First, I'm playing the game and it is entertaining me for now.
That out of the way, Adam if you knew anything about D&D history you wouldn't have expected this to be anything that could be related to Gygax and thus feel compelled to bring up his name. You like 4th edition. Great. The vast majority of table top gamers did not. And if you ask me to prove it then I KNOW you don't follow D&D and it's subculture.
A hint: When Monte Cook, one of the forefathers of the creation of D&D hops boat and goes to help Paizo create a true successor to 3.5 in Pathfinder, then you know you screwed up the use of the IP. Pathfinder has far outsold 4th edition. So much so that WotC are working on the 'Next" edition and instead of thinking "they know what's best" they jumped straight on their forums and said "guys, what do you want this time".
4th edition was made as it was because of the limited success of D&D Online by Turbine. They wanted the next rules set to more easily transform into an MMO. I give them credit as they have done so. That said the verdict (overall sales) is in and they are not preferred as a table top ruleset by the IP's fans.
You were never, never, ever going to get the full D&D experience as imagined from original through 3.5. 4th edition ruleset just fights against that experience from the core. Add this to the fact that it is unlikey that a game company will get their crap together and implement an entire campaign world with multiple cities and locations, points of interest. etc. and allow players to start anywhere and begin exploring in any direction. This is what the core IP fanbase wanted with D&D Online and instead got a dungeon crawler X3 (easy, medium, hard). That same fanbase knew Neverwinter was not going to meet the those standards as well.
That said, again, it is entertaining for what it is, but the closest thing to a worthy D&D MMO that we will see knowing what we know now is Pathfinder Online. The things that players can do in table top (land holding, empire building, political intrigue that actually has political positions that matter, make laws, break laws, start wars, end wars, etc.)...all those and more you will be able to do in Pathfinder Online. None of those can you do in Neverwinter or D&D Online.
Even in it's pre-production state Pathfinder Online is closer to giving you the experience you want, Adam. That said, Neverwinter is an entertaining multiplayer coop rendition of the 4th edition license. Is it D&D in the opinion of a guy that has been playing D&D for over 26 years? No.
"Many nights, my friend... Many nights I've put a blade to your throat while you were sleeping. Glad I never killed you, Steve. You're alright..."
I disagree and I'm a big time Pathfinder .none of what you said Is dungeons and dragons . Pathfinder online as less a versipon of mmo as I have seen. Dnd, my Pathfinder campaign it's about a bunch of Adventurers going into dungeons around an interesting story. nothing I heard from The game focuses on that.
Its F2P. They inherently don't have the money to run gameworlds/servers the way that wow did. Instancing is the way to go for F2P.
Just one of many reasons not to play F2P.
Lag is a problem aswell.
Are you kidding me? It's Perfect World that was funding the game. They have PLENTY of money! They already have a very open world MMO with Perfect World International and it's server runs fine. You're just making excuses now.
PW is a publisher for this game, they simply take a cut from all the sales for providing the payment structure and posting it under the banner of a company with history. Cryptic was the one making the game, and yes you are partly right, they certainly have money from other games they made, but break it down like this - any profit (probably quite minor) from say STO pretty much has to be fed back into STO. Very little of that is a fallout that can be collected to develop another mmo. So where's the money's you say? The $200 Founder's packs.. pretty much, at least to start with. And I like how they increase the 'Potential Value' of the pack, now from $450 to $700 dollars, and how on every site that advertises it, it says NEW items have JUST been added, yet I look, and it's same one's as before, nothing new. |
So pretty much all the gullable players have funded the game, that is in 'beta' but not in 'beta'.
I mean, how fucking retarded is that? Since when did we start allowing that kind of slack company attitude, where they can charge for an unfinished product.
Someone might argue - mmos are never finished. You are quite right, however, mmos SHOULD be finished to the POINT that was CONCEPTUALIZED for release, before charging people money for it, or in this case opening anything even resembling a store.
I think Pathfinder online will DESTROY Neverwinter and give a better D&D feel. The rules are far more like the D&D most people remember, the classes and races are more inconic and lets face it 4th ed failed big time to catch many peoples interest and with D&D next coming down the line it will further fracture the D&D crowd.
Neverwinter lacks so much IMO. I liked Neverwinter Nights far better. I highly dislike being stuck in a microtransaction heavy game with tons of people crowding around a city that was supposedly just under attack. I cannot be evil or self-serving, the PVP is terrible and the quests uninspired.
So if I want a better game that is based of a PnP francise, I think Pathfinder and WoD Online will do much better.
The game was nothing but every other pay to win game. It was fun to 60 but there is no reason to put any money into it because there is nothing there after. That is unless you're willing to spend hundreds of dollars to play it.
This is the fate of all Pay to win games. Fuck this pay model.
I personally love instancing. I'm not trying to escape my life/world and anything that can break immersion will not necessarily break immersion for me.
I have a life worth living and don't escape into games-- I play them for their entertainment value.
I will never support freeloaders, no more subsidized gaming. My Blog
Originally posted by dontadow I disagree and I'm a big time Pathfinder .none of what you said Is dungeons and dragons . Pathfinder online as less a versipon of mmo as I have seen. Dnd, my Pathfinder campaign it's about a bunch of Adventurers going into dungeons around an interesting story. nothing I heard from The game focuses on that.
Your Pathfinder campaign is as it is because that's the level of imagination you guys put into it. Nothing wrong with that, though. The game system itself, evidence the new Ultimate Campaign book coming out in September is meant for way more than you guys are putting into it. In fact, it goes hand in hand to what I wrote above.
The problem here is you only see what your group is doing as "the point". It's one of many points, in fact. My group has move on to what we deem a more elder game in that while our group still adventures in dungeons they also have the responsibility of raising a nation.
All are options in D&D and Pathfinder. There are source books in both systems (right now Pathfinder only has River Kingdoms supplment- hmm, PFO is set in River Kingdoms...) but as I mention the full Campaign guide will expand on RK and more.
"Many nights, my friend... Many nights I've put a blade to your throat while you were sleeping. Glad I never killed you, Steve. You're alright..."
I can't even understand what that guy is saying. His punctuation and grammar is terrible. Pathfinder is far more D&D than Neverwinter will ever be. I like what Pathfinder is doing with their game and I feel it will get more players and probably pull quite a few away from Neverwinter as well.
And Neverwinter isn't shoddy? It was supposed to be like Neverwinter NIGHTS. Now its this microtransaction hell thanks to Perfect World. I have faith in PFO. Pathfinder is doing far better in sales than 4th ed and D&D next will just piss off more people.
I love the Pathfinder system. However, I have very little faith in PFO. I think it is a lot of great ideas that
are going to be monsters to implement.
Now here is the question... why should I believe in a project if the parent company doesn't believe in the
product? Paizo made a spin off company to create the game, but isn't funding it? They are asking for
community funding. It just seems too side project and not enough investment coming from the producer's
side of things.
Unfortunately all the good ideas in the world are meaningless when corners have to be cut and production
is shoddy.
Easy one (question that is).
Risk.
The RPG pencil & paper side of things is well established, multimillion dollar a year train that is rolling and rolling well. So well it knocked D&D off the number 1 spot of RPGs and is why WotC is appealing to the players on how they should build D&D Next (Remember with 4.0 they didn't want our input as they "knew what they were doing...riiight").
If PFO crashes and burns and Ms. Stevens and Co. don't want anything to happen to the RPG side of things, naturally. So they created a separate company under Paizo to handle this side of things. This is NO DIFFERENT than Sony having SOE under them or EA having Bioware, Mythic or any other Publisher that has a dev house under them. Well, other than the fact that Goblinworks as an in-house created entity won't have to put up with the bullcrap that other development companies get from their publishers.
The thing you seem to forget is it isn't just "community funding". Each pledge at $35 or more is buying a copy of the game. Only roughly 1,000 folks out of the 8,000 plus just gave the project money because they liked the idea. The rest are getting a product in return, though it will be a little while.
As far as "investment" coming from the company, they don't have to make this game, ya know? All these years of themepark lovers telling us sandbox folks that we need to put our money where our mouth is. Well, when we do and the game is getting made, then there is complaints about us spending our money.
Selfishness is what it is. The cattle call themepark lovers (for the most part) can't stand to see a niche sandbox game being made. A game not made for them that they can't latch on to, spend 30 days, "win" and then move on to the next game. A game that will make you invest time into playing it to get rewards, a game that will most certainly penalize you for not being prepared.
One less dispoable MMO...and they can't stand it.
"Many nights, my friend... Many nights I've put a blade to your throat while you were sleeping. Glad I never killed you, Steve. You're alright..."
Neverwinter you can pay hundreds of dollars a month for in game currency so they can effectively create a higher level of income per head than wow can per head (this is based upon equal player numbers as a guide). wow may have 10 million odd subscribers at $15 a month but if neverwinter had a half of that number paying $50 a month for zen the income would be wow $150mil, neverwinter $250mil.
Just cause there F2P does not mean they cant afford to develop better.
OK.. Lets explore these myths about open world and instanced ones based upon the RPG game.
In the RPG game the dungeon master ( I was one for over twenty years) makes an adventure or uses a bought one. ALL D&D modules were linear, some had a more open movement path but they all basically had a point where the players HAD TO go a certain direction or they ended the module. ALL open world travel in AD&D RPG game was based upon word of mouth, there was no time you moved on a map or board unless you had an encounter. The reality was "I think we'll head to baldurs gate", "ok" says the GM. "You manage to reach baldurs gate in a few days with no encounters on the way", travel done and so much for an open world.
The reality is that the pen and paper D&D, AD&D was all instanced there was no real freedom of movement unless the GM used on the fly encounter generation and it was basically going here, ok you get there no problem mark of 3 days rations and time.
Online MMO's of all calibre opened this up to a more visual and insertive game system/style. Instead of the GM describing it to you, now you can actually see it in all its beauty (or horror).
MMO's that had open world travel allowed the player immerse even more into the game, until this became a pain in the butt to constantly have to travel between towns, long boring runs along roads and I am certain most of us wished for faster travel. That could be why wow introduced the flying taxi service (so to speak) as did other games, they realised that though its an open world, players get fed up with the constant travel in it and opt for a more rapid deployment system. Wow had it's taxi service and hearth stones, other games had there equivallents. Neverwinter decided to do away with that altogether, you just travel like you do in the pen and paper version.. head to the gate, select your destination and hey presto your there.
So all of you saying neverwinters loosing something and its not akin to the pen and paper game.. ding dong, your wrong.
FYI, neverwinter is running AD&D using 4th edition up.. I know this as I gm'd and played 4th edition and though 4th edition you could more encounter and dailies available, you also had limits on how often you could use them. For example and encounter power could only be used once per encounter, non of this 3.6 second cooldown, also dailies were just that, once per day (though during certain rest cycles they could reset).
So I think they lowered the number of encounter powers and dailies available but them useable more often to make it a viable and playable real time action.
I think they've done a reasonable job as well (but I do agree they could make more slots available).
Anyhoo.. I think that's more then enough rant from me...
except to say I feel the game at higher level is far to overpowered on the soloable quests and dungeons.. I don't agree that a player should be forced to expend 6 injury kits and 50 healing potions just to get through a solo dungeon required to advance his class development.
Comments
First, I'm playing the game and it is entertaining me for now.
That out of the way, Adam if you knew anything about D&D history you wouldn't have expected this to be anything that could be related to Gygax and thus feel compelled to bring up his name. You like 4th edition. Great. The vast majority of table top gamers did not. And if you ask me to prove it then I KNOW you don't follow D&D and it's subculture.
A hint: When Monte Cook, one of the forefathers of the creation of D&D hops boat and goes to help Paizo create a true successor to 3.5 in Pathfinder, then you know you screwed up the use of the IP. Pathfinder has far outsold 4th edition. So much so that WotC are working on the 'Next" edition and instead of thinking "they know what's best" they jumped straight on their forums and said "guys, what do you want this time".
4th edition was made as it was because of the limited success of D&D Online by Turbine. They wanted the next rules set to more easily transform into an MMO. I give them credit as they have done so. That said the verdict (overall sales) is in and they are not preferred as a table top ruleset by the IP's fans.
You were never, never, ever going to get the full D&D experience as imagined from original through 3.5. 4th edition ruleset just fights against that experience from the core. Add this to the fact that it is unlikey that a game company will get their crap together and implement an entire campaign world with multiple cities and locations, points of interest. etc. and allow players to start anywhere and begin exploring in any direction. This is what the core IP fanbase wanted with D&D Online and instead got a dungeon crawler X3 (easy, medium, hard). That same fanbase knew Neverwinter was not going to meet the those standards as well.
That said, again, it is entertaining for what it is, but the closest thing to a worthy D&D MMO that we will see knowing what we know now is Pathfinder Online. The things that players can do in table top (land holding, empire building, political intrigue that actually has political positions that matter, make laws, break laws, start wars, end wars, etc.)...all those and more you will be able to do in Pathfinder Online. None of those can you do in Neverwinter or D&D Online.
Even in it's pre-production state Pathfinder Online is closer to giving you the experience you want, Adam. That said, Neverwinter is an entertaining multiplayer coop rendition of the 4th edition license. Is it D&D in the opinion of a guy that has been playing D&D for over 26 years? No.
"Many nights, my friend... Many nights I've put a blade to your throat while you were sleeping. Glad I never killed you, Steve. You're alright..."
Chavez y Chavez
PW is a publisher for this game, they simply take a cut from all the sales for providing the payment structure and posting it under the banner of a company with history. Cryptic was the one making the game, and yes you are partly right, they certainly have money from other games they made, but break it down like this - any profit (probably quite minor) from say STO pretty much has to be fed back into STO. Very little of that is a fallout that can be collected to develop another mmo. So where's the money's you say? The $200 Founder's packs.. pretty much, at least to start with. And I like how they increase the 'Potential Value' of the pack, now from $450 to $700 dollars, and how on every site that advertises it, it says NEW items have JUST been added, yet I look, and it's same one's as before, nothing new. |
So pretty much all the gullable players have funded the game, that is in 'beta' but not in 'beta'.
I mean, how fucking retarded is that? Since when did we start allowing that kind of slack company attitude, where they can charge for an unfinished product.
Someone might argue - mmos are never finished. You are quite right, however, mmos SHOULD be finished to the POINT that was CONCEPTUALIZED for release, before charging people money for it, or in this case opening anything even resembling a store.
http://sigs.griefwatch.net/index.php?kb=LESTUS&name=lestus&template=chaos
I think Pathfinder online will DESTROY Neverwinter and give a better D&D feel. The rules are far more like the D&D most people remember, the classes and races are more inconic and lets face it 4th ed failed big time to catch many peoples interest and with D&D next coming down the line it will further fracture the D&D crowd.
Neverwinter lacks so much IMO. I liked Neverwinter Nights far better. I highly dislike being stuck in a microtransaction heavy game with tons of people crowding around a city that was supposedly just under attack. I cannot be evil or self-serving, the PVP is terrible and the quests uninspired.
So if I want a better game that is based of a PnP francise, I think Pathfinder and WoD Online will do much better.
The game was nothing but every other pay to win game. It was fun to 60 but there is no reason to put any money into it because there is nothing there after. That is unless you're willing to spend hundreds of dollars to play it.
This is the fate of all Pay to win games. Fuck this pay model.
I personally love instancing. I'm not trying to escape my life/world and anything that can break immersion will not necessarily break immersion for me.
I have a life worth living and don't escape into games-- I play them for their entertainment value.
I will never support freeloaders, no more subsidized gaming.
My Blog
Your Pathfinder campaign is as it is because that's the level of imagination you guys put into it. Nothing wrong with that, though. The game system itself, evidence the new Ultimate Campaign book coming out in September is meant for way more than you guys are putting into it. In fact, it goes hand in hand to what I wrote above.
The problem here is you only see what your group is doing as "the point". It's one of many points, in fact. My group has move on to what we deem a more elder game in that while our group still adventures in dungeons they also have the responsibility of raising a nation.
All are options in D&D and Pathfinder. There are source books in both systems (right now Pathfinder only has River Kingdoms supplment- hmm, PFO is set in River Kingdoms...) but as I mention the full Campaign guide will expand on RK and more.
"Many nights, my friend... Many nights I've put a blade to your throat while you were sleeping. Glad I never killed you, Steve. You're alright..."
Chavez y Chavez
I love the Pathfinder system. However, I have very little faith in PFO. I think it is a lot of great ideas that
are going to be monsters to implement.
Now here is the question... why should I believe in a project if the parent company doesn't believe in the
product? Paizo made a spin off company to create the game, but isn't funding it? They are asking for
community funding. It just seems too side project and not enough investment coming from the producer's
side of things.
Unfortunately all the good ideas in the world are meaningless when corners have to be cut and production
is shoddy.
Help support an artist and gamer who has lost his tools to create and play: http://www.gofundme.com/u63nzcgk
Easy one (question that is).
Risk.
The RPG pencil & paper side of things is well established, multimillion dollar a year train that is rolling and rolling well. So well it knocked D&D off the number 1 spot of RPGs and is why WotC is appealing to the players on how they should build D&D Next (Remember with 4.0 they didn't want our input as they "knew what they were doing...riiight").
If PFO crashes and burns and Ms. Stevens and Co. don't want anything to happen to the RPG side of things, naturally. So they created a separate company under Paizo to handle this side of things. This is NO DIFFERENT than Sony having SOE under them or EA having Bioware, Mythic or any other Publisher that has a dev house under them. Well, other than the fact that Goblinworks as an in-house created entity won't have to put up with the bullcrap that other development companies get from their publishers.
The thing you seem to forget is it isn't just "community funding". Each pledge at $35 or more is buying a copy of the game. Only roughly 1,000 folks out of the 8,000 plus just gave the project money because they liked the idea. The rest are getting a product in return, though it will be a little while.
As far as "investment" coming from the company, they don't have to make this game, ya know? All these years of themepark lovers telling us sandbox folks that we need to put our money where our mouth is. Well, when we do and the game is getting made, then there is complaints about us spending our money.
Selfishness is what it is. The cattle call themepark lovers (for the most part) can't stand to see a niche sandbox game being made. A game not made for them that they can't latch on to, spend 30 days, "win" and then move on to the next game. A game that will make you invest time into playing it to get rewards, a game that will most certainly penalize you for not being prepared.
One less dispoable MMO...and they can't stand it.
"Many nights, my friend... Many nights I've put a blade to your throat while you were sleeping. Glad I never killed you, Steve. You're alright..."
Chavez y Chavez
Not true.. WoW you pay $15 a month subscription.
Neverwinter you can pay hundreds of dollars a month for in game currency so they can effectively create a higher level of income per head than wow can per head (this is based upon equal player numbers as a guide). wow may have 10 million odd subscribers at $15 a month but if neverwinter had a half of that number paying $50 a month for zen the income would be wow $150mil, neverwinter $250mil.
Just cause there F2P does not mean they cant afford to develop better.
OK.. Lets explore these myths about open world and instanced ones based upon the RPG game.
In the RPG game the dungeon master ( I was one for over twenty years) makes an adventure or uses a bought one. ALL D&D modules were linear, some had a more open movement path but they all basically had a point where the players HAD TO go a certain direction or they ended the module. ALL open world travel in AD&D RPG game was based upon word of mouth, there was no time you moved on a map or board unless you had an encounter. The reality was "I think we'll head to baldurs gate", "ok" says the GM. "You manage to reach baldurs gate in a few days with no encounters on the way", travel done and so much for an open world.
The reality is that the pen and paper D&D, AD&D was all instanced there was no real freedom of movement unless the GM used on the fly encounter generation and it was basically going here, ok you get there no problem mark of 3 days rations and time.
Online MMO's of all calibre opened this up to a more visual and insertive game system/style. Instead of the GM describing it to you, now you can actually see it in all its beauty (or horror).
MMO's that had open world travel allowed the player immerse even more into the game, until this became a pain in the butt to constantly have to travel between towns, long boring runs along roads and I am certain most of us wished for faster travel. That could be why wow introduced the flying taxi service (so to speak) as did other games, they realised that though its an open world, players get fed up with the constant travel in it and opt for a more rapid deployment system. Wow had it's taxi service and hearth stones, other games had there equivallents. Neverwinter decided to do away with that altogether, you just travel like you do in the pen and paper version.. head to the gate, select your destination and hey presto your there.
So all of you saying neverwinters loosing something and its not akin to the pen and paper game.. ding dong, your wrong.
FYI, neverwinter is running AD&D using 4th edition up.. I know this as I gm'd and played 4th edition and though 4th edition you could more encounter and dailies available, you also had limits on how often you could use them. For example and encounter power could only be used once per encounter, non of this 3.6 second cooldown, also dailies were just that, once per day (though during certain rest cycles they could reset).
So I think they lowered the number of encounter powers and dailies available but them useable more often to make it a viable and playable real time action.
I think they've done a reasonable job as well (but I do agree they could make more slots available).
Anyhoo.. I think that's more then enough rant from me...
except to say I feel the game at higher level is far to overpowered on the soloable quests and dungeons.. I don't agree that a player should be forced to expend 6 injury kits and 50 healing potions just to get through a solo dungeon required to advance his class development.