I'm starting to think this latest rotation is cursed. Neither Lord of the Rings Online nor City of Heroes were at their best this time around, and The Old Republic didn't disappoint only because I already know what I was in for with that one and lowered my expectations accordingly.
Now it's Neverwinter's turn.
What really rankles about this is that I have to take back almost every word of one of my previous posts, because as it turns out Neverwinter does make older content obsolete. If not entirely irrelevant then something very close to it.
The raising of the level cap to 80 has trivialised the older endgame content. It's no longer an adventure to enter one of these zones, it's admin work - something to sleepwalk through in order to tick a few boxes in a build.
As I wrote a few days ago, when I hit level 70 I went into Dread Ring with an item level of about 8K. That zone has a recommended ilevel of 11K so I was under-geared, and it felt like it. It wasn't impossible, but it was tough. Then, after picking up my Undermountain gear, I went back in, now at 13K ilevel. Like I said then, it was easier, but not 5K of item level easier. Now, having hit level 80, I've returned again. I ran Dread Spire - one of the zone's instances - twice in a row. The first time I was stripped down to about 7K item level - less than when I first entered the zone - and the challenge was about on par with having 13K ilevel at level 70. Then I ran it again, fully geared up to 14K, and it was Ghost Stories all over again - one hit kills all the way.
A quick trip to Bryn Shander gave more or less the same results. Likewise the opening of Cloaked Ascendancy. Chult and Ravenloft offered a little more in the way of challenge, but not much. That I could solo kill the first roaming T Rex I encountered in Soshenstar didn't fill me with confidence that anything else in that zone was going to present any kind of challenge.
A couple of the older campaigns - Sharandar and Elemental Evil - have been easy to out-level for a long time, but with the raising of the level cap Dread Ring, Icewind Dale, Storm King's Thunder and Cloaked Ascendancy all join that club, and Jungles of Chult and Ravenloft are knocking on the door.
This isn't old content - Ravenloft was released barely two years ago, and the amount of actual level 80 content in the game is miniscule compared to what's been pushed to the side by these changes. This is a spectacular squandering of past work by Cryptic, and entirely at odds with the way in which Neverwinter formerly kept older content relevant.
All MMOs experience periods of content drought - it's an undeniable fact of the genre that no developer can crank out new PVE content fast enough to keep pace with the speed at which the playerbase goes through it. I started with Neverwinter shortly before the release of Mod 13: Lost City of Omu, and by the time Mod 14: Ravenloft was released I had finished every campaign except Storm King's Thunder (which was over long, but that's a subject for another day.) By rushing players through content to get them through to the newest stuff developers are only making a rod for their own backs when those same players start complaining that they've got nothing left to do.
There have always been options for players who want to skip ahead - you can buy campaign completions in the store, or for that matter a new level 70 character - so it's not like anyone is being forced to do the old campaigns. Rather, they're being forced to sprint through them.
Why do developers do this? I feel it comes down to a contradiction that lies at the heart of the genre - MMOs accrue tons of content over the years, but MMO players are only interested in running the latest sliver of that content and regard everything else as an obstacle to reaching the 'real' game - something to be sped through as rapidly as possible when it can't be bypassed altogether.
Not every MMO player thinks this way, but it's a mindset that more and more games in the genre focus on to the exclusion of any other way to play. God knows what a new player would make of the legacy campaign system as it is now, seeing as if you don't go looking for it then the entire thing is dumped on you at level 80, accompanied by a near incomprehensible explanation that tries much too hard to justify the changes in-game. Seriously, it's absolute gibberish.
There's no sense of progression since I can run every campaign simultaneously at the same level of low to non-existent challenge. The narrative from one campaign to the next is also utterly trashed to a degree I haven't seen since World of Warcraft screwed up its timeline so badly that the Horde now has a different Warchief depending on what zone you're in, and levels 1-60 take place after levels 61-80.
Fine. I doubt that anyone plays Neverwinter for the story, but it's there and it's not actually awful so maybe it - and everything else pre-Mod 16 - shouldn't be treated quite so dismissively.
So what now? That the Mod 16 changes might diminish the experience of running the older campaigns is a possibilty I've been dreading since I started this run of Neverwinter, and now that it's no longer speculation but certainty I'm at something of a loss as to where to go from here. Honestly, if it were possible to put XP gain on hold in this game I'd sacrifice this character to the reroll gods and embark on a fresh run with the intention of pausing my levelling at 60 and then again at 70.
If I did so - which I can't, but if I could - it would be a long time before I was back at 80, but it would be worth it. I was looking forward to revisiting those campaigns, and while there's fun to be bad in blasting through them eventually that's where my engagement with this content should end, not where it should start.
With 8 hours of this run to go I may as well return to Undermountain, because there's not much to be gained from the older content other than a reminder that it used to be so much better than it is now. So let's see what Mod 16 and beyond has to offer. Let's see what the game is in such a rush to show me.
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