It's been a while.
I had every intention of returning to Neverwinter this month. It was my most played MMO of last year and being at max level means I'm closing in on the latest content, which is unusual for me on any character. I was also looking forward to the next update, which would be revisiting Sharandar. At least I was looking forward to that until Cryptic announced that as part of this update the original Fury of the Feywild zones would be removed from the game.
No MMO is so inexhaustibly rich in content that the dev team can afford to throw away entire zones, and seeing as this is not a revamp of the current campaign but a sequel there's every reason not to do this. I'd much sooner play through these (soon to be) past events than simply be told about them.
In addition to this the latest round of combat changes have now gone live and have not been well received. I'd hoped to draw a line under the subjects of balance and level scaling at the end of my last run of the game and could have done without this becoming a hot topic. Again.
Ultimately I'm just exhausted with Neverwinter. I daresay I'll return to the game at some point, but it won't be any time soon.
It's been 8 months since I last ventured into Dungeons & Dragons Online, and in my first quest it showed. I jumped heedlessly into a fight that I could have far more easily won if I'd paid closer attention to my surroundings; I died in my initial run at a later boss because I'd come straight from another (optional) boss fight and hadn't healed up - it having momentarily slipped my mind that automatic health regeneration isn't a thing in this game; and my dual wielding Rogue went into that last fight with only one sword, because I'd managed to break all my other weapons fighting a rust monster.
DDO doesn't mess around with short duration debuffs for things like that. Weapons can break and once they do they're unusable until repaired, and that won't be until after the quest is over. It was only by luck that I didn't end up having to try to punch the final boss to death.
I wrote a couple of days ago about how Oblivion reminded me of this game, but the games that DDO itself reminds me of are the action-adventures of the PS1, like Tomb Raider and Deathtrap Dungeon. Traversing the rooftops of Stormreach during one of these recent quests felt very reminscent of Lara Croft's adventures, as does the jumping, climbing and swimming involved in exploring many of the game's dungeons.
The similarities to Deathtrap Dungeon are even more obvious. That game had its origins in the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks of the '80s, which in turn were inspired by the original pen and paper RPGs - especially D&D. It's not just theme and setting though. At times DDO feels uncannily like Deathtrap Dungeon, or at least like the version of the game I wanted to exist back then - a game of much greater scope in which I could take my character beyond Fang and into adventures from other books in the series... and also one that wasn't quite so fond of insta-kill traps and lethal platform puzzles.
I've picked up exactly where I left off, and these are level 5 quests I've been running. Seeing as I'm currently level 6 - Rogue 4, Wizard 2 - I'll be taking a run at some on-level quests next. Whether or not I can handle them remains to be seen. DDO can be unforgiving at times, even if it's not as hard as those '90s games it often reminds me of.
"No MMO is so inexhaustibly rich in content that the dev team can afford to throw away entire zones." DAoC and Destiny 2 also recently did the same thing. DAOC actually set about half the solo PvE content on fire to repurpose the zones for raids (that reward items you can much more easily get solo doing other content now). D2 retired a bunch of areas, some that I had barely been able to explore when there last big update went live.
ReplyDeleteIt's always a baffling and frustrating move to me. I've stopped playing both games. What you describe in NW probably would have also ticked me off.