18 hours to level 20. 18 hours!
It's safe to say this a record that's never going to be surpassed by any other MMO. I've hit the level cap in Neverwinter and I still have close to six hours of this run to go. Compared with this, even Guild Wars 2 is a slow, leisurely journey.
It's worth pointing out that while this hasn't been a speed run as such I did stick to the quest line pretty rigidly, and I probably have an hour or two of character maintenance ahead of me while I sort through my inventory. I've got a lot of hours in this game and on this class so I knew what I was doing, and it was only in Whispering Caverns that I started to rack up a few extra defeats on my still slightly undergeared Rogue. So I imagine a first time player would take a bit longer to reach 20... but perhaps not much longer. This is a very fast track to endgame.
Neverwinter has always been good at presenting me with things I usually dislike in MMOs and winning me over - stand alone zones rather than a connected world; no day/night cycle; tons of repeat/daily activities; dodge heavy action combat - and it continues to do this. I hate accelerated levelling, especially when it involves the removal of content, but here it almost entirely works for reasons I've touched on in previous posts.
One interesting aspect of this is that levelling up is now locked to quest progression - you gain your levels at the end of specific quests and XP doesn't come into it at all. It is very linear, but you're in and out of each zone in three hours or less so it doesn't start to drag. In a way, the devs have taken the old argument that everything prior to the level cap is a tutorial (aka 'the game begins at endgame') and made it a reality. I should hate it. I don't.
I do have a few minor criticisms. Without side stories like the race and class questlines and the Plague Tower to break up the relentless forward momentum, the pace of the game is almost too frenetic. There's also a few forlorn former questgivers left hanging around in the zones with nothing to do, which isn't so noticeable in the hubs, but is when you come across a named NPC just chilling in the middle of the zone with no clear reason for being there.
Almost all of the quest text is voiced now, though there's a few moments that aren't and stick out accordingly. The voice acting is adequate, mostly, but rarely exceptional. Some of it is pretty bad and I'm starting to think I may have been too harsh on Elder Scrolls Online.
Also, the gear you pick up while levelling used to have a distinct class identity - variations on a theme that mixed and matched well together - and this is no longer the case. There's no consistency in style or color in what I've received in the last 20 levels, and while this does give the player more choice I did find myself missing the old Rogue gear. I'll be spending some time putting together a more coherent look now that I've hit 20.
Importantly though, shifting the focus from character level to item level has worked fantastically at restoring the game's balance, and hopefully that continues into the campaigns. Neverwinter has in the past often handed out boxes of gear to bring characters up to the level of the newest content, and while I don't know if it'll be doing that again I do know that if it does I won't be taking adavntage of it. I've learned my lesson from the Undermountain fiasco last time around.
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