There's a practicality to my love for free to play games:
they're free to play, so why not play them?
But there's also something curious about their design. Free-to-play games don't generate revenue by
appealing to a large audience. They
generate revenue by engaging with an existing audience for an extended period
of time. Free-to-play games have to be
fun to play, and they have to be fun to play for a good long while if they want
to make any kind of return on investment.
Mechwarrior: Online
is fun to play, or at least, I find it fun to play. The recent slough of negative reviews remain
somewhat puzzling to me, not just in their scoring, but in their discussion of
the game itself (one of them referred to a free-to-play game as 'unreasonably
expensive' in an excerpt). But I've been
playing Mechwarrior: Online for
almost eight months. Sometimes I need to
take a break. Sometimes I take a break
with things like Battlefield 4, but the competitive twitchiness of Battlefield 4 can be a bit much for
me. So I found a new free-to-play game
with some nice slow burning actiony play and a solid grindy progression. I started playing Neverwinter.
Neverwinter, to
those unfamiliar (as I was) is a free-to-play D&D action/RPG MMO, heavy on the RPG side - it plays a lot like
Star Wars: The Old Republic, but
without large scale faction warfare, with a lot fewer classes, and without full
cutscenes. Its primary draw is the D&D/Forgotten Realms license: people
love Dungeons and Dragons, and people
love the Forgotten Realms flavor of Dungeons and Dragons particularly well
(or at least, video games have explored that particular setting especially
thoroughly) and so Neverwinter gives
gamers who are bummed out about a general lack of new D&D games with an
endless slough of new experiences to play through (Neverwinter has been trickling out content and sports a robust tool set that lets users build adventures, or "modules," for other players to
explore).
There's a catch, of course: Neverwinter is extremely limited in every way. Players only have access to six classes, two
of which are technically just different specializations of the same class. While players have, in turn, access to a
decent number of character races, nerds may be disappointed at the array of
available races, and by the translation of a few of the races into the
game. While they're varied, there's no
point buy system, so the venerable (and, in a sense, shitty) random-roll system
of characer generation is at work here, which can be problematic for an
MMO. None of this should sound terribly
limiting for a free game (though, if you're like me, you'll be grinding your
teeth as you re-roll until your stats work out just right) but all of these
character combinations are rooted in a game that only gives you two character
slots. Since you'll spend a lot of time
with each character, this isn't that big a deal, but you level up quickly in Neverwinter, and a great deal of the
content being developed for the game appears to be focused on the end-game - Neverwinter is about epic content, as
many Forgotten Realms computer games have been in the past.
These draconian limits on character slots mean you're
effectively just trying the game out for free.
If you want to get into the real meat of it (playing multiple characters
up to and past level 60) you'll need to buy some in-game currency that can in
turn be spent on character slots, and other goodies. It's a brilliant strategy - the core game
itself is largely free of "pay to play" iterations, but layers of it
are totally mired in them, to the point that my brain doesn't even acknowledge
their existence. While I'm enjoying the
game just fine, I don't plan to play another character after I max out my
Trickster Rogue, and I'm okay with that.
The game seems okay with that too: it just wants me to stick around and
sink some more hours in. My playing
gives other people someone to play with, and if one person who spends money is
part of a five man group, I get the sense that developer Cryptic will be
just fine.
There are some pretty mercenary attempts at getting me to
spend money, invasive ones like "Rusted Lock Boxes" that require me
to spend real world money to open them.
These lock boxes contain all sorts of neat goodies, and they're fairly
cheap to open (and frequently occurring) - they're a bit like slot machines,
and they appear everywhere. Likewise,
trade skills appear to rely on non-standard currencies and, given their
prominence in the game's menu system (it's easier to navigate your trade skill
menu than it is to navigate things like Paragon Trees and Feats) it's clear
that Cryptic hopes you'll spend money on them. But, as I said, these things are occluded by
a game which is, by and large, just fun to play.
The parallels with SW:TOR
are abundant: play occurs quickly and varies dramatically according to
class. My Trickster Rogue plays on
attacking rapidly and repeatedly for decent damage, then exploding with a few
well placed hits. It's very similar to
playing a Marauder or Sentinel in SW:TOR,
but I'm a rogue, not a Sith, or whatever.
It's a matter of flavor, and a distinction in how powers develop. SW:TOR
is about an ever expanding scope of powers, while Neverwinter is about giving
you tools you can play with.
See Neverwinter
plays with Dungeons and Dragons' 4th
Edition Powers system, which sets some pretty strict limits on how many powers
a given character can have at any given moment.
Characters can swap out powers more or less as they like, but
they'll never have more than a handful (in Neverwinter's
case, it's 7) at one time. As such, the
game becomes less about learning when and how to use every tool in your arsenal
(the way that SW:TOR is) and more
about learning which tools you want to use under which circumstances. If you're fighting a lot of enemies that do
AOE damage immediately around themselves you'll want to set your rogue up with
ranged powers that debuff enemies and do AOE damage in response. If you're fighting big monsters with tons of
HP and directional attacks with massive cast-times and cool-downs, you'll want
to spec up your ability to dodge and change location and pack a bundle of
direct damage powers.
It's a neat tactical layer and, beyond the setting, what
realls makes the game original: for the most part, you've actually seen
everything Neverwinter is doing
before. This isn't a bad thing, make no
mistake. Neverwinter is an example of iterative game design at its
best. It understands what other games do
well, and it makes those things its focus.
It even repackages them in a way that might get past some players, but
it's not being overly tricky about it: you've got a set of swapping companions
that level up with you, a set of trade skills that occur without you really
doing anything, gear that tweaks up bit by bit.
It's easy to play, easy to engage with, easy to understand. Its familiarity is a kind of comfort.
But it's not without its pitfalls: this familiarity, paired
with what might be considered the most generic Dungeons and Dragons setting (in contemporary play I'd contend that
Forgotten Realms has displaced Greyhawk, though they're both seminal
considerations of contemporary fantasy settings and the psychology behind them)
might leave players feeling like there isn't really a whole lot going on behind
the mechanics themselves. The quests
will feel generic, the dialogue is incredibly skippable (in fact, it feels like
the developers just want you to skip as much of it as possible) and the narrative
itself, the thing that Dungeons and
Dragons is supposed to excel at, is generic as all get out: there's an evil
lich, she's attacking the city. There's
some more ambiguity in there too, but it's pretty light: maybe the current king
of Neverwinter isn't the nicest dude, who knows. It'll seem pretty familiar to anyone who
remembers the Waterdeep focused Gold Box RPGs, or even the infuriating Eye of the Beholder first person dungeon
crawler that snapped controllers and promoted unnecessarily peripherals on SNES
in the 90s.
But all that said, it's free. And that's an important thing to remember: Neverwinter is a free to play game,
designed from the ground up to be free.
Players looking for a story, unperturbed by the removal of "rest
XP" from SW:TOR, would be better
served to give their time to Bioware, but the grind in SW:TOR can get heavy without the progression easing that "rest
XP" brings. Neverwinter presents a similar, simpler consideration of gameplay
with lower stakes, less depth, and easier access overall - if you like D&D, or you just want a solid action
RPG to test out over the holiday, you could do considerably worse.
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