My 5 Worst Neverwinter Modules

As a counterpoint to the last post, these were my personal least favourite additions to Neverwinter over the years:

5. Mod 12: Tomb of Annihilation & Swords of Chult (July 2017)

The jungle theme never resonated with me (awkwardly stereotyped NPCs didn't help), and personally I found the focus on pure mob grinding over doing anything vaguely resembling actual content pretty off-putting. It was also quite hard on release and being unable to ride anywhere without getting knocked off your mount by jumpy dinos every couple of steps was super annoying. It took me a long time to work up the energy to complete this campaign.

4. Mod 17: Uprising (August 2019)

I wasn't actively playing when this came out, but after finally completing this mod's content earlier in the year, I'm still baffled how they ever managed to sell this to the player base as a full module.

3. Mod 6: Elemental Evil (April 2015)

The first time Cryptic decided to raise the level cap, they did seemingly everything wrong: The XP curve was terrible, tuning was out of whack, and the new content felt cheap, grindy and recycled - to name but a few of the problems. Looking back at my blog posts from that time, I somehow managed to at least somewhat enjoy myself despite of all this, but it was still bad.

2. Mod 16: Undermountain (April 2019)

I was a bit hesitant to rank this one this high (or low as it were) since I actually think the Undermountain campaign is pretty fun, but everything else that went along with Cryptic raising the level cap for the second time was pretty awful in my opinion. (They just don't know how to do this, do they?) You can argue that some of the changes they made were good and maybe even needed, but drastically revamping all the classes plus the way powers, boons and companions work - all at the same time - was a huge mistake in my opinion, as it made it an absolute nightmare to find my footing in the game again as a casual player with many alts. Also, the story may have been fun to go through once, but redoing a long and completely linear quest chain on every alt is rather tedious.

1. Mod 15: The Heart of Fire (November 2018)

The Penny Arcade style humour of these quests fits into the rest of the game about as well as a fish on a bicycle, and while this might have been fine in an optional one-time quest, the fact that you're supposed to re-do the same small handful of story quests stuffed with bad jokes over and over for all your boons is just awful. While I did finish the base story once, I still haven't earned the boons from this even on my main as the mere thought of having to re-do those quests yet again makes me want to throw up. As the cherry on top, this was also the module that did away with the old professions system and replaced it with the workshop, which I still don't quite get along with to this day. Let's not do anything like that ever again please.

Uprising Letdown

Having just completed Uprising at the time of writing this post, I have to say that it has to be the laziest campaign that Cryptic has ever released, and lazy is not a word I use lightly in a context like this. It literally adds nothing but a tiny new quest hub where an NPC gives you a mission to fetch four whatsits.

To get a whatsit, you first need to gather thingamabobs. To get thingamabobs, you need to run more of the same expeditions that you've been running for all of Undermountain, only without the relics and with some different boss mobs at the end.

To get access to those ever so slightly different expeditions, you first have to get doodads. To get a doodad, you have to do a daily quest to kill mobs in the exact same zones that you used to level through Undermountain, only now they have some different mobs in them.

So basically, aside from the quest hub and a couple of new boss mobs, there were no new zones, story or content in Uprising. Worse, what I explained above isn't even properly conveyed in game either - you're just given the quest for the four whatsits and then two daily quests to get doodads, with no indication of how the two are connected. For some reason Cryptic couldn't even be bothered to create an actual campaign screen for this one to track your progress. You'll just have to google it to figure it out.

It's not that I hated the content (mob grinding is a big part of Neverwinter and doesn't need to be particularly inspired as far as I'm concerned), but I'm stunned that they officially labelled this as module 17 considering that there've been sub-modules in the past that had more than this to offer.

Keeping Up Appearances

At launch, Neverwinter had no real cosmetic system at all, only the option to display a "fashion set" instead of your regular gear, which was extremely limited. Later on they added dyes and the ability to "overwrite" an item's appearance with that of another item, but doing so destroyed the latter, which was annoying e.g. when you got a new weapon and had to choose between either salvaging the old one for currency or destroying it to preserve the appearance. It could also get quite expensive if you replaced your gear frequently but wanted to keep the same look.

I was pleased to see that with Uprising the devs decided to make an attempt at getting Neverwinter caught up with more modern MMOs in regards to cosmetics. There is now a dedicated appearance tab where you can set a look you want and it stays on even if you swap gear around. You still need to destroy gear that you want to "add to your appearance library" once, but after that you can re-use the look forever. Likewise dyes only need to be unlocked once and are re-usable after that.

I felt vindicated for actually having kept some old gear pieces that I liked the look of in the bank for a rainy day - now I just needed to convert them to appearance library items and they were ready to be worn again!

The system's still far from perfect, mind you - for example there is currently no way to save multiple outfits for easy swapping. Also, the old fashion system still exists and now just feels weird and confusing in the way these things tend to go in older MMOs when a newer system effectively replaces an older one but the old one doesn't get removed. Still, it's a step in the right direction.

New Tutorial

One of the things that intrigued me enough to get back into Neverwinter was mention of a revamped early levelling experience. In hindsight I had already read about plans for that back in July last year; I'd just forgotten about it again after more or less moving on from the game.

So I went ahead and created a new great weapon fighter barbarian of the one free-to-play race I didn't have yet - wood elf, apparently (this game has too many sub-species of elves) - and levelled her from one to ten.

And... I quite liked it! In terms of functionality and major plot points, the tutorial is largely unchanged, but it now makes for a much smoother continuation from the intro cinematic. I always thought it was a bit odd that after you witness the city under attack, the game then introduced your character as a shipwreck survivor (?!), with the only vague connection to the cinematic being a flash of memory indicating that your ship was sunk by the same dracolich that's also attacking the city. Then you fight your way into Neverwinter itself and... everything is peachy keen inside.

In the new version, you willingly join the battle to defend the city and even assist Makos with bringing down the dracolich. You also meet Celeste early on. When you get into the city, there is still fighting going on, with the Nashers having used the distraction to steal the crown, and only after you re-emerge from the vaults do you see that things have calmed down.

What does intrigue me is the fate of Private Wilfred though, who used to be the friendly NPC guiding you through the tutorial instead of Makos, just to die by Valindra's hand five minutes later. In the new version he's inside the city and lends you a horse at Sergeant Knox' command but doesn't speak. Has the timeline been altered to result in his survival? Or is he just doomed to die at a later point now, like the protagonist's fiancée in the 2002 version of The Time Machine? I kind of want to find out.

Uprising

While I'm only just trying to come to grips with the havoc wrought by Undermountain, Cryptic already announced the next module coming in August, called Uprising.

It will introduce the first new race in a while, the Gith. I have to admit that I'd never heard of them before this, and my first impression is that they look like the love children of orcs and elves. Also, apparently we'll be going to space?! I'm not familiar with that part of D&D lore at all, but it sounds wacky.

To me though, the most intriguing change mentioned in the announcement post was "recrafted early game zones and stories". I've never found Neverwinter's levelling particularly engaging, but it's serviceable, and to be honest I'm not sure what they could do to make it better, the game being what it is. Makes me glad to be levelling a new character right now though - that means that the current content will still be fresh on my mind when it comes to comparing old and new.