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Co-op Neverwinter RPG Announced For 2011
Atari and Cryptic Studios are teaming up to make a new Dungeons & Dragons-based RPG called Neverwinter, planned for Q4 2011. Gameplay will center on five-person groups that can include other players and/or AI allies, and there will be an extensive content generation system. Gamespot spoke with Cryptic CEO Jack Emmert, who explained parts of the game in more depth:
"I think there are two very unique gameplay elements in 4th Edition that we've done something interesting with: action points and healing surges. In the tabletop game, an action point lets a player perform a reroll or add an additional die to a roll. In our game, action points are earned through combat and spent to power special abilities called 'boons.' These boons give players special boosts, but only in certain circumstances. Healing surges represent the amount of times a player can heal himself before resting. In D&D and Neverwinter, various abilities let players use a surge immediately or perhaps replenish the number of surges available. It's a precious resource that players will need to husband as they adventure in the brave new world. Positioning, flanking, tactics, and using powers with your teammates are also all things that come from the 4th Edition that are interesting. Of course, we're using power names and trying to keep power behavior consistent with the pen-and-paper counterparts. Neverwinter will definitely feel familiar to anyone who has played the 4th Edition."
You got your WoW in my D&D!
or
Can haz EZ-Mode?
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Gay as hell. The best part of D&D was the Slay Living spell on the front door handle to every dungeon. And the illusory floor/spike pit at the end of the first hallway. bring back that and stop letting character heal themselves for no damned reason!
The eternal struggle of good vs. evil begins within one's self.
Only played 4th Edition briefly, but I believe action points are used for an extra move, minor or standard action...
As far as tabletop 3.5 rules and 4th Ed feels like a MMORG ie all the classes are the same every class has a special ability that basically does the same thing but with a different effect, no characterization all the classes can do most things so whats the point in playing other classes.... all fighters, need a heal cast a spell... I'm so disillusioned by wizards and 4th ed
I read most of the 4E documentation - I feel that DnD went down a few notches, jumped down the ladder...
Standard races include 3 'elves' and a creature which is recommended if "You want to look like a dragon".
They pandered too much to the 'I like WoW' crowd.
Hope they don't manage to screw it up the way turbine has screwed up DDO lately. Turned into a money grab WoW wannabe.
BUT.... atari is involved.. that's not a good sign.
At least it's not sony i guess.
Surely bioware have reason to be annoyed with their Neverwinter Nights game being in the same genre?
I wish I could work up much interest in this announcement, but to be honest, I'm finding it hard.
What is it with everybody going for a multiplayer focus these days? I mean, sure, I've no objection to having a co-operative mode in the game (indeed it's a positive boon), but I'm getting sick to death of games where the singleplayer campaign is rendered unnecessarily hard or boring due to pandering to co-op. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is probably the most recent example (there are sections which are a nightmare on any difficulty if you're on your own), but it's just one of many.
Once upon a time, I'd have been more positive, I guess. Back when I was a student, or newly started working (and still relatively junior, at the point where I was working fairly sensible hours), myself and a bunch of friends would routinely play online co-op. But even then, it wasn't that easy, for a game that demanded a substantial number of people and a good chunk of time. I remember a theoretically 6-player co-op run we did through Baldur's Gate 2 and its expansion, where in reality, after the first session or two, we never seemed to have more than 3 or 4 people in-game at any one time (which BG2 was thankfully very good at adjusting for). We ended up running the first NWN with a 3 person party (as NWN was much less resilient if your group was missing a player) and felt like we were missing out on a lot, since you couldn't really get a properly balanced party with just 3 people. These days, after going through a MMORPG phase (which does help with the problem somewhat by increasing the pool of available players, at the expense of basically needing to devote 30+ hours a week to it to play sensibly) we just don't seem to bother. With the people I actually know and like well enough to want to play online regularly with all in the same situation as myself, working jobs with substantial degrees of responsibility and erratic hours, getting people together on any kind of schedule is just too difficult. Co-op gaming for me has basically come down to the odd Gears of War mission on a Sunday afternoon.
Maybe it's just me being a Grumpy Old Man (TM). Maybe there is a huge market out there for games where the developers have cut loads of corners and justified it by saying "but it's multiplayer focussed". Oh well, at least Bioware still seem to be on my side (now when's Dragon Age 2 out?).
What happened to the days when all you needed were three books, (The DM's guide, player's handbook, and monster manual) and some imagination to play DnD? I'm not ever from that generation but I can see how v4 has taken all the creativity and original thought out of DnD. Instead of think up scenarios, worlds, and campaings for players. All DM's have to do is roll dice until their twenty-some books have told them what to say. The massive amounts of rules don't add to the gameplay, they just limit what you can do both as a DM and a character. I used to run v1 campaigns and can't do it anymore because any new players I get, (and most of them are older than me since I was born in 1993) can't understand its simplicity. I hope that at some point people will get fed up with having to keep track of tons of little things just to keep their character alive and go back to just making sure you had enough hit points kill the dragon before it cooked you and ate you for lunch.
It's exactly what it looks like
The best NWN was number one, and the Horde of Underdark expansion.
NWN2 was Ok I guess.
This new one promises to be just another beat them all a la Diablo, with its 4th ed rules.
I like the way the combat system works for magic, as it alleviates the players trying a fight/rest/fight/rest type of dungeon crawl. Outside of that I much preferred 3.5. I was thinking of trying a hybrid campaign where we used the 3.5 rules for everything except magic, which would use the 4th ed turn/combat/daily magic use.
"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much." - Oscar Wilde
If its "neverwinter" then it will be released for linux! Hurray!!!
The beauty of D&D is one is free to ignore the rules. I've never DM'd or played a campaign that didn't pick and choose and even customize with house rules.
Haven't played in awhile but when we do it's usually 2nd Ed + house rules.
That being said, I have seen nothing good at all about the 4th edition, and frankly no, it's not really D&D anymore other than the name. IMNSHO.
I was pretty excited at the opportunity to have another D&D-based PC game to play w/ my wife and friends...
Then I read that... :(
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
Are your gripes related to the PDF of a d20? I liked rolling three d6 etc. The combination was decently close to a normal distribution which seems more realistic. And realism in simulating my attacks on gazebos is important to me.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
OD&D - The perfect dungeon based roleplaying game, with dungeons. Just where the hell can I buy Chainmail?!
BD&D - Pandering to the Rogue-like crowd. Also, when my DM's in a bad mood with me and make up biased rules.
AD&D - Pandering to the Dungeon Master crowd. Also, can we not start at 5th level and I play a Wizard? With psionics?
2D&D - Pandering to Diablo crowd. Also, whoo, this all tastes a little Vanilla.
3D&D - Pandering to the Ultima Online crowd. Also, while I've spent 40 hours perfecting my NPC liche, it's too complicated to actually run.
4D&D - Pandering to the WOW crowd. Also, it's only fun when actually, you know, playing the game.
Now T&T, there is a game.
I really wish someone would take the code to Neverwinter Nights (Orig + SoU + HotU), clean it up, spruce up the graphic detail a bit and not change it completely, and re-release it with a whole new campaign. Outside of college Friday night lan fests, NWN1 was the best fun I've had both gaming as well as creating content.
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
Won't this just conflict with Diablo III? If I had this game now, I'd have something to hold me and my friends until that came out.
My THAC0 is 18, can I get some dorritos and Mountain Dew??? Please????
4th Edition killed my interest in D&D. It's a shame that I will apparently never have a new D&D computer game to play ever again, but I'm sticking with 1st-3rd Editions and Pathfinder which feels far more D&D than 4e ever will.
Forgotten Realms was one of my favorite fictional settings, but 4e killed that too, with the Spellplague and jump forward in time and everything, so again, 4e ruined not only D&D but also the Forgotten Realms.
Furthermore, Cryptic is one of my least favorite developers. They make very simplistic games that are all about combat mechanics and hack and slash, with no good story or intriguing characters anywhere in sight.
This is a strong pass. I'd *love* a good Forgotten Realms D&D game, but this provides for none of that. "good" is negated by Cryptic, "Forgotten Realms" is negated by 4e, and "D&D" is negated by 4e.
4e may copy the feel of WoW, but it's Magic: The Gathering at it's heart. As a foundation for a computer game it's a hopeless joke. Over a third of the powers in the game "interrupt" another power. That's great for a table top game, but every one of them will have to be rewritten for a computer game in real time. By the time they are done with it they're going to have a new system in place entirely.
sounds just like NWN!!!! now let me get back to slaying the damn beholders here!
Honestly, I feel that it will end up like half of the games Cryptic announces. Dead in the water. Emmert has too big of an ego and wants everything his way, regardless of what the playerbase wants. Citation: City of Heroes, Champions Online, Star Trek. Atari needs to wake up and fire this clown or at least move him out of the development process and put him in sales and marketing where he belongs.
Well since action points are to take an extra action and not to add a die or re-roll like he says they are, I'm sort of wondering how it will fee familiar to 4E players when it's based on imaginary rules instead of the actual ones.
This is coming after 5 years of when it should have, i remember getting winternights and thinking about something more like wow, and thinking i had been cheated a bit, now 5 years later they r thinking of catching up, sorry jedi knights is coming out and also have starcraft2 to deal with, i doubt i will have game playtime left...even if i give up wow.
This is all really light on details, but Neverwinter Nights had a dungeon master client, a level generator, etc. None of that here, so I'm guessing we're looking at a Guild Wars clone based on the 4e ruleset?
If not, I stand corrected. If so, a definitive meh.
I see a lot of the comments are taking sides on which rules edition is best and that's fine and to be expected. Problem is, the biggest issue on this is not that they're using the 4e rule set, but that they handed yet another beloved property to Cryptic. Y'know, the guys who took the Star Trek MMO license and took a big steamy dump on it. The guys who took their Champions Online engine and skinned it Star Trek then called it a days work. The company who innovated on how to nickel and dime their player base and laughed from their pile of money conned from a bunch of Trek fans. The company that promised Atari that it could publish a new MMO every year so they could rake in the cash.
Yeah, this isn't Bioware doing Neverwinter Nights as an MMO, this is just Cryptic preparing to kick yet another nerd group right in the balls. My bet is that their precious "character customization" selling point, which they mention in every goddamn fluff piece from their marketing department is the same thing from when they were involved with City of Heroes/Villians which really amounts to your various options on a slider bar. Bah, I'm never giving Cryptic another damn dime. Gaming is better off if this company goes broke and folds.
Look at the Reserve Feats in Complete Mage if you want a 3.5 Wizard/Sorcerer with some more staying power. Gives you at-will abilities based on the spells you have memorized with the power of the ability determined by the level of the spell. For instance, a fire based attack that does 1d6 damage per level of the highest level fire spell you have memorized.
Otherwise I'd suggest Tome of Battle: Book of Nine Swords, which is where they essentially prototyped the 4th edition rules in 3.5. Fair warning, though, the three classes in ToB are pretty overpowered compared to the base classes in PHB. There's practically no reason to ever play a Paladin when you could play a Crusader, or play a Fighter when you can play a Warblade, for instance...
There's also the Warlock class (from Complete Arcane, I think?), which has a ridiculous ranged touch attack blast every round and a bunch of "invocation" spell-like abilities... I don't like the class, though, because a player in one of my groups always plays very munchkiny builds with it...
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
I'd like a co-op version of Dragon Age. I also like 4e D&D. The premise is good. Will the game be good? No one knows yet so don't hate.
It sounds as if they're not going to fix the biggest problem with Neverwinter Nights 1 and 2: that they were not turn-based.
Neverwinter Nights 1 was a really good game, surprisingly faithful to tabletop D&D. The modmaking community produced a lot of modules that were adaptations of classic tabletop D&D modules. There were a number of minor deviations from the tabletop rules, but the most serious deviation was that NWN 1 was not turn-based. Neverwinter Nights 2 worsened the problem.
The turn-based mechanics of D&D are significant in all sorts of ways: it directly affects tactical gameplay, and indirectly affects the relationships between character classes. Spellcasting and archery work very differently in turn-based combat, spellcasting especially. In tabletop D&D, spellcasters can precisely target spells, at fixed locations, or at the current location of enemies. There are saving throws to resist spells, but most spells hit their targets automatically -- this is a significant advantage for spellcasters, offsetting the limitations of casting a limited number of spells. At low levels, spellcasting is much less effective than melee combat. At high levels, spellcasting determines control of the battlefield, and melee combat is used to guard the flanks of spellcasters.
In NWN1, spellcasting was much reduced in effectiveness, because targets were still moving when spells were being cast. This meant that players of spellcasters had to lead their targets. Since the targets were only spotted at short range to begin with, this made area-of-effect spells of only limited usefulness. It also made spellcasting combat a matter of player reflexes, not player tactical acumen. It also lead to a lot of emphasis on spells to make spellcasters melee combatants, and on monster summoning spells, which made for a very different feel from tabletop gaming. Finally, it meant that the singleplayer game encouraged players to "rest" between each combat to recover spells, removing the strategic element of carefully selecting spells; the overuse of "rest" was very controversial among players, DMs, and modmakers, as various solutions to prevent the overuse of "rest" would cause other problems.
NWN2 made things worse, as it shortened the viewable range, and shortened the range at which enemies were detected. On top of that, it made it take time for spells and missile weapons to reach their targets, rendering ranged combat and area-of-effect spells almost useless.
It sounds as if the developers of this new game have learned nothing from these mistakes.
The really sad thing is that, while D&D has had an incredibly large impact on computer games, most of those games, including the ones that claimed to be D&D itself, deviated significantly from the underlying mechanics of D&D. The Baldur's Gate series, and Neverwinter Nights 1, came closest, and NWN1 had an enormous community of modmakers. It seems as if the dream of a really faithful, playable online D&D is receding.
Neverwinter! Like as in Neverwinter nights, the game I learned game modding on when I was young! Oh the Excitment! Oh the Joy! oh the... 4th edition. God Damn it. There goes my gnome.
This.
I can't believe I had to wade through hundreds of arguments over 3.5 vs 4 and pages of twink guides and batman v. superman like discussion to get to what is the REAL heart of this story. Cryptic Studios and their history of shitting all over the franchises handed them.
Cryptic hasn't gotten it right since City of Heroes, and honestly that was only good by comparison to all the other super hero games of the day (read: none). Quickly it turned into an EXTREMELY drab treadmill. Then once that horse was beaten to death with some really lackluster expansions ("We are out of good ideas and talent, so here's a dungeon toolkit!") they moved on to the Dew Chuggin', Snowboardin', Xtreme Sports version of CoH they called Champions Online. Leveraging the power of stolen ideas and artistic style, they managed to simultaneously dumb down and Lens Flare CoH into a true apex balance point of pointless flash and mindless gameplay.
With the Superhero genre beaten down like the first Robin and vital juices all squeezed out to feed the money machine, Cryptic ran out of good ideas. So they bought one. Never mind that every Star Trek game with VERY few exceptions (Elite Force was surprisingly good, for a re-skinned Quake 3 Arena) has been a complete and utter failure. Never mind that they have no idea how to tell a cogent story or have anything but a comic-book (heh) grasp of the genre. Never mind that every other game they made was all sizzle and no steak. This will be different!
It wasn't.
And now they turn their sights on yet another pillar of nerd-dom to hump dollars out of. Fear not, fans of 4th edition, they will not desecrate the game you love because this will not resemble that game except in the most brief and fleeting ways. You'll still have the same DoTs, knockbacks, and DDs you have in every other game they make, they will now just be called Cone of Cold or Acid Arrow and will have 6 differently colored versions. Oh and a tied in series of "books" by Bob Salvatore since he's firmly chained to the Wizards Wheel of Woe and Profit by +4 Contracts of Binding (which honestly will probably be better than the game, he's a pulp fantasy writer but he is entertaining).
In the end it will feel like someone spilled a sticky bucket of D&D on Champions Online and ultimately will go on the woodpile next to Temple of Elemental Evil and Iron & Blood to burn brightly, illuminating our map grids and figurines for a brief moment, a moment brighter than the spark of joy we felt hoping that someone would make a D&D game that was like the ones we fondly remember. (Silver Blades, Beholder, even the later Baldur's and Planescape - NWN was pretty close, but felt cheap somehow)
Dragon Age was the closest to this that I've seen in recent years, but even it felt awkward - like it didn't want to acknowlege its turn-based roots and chose to hide this disfigurement behind a veil of shiny graphics. 4th ed, though, is TIED to a turn based grid, is balanced around it, and I totally see that being the first thing out the window. Strategy is anathema to RPGs for some reason these days, and yes you can blame WoW (yes, there is some strategy to WoW but not until you get 25 ppl together which takes a bigger time investment than my mortgage). Even Dragon Age is moving towards an action RPG genre style. I'm quite sure someone is trying to fit Halo or Gears of War qualities into the equation somewhere, like a set of tits on a chessboard.
Woe be unto the traditionalist RPG turn-based gamer, I'll see you in the nursing home. I'll be the one in the back with the barium suppository debuff counters in the medicine cup figurines and the DM screen made out of old medical charts paper-clipped together. Now roll initiative before I poop myself.
"Not all who wander are lost" -- JRR Tolkien
The 4th edition hate is completely irrational and from reading these posts... uninformed. Instead of talking out of your asses about 4E, maybe you guys should play it and run it.
News for cranky old nerds.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
I ditched D&D in disgust during 3rd edition; manual bloat was too obviously a scam, not unlike the "cardboard crack" of MtG.
I missed it, I longed for it. I was seeking. Reading tons of reviews for other RPGs and dungeon crawl focused board games. Nothing ever quite scratched my itch.
Then I discovered the "retro clones". Now I'm running D&D with 1 manual, about 100 pages only and its a free legal PDF, printed it myself. Its like the Open Source of D&D! I'm playing again for the first time in forever and I thank the clones for existing.
If its 1st edition you want, then your clone is OSRIC. The manual is a little thick (400 pages) but its 1st edition, in print, and only one book. If 2nd is more your cup of tea, then, well, there is no clone of 2nd. However, 1st and 2nd are so similar you probably want to go with OSRIC again.
If you're a fan of "0th edition" (it predates even AD&D1), then you want Swords & Wizardry. "Basic D&D" is covered by Labyrinth Lord, Basic Fantasy and Dark Dungeons.
-OSRIC-
http://knights-n-knaves.com/
-Swords & Wizardry-
http://www.swordsandwizardry.com/?page_id=4
Go kill some dragons.