A Sad Decline

Hearing about Neverwinter Classic got me to re-read some of my old posts on this blog and made me all nostalgic. Damn, I really loved this game for a while, playing it on and off for about eight years.

I decided to have a look at Steam Charts to get an idea of how Neverwinter is doing nowadays, and it was honestly quite sad to look at, especially when comparing its numbers (green line in the screenshot below) against those of its sibling Star Trek Online (blue line), which is also based on a large IP and developed by the same studio.

STO shows only the gentlest decline over time, maintaining a remarkably stable population for more than ten years. By comparison, Neverwinter started out huge and held on to almost half its launch base for a full year, but then you see the first permanent decline around April 2015, when the Elemental Evil module raised the level cap and made an incredible mess of things (there's a reason it was on my own list of least favourite mods).

However, the devs eventually managed to stop the bleed from that and things remained relatively stable for the next three years, with the game even seeing a new peak of active users in July 2018, after the launch of the excellent Ravenloft module (also in my own top 5).

But then! Another permanent drop after April 2019 when Undermountain drastically revamped all classes (again, I agree with this vibe and it was another one of my least faves). The game recovered a bit of population during the Covid bump, but then experienced another permanent population drop at the end of 2021, when unwelcome changes to the enchantment system ended up driving me away as well.

I mostly take two things away from that:

1. As far as Neverwinter goes, I'm no contrarian and it's actually surprising how much my personal opinions seem to align with the masses.

2. It's very much possible to drive an initially successful MMO into the ground with repeated terrible decisions.

Neverwinter vs. STO

There is a little chart called "weekly top games" on the Arc launcher, and for as long as I can remember, Neverwinter has held the number one spot on it, followed by Star Trek Online in second. Ever since I came back though, I've noticed that STO has been in first place some weeks. Has Neverwinter really decreased in popularity that much?

I consulted the Steam Charts once again, just to get a gauge on the relative popularity of the two games, and they do indeed show more people having played STO than Neverwinter for most of 2020. The last time that happened was back in 2016! Then I realised that STO recently celebrated its 10th anniversary though, which I'm sure helped it garner some extra attention, and activity does appear to have been dropping off again since that event ended on PC.

That said, the Neverwinter chart has definitely seen better days too. The game's last major peak appears to have been in July 2018 with the release of Ravenloft (understandably), and after the release of Undermountain in particular you can see a noticeable decline in interest (also understandably if you ask me - people don't like having to relearn the entire game!). We'll see if the current climate encourages more players to give the game another chance, like I have.

Professions

Professions in Neverwinter are a "click and wait" game, similar to the duty officer system in Star Trek Online or the companion crew skill system in SWTOR. Your character doesn't do anything herself, she just sends out her minions and reaps the rewards after a few hours.

The thing that feels weird to me is how your "minions" in this case are just really generic items that sit in your crafting inventory and can be traded on the auction house. At least the duty officers in STO have names and personalities, and it makes sense for a starship to have a large roster. As for why my half-elf cleric and my tiefling rogue have random guys doing all their work for them... who knows.

Professions are also really grindy. While levelling my cleric I focused pretty much exclusively on leadership, while ignoring all the other professions. Yet after two and a half months of playing and logging in every day, her profession level is still only 16 of 20.

The profession system is also one of the areas of the game where spending real money will give you huge advantages. Special workers who can cut a mission's time in half are only available from random packs that you buy for real money, while training up the basic white quality workers that offer no speed bonuses takes literally days and weeks of time.

While leadership at least is a very useful profession to have (I don't really have enough experience with any of the others to judge them), it does have a strong pay-to-win flavour to it that can be somewhat discouraging if you get a chance to compare your progress to that of someone who paid real money to gain advantages.

Sharandar

Ever since hitting the level cap, my pet tank and I have been busy doing dailies. There are several daily areas, with the first one being Sharandar, which was released as part of the Fury of the Feywild module last year.

It has some similarities to Star Trek Online's New Romulus daily area, both in theme (dispossessed people asking for help securing their new home) and execution (do dailies, collect various currencies, unlock rewards in stages by using a special UI). It's not without its issues, but it still feels like an improvement compared to STO, where I often found myself blocked by how much of a sheer (in-game) money sink it was to increase my reputation. You shouldn't have to do dailies to fund your other dailies. Of course it also helps that the combat in Neverwinter is more engaging than the ground combat in STO.

We've also dipped our toes into the campaign areas that were released later, and it's obvious that Cryptic has already learned how to make the experience smoother and even more enjoyable.