the minimum requirements, but even with the graphics turned down, the game was nothing but a slideshow and my input with keyboard and mouse only caused erratic responses, if any at all. I struggled to even move around and only made it through the starter area by basically having my partner complete all the quests for me while I clumsily tagged along. When we moved on to the next area, I fell off the platform we arrived on and somehow managed to wedge myself into a corner I couldn't get out of, not with how unreliable the movement controls were for me anyway. I sighed and logged off, never to be seen again.

It's a testament to the strength of the character creator that I actually found myself missing those barely-played characters in a burst of nostalgia the other day, to the point that I contacted Cryptic's customer service to ask if my account could still be recovered somehow. (When I downloaded the game and logged in, with the same credentials I used back in the day, nothing was there.) The answer seemed to be "maybe", but only if I created an entirely new Arc account because for some reason they couldn't link my old account to my current one. That was more effort than I was willing to go to in the end.

Warhammer Online

Fun fact: Warhammer Online was what got me into World of Warcraft. How does that work? Well, my boyfriend at the time was into tabletop gaming and introduced me to the world of Warhammer and Warhammer 40k. Somehow, while reading up on these online, I came across the site for a game called Warhammer Online, which sounded amazing! Unfortunately it was still several years away from release. But there was this similar game called World of Warcraft... the rest is history.

By the time WAR actually came out, I was way too engrossed in WoW to care about anything else. Though I remember a friend of mine playing it and getting all glassy-eyed when he told me about his dwarf standing shoulder to shoulder with other dwarves to hold off an orc attack, saying it was the most fun he'd ever had in PvP.

Anyway, I did eventually get around to trying the game, but not until early 2011, by which point it offered a free trial. It wasn't easy to find though, as EA seemed to already have more or less abandoned maintaining the website at the time.

Again, my then-boyfriend and I went in as a team, me as a warrior priest and him as a bright wizard. The starter area seemed okay, though not particularly exciting. I do remember being impressed by the first public event we encountered, as I hadn't seen anything like it before, though I also remember the scoreboard it had being super confusing to me.

However, by the time we got to the next area, the population thinned out drastically, and the next public event we encountered proved too much for just the two of us. (These things didn't scale at the time.) We made a note to come back later, but then never did. RIP WAR.

Star Wars: The Old Republic

No need to go into any detail on this one, that's what this whole blog is about!

Neverwinter

Initially it looked like Neverwinter was going to be just another experiment with friends, as everyone including myself lost interest in it within a month, but then we came back to try again and since then I've never entirely gone off it. I have a blog about this one as well, though I only update it sporadically, just like I'm going through phases of playing the game a lot or not at all.

I think it complements SWTOR very well on my gaming menu in that it's completely different - not just because of fantasy vs. sci-fi but also in that its appeal lies very much in the moment-to-moment gameplay/combat, while the story is rather weak, which is pretty much the opposite of how SWTOR works. It's also the game that taught me what it's like to play something casually but still be attached to it. Before that I never truly understood how someone could like an MMO but not want to go all in with it and play it all the time. Neverwinter showed me how that can work.

Star Trek Online

I was pulled into STO by my pet tank and he more or less carried me all the way to the level cap. I wrote a post about it at the time. In hindsight it's a bit surprising to me just how positive that post ended up sounding, because in the end I left the game with a somewhat sour feeling. I seem to remember that it had just had an update, with me once again expecting my pet tank to help me through the new content, but he got distracted by something else, so I eventually just logged off with a sigh... and never came back.

While I liked the setting, I just couldn't abide the combat, whether on the ground or in space. I'd like to say that to me, gameplay doesn't matter as much in an MMO as things like setting, but STO proved me wrong in so far as it showed me that no matter how much I like the setting, if I can't log in and simply have some fun playing, even while on my own, it's just not going to last. The things I actually remember liking the most were the little mini games involved in scanning space anomalies and mining dilithium, flying around searching for good duty officer missions and chasing epohhs on New Romulus, none of which had anything to do with the core game.

Elder Scrolls Online

My relationship with ESO is weird. I have no connection to the Elder Scrolls franchise and had no interest in playing this at first, but a friend gifted me a beta key so I thought I'd give it a try for a weekend so his gift wouldn't feel wasted. And I liked it quite a lot! This was during the period when everyone was bashing it as buggy, boring and uninspired, mind you. Even though I knew that I wasn't going to play it at launch, I vowed to myself that I was going to keep an eye on it.

Some time after it dropped the mandatory subscription and reduced its box price, I bought a copy from Amazon. I didn't actually have enough disk space to install it at the time, but again I told myself that I was going to get around to it eventually.

Finally, after another one and a half years of the game sitting shrink-wrapped next to my desk, I had a chance to install it. By now, people had also changed their minds about it and were praising it as so much better than at launch! I logged in, amused to find myself gifted with a free monkey pet for having participated in the beta more than three years ago, played through the tutorial... and then logged off again, never to return.

I'm still telling myself that I'll get back to it eventually, but I just haven't felt any itch to return to it at all since I actually played the live version. Maybe all that waiting caused me to subconsciously hype it up in my head to expect more from it than it could deliver and that's why I ended up disappointed when I actually logged in again? Sometimes I don't quite understand myself.

Lord of the Rings Online

I wrote about trying out LOTRO earlier this year. We were having a reasonably good time with it, even though it was really showing its age by overwhelming new players with lots of confusing systems. I ended that post by noting that we were going to try the first dungeon next.

That's another funny story actually. Everyone kept telling us not to use the group finder because "nobody uses it". I took this with a grain of salt in the same way that "nobody" uses the group finder to get random ops groups in SWTOR - the experienced players mostly form their groups in chat, but there are people queueing through the interface too. These groups are just rarer and more prone to failure. I really wanted to see whether LOTRO worked the same way, plus I was honestly a bit shy about putting a group together in chat since I knew so little about the different classes and what sort of setup would be desirable.

The problem turned out to be this: We couldn't actually figure out how to use the group finder interface. How silly is that? Our one attempt to use it just ended up teleporting us inside the instance with only the two of us. That didn't go so well. I actually went to reddit afterwards to ask for advice and it turned out that we had used the wrong one of the many tabs of LOTRO's group finder tool. I planned to give it another try later, but then Secret World Legends came out and my pet tank was all over that instead, so LOTRO fell by the wayside. I still want to conquer the Great Barrow some day.

Secret World Legends

I wrote a first impressions post about that one as well, but unlike with LOTRO we've managed to stay surprisingly loyal to it. We don't play every weekend, but we have kept coming back to it and are nearly done with Tokyo now. I have a post in my drafts folder that details my "second impressions" of the game, which I will put up whenever we manage to finish the current storyline.

I think the takeaway from this history of my MMO experiences is that it takes a strong IP as well as social hooks for me to want to try something new, and both friends and fun gameplay to make me want to hang around. I guess with people like me it's not surprising that new games are having a hard time establishing themselves in a crowded market.

Trying Secret World Legends

I mentioned previously that I was trying out another new MMO this month... and this MMO has been Secret World Legends. Yes! For once I, too, am on the bandwagon of bloggers all trying out the new shiny on the block (sort of).

Unlike LOTRO, the original Secret World was an MMO that I never had any desire to play, for one simple reason: the setting. I don't have much interest in horror and mystery at the best of times, but completely immersing myself in a world filled with these things? No, thanks.

I still enjoyed reading about the game sometimes though, mostly because it's a great example of how a loyal and vocal community can greatly influence public perception of a game. From what little numbers we have (such as steam charts), the original Secret World seemed to have a player base of a size roughly in the same ballpark as Wildstar. Yet while the latter is constantly lamented as dying and seemingly no news article can avoid mentioning threats of closure, Secret World was consistently praised as a successful niche game and for supposedly having a payment model that "does it right". I remember I once mentioned in a comment that I didn't think Secret World's payment model was working out well for Funcom and was immediately told off for daring to suggest such a thing. I have to admit I felt quite vindicated when a Funcom dev said pretty much just that in an interview leading up to Secret World Legends' launch: that part of the reason for the reboot was that they needed to find a different way to monetise the game.

But I digress... as I was saying, I was never planning to play it myself, but a couple of months ago my pet tank suddenly got it into his head that he wanted us to try it together, and with the F2P relaunch coming up it was really hard for me to say no. So it happened, and here we are.

For someone who went into the game fully expecting not to like it very much, I found myself strangely attached to my green-haired, bespectacled Templar surprisingly quickly. (Once I had made it through the slightly strange character creation screen, which had everything in hexes... which is probably in line with the magical bee theme from the intro but made it kind of hard to see all the options.)

Reactions to the new tutorial from veterans seem to be mixed, but to me it seemed serviceable. In fact, I could have done with some more information still. Even if you pride yourself in your game being challenging, figuring out how the UI works should not be the main event! I think the main reason I didn't have more trouble than I did was that a lot of keys were mapped similar to how things work in Neverwinter. But as an example of what was lacking: As a "Ravager", I was given a healing skill to start with but there wasn't even a mention of the fact that there is a separate friendly target and that you switch it by using the mouse wheel. That I learned only through reading other people's comments about the game on blogs. (Pretty cool feature though.)

The quality of the cut scenes was also good in my opinion, except for some of the NPCs having awkward, nutcracker-like mouth movements which stood in stark contrast to everything else - but then I also read somewhere that this is a bug and not how they usually look. I immediately disliked my character's silence though, something that I knew to expect from videos and which I'd already found off-putting the first time I saw it. I don't need my quest delivery to be super-fancy, but if you do put work into such detailed cut scenes and voice acting, it has to go both ways. As it is, all the NPCs monologuing on and on while my character just stands there looking like a lump falls into a sort of uncanny valley for me... close enough to believable human interaction to draw attention but then missing the mark, with the final result veering mostly into awkward and unintentionally comical. Maybe it works for people who imagine their character as someone super shy who always clams up in the presence of anything that isn't a zombie.

Don't mind me, I'll just stand here and stare at you blankly... it's my thing.

Since I never played the original version of the game, I can't comment on just how the new streamlining and combat changes compare to the original, but to me they seemed... okay. I never felt lost for things to do, though the sheer rigidity of the level requirements for some quests seems a bit patronising. While questing in a group, I also found the quest tracker a bit annoying as it allows you to pick up several missions at once but will only ever display one, and the game can be very fiddly with individual mission steps - sometimes they update for everyone in the group, sometimes they don't. It's become a running gag how often I had to backtrack because I had missed a "click on this" step somewhere and suddenly couldn't progress.

The combat seems okay so far, though it's a bit hard to judge when things fall over as quickly as they do in the first zone. In fact, while questing with my pet tank we repeatedly ran into the problem that he started attacking a rare mob from range and it would die before I could run into melee, resulting in no loot baggie for me.

My starter class combines fist weapons and blood magic - god knows how I heal people with spiked fists, but considering that I spend my days dishing out healy goodness in SWTOR with a giant assault cannon, who am I to judge? Things may have been simplified compared to what they were like, but I still had to rearrange my bars multiple times already to find a combo of skills that worked for me. In fact, I think I'm still not quite there yet, despite actually willfully ignoring a lot of the built-in complexity for now and trying to keep things simple.

As an example, fist weapons have this mechanic called fury, which you can spend on going into a frenzy, which in turn gives you more powerful skills to use. In theory. In practice, every time I tried this the frenzy state was so short (3-5 seconds it seemed), that I had trouble figuring out what was even going on. Later I deduced that apparently all those exciting, more powerful skills are pretty much the same as my regular ones, only with slightly bigger numbers. I decided to just forget about the whole thing for now as too much of a hassle. If it matters later on, I will revisit it.

Being in a group at all times hasn't really helped in that regard, because as mentioned above things die way too quickly. It has also affected my experience of other parts of the game. Like those much-acclaimed investigation missions that people like to talk about? Well, my pet tank has already done them all on his second, higher-level character, so each one so far has basically consisted of me plodding after him while he mumbled something about "music puzzle here, need to enter the correct notes" while I'd just smile and nod until he was done. (Credit for those things was thankfully shared, so I basically got all those missions done without actually investigating anything myself so far.)

One thing that was a really positive surprise to me was the first dungeon. This already opens up at level 10 and I thought it was super fun. Not very difficult perhaps, but once again I found this hard to judge since my pet tank was constantly instructing me to avoid this or run over there. There did seem to be some mechanics that would most likely have killed a group of completely ignorant new players. Either way I found it extremely fun and atmospheric, and immediately wanted to run it again once we were done. I was surprised in so far as I remember seeing very little talk of TSW's dungeons on blogs and such... I guess that like with SWTOR, everyone is so focused on the unique features of the solo content that the lovingly crafted group content gets treated as a side feature? In my opinion it shouldn't be (in either game). We also wanted to try some PvP but there currently seems to be some sort of bug when you try to queue as a group that will only queue one of you.

Fighting winged Cthulhu as early as level 10? Sure, why not!

Overall, my impression of the game so far has been a lot more positive than I expected. They've clearly made an effort to make it more appealing to people who had no interest in or disliked the previous version, and it shows - even if previously loyal veteran players are understandably annoyed by the result. Whether it will work to give the game a second lease at life... who knows. Even though there's been noticeably less buzz about it on my blogroll than there usually is for a completely new MMO, the "new game smell" is still strong: The official subreddit is full of fun threads such as customer service admitting they are too busy to deal with anything but payment issues or people being totally unable to play the game, or a player complaining that they spent over 400 dollars on lockboxes without getting the items they wanted (whales ahoy). Sustainability is something else though.

The new monetisation model reminds me a lot of Neverwinter's, which is widely criticised but clearly works to support a steady stream of content updates. Specifically the triple currency system is very reminiscent of Neverwinter's (I keep referring to the middle currency as astral diamonds whenever I forget its proper name), and they even had their own version of the Caturday exploit just before launch! Likewise the weapon upgrade system has a lot of similarities to Neverwinter's artifact refinement so far. The question is whether SWL will also copy the overall trajectory of that game's monetisation: which is to be extremely generous at low levels and to casual players, while squeezing those who are highly invested in gear upgrades for all they are worth.

Are Galactic Command Boosts on the Cartel Market One Step Too Far?

Let me preface this by saying that I hate discussions about pay-to-win in MMOs, simply because I have yet to see any such discussion go anywhere interesting or useful. Since MMOs don't have a clear and indisputable win condition, whatever area you personally don't want to see people overtake you in is at risk of any related cash shop purchases being perceived as pay-to-win. I'll never forget Liore's post about how cash shops selling all those cosmetics kind of sucked the fun out of MMOs for her since collecting cool outfits had been an important part of her gameplay until then.

But even when we're talking about an aspect of the game that is clearly meant to be competitive and where most people would agree that they don't want money to buy someone an advantage, players are easily distracted by simple obfuscating tactics. People protesting about the Sword of a Thousand Truths being sold in the cash shop? Well, make it so that by collecting a thousand rare "sword shards" in game, people can acquire it without paying as well. Never mind that it's going to take three years and nobody is realistically going to do it, a lot of people will suddenly give it a pass if there's a way of getting the same thing without paying, never mind that it's not really viable in practice.

The only thing that I see all pay-to-win accusations having in common is that the cash shop items in question make people uncomfortable. To be fair, that also applies to things that don't necessarily have anything to do with pay-to-win, such as lockboxes, but let's use it as our standard anyway. Galactic Command boosters definitely make me uncomfortable.

To explain why, let me first talk a bit about what I tend call my secondary MMO: Neverwinter Online. There are definitely things I really love about that game or I wouldn't be playing it, but its cash shop is not one of them. I do want to give Cryptic money every now and then because it only seems fair when I've spent a significant number of hours playing their game... but deciding what I actually don't mind spending money on is always an agonising experience.

My biggest annoyance and the things I've sworn myself to never buy are what I would call anti-grind consumables. For example there is a process where you upgrade enchantments in your gear, but the higher you go up in level the higher the chance that the upgrade will fail and that you will simply lose all your expensive mats in the process, up to the point where the game will literally present you with a 99% failure rate. Except... you can avoid the issue by using a consumable from the cash shop! (Yes, they also exist as very, very rare drops that you can get without paying... but I refer you to my point above.)

Or take refinement, a related process through which you upgrade your gear in Neverwinter. For this you need to use up "refinement points", which again you do get through normal play, quite commonly in fact, but you need literally millions of them to actually fully upgrade an item, which is never going to happen for most people by playing normally - but once again, the cash shop offers relief in the form of expensive items that are worth tens of thousands of refinement points at once.

The reason these things bug me is that they are basically a sneaky way of trying to get a continuous stream of money out of players. I'm actually someone who is quite happy to continually support a game financially (aka pay a sub)... but be honest about it! Don't make your game free and then make it such a pain to progress that you have to shell out money over and over again (unless you're willing to literally just pay hundreds of dollars at once to get your items to cap right away).

What does all this have to do with SWTOR? Well, SWTOR does charge a subscription. But now we have a new, super grindy system for subscribers anyway, and lo and behold, there's also something you can spend money on to ease the pain for a little while, again and again. Not subtle, Bioware. The main mitigating factor in my eyes is that it's really a pretty weak boost. 25% extra CXP doesn't really speed you up significantly in the short term, and you still need to actually play too - the boost increases your Galactic Command gains but doesn't just "give" points to you. But it still feels like a pretty cheap move, and I think Bioware can do better than that. If Command XP were a thing for everyone and then subscribers got a boost to it automatically, fine. But paying to be able to grind and then paying again to lessen the grind is a poor way to be treated as a customer.

All that said, I will confess that I actually bought some of these boosts. Why? Because thanks to referrals, I'm sitting on tens of thousands of unused complimentary Cartel Coins that I never use for anything since I'm not really one to buy lots of cosmetics or crates of randomness. There's just little for me to spend them on right now, and at least these boosts are actually useful to me. I don't know how I'd feel if I actually had to pay for them with real money though. I don't think I would want to.

Neverwinter: Second Impressions

About a year ago I wrote about trying out Neverwinter Online for a while, to get back into a fantasy MMO for a bit. In the end I think I played it for about a month before my interest fizzled out again. The friends that had originally suggested it as a game to play together never actually bothered to group up, and even my pet tank lost interest after we accidentally outlevelled a skirmish and thereby hurt his completionist feelings because now we weren't going to see ALL THE THINGS (yes, this is a thing with him). I continued to log in on my own for a couple of days just to invoke and gained a few more levels that way, but eventually I just... stopped. No hard feelings; I just lost interest.

Recently, a couple of my SWTOR guildies have been dabbling in the game again, which led to my pet tank's interest reawakening as well and him suggesting that we should go back and give it another try by rolling up a new pair of characters, following our usual, tried-and-tested tank and healer routine this time. "Why not?" I thought.

The game almost immediately provided an answer to that question when I tried to pick up my level four cleric alt and found that her main quest line had been reset due to inactivity (???), asking me to redo the instanced starting area, which - as far as I'm aware - had already become inaccessible to me at this point. I fumed with anger for a little while but then decided to just cut my losses, delete and reroll her. It's not as if I was losing much after all; it just seemed like a random and very pointless obstacle to put in my way.

My half-elf cleric at level 40. Sadly the different bits of armour you get while levelling up all look more or less identical, but I do appreciate that the gear looks pretty realistic and functional. 

In general, the game immediately made me appreciate SWTOR's polish. SWTOR has got some minor bugs, sure, but I've only been playing Neverwinter for less than a week now and have already considered keeping a little diary just to keep track of all the random disconnects, instancing issues, group finder bugs and whatever else we've encountered so far, because there've been a considerable amount of them... though fortunately not enough to make the game unplayable. There have also been some improvements compared to when I last played a year ago: for example the game is now much more likely to put group members into the same instance when they transfer maps, something for which I'm eternally grateful considering the frequent zoning required by the game.

On the whole, I'm quite enjoying the change of pace. I'm still no fan of action combat, but it certainly makes for a very different experience. The constant dodging of special attacks is quite challening, and as we go up in levels we're finding the dungeon bosses harder and harder. To be honest, as it stands I'm worrying that we might soon find them too hard for our skill level (plus that of our randomly dungeon-findered group mates). The last boss in Throne of Idris wiped us about five times before we got her down, and when we tried to complete the Gray Wolf Den last night, we eventually had to give up after so many wipes because we kept getting injured (which gives you a debuff) and we had run out of injury kits to cure ourselves. Having read up on the boss afterwards, it seems that she spawns extra adds every time someone gets hit by one of her abilities, and since adds running rampant makes it even harder to successfully dodge everything, it's easy for things to spiral out of control very quickly.

It's also interesting that even though the game officially has a trinity system, group gameplay doesn't feel very controlled. I'm not sure if that's just a side effect of running with uncoordinated pugs, but Pet Tank keeps complaining that his tanking tools are too limited and I find myself getting swarmed by adds attracted by healing aggro on every major fight. At the same time, clerics aren't even "real" healers in the classic sense, as their direct healing abilities are extremely limited, and most of your healing will come from abilities doing incidental healing while you actually use them to dps. If someone takes a big chunk of damage from standing in bad, you can't really help them; they'll simply have to chug a healing potion. I'm still enjoying it, as I used to love playing support as a shadow priest in WoW's Burning Crusade too, but it certainly took some mental adjustments. Especially at the beginning I found myself getting frustrated a lot, trying to use my one targeted heal on people and always hitting the wrong person since it's extremely hard to stay on target when everyone's constantly running around and dodging things in melee.

These new experiences were created by me choosing a different class to level than I did at launch, but other than that the game doesn't seem to have changed much. There were a couple of new low-level quests to introduce us to systems we didn't know about, but I couldn't really tell whether they were actual new additions or just things that simply weren't explained very well back at launch. (I know the scrying orbs definitely weren't around a year ago, but the artefact gear slot? Not sure.) I'm guessing that all the major new content updates have been max-level additions. There's also the possibility that some things just didn't feel that new to me due to reading Telwyn's relatively frequent posts about the game over the last couple of months.

I've also come to take another critical look at the game's free-to-play model. On the surface it's very generous and you can play pretty much all the content for free as far as I can tell, but as soon as you go deeper it seems that there are a lot of systems that give significant advantages if you pay with real money, as the alternatives would require literally months of grinding. The companion system is a good example, limiting the basic companions available for in-game currency to being only half as powerful (possibly less) as the highest level ones from the cash shop. Do you need a companion that's that much more powerful? Probably not, but it certainly helps. Same thing with mounts: you can buy a very slow and basic one for in-game gold, but if you want a fast one you either have to shell out some real cash our grind out literally hundreds of thousands of astral diamonds (the "in-between" currency) over the course of weeks and months. Maybe it wouldn't matter much to me if I was only playing with other free players, who are on the same level as me, but Pet Tank bought one of their expensive starter packs at launch, providing him with an epic quality mount and companion on every character, and it certainly feels grating when he charges through groups of mobs ahead of me while I get knocked off and forced into combat because my mount is too slow.

Me on my free-to-buy-with-gold horse and pet tank on his monstrous armoured spider mount from the expensive founder's pack.

I did end up giving Perfect World some money again, because among other things they had a special offer going on that provided you with a "starter pack" which included a blue quality companion simply for buying cash store currency, while still leaving the actual currency to be spent on something else. However, the whole thing did once again reinforce my overall feeling that I prefer games with a subscription, even if it's optional. A one month sub is a relatively small outlay to get access to everything you need for the duration of your play time, and then you only end up paying more as and if you actually spend more time playing. When instead you have to shell out a bigger lump sum to get access to what I consider pretty basic gameplay features, it's much harder to judge whether that's going to be a good investment in the long run.

Greetings From Another World

Unlike many MMO blogs that I read, I prefer to maintain a narrow focus in my writing. This is my outlet for thoughts about SWTOR; if I have something to say on another subject I'll find somewhere else to talk about it. Today I'm going to make an exception to that rule though... as thanks to some friends, I've found myself compelled to try out the new Neverwinter MMO in the past week.

I suppose there's still going to be at least a tangential SWTOR connection here as I'm not a very experienced MMO tourist, and thus my impressions are heavily coloured by my main MMO. But where to begin?

Setting

While I've been playing exclusively in a galaxy far, far away for more than a year now, my first MMO was World of Warcraft, so playing in a fantasy setting immediately felt familiar. In fact, there's something oddly reassuring about the many similarities between different fantasy MMOs. Elves, dwarves, magic... you might not know all the details about the lore, but it's easy enough to jump in and get the gist of it. In this particular case, having some familiarity with Dungeons & Dragons helps as well of course.

Graphics

The game looks "pretty enough" I would say, though I feel that it lacks a distinctive art style. You know how with some MMOs, you can immediately recognise the game in question as soon as you see a screenshot from it somewhere? Yeah, Neverwinter is not that game.

Still, some things look very good (... then again, some don't). I do absolutely love some of the combat animations. Just seeing those get executed over and over again makes my character fun to play. On the "not so impressive" side however, my tiefling has some awful clipping issues while riding a horse. I'm usually pretty indifferent towards clipping of weapons and the like, but no character of mine should ever have body parts disappear inside a horse's butt!

Sound

There is this one theme that reminds me of the original MechCommander every time it starts playing, which is a rather bizarre connection to make, but I suppose stranger things have happened.

The main quest lines are voice-acted and show close-ups of the NPCs when you talk to them. Who says that SWTOR hasn't had an effect on quest delivery standards going forward? Too bad it's also set said standard really high... because Neverwinter's voice actors speaking in hilariously bad accents just make me laugh, and the fact that the talking NPCs aren't in any way animated other than that they move their jaws a little makes them look like creepy dolls in my opinion. To be fair though, I find that amusing more than off-putting.

Gameplay

Neverwinter is one of those newfangled "action combat" MMOs, which means that you have to constantly move around and dodge stuff. Having never played one of these before and knowing myself to be bad at twitch gameplay I was very sceptical about this at first but I've actually been coping alright. Still, I have to say I'm coming to appreciate how positively sedate SWTOR's combat feels in comparison. I like being able to slack a bit while questing and fighting trash in group content, thank you very much! In Neverwinter you have to keep your hands on both keyboard and mouse at all times to get anything done at all, and it gets tiring after a while to be honest.

I was also kind of surprised that the game has a companion system! Another win for SWTOR I guess if that's something that other games copy now. Neverwinter's companions are just generic pets from a vendor though and don't seem to have very good AI from what I've seen so far. I accidentally chose a wizard as my first companion due to lazy clicking, and he spends a lot of time just standing around and staring at me in combat. To add insult to injury, one of his idle animations is a "point and laugh" emote which he's really fond of for some reason! So basically I have a lazy sod following me around who enjoys mocking me at every opportunity. Hmm...

Heals, Please?

While I'm a healer at heart, someone else in the group of people I was going to play with said that he wanted to be the healer this time around, so I rolled up a rogue. Stealth and stabbing things, right? Right. Still, being deprived of my usual ability to heal, I thought it was an interesting twist when I found out that there is no standard out of combat health regeneration in Neverwinter, unless you're in a dedicated safe spot (next to a campfire) or drink a potion. This added a real sense of danger to the world for me and has made exploring hostile territory very exciting. I find myself being extra careful at all times and have yet to die outside of a PvP match at level 28, even though there have been some close calls.

Who is that masked tiefling?

I do wonder what sort of attitude towards healers this will produce in the long run. Will they be extra valued due to providing a rare service? Or will people not care because they are used to surviving without one anyway? I ran a pretty tough skirmish (short five-man group content) tonight where the automated grouping tool hadn't provided us with a healer, but everyone in the party just paid attention to their own health and chugged potions as needed and without further comment. What a strange world, where people actually feel responsible for their own survival...

Social

Unfortunately the game seems very unfriendly towards grouping when compared to SWTOR. It's got an automated group finder for dungeons and skirmishes, but that just keeps throwing you into "rush rush" type groups where nobody talks and which are already starting to wear me down a bit to be honest, even if they get things done. (As a rogue I'm perpetually saddened by all the people who run over traps and skewer themselves before I've even had a chance to disarm anything.) While the open world areas are quite densely packed with mobs and make grouping up an advantage, I have yet to run into any dev-created content there that intentionally seems to be tuned with groups in mind.

The UI is also very punishing towards parties. As far as I can tell there is no way of seeing what quests your group mates are on, and conversations along the lines of "What are you doing?" - "Wait, didn't you pick that quest up as well?" are not uncommon. While transferring between maps it's easy to get yourself stuck in a situation where the game won't let you move on without "gathering your party" first, even when said party is on another map, meaning that you have to break group and reform in the new area just to be able to continue.

For some reason that I can't fathom they also didn't consider it necessary to make sure that when zoning, all members of a party land in the same instance of the new zone. This is bad because there is a lot of transferring between zones in this game, meaning that you will constantly find yourself separated from other members of your group whenever you get placed in different phases. While it's easy to switch between map instances in theory, the game locks you out of it for a few minutes if you do it too often for its taste, which means that my questing partner and I already had to spend a fair amount of time just sitting around and twiddling our thumbs while waiting for the instance switch to come off cooldown just so that we could actually get back onto the same map and play together.

Content

At the moment it feels like there's loads to do in the game, but I suspect that's because there's a lot that I haven't seen yet. The amount of developer-created quest content is actually somewhat limited and you'll fall behind the experience curve quite quickly if you try to level through the main story quest line alone. However there are quite a few additional sources of experience, not to mention the much talked about "Foundry" where players create their own content. And it's all free to access, so that's good.

On Free To Play

Back when SWTOR announced its introduction of a "free to play option" I scoffed at the idea, both because I don't like the idea of free to play models for a variety of reasons, and because I found it odd to call it an "option" - either a game is free to play or not. Looking at it now however, I think it was the right choice of words, because at its heart SWTOR still feels like a subscription game to me, with the free part of the game constantly trying to nudge you towards subscribing. I've heard a lot of people comment negatively on that.

By comparison Neverwinter truly is a free to play game that just hopes to make some money out of you by making you buy things that save you time and/or are shiny. Funny thing: after nearly a week of playing it I found myself getting frustrated with my lack of bag space and decided that I should probably spend some real money on a bigger bag. After all I was having fun; might as well throw the devs a bone, right? But I really struggled to make myself do it!

It made me realise that for some reason I'm perfectly happy to pay for what I feel is a service (such as access to a game, aka a subscription), which is usually measured in time, but I don't like buying virtual items. Even if the total cost is the same, the latter just feels like so much worse value for money to me somehow. I mean, a tenner for a virtual bag? Compare that to the price of a subscription for a whole month of entertainment and there's just no contest. The huge part of the game that I already got for free doesn't even factor into it.

I did give them some money in the end though.

In Summary

Neverwinter offers a nice little romp through a pretty fantasy world that feels quite true to the setting and has a fair amount of things to do. I think that the strenuous action combat and UI fails that make grouping a pain will be off-putting to me in the long run though.