Neverwinter Spring

This weekend saw the first of three short betas for Cryptic's upcoming D&D flavored MMO, Neverwinter. Massively have been giving the game extensive coverage but Tipa at West Karana has by far the best write-up I've seen.

Last November I mentioned my interest but it had faded somewhat . Most of the information that trickled out didn't sound all that inspiring. I didn't even bother signing up for the beta, far less lay out $60 for the "Founder's Pack" so I could play three weekends then have my characters deleted. Oh, and then another three days with my real character before the game launches completely free-to-play. Yes, I know there's a mount and a companion and some other odds and ends but, really... $60 for three beta weekends a month or two before a full F2P launch?

This seems to be a thing, though. City of Steam did it too and I guess if you know you are going to play the game and you know you are going to spend that much in the cash shop anyway, it does no harm to pony up in advance and have the benefit of beta. I can't pretend I won't be doing it for EQNext if the opportunity arises.

Neverwinter, though, I am not that stoked for, but Tipa's piece and some of the comments on it have rekindled my interest, as have some of the videos and screenshots. It's still the Forge content creation system that I most want to get my hands on, but the game itself looks like it could turn out to be fun.

I played Dungeons and Dragons Online for a fair while, first in beta, when it was rubbish (and that's being generous) and later when it had been tarted up into something that could pass for a real MMO in a dim light. By then it had become sort of fun, but the reliance on repeating story-driven dungeons on increasing levels of difficulty struck me as ludicrous after a short while, so my stay was short.

Another point against DDO was the Eberron milieu. It was unfamiliar and I can't say it grew on me much in the time I spent there. I'm no big-time D&D fan but I do know and like the Forgotten Realms setting and that alone makes me considerably more interested in Neverwinter.

I also like what I've seen so far of Cryptic's MMOs. While neither Champions Online nor STO grabbed me, that had more to do with the genres they inhabited than anything about the way they were made. I found both of them clean in design, straightforward and pleasant to play. I have reasonable confidence that the House that made those could make a fantasy MMO that I would enjoy.

There's still the action-MMO aspect to get past, but I found Shawn Schuster's negative impressions of Neverwinter's combat strangely encouraging. The very things he rails against, the hand-holding, the clunky, static movement, the lack of strafing, lead me to hope that there might not be all that much "action" after all.

Anyway, not long to wait. Neverwinter should be out in a couple or three months. I'm quite looking forward to it.

Never Say Neverwinter

John Smedley believes user-generated content is the future. He may be right. It certainly has been in the past.

Ten years ago I spent a big chunk of time working on a module for Neverwinter Nights, much of it struggling with BioWare's custom scripting language, something with which I never really came to grips. Eventually the thing was as near to finished as it was ever likely to be and I uploaded it.

In the way of the internet, I was able to find it with only a small amount of effort this morning, still sitting in the IGN Neverwinter Nights Vault ten years on. As the comments clearly show, my scripting skills weren't up to the complexity of the task I'd set myself, although some people managed to enjoy parts of it despite all the things that just didn't work as they should have done.

I enjoyed making the module but once was enough. I didn't even buy NeverWinter Nights 2. When the Neverwinter MMO was announced, to be made by Cryptic and published by Perfect World, my ears perked up then perked right back down again at the dreaded phrase "action MMORPG".

I never really "got" action RPGs. The first and last one I ever bought was Dungeon Siege, which came out just before NWN in March 2002 (which, incidentally, suggests that MMOs had considerably less of a lock-hold on my gaming in 2002 than I would have remembered). I probably played it for three or four hours, tops. It's not that it wasn't fun; it was just too fast and too very obviously pointless.

Since then, "action" as a prefix has acted as a brake to any interest I might otherwise have had, doubly so when attached to "MMO", although since I've played and very much enjoyed Dragon Nest and DCUO, my longstanding ability to believe one thing while doing another clearly remains unimpaired.

How I felt after ten minutes in Torchlight2

All the same, I had been resolutely ignoring Neverwinter until I happened upon Massively's recent mention of the Neverwinter Foundry.  I already knew of Star Trek Online's Foundry. Tipa at West Karana used to write about it sometimes back when she wrote about MMOs not bridges. It always sounded intriguing but it was coupled to a franchise for which I have little affection so it slipped from my mind.

When EQ2's Age of Discovery expansion trundled up with the Dungeon Maker system in tow I was somewhat excited. I'd very much like to be able to tell some stories inside an MMO that I play, especially if I don't have to wrestle with scripts to make it happen. The Dungeon Maker hit the mark for ease-of-use but it worked about as well for telling a story as semaphore did for Wuthering Heights.

You've ruined your own foundry...

There's not much detail on the Neverwinter Foundry yet. Just a brief FAQ and some indistinct screenshots. Enough to pull the game off my MMO slush pile and shove it onto the ever-growing heap marked "Give this a go".

I suspect that if it's going to work for me, this set of dungeon creation tools will need an easy mode. It's not that I think I won't be able to master a more complex set of commands, it's that when it comes down to it I'd rather be playing. Or blogging about playing. I can knock up a dungeon in EQ2 in three or four hours. I'd be happy to double or treble that writing dialog to tell a story but much more and I'm going to get itchy.

When it comes to dungeons I'm probably more of a consumer than a creator. Won't be long before I can put that to the test. Release date for Neverwinter is listed in the FAQ as "4th Quarter of 2012". Even with traditional slippage that ought to see it out before next Easter.

If I do end up making a dungeon, Neverwinter is completely F2P so you're all invited.

Learning To Fly

Tutorials. Don't you just hate them? Okay, okay! Leading question. I withdraw.

I do purely loathe tutorials though. There's no way round it, I just can't stand 'em. I appreciate that even though everyone in global chat is banging on about how every one of the dozens of MMOs they already played was way better than this current POS they just made the cardinal error of downloading, still every MMO must have at least one person playing who just started today and who never played an MMO before. I appreciate that though most MMOs look and play exactly like most other MMOs they are are all in fact utterly different and hardly like each other at all when you really think about it. Let alone when you don't think about it and let's face it, who really thinks when they play an MMO?

Moreover, I recognize that MMOs are ferociously over-complicated compared to almost any other form of popular entertainment. If you intend to make sense of the tottering stack of stats and skills, functions and commands in even the supposedly dumbedest-down (dumbed-downest?) MMO, the potential learning curve is a sheer cliff face looming over you. And up at the top of the cliff the hardcore seagulls circle, taking aim right at your eye.

Have Flares, Will Travel

Yes, I appreciate and recognize all of that. It's still no excuse for the existence of tutorials.

Wait, let me clarify. It's no excuse for the existence of tutorial zones. Separate instances where all the new players can ride around the play-park on their tricycles with the stabilizers down, caroming off the softened, rounded corners of the scenery, batting at the de-clawed, de-fanged herbivores in the petting zoo with their spongebats, while Captain Nanny of the Toytown Guard trails along behind reading out the rules from The Big Book of How To Play.

We're all endlessly arguing about sandboxes versus theme-parks here in MMO Blogland. It's always been something of a false dichotomy or at least a more granulated scale than the bipolar argument would have it and my position has always been that the sandbox is largely in your head and that just because your park has a theme doesn't mean you have hum along. Well, none of that applies to to tutorial zones.

Tutorial zones are the MMO boot camps where your individuality gets beaten out of you. Oh, its a nice, polite, gentle beating. No name-calling, no shouting, no having your bed turned upside down in the middle of the night, but that individuality has just got to go. You're not leaving the tutorial until you learn to be just like everybody else.

I remember when it was all buildings around here

There's a trick novelists use called in media res. Happens in movies too. Dumping you into the middle of the action and letting you figure things out for yourself. It runs the risk of alienating the audience but when it works it's dynamite because it makes you feel respected, trusted, intelligent. Like when your dad drops you in the deep end of the pool and calls it your first swimming lesson, only with less yelling when you come home and tell your mother and no one has to sleep in the spare room for a week.

And really no-one is going to drown because they couldn't figure out some gameplay mechanic in an MMO. Alright, if they fall off the raft from Halas to Everfrost and don't know about pushing the mouse forward while holding down the left mouse button and W on the keyboard simultaneously then yes someone might drown. Bad example. But it would only be a virtual drowning, and a barbarian to boot so, hey, no harm done, right?

It was a long trip Ma, but we made it! Me and Rocky outside Sanctum!

People that play MMOs are generally not complete idiots (go with me...). They had to be able to download and install the game and register an account. They have to be literate, since most of the instructions and communication in-game will be written down. (And with all due respect to TOR, having every quest voice-acted is not going to be the way of the future, for cost reasons if for no other). It seems to me that people who are able to do all that can be trusted to work out how to play the blasted game by playing it.

Hints, mouseover tips, introductory quests, helpful NPCs or companions, all fine. Adds to the gaiety of nations. Just put them in the same virtual space, virtual time-frame and if you possibly can manage it the same centre of population where everyone who started two hours before you has already arrived. Not in an exploding spaceship, not in a pocket dimension, not 20 years in the future or the past, not in an underground prison or on an island you'll never see again.

Is this Pay-and-Display or On Exit?

Just let us start as we mean to go on. And what brought all this on out of the blue, you may well be asking. I downloaded Star Trek Online and played through the tutorial yesterday, that's what. And it's not even a bad tutorial!