The other day I was surprised on logging in to find that Cryptic had added a cinematic trailer for Jewel of the North, which plays the first time you log in after the most recent patch.
The only other module I remember having a cinematic trailer was Ravenloft, and that's one of D&D's most well-known IPs. I'm not sure what exactly qualified this mod for the extra marketing budget.
The trailer isn't the greatest thing ever, but I do kind of like it. It's just sad that the way it wants to evoke the connection to the tabletop game and going on badass adventures with a party of friends doesn't really map to anything you can actually do in the game.
I was starting to wonder whether the tradition to give each module a name was simply another thing Cryptic was getting rid of. But no, it's going to be called "Jewel of the North" (which is a "nickname" for the city of Neverwinter) and they uploaded a "features trailer" for it today:
Release is going to be in two weeks. Let's see how that NGE and bard class play out.
I quite enjoyed the new April Fool's event that Cryptic added last year and was happy to see it return, but as my focus is currently on other MMOs I didn't really plan to grind the dailies again, plus at first glance it didn't look like anything had changed about the event. That was until I learned that this year, they also added an event dungeon called Sewers Most Fowl, in which you get to play as chickens in a group PvE context.
I did it with my guildies and it was great fun. If you enjoy this kind of thing, I can only recommend going in blind with friends and allowing yourself to be surprised - the event is on for another three days or so. Otherwise you can just watch me and my guildies bumble through it in this video:
TheLazyPeon is a well-known MMO YouTuber. The other day he released a video compilation of snippets from "failed" MMO reviews, as in games he wanted to review but gave up on for one reason or another. Most of them turned out to be indie or early access titles of some kind, so I was very surprised to see Neverwinter in there as well.
Basically Peon got bored during the starter experience on two different characters (which I can't entirely blame him for - I've said before that in an inverse of most MMORPGs, the early levels are some of the worst in Neverwinter) and then decided to try and jump straight into endgame group content by buying a level 70 character boost.
This caused him to run into an interesting problem however: 70 isn't actually the level cap anymore, there's no PvP before the cap, and most of the higher-level dungeons require some kind of unlock through completing quest content, so he still didn't have access to any queues other than the levelling ones, and those didn't seem to want to pop (I'm guessing at least in part because he was queued as dps). He eventually gave up in disgust. I always find it interesting how players manage to navigate themselves into "dead ends" in an MMO, and that was new one to me.
It's pretty traditional for Cryptic to include a new dungeon and/or trial (raid) with each new module. From what I can tell these are actually always pretty inventive and well done, but since the difficulty is tuned for players at the very top-end, I tend to not see them until a few years later, once several new tiers of gear allow you to overpower the fights a bit.
I've been pretty stern with my guildies about not even wanting to bother while a dungeon is still hard (too many bad experiences), but today I allowed them talk me into running Tomb of the Nine Gods (released in 2017) and Castle Ravenloft (released in 2018). Tomb was actually pretty fun and not too tough anymore except for the last boss being somewhat manic. Castle Ravenloft was still tricky though, especially the last boss. We persevered though and eventually downed him after a number of tries. By that point, everyone apart from the tank had died 20+ times. Still, it was an adventure with friends and we enjoyed figuring out the tactics together, so it was ultimately fun. I uploaded our final fight against Strahd to YouTube:
A few days ago, Cryptic revealed that the next module will be called Heart of Fire. Is it bad that my first association with this title was to imagine some sort of love child between the two Guild Wars 2 expansions (Heart of Thorns, Path of Fire)?
Interestingly, despite of that news post and some more info on Neverwinter Unblogged, I feel like I still have no idea what this module will actually be about. Apparently it's supposed to be some sort of cross-over featuring the Penny Arcade creators? The trailer makes it look like some kind of silly D&D theme park - which doesn't sound bad, I just don't know what to expect from it beyond the very general mood.
As a commenter on the YouTube video so aptly put it: "That was extremely informative. Thank you, Mr. Dinosaur."
Whatever else you want to say about Neverwinter, there is no such thing as content droughts in this game. Even four years later, they just keep on churning out those modules at an impressive pace.
PSA: It seems that in the Cloaked Ascendancy's campaign progression, it's better to immediately follow up "Investigate [Boss X]" with "Confront [Boss X]" instead of investigating the other two bosses first, as this apparently unlocks the weekly quest. My pet tank and I were not aware of this and therefore wasted some valuable progression time during which we could have already had access to the weekly.
I really like what they've done with the weekly mission in this zone. There are three bosses with strongly themed lairs (magic, fire, nature), and each one presents a slightly different challenge in terms of mechanics, not just focusing on combat. In the first you super-jump across floating platforms, in the second you dodge streams of fire and in the third you get to ride fey stags through an obstacle course before confronting the boss. You only actually have to face one of them each week too, so if not all of these mechanics float your boat, you can pick your favourite and just stick to that.
Even though we initially died many times before we got it right the first time, I think the stag ride in Nostura's realm is my personal favourite so far. The slight trippiness of it all somehow reminded me of Robot Attack Unicorn - thus I chose Erasure as my soundtrack when I recorded it:
I don't really like Neverwinter's PvP, mostly for balance reasons, but after having a fairly good time in the 10-19 bracket with Traitine the other day, I decided to give it another try on my level 62 pally tonight. Imagine my surprise when I was joined by nothing but bots on both teams...
I had some silly fun with that for a couple of matches, as shown above. (I didn't intend to record my voice actually, but I used it for the video in the end because both the confusion and the insane cackling seem naturally appropriate.) Then I got into a match where there was an actual player on the enemy team, a trickster rogue who kept perma-dazing and two-shotting me. That reminded me of why I don't like Neverwinter's PvP to begin with and I quit.
I've been meaning to mention for a long time how I think that Neverwinter's biggest technical problem is the horrific lag and rubberbanding that besets the game at times. It's almost always present to a minor extent, and at its worst it leaves the game completely unplayable, even if the way you get teleported into unexpected places is kind of hilarious. One of the reasons I haven't actually made this post before is that it's something that's best seen for yourself and hard to capture in a screenshot (even if you're lagging enough to have time to inspect your unicorn's butthole).
Well, tonight I was finally able to capture some nice rubberbanding while doing dailies on my hunter ranger in Sharandar. Enjoy this little demonstration:
The Summer Festival has come around again and since I remember quite enjoying it last time, I wanted to have another look at it... however SWTOR's Dark vs. Light event has its hooks in me pretty firmly right now. I kept telling myself that I probably wasn't missing anything as the festival would just offer the same activities that I've already done before, however it turned out that I was actually wrong about that!
There is a new ball game called Sahha, which is played in an instance in teams of 5v5, and while it's a bit slow, I did find it decent fun to play with my guildies. Once again Cryptic gets credit for trying to come up with some fun non-combat gameplay as an alternative to all the fighting.
My pet tank incessantly pestering our guildies to play Neverwinter and level up is starting to pay off: Last night we finally had enough sufficiently geared max-level characters online to run an epic dungeon as a guild group! We took our time to find all the treasure chests and the bonus boss in the side rooms that pugs usually run past, and much fun was had by all. The only downside was that the game's overzealous queuing system swiftly removed one of our guildies from the group when he suffered a disconnect near the end and instantly replaced him with a random pug. Still, a pivotal milestone for our guild's Neverwinter chapter! You can watch the full run and listen to us banter in the video below:
I wrote about the Protector's Speech skirmish last year. I've been running it on all of my alts again this year, not because I particularly care about any of the rewards, but because it's fun.
Most runs are smooth and very quick. I don't know if Cryptic's matchmaking is actually that good or whether it's just luck, but almost every run I get into has at least one guy in amazing gear who smashes everything in seconds while everyone else can more or less tag along. It's even more pronounced this year since they didn't level the skirmish up to 70 but are instead scaling max-level players down to 60, which makes them seriously overpowered compared to the mobs.
I only had one run that didn't go so well, where my great weapon fighter in her paltry greens had to slowly solo most enemies because the rest of the group seemed to spend most of its time milling about it confusion on the other end of the map. We missed all the bonuses by a mile. When we left the instance, I noticed that two of the other group members were level 11 and 13 respectively, which explained a lot.
For fun, I recorded one of my runs with all sounds turned off except for the NPC voices, so you can actually listen and pay attention to Lord Neverember's speech. Enjoy!
On Thursday Cryptic posted an update on Strongholds to say that it's "coming summer 2015", plus some incredibly vague PR speak that seems to indicate that it will have both a PvE and a PvP side to it. ("Once the keep has been secured, guilds will have to battle against
the environment as well as other players to ensure they maintain control
of their lands.") It doesn't seem to feature anything like traditional MMO housing.
They also posted a video which shows people running around and fighting, apparently to save some villagers, and which makes you wonder how exactly the stronghold comes into it except as a background prop.
I like that the currently most upvoted YouTube comment on the video is: "Really? A guy on a 50% mount keeping up with the other guys? Make it realistic!"
I'm a bit late commenting on this, but about ten days ago IGN posted a gameplay trailer for Tyranny of Dragons, the upcoming fourth module (mini-expansion) for Neverwinter.
It doesn't really show anything amazing, just some characters fighting a couple of new monster models in familiar-looking locations. The implication to me seems to be that this module won't follow the "new area with dailies" model but will instead add new content to existing zones. This is neither particularly good nor bad in my eyes; it just makes me wonder about how exactly accessing the new content is going to work.
Also, a small detail I really liked: "The Scourge Warlock uses forbidden lore and long-forgotten ancient secrets to power her magic." I suppose it's sad that I still have to find this remarkable at all, but too many gaming companies still default to always casting their heroes as male characters.
Neverwinter's soundtrack is pretty good. Not amazing, but it does a good job at conveying the general mood of the MMO, which I would describe as somewhat serious and heroic but also optimistic and light-hearted at its core. Here's a playlist of the base game's soundtrack on YouTube.
One of my favourites is the Protector's Enclave theme, which is something you obviously hear a lot, seeing how it plays in the game's main hub. It's fairly short, but also cheerful and catchy.
The soundtrack for newer parts of the game seems to be harder to find online for some reason. I was quite surprised that I was unable to locate a version of the theme that plays in Caer-Konig in Icewind Dale for example, which is another cheerful and catchy tune but with a Nordic-sounding twist.
In the end I went so far as to record and upload it to YouTube myself. Enjoy!
