How big a zone feels in an MMO often has little to do with its actual size. In City of Heroes the zones can feel smaller than they actually are due to the ease and speed with which they can be traversed, with or without travel powers. Less so in other games where characters are neither so agile nor so fast. Another factor is how the zones are laid out, and it's here that Neverwinter chooses to go small.
In a game like Lord of the Rings Online the road to the next quest objective can be a meandering one, with time along the way to admire the scenery and just be in the world. Not so in Neverwinter, which uses both the size and the layouts of its zones to ensure that the player is never too far away from their next objective. There are clear paths through the zones, some of which are obvious and some of which are not, and by following these paths the player can get to where the action is without delay.
In the 1-60 levelling zones this does lead to a tendency to very linear layouts, with each quest hub existing in isolation from all the others and connected only by narrow pathways that funnel the player from one to the next. The later content, from Sharandar onward, made big improvements in this, and the paths are a lot less constraining now. They are still there, and there are routes to be found between one hot spot and another, but the difference is that they feel like an actual part of the landscape rather than merely connecting threads, and there's more than one way to get from place to place.
So in a zone like Dread Ring or Barovia a player can pick up four quests that take place in four different parts of the zone, and the process of doing those four quests remains fast paced because the zones are still designed to make it easy to move from one to the next, and the mob density is enough that there's a sense of danger when there should be, but it's not so dense that the flow is broken up every ten steps for an extraneous fight.
All of which is great for Neverwinter's fast paced in-and-out daily quest/weekly quest gameplay loop, which is also well served by every zone in the game being instanced rather than being part of a true open world. Now one of the things I love most about MMOs is their vast connected worlds, so I was initially ambivalent about Neverwinter not delivering on that. It's a structure I'd loathe in some other games but I was won over for this one fairly quickly, because it's a good fit for how Neverwinter plays. This isn't LOTRO where it's literally all about the journey. Neverwinter is all about the destination, and what you kill when you get to that destination.
No zone is more than a click away from any other, and while that does nothing to make the world of Neverwinter feel like a world, it does a lot to keep the game moving. Neverwinter is all about the action, and the game wants you in the action as quickly as possible.
At times though this can lessen the atmosphere of a zone, and Undermountain is definitely one of those times.
Undermountain gets a big build up, and before stepping through the portal there's a lot of ominous comments about how no one ever comes out again... and then after finishing the introductory quest I'm free to hop back to Protector's Enclave at will, in between or during forays into this dark subterranean world from which, so I'm told, few ever return.
Of course this is nothing new for Neverwinter. The introductory narratives of Icewind Dale and Jungles of Chult both feature long journeys to these distant lands, but once the player arrives they're no further away and no harder to travel to and from than anywhere else in the game. Likewise Ravenloft, which has to provide an in-game rationale for why players can enter and leave Barovia at will. That's not supposed to be possible but that's what the gameplay requires.
So it's not new, but I bring it up in relation to Undermountain partly because the whole gateway-of-no-return thing is laid on very thick during the introduction, so it's hard not to notice that there's no payoff later on,* and partly because the zones of Undermountain, thus far at least, are quite small, even for this game. There's not much sense of descending into a vast and uncharted dungeon when I'm never more than a minute or two away from a portal to everywhere.
*Alternately there actually is a payoff, and the real reason no one returns to the camp at Dead Men's Mere is that they've all found their way to the Yawning Portal, the pub at the top of the dungeon. That might be where they're going with that but I can't say for sure. The storytelling in Undermountain is, all in all, a bit hazy.
Comments
Post a Comment