The game is turrible, just turrible.
I played a "Control Wizard", (There are 4 classes available, this is the wizard class). Good: each class has a different idle animation. Bad: The idle animation for the control wizard warns others of their impending proctology exam.
The Control Wizard has apparently been sent back to the drawing board by alpha testers four seperate times for being fundamentally broken, to the point where it's actually been removed from the list of classes that are confirmed to be in at launch. It still is broken. The basic attack is magic missile. Remember the scene in almost every kung fu movie, the scene when the master is surrounded by five or six people, and then he takes them all out in a crazy set of flailing about kung fu moves in a second? That's the animation for casting magic missile. The screen also shakes violently when you cast it.
Your alternate basic attack is ray of frost, which will helpfully gradually freeze people in place. Once they are frozen in place they are stuck there temporarily, unless they take any more damage, even more freezing damage, at which point they bust out of the ice cage. I tried to freeze enemies in place and leave them that way, but the magic "frozen enough to stop, but take no more frost damage so they bust out of the ice" point never happened.
Per Cryptic, the game splits the 20 pre-epic levels over 60 levels. So level 9 in Neverwinter Online is level 3 or so.
I have 900 hit points, at level 9.
Enemies hit me for as many as 30 hit points. Potions of minor healing heal 1000 hit points instantly.
If you stand in giant bonfires placed in some levels, you don't take any damage. The bonfires are just for looks. They don't tend to cast any light around them either though, so they've got that going for them. Maybe they're all illusions?
Sparkly vfx paths tell lead you to the next quest objective. Or they don't. You can deactivate them. Turning them on and off doesn't work regularly. Sometimes they just turn off randomly. Maybe because the key for doing so is right next to the movement keys.
Party mechanics:
Two other community members I'm aware of also have beta keys. One is a Vault Hall of Fame modder, and the other runs a PW. Since we know each other from irc, we joined a party together. I won't sully their names by saying who played the game with me.
Well, we tried to join a party.
I tried to join a party with the first one to show up. The game refused to let me, since we were different levels. Litterally, I was level 5 and they were level 4, and I was told we couldn't join due to level difference. Remember, the game has 60 levels.
There's no way to teleport to party leader, so you have to jump to the game shard they are on and then find them. The game shard they were on was not available in the list of shards to jump to. When you are on a shard, there's no way to turn on a sparkly vfx "take me to the party leader".
We finally all went to a shard we could reach and joined a party. When we didn't all transition between city sections at the same time, the game helpfully split the party among different shards. This happened multiple times.
We wanted to try some content created in the Foundry, the game's "toolset" (it needs quotes). The game has two ways of accessing Foundry quests, via a Harper Agent (these are "promoted quests"), and via a job board. We picked one of each.
Foundry content:
First, the promoted quest. This quest was rated 4 stars out of 5, which was higher than any of the quests available via the job board.
The questgiver had a single sentence line. This line had an obvious typo.
We killed two enemies, the message that we'd completed the quest appeared and the boss chest appeared. The door to exit the quest became active. The sparkly vfx "this way to quest objective" insisted this was the door.
We couldn't exit through the door.
We backtracked to the area entry point. The questgiver didn't acknowledge anything we'd done, but at least the door we'd entered the area through still worked, so we were able to get out.
Remember, that was the promoted quest.
The second quest was made by a Neverwinter Online forum moderator, that's specifically why we chose it as we figured that would hopefully be of decent quality. Something about Mystra. When my wizard selected the conversation option "Miss-tra? Who is that?" The questgiver didn't say anything about why the heck a wizard (and it's totally obvious I am one, since all wizards have a crystal ball floating around their heads) wouldn't know who Mystra is.
We entered the map, and after bunches of drow and spiders spawn directly on top of our party, we are at least able to exit through the door. No wait, we try to exit, but more stuff just spawns on top of us (we'd already received a message that we'd cleared the place) and attacks. We start fighting, but the mission decides it's time for us to leave and so just ejects us, "mission success!".
"Toolset":
Apparently not available in the general beta, though some content has been created using it, presumably by alpha testers or toolset specific testers. Don't worry though, you can't make a PW, or make an external map (you must use prefab external maps).
You can't assign loot. Or place monsters. Or set the monster abilities. Or write scripts. Or add any custom content other than text.
Other than that, we're promised it's awesome.
Story:
The game's tutorial ends with the game's big end boss literally standing directly outside the gate to the city with her giant undead army, with catapult shots from the city raining down that you have to avoid. You get by and in the gate.
Meanwhile, life in the city apparently continues on unabated despite the huge undead army directly outside the gate.
Don't worry though, you can freely leave the city via any city gate to go on quests outside the city.
Did I mention the first set of bad guys you face in the official questline inside the city is the Nashers? It's not explained in game either.
Character creation:
Character customization is "Cryptic's strong suite". There are sliders for about half as many things as Skyrim. That's pretty good.
I tried to make my wizard fat. You can't.
You can select a "Cyric Facial Tattoo".
You can not select Cyric as your god.
Or any other evil god.
There is no alignment, everyone is "good" per Cryptic.
Ability scores outside your primary and secondary attributes make no discernable difference.
Then again, neither do your primary and seconday attributes.
Game:
This is a third person view action rpg. Minus the putting points into a talent tree to specialize. After level 30 you can apparently chose a "prestige class". The prestige clases are the equivalent of having a talent tree. You still don't put points into skills. Well, the interface implies you can, but I currently have no skill points. The interface claims you can spend skill points for things like a 2% (woooh!!!) damage bonus, so even if you get them, it really doesn't matter at all.
Each class has a unique skill that they can use (wizards get "arcane") to interact with things that have been placed in the environment. You don't put skill points or anything into it, you just have it, so your level 1 wizard is just as good at arcanery as a max level wizard. No one else can interact with anything "arcane" in the dungeon, except for anyone with an "arcane kit" they bought at any merchant anywhere in the game, for 10 copper pieces. The class kits also drop as loot.
Graphics:
They decided to skip trying to for "realistic", and also skip going to the other end of the spectrum for "stylized". They tried neither direction, and succeeded wildly: everything is slightly blurry and washed out.
Modifié par kamal_, 09 mars 2013 - 12:55 .
Retour en haut
It seems posativly polished in conparasion 
There were about ten different options for presets and I could customize these as well but the textures and models were quite poor especially for a 2013 title. Coming from my experience with titles like Guild Wars 2, I'm shocked at the low level of quality of character models.
