So there are my completely Unfair Impressions for Dragon Nest and Neverwinter. Based on my current mood, it isn’t particularly likely that I will. I did not even try anything in The Foundry, which is likely the most remarkable thing Neverwinter brings to the table. But it certainly felt like a big deal as I was playing. Which maybe is the point? There is health potions and such so maybe it is not all that big a deal. Maybe it does later? It just feels really weird in an MMO for it to not, as it sort of subconsciously delineates the world into checkpoint corridors. The other curious issue I ran into was how… health doesn’t regenerate. I can’t quite explain it better than that, but that feeling seeps into everything. You know how in WoW and Wildstar and GW2 when you get a movement speed buff and you can kind of keep the momentum going after it wears off by jumping? You can’t quite do that in Neverwinter. But movement in general just didn’t feel all that good. I very much enjoyed how each class seems to have their own unique movement mechanism: warlocks float at a sprint whereas rogues do a dodge-roll. The rest of my limited experience was spent seesawing between interest levels. All of this managed to evoke both D&D and a sense of physicality, the latter of which is otherwise conspicuously missing from combat itself. After passing a Dungeoneering check (which basically happens automatically), the bookcase opens up to reveal a treasure chest on the other side. For example, after killing an NPC in a cave complex, I noticed a sparkly skull over in a bookcase. There are “skill checks” of sorts when interacting with certain objects out in the world. Your “daily” power meter is a d20 that fills up over time. There were a lot of little D&D touches that I liked. It is sort of how I felt about Guild Wars 2, but worse.

And sometimes they were just really hard to see. It is another crosshair-targeting game but I had a real hard time ascertaining that enemies really existed out in the world. Although I am on maximum settings, the world just feels… muddy, yet insubstantial. In my handful of hours of play, Neverwinter just strikes me as a game that is missing, oh, maybe $25 million in development. If you enjoyed old-school Alterac Valley though, Crowfall seems like the MMO game for you. Then again, everyone already has experience with these sort of issues in, you know, battlegrounds in other MMOs. What motivation is there to continue fighting a losing battle when another server is a click away? Hell, if the devs aren’t careful, the whole “multiple passively trained alts” thing could resemble P2W considering you could swap your losing alts for one on the winning team. As SynCaine points out though, there are all sorts of other problems that can occur once you start dealing with defined, close-to-zero sum competitions. In fact, it might precisely be because it’s not an MMO that Crowfall avoids all the traditional pitfalls of the genre. I’m not suggesting that Crowfall will be bad because it’s not an MMO. Or, you know, every other lobby-based online game out there. But my point is that Crowfall isn’t an MMO unless you happen to extend that definition to encompass a lot of lobby-based games. You don’t bring out your Gnome bones or whatever outside the individual AV match… unless you count Honor and/or Reputation as resources (which they are). Defined beginning, middle, and end? Check, check, and check.Ĭompetition for the Dregs space was fierce. Persistent characters that progress in levels? Check. Let’s call a spade a spade: Crowfall is Alterac Valley. Which sends you back to the Lobby, cough, Eternal Kingdoms. However, most of the MMO community seems fine in describing it as a straight-up MMO. In the Kickstarter video, the devs state that Crowfall is a marriage between a strategy game with a defined end-state and an MMO. In no way will it be anything I would recognize as an MMORPG. Hell, even I had trouble describing my feelings on the matter until Bhagpuss came right out in the comments last time and proclaimed the emperor nude: It seems like a simple enough question, but few people seem intent on asking it.

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