Neverwinter Foundry – Surprisingly Few Dildos

This last week I’ve been laid up in my house with a bad flare up of The Gout.  As such, I’ve had a fair amount of time on my hands to put into Neverwinter, which recently launched its open beta.  So far I’ve been enjoying it quite a bit – it’s a pretty simple game with some nice features and fast fun gameplay.  But what I’m most excited about is The Foundry, the tool that lets users create their own content.  User created content in an MMO you say?  Madness!  But it actually works pretty well.  

The Basics

User content comes in the form of quests.  The quests that come out of the Foundry are all (mostly >.>) instanced.  You don’t need to worry about the main areas of Neverwinter filling up with custom NPCs named Nedd Starkk or Drizzitt.  It’s accessed through a few methods: job boards, NPCs, and the menu system.  The job boards and the menus give you the widest selection of content, while the NPCs show only the top rated and most used content, but feel a little bit more immersive.  There IS a rating system, which over time makes it much easier to find the best content available, as well as a review cycle, which prevents you from having to quest on ShitCock Mountain.

The game itself also incentivizes players to both create and experience the user content.  One of the regular events (happening several times per day) is an experience bonus for running the top rated Foundry content.  There are also daily quests to do Foundry adventures with a reward of astral diamonds, a type of in-game currency that can be exchanged for zen, the currency you use for the game’s microtransactions.  After finishing a Foundry quest, users are given the option to both rate the quest and tip the creator in astral diamonds, which gives a nice incentive for users to actually take the time to create content.

What You’re In For As . . .

. . . A Player.

The game is still in open beta, and hasn’t been out for all that long, so currently most of the player population is still running through the Neverwinter story quests.  That means that the pickings on the Foundry aren’t that great.  You’re going to mostly see hack and slash dungeons with extremely thin stories.  Occasionally you’ll run into some 3d mapping problems, like misplaced trees clipping through walls.  And if you wince when people misuse “they’re” and “their”, you should probably avoid the Foundry for the next few weeks, as the tools don’t include a spell check or a slap upside the head for moving every Zig.  There are also lots of intro adventures to larger quests that don’t have followups, so you’re left hanging after reading the first chapter of the book.  Let’s hope the typical author doesn’t create content on a George R.R. Martin timeline.

However, a few of the top rated quests are starting to show promise.  The dungeon designs are starting to get interesting, and the stories show an obvious love for the Forgotten Realms setting.  For the most part quests aren’t designed to use the Neverwinter setting don’t make it through the review process, so we don’t have to deal with Luke Skywalker casting fireballs.  (Though there is a Ravenloft adventure up, which makes sense if you know anything about Ravenloft and screw you if you don’t like Ravenloft).

As a final note, it appears that there are no localized servers for German or French, and no way to filter non-English quests out of the list, so you may find yourself out there killing gnolls with no idea what the hell is going on.

. . . An Author

The Foundry tools are surprisingly easy to use.  They are reminiscent of the old Neverwinter Nights authoring tools, but much more streamlined.  Creating a branching dialogue tree is very simple, as is the basic map creation.  There is a good bevy of monsters and map art to choose from, and it generally appears that the Foundry was probably used to create a fair amount of the publisher’s content, before the devs went in and tweaked it all.  It also keeps track of all of the things you need to complete before your quest is ready to be published.

Being in beta, however, it does have some shortcomings.  It’s a little buggy, and will sometimes tell you to complete tasks that are already done, don’t need to be completed, or reference NPCs and objects that don’t exist.  Some of the prefab rooms you can drop into dungeons have doors that don’t appear on the design map that lead off into space, which allows players to fall through the world if you don’t use other objects to cover them.  You can’t really create scripted events, either.  There is a limited list of encounter types you can present to players, and that list for the time being is pretty small.

The largest problem for me, however, is in positioning the 3d objects that you place onto your maps.  You place objects using a 2d top-down dungeon design map, but in order to do the fine tuning you need in order to keep objects from clipping into each other, you need to load up the map and run around with a character manually moving things.  My computer isn’t a beast, so this takes a little while for me, and I often have to bounce back and forth between the two modes several times when things are working the way I want them to.  This makes the finishing detail work in dungeons a real pain sometimes.  But honestly, when it comes to the ability to create content in an MMO that thousands of people might experience, that’s pretty small potatoes.

So, for the time being, I’m giving The Foundry a big two thumbs up as an experiment in MMO user content creation.  I really hope that it catches on, because the more people that use it, the more refined and enjoyable the content is going to become.  So download Neverwinter, join the Mindflayer server, and start churning out content for me to play!