Working...

The other day I logged into Neverwinter to do a couple of minutes of inventory management. I didn't intend to actually play there and then, but my character was right there in Neverdeath, standing outside a quest entry, and I thought... why not?

So I dived into the quest and killed some undead, then exited and ran through a couple of other quests that were open in my log, then returned to the hub to turn those in and pick up a few more. It was all done in less than thirty minutes of fast paced action in well realised locations.

There's a real sense of forward momentum to levelling in Neverwinter. Levels come fast, as do quests. Enemies die quick and the zones are laid out in such a way as to speed you on your way to the next quest. You're rarely that far from the next place you have to be or the next thing you have to kill.

Which makes the new crafting system all the more inexplicable.

Neverwinter used to have a very generic menu-driven crafting system. This has been replaced by a side-quest (?) about running a workshop, which requires you to go to Protector's Enclave, talk to a succession of NPCs – who are lavishly presented in cutscenes to a degree that's wildly disproportionate to how important they are – and then wander back and forth from a workbench to a notice board doing... more or less the same things that you did when it was all done via menus.

If that's too exciting you can also go into your office and sit behind a desk while reviewing job applications.

Having done all this and clicked through your actual crafting and gathering – which is time gated via a morale system – you can then get back to your actual adventuring until the following day when, if you want to continue crafting, you have to go all the way back to Protector's Enclave.

I can see the thinking behind it – kind of. There's a few more moving parts that should add some more complexity and, perhaps, some more utility to a fairly under-used system. I'm fine with that. I could do without being dragged back to Protector's Enclave every day to do middle management in the workshop when I could be out stabbing monsters to death.

It's all a bit over-done. I don't care about my retainer. Are they going to be possessed by some hideous entity from the Far Realm that leads to their next performance review being a boss fight in the workshop? If not then it feels like a lot of work went into assigning a name, an appearance and a personality to an interface that needed none of these things, and having to go back to Protector's Enclave any time I want to do any crafting means is so clunky I'll likely let this slide for the most part, for now.