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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
On the other hand, 3rd ed was about "How much jerky did you bring when you went on this hike?", "Well, that's not enough jerky".
4th Ed is the first one I can play with my friends where we spend more time playing than looking in damn books. Also, if you don't like Eladrin (basically High Elves) or Dragonborn, don't play them.
Extra standard action, which can be substituted for a move or minor action as per the usual rules. Though you normally get some other effect with it, like temporary health, and some abilities allow for spending them to cause other effects (IIRC).
I tend to play without them, because people always forget about them anyway, and it's hard to explain exactly what they're supposed to be.
accessible content creation tools
If true, this one's the really big deal - it's what made NWN stand out originally. Its singleplayer was only so-so, but the ability for a relative newbie to easily create your own worlds and then DM a party (or just a bunch of randomly wandering players) in them was what made the game worthwhile.
Try Pathfinder, it's basically what 4th should have been.
The classes maintain their flavor while gaining options.
They streamlined what needed it (NOTE streamlined what was needed. NOT made stupidly dumb everything)
http://paizo.com/pathfinderRPG
95%+ compatible with 3.5
I've been playing since 1982 and pathfinder is the best version of AD&D I've seen yet, not perfect, but it's never been perfect.
AD&D has a cycle to it, version, add on rules till it gets to be a mess to track them, then new version, lather rinse repeat. But it's still a lot of fun.
Mycroft
https://signup.leagueoflegends.com/?ref=4c3ed6600b6ea
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?).
I didn't know Neverwinter Nights even had single player. Oh wait. You mean the remake of NWN from Bioware? I don't know why everyone has so little imagination that they have to keep reusing the same name. It doesn't bode well for the games themselves.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
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
I completely agree and really wish I had mod points to add to this. While I have a few balance gripes with anything d20 related, any tabletop RPG will inevitably have one thing that is 'better' than another in most situations. And when you really start to play a game with a competent GM and group of people you can call 'friends', balance should be maintained through social contract. Not through rules so simple that they cripple a character's ability to be unique.
Ginga no Rekshiya Mata Each page.
Equally good at everything != Awesome at everything.
He absolutely sucked at a lot of non-combat skills, his AC wasn't great (wizard, can't use metal armour, though thick dragonborn skin helped) and combat wise he was much better used against swarms of minions than against stronger individual enemies (typical wizard). When I say hitting with his staff was as strong as most of his spells, that's ignoring the range and area effects on the spells, and I should be clear that hitting with his staff comes nowhere near what a true fighter is capable of.
He wasn't some kind of super do-everything-awesome character, I'm just saying he had flavour, and you don't have to stick to the expected class for a race to get a good character.
Roleplay isn't something you can really put in or take out of the rules. Whether you get roleplay or not depends more on the group you're playing with. For example, one of the (4e) encounters I set up for a group recently went something like this:
Party is doing the usual killing thing in a ruined keep, and finds a note in a chest revealing that someone is to meet with a cultist that night to hand over an artifact (elsewhere in the ruins was an excavation, down into a room below that was now empty. Hint hint.).
They decide that the best way to proceed is to make a fake artifact (not knowing what it looks like didn't stop them), go to the meeting, and try to get some more information out of the cultist guy. They even try to get the reward for handing over their fake, but narrowly avoid being stabbed instead. Then they tie the cultist guy up, borrow his cloak and pretend to be him when the guy with the real artifact comes.
They could have handled it several other ways, including attacking him to get the artifact, or following him back after he gets the artifact and stealing it, etc. but they chose the roleplaying route and it worked out amazingly well for them. The fact that it was 4e wasn't a barrier to the roleplaying at all, despite what people say about d&d having been made into a hack&slash.
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
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 wish I still had people like that to game with.
Every group I've been part of in the past decade or so (before I finally threw in the towel) would have just killed the cultist, stashed the body, and then killed the contact.
And then demand extra XP for being "clever."
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.
Agreed. I always like trying different combinations that may not be best suited for each other. For the last campaign I was in I rolled a minotaur bard - the DM normally doesn't allow monster classes but he made an exception since it wasn't a typical combination. The roleplay element alone made the character more than worth it.
This sig is in another castle.
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
The great things about 4E are:
1) It's extremely DM friendly, especially for making up adventures on the fly. To crunch out the stats for a fight that would be interesting and challenging to veteran 3/3.5E players would easily take an hour. 1/2E didn't have that level of complexity, but it was really easy to guess wrong about how tough a fight would be. (And sure, you could fudge it from there if you wanted -- *rolls behind the screen* "Damn, the terrasque rolled all 1s... again." but that's not particularly fun for anyone.) 4E makes it ridiculously easy to throw together an encounter on the spur of the moment that's actually interesting and balanced.
2) It's actually pretty balanced. Earlier editions are fundamentally imbalanced even with just the basic books. For example, in 2E, dual classed humans are ridiculously more powerful than any other kind of character you could make. In 3E, wizard/cleric/druid are ridiculously more powerful than any other kind of character you could make. (People like to say that those caster classes were weak at first and grew strong over time, but as your players have a stronger grasp of the game, the level where the pure casters are equal to anyone else gets lower and lower. By the time we stopped playing 3E, it was about level 3.)
And sure, you can just sort of agree amongst the players that you're not going to play anything especially powerful, but how fun is that? I think it's perfectly reasonable to say, we're not going to pick one level each of 10 different prestige classes from 8 different books, but how fun is it to say, no one can play a spellcaster?
People sometimes turn that criticism into a strawman that I think D&D is about building the strongest character you can and how that's not the way the game's not meant to played. And that's true, it's not -- it's a team game. Team games are fun if everyone in terms of character strengths has something to contribute. It's not fun to be the 3.5E fighter in a party with a 3.5E cleric, who's a much better fighter than you and can cast a ton of spells. (On the other hand, you can have a lot of fun with 2E/3E/etc. until the point when the players start figuring these things out.)
The bad thing about 4E is this:
Sadly, it turns out that a rigorously balanced version of D&D isn't all that much fun to play if you're used to previous editions. Balance is achieved by making each character class fairly similar in, not every way, but a lot of ways.
Additionally, the non-combat abilities of your character are drastically reduced. In a sense, this was necessary, because again, who wants to play a fighter (who has basically nothing other than a couple skills maybe to contribute mechanically outside of a fight) when there's the druid who's not only a much better combat character but also has 100 creative things he can do outside of combat.
I meant to do something with the idea of the pit being illusionary. Or the spikes. I'm not saying the players wouldn't die, just that it wouldn't be straightforward :)
We had a DM that loved fake traps. His best was a room where the ceiling was coming down towards the party, the door slammed shut behind us and wouldn't open, and there was a button next to it on the wall. Every time the button was pushed the ceiling would reset and start coming down again. It took about an hour and a half for everyone to figure out the solution. Turns out there was an invisible ledge with a pressure-sensitive switch that opened the door; the ceiling came to rest on it just outside everyone's reach. Every time someone hit the button they delayed getting out of the room.
They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it's not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance. - Terry Pratchett
What made NWN 1 a game where I bought multiple copies of (one per computer) were seven things:
1: The DRM or lack thereof. The CD protection got patched out, and a valid and unique CD key was needed to play multiplayer. This by itself made the game worth installing and buying multiple copies of, because they actually considered gamers as (WTF) paying customers, and not potential thieves. What a concept that is unheard of these days. I use NWN1's implementation of DRM and its exceedingly low piracy statistics as an example of how a game should be shipped. Why spend time on local DRM when that will be cracked anyway? Just have a valid/unique key for the network stuff to ensure people who paid their tickets can access that and spend the money that would have gone for DRM on making the game better.
2: The forums were not just active, but Bioware reps were very common and extremely helpful. Had a question about scripting? It was answered immediately with well thought out answers.
3: The sheer amount of very well done player written modules. There were easily thousands of modules worth playing.
4: Persistent worlds. This reminded me of the MUDs of yore, where they had a relatively small player base, but everyone knew each other and actually roleplayed. Newcomers were always welcome, and if they had any ability to interact with others, they usually found a place in the world.
5: NWN1 did not feel as it was rushed out the door unlike modern games which feel like early betas. The campaigns were of a decent length, (although I miss the detailed story of Baldur's Gate 1 and 2,) the tools to build modules and/or a PW were well documented and very good, and it was easy to add "hackpacks" or additional models or tile sets. The expansions were well worth getting.
6: NWN1 ran not just on Windows, but Mac and Linux. I had a PW server happily running on a Linux box for a long time. To boot, all three were patched at the same time, rather than having one platform languish. Other than Blizzard, every other game company gives lip service at best to Macs and just laughs loudly if asked for Linux support.
7: NWN1 was constantly updated, even years after the expansions. These days, you might see *one* update to a game, then it is scooted to the wayside and all development effort put into making another sequel.
My hope:
Maybe I'm wishing on a star here, but I hope Neverwinter harkens back to NWN1 in being a game that is timeless in the sense that even years down the line, people still buy the game for the player written modules or the persistent worlds.
If Neverwinter came out with only a CD key as copy protection, a good way to find player modules to download, a strong multiplayer server finder network, top notch editing tools for PWs and modules, vibrant game forums, and perhaps even some contests to get people to write modules, I'm sure it will do quite well over a long period of time, where other games would be long forgotten.
I have to disagree with just about everything you've said here... with the exception of 4th ed being not much fun.
1) It's a drag for DM's because you can't do anything with the system but frustrate the players. Monster powers are arbitrary and often completely out of line with their challenge ratings, and there was often no logical or systematic reason for what monsters could do. At the same time, you couldn't actually tell an epic fantasy story in it because the high level free form magic was all gone, so even if you gave those abilities to your NPC's there was no way for the players to respond.
2) Wizards have not ruled the game since 2nd ed, and clerics have never been other than a support class. Druids still kick ass, but everyone gets their moment to shine. Are you sure you played 3.5? A cleric who spends five full rounds buffing himself can be a mediocre fighter, but still can't beat a fighter two levels lower than he is (we put this to the test.) But a similar range of buffs on the tank can turn him into a Dragon slaying god. Spellcasters are good at taking out hordes of grunts, but for bosses, there's no saving throw against a good axe.
Most of the time my party defined insanity in finding solutions. I recall one "boss" that we tried to avoid peacefully, and the resulting situation involved his horde of minions singing him Happy Birthday as he chased us out of his palace with a rather large hammer.
2) Wizards have not ruled the game since 2nd ed, and clerics have never been other than a support class. Druids still kick ass, but everyone gets their moment to shine. Are you sure you played 3.5? A cleric who spends five full rounds buffing himself can be a mediocre fighter, but still can't beat a fighter two levels lower than he is (we put this to the test.) But a similar range of buffs on the tank can turn him into a Dragon slaying god. Spellcasters are good at taking out hordes of grunts, but for bosses, there's no saving throw against a good axe.
With all due respect, your players are not very good at playing spellcasters. (You should be happy about this -- seriously, their incompetence makes the game more fun than it actually is.) Hell, if your clerics are even wasting rounds buffing they're not very good. One round of buffing (usually while closing in anyway) is pretty standard at the low-mid levels but that phase doesn't last very long, level-wise. You fix the buffing problem in a number of ways -- for example, spells that last either all day or plenty long to clear a dungeon or whatever, possibly with extend spell to turn hour/level durations into 'all damn day', quicken spell to get short-turn combat buffs out fast. Pearls of power allow throwing the 10 minutes/level spells like barkskin (plant domain as one example -- there's good stuff for other domains as well, of course) as many times as you need to. Bead of karma and other casting-level mods to jack up the casting level of buffs, increasing their bonuses, increasing their duration, and making them harder to dispel.
It only even matters so much what items you even choose to let the players have because of craft wonderous item.
That's all out of the core PHB/DMG. If you allow other books into play, it gets even worse fast. Divine metamagic is probably the most broken feat in the whole edition and drastically increases the cleric's ability to throw out big buff spells or combat spells while full attacking. Divine spell power makes the aforementioned casting level problem worse. Sudden metamagic feats make all of the above worse.
A fighter is a better fighter than a cleric at very low levels. Get into the midlevels and it's over -- if your cleric gets into any fight without about 10 buff spells already up, he is doing something seriously wrong. Get into the high levels (16ish) and throwing out 500 melee damage in a round as a cleric with no combat feats, no magical weapons or especially combat-focused magic items, and a 10 strength is very possible with no prep time (outside of spells that last literally a day or longer.)
I give you, the fighter always has feats on the cleric -- but that's about it. Divine power fixes the base attack deficit, and that's out at level 7. Past that point, it's not very satisfying to be the fighter when the cleric puts out twice the melee damage you do AND has the full wack of cleric things to do.
Add to that giant rant:
1) If a 3/3.5 druid is not the toughest character at the table at level 1, he is doing something wrong. It will just get worse from there. By level 7, the druid, played competently, is tougher than the other 5 guys in the party put together. The game devolves to watching the druid do everything.
A genuinely well-played druid is even worse. I've seen a ~ level 10 druid (this is in regulation/tournament play -- no weird house rules in play, etc.) respond to the appearance of a pit fiend in an adventure that the players were clearly not meant to fight by grappling it and pinning it before it even got to go.
2) 3/3.5E wizard is weak at level 1-2. By 3, it's pulling its own weight as a party member and it only gets stronger from there. One hint is: if your wizard is doing damage in combat, you're probably playing it wrong. Level 2 wizard damage spells kind of suck. Conversely, blindness (to pick one malediction/debuff style spell) is hugely crippling and permanent. A properly built wizard will already be throwing out spells at that level that will almost never have their saving throws made.
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.
Fun is what you make it.
I've been on both sides of this (being useless in combat and being the top damage) and I would rather be in a rag tag party of misfits and having fun any day of the week. As long as it is fun and the story is good who cares about balance, I play pen and paper RPGs to get away from that kind of drama.
I don't give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.
Mark Twain
Roleplay isn't something you can really put in or take out of the rules.
White Wolf's Exalted handles this really, really well. For any action, you can try to get "stunt dice": basically, you describe what you are doing in a cool way and if it sounds creative, you get extra dice to roll.
So, instead of, "I attack with my sword," you say, "I lunge over the table, uttering a blood-curdling war cry, and slash mightily at his mid-section."
Even more extra dice if you cause the entire group of players to either laugh or gasp in amazement. It does a great job of keeping the players engaged and thinking creatively.