Reaching the next level in Neverwinter.

I talked about Neverwinter at the end of the third closed beta weekend and we even had a whole podcast devoted to it more or less. Hell, Nick just wrote an article about the Foundry system not long ago. It’s pretty fair to say that some of us here seem to enjoy the game. I’ve been playing it at what I suppose could be called a casual pace since open beta started. So when I got the news recently that the official launch was going to be today (June 20th for those not reading this the day it’s published), I couldn’t think of a better way to kick off the launch than by blasting my way to the max level of 60. It wasn’t nearly as painful as I thought it might be.

Let the marathon begin!

Ding!

I started this little race one week before launch at level 41 on a Friday evening. Over the next two days I managed to log a relationship straining 20+ hours in that freakishly addicting D&D universe. What’s probably the most surprising thing was that I didn’t spend any of that time feeling like I was in a pointless grind. In fact, at no point in my experience with leveling in Neverwinter did it feel like I was just killing things to gain experience so that I could progress to the next area. Having played a good number of f2p MMORPGs lately, that’s a rather unique thing to find.

The lack of a grind feel is, as far as I can tell, the result of a wonderful confluence of features that Cryptic is kind enough to offer its players. Firstly, the quests are immersive and helped along by using voice actors for every major quest giver. If story is fluff to you, you can always skip it. Secondly, you’re given incentive to participate in various events throughout the day that provide extra rewards for Foundry quests, skirmishes, pvp, or dungeons. So it’s always easy to take a break from the solo leveling and gain xp in another way. Thirdly, you can freaking craft xp through the leadership skill. Set a couple guys to do a long crafting job with big xp rewards just before logging off for the night. Or, even better, utilize the web based crafting interface at gateway.playneverwinter.com when you’re bored and not in game. Dorkadia does not endorse using the Neverwinter gateway when you should be working. Lastly, don’t forget to take advantage of invoking when possible because the xp rewards (not to mention the ardent and celestial coins) are rather generous and even grants rough astral diamonds.

The final countdown! …to Neverwinter

Hope you have a good video card.

To entertain the players in the last few days until the official launch, Cryptic ran a couple events in game to reward its supporters. The first phase of the event involved doubling the number of enchants and runes received from drops and chests. This was downright awesome and helped build my supply of enchants by quite a lot. Phase two was interesting, though not quite as awesome of an idea as it sounded. There was an invasion in Protectors Enclave (the main hub of the game) where portals would open for 5 minutes every 30 minutes and then every 10 minutes in phase 3. Phase 3 also introduced the much stronger Unhallowed Wights into the mix of undead scourge being summoned. There were cool rewards like enchants, buffs, and even a skeletal dog companion. The problem was that anyone without a great net connection and top end graphics card just couldn’t handle one hundred wizards using all of their aoe attacks in one area. Lag would be putting it mildly from the complaints in the general zone chat channel. At least the patch midway through helped alleviate the massive freeze up felt by virtually everyone when the portals closed.

So now what?

Now that I’m level 60 and I’ve completed all of the main quest areas, I’m left wondering what I’m going to do now. The problem, for me at least, is that the reason I don’t stick with MMOs is that I don’t want to run the same dungeons over and over again. I very certainly do not want to pvp unto the end of time. That’s mostly because I’m really really bad at pvp and even fail at it as a rogue. Thankfully, there’s a near endless supply of user created content thanks to the Foundry. In fact, now that I’m at the end game I may just try my hand at crafting quests of my own through the Foundry. The other thing left for me to do is work on crafting since I left it way behind when I went leveling crazy. Not that I ignored it, there was simply no way that it could keep pace.

Thankfully, there’s a free expansion to Neverwinter called Fury of the Feywild coming out this summer. In addition to that, they’ve just announced a new profession: alchemy. So there are plenty of things to keep my D&D nerd brain occupied in Neverwinter for the coming future. Will any of it be as cool as opening a door to a hallway and nearly getting engulfed by a gelatinous cube? I don’t know… that’s going to be tough to beat in terms of surprise and joy. What’s been your favorite D&D experience in Neverwinter or elsewhere?