Well, I dropped the $60 for the Guardian of the North pack. It's the same company that runs Blacklight retribution and I very much liked that game and how they ran the cash shop. When the Betas come around I'll keep you guys updated on how I feel about the game and if anyone has questions I'll suss out the answers as best as possible.
Youtube wanted me to see this, so I pass it on here: I'm fast forwarding here and there to skim through. He crashes. On the plus side; the in-game voice sounds amazing, probably the best in-game voice quality for a game I've ever hea... oh that stopped working for him too after he crashed... oh well, F2P!!!!
Spent 10ish hours maybe playing this weekend. Not exactly sure how long, I had to focus on a paper more than this (even though i still put around 10 hours in). I made it up to level 20. I'll write more on it later this week. I did enjoy the gameplay I was able to experience. Any specific questions anyone has that I can try and answer? I might not be all that helpful
As someone who knows really nothing about it: What aspects of the game do you think they did well on? What do you think they need to work on?
What class(s) did you play? Did you team up? Did you find the loot with teams ok or annoying? (coming from D3 where I only see my loot)
I enjoyed the combat system that they had in place. It is centred around using a reticule to target in combat and to look around the world. They have a freelook option that you can use when running around but there is no HUD visible. I didn't find using the reticule to target opponents to be difficult or have any problems staying locked on target. The attack system (for warrior) took a little getting used to. I come from GW+GW2 where you can strafe to your hearts content and move while you are attacking all you want. Not going to fly here if you want to play warrior. Once you press that attack button you are committed to finishing the attack animation. This means that if you want to dodge an attack started by the opponent you must wait until your attack is done or suck up the blow. I ended up liking this because it meant that you actually had to use your shield for something!! In GW it was just there for looks and AC. There is also a ton as far as stats is concerned but that is nothing new for the realm of DnD. I always find dealing with stats the most overwhelming part of playing any MMO. There is just a lot to keep in mind if you want to be spec'd out really well but it's not essential to learn in detail. They explain what you will need to know to get through the game if you want to take the time to learn it. The one experience I had that was a little awkward was the party mechanics. Once I got to about lvl 16 I decided it was time to try and group up with people. It was a little tricky because there is zone chat where you can talk to everyone, even if they aren't in your shard. So you ask for members in zone chat then you have to go through the process of migrating to the same shard if you wish to quest together. The party forming mechanic itself was little unintuitive as well which made things a little frustrating. Just takes time to learn some eccentricities of the game I guess. This is the only area that I had any qualms with. I played warrior. It's my go to class when I start a game with it as an option. Teamed up with one player for a quest and there were some encounters called skirmishes that were mini pve events that you could queue for and wait for another 4 people to join as well. The 2 skirmish events I did were about 10 minutes each and were just defeating a certain number of waves of baddies. None were too difficult and nobody died in either I of them. They have a scoring system at the end of it that ranks you in order of dmg given, dmg taken, kills, heals, death. There didn't seem to be any reward for placing at the top of any. There was also a chest at the end that contained some cash and an item. You also had items and cash drop throughout the event. I found the loot system a little odd. I don't really understand how DnD deals with it. The way it worked was cash was automatically distributed to everyone when someone walked over it. You had to pick up things like potions and kits. You didn't see other peoples drops. Sometimes items would drop and everyone had a chance to get it. You were given three option: Need, Greed, Pass. You had to select one of them and then the game would roll for you and the person with the highest roll would win the item. I am not sure what benefit selecting need or greed gave. But I didn't find it annoying. The questing system seems to work pretty well and you can activate a pathway that kind of guides you to where you need to go next. There are local events in some areas where you need to collect items and whomever collects the most within the time limit wins. You are scored into tiers and reward is given accordingly. Once you hit 20 you can grab yourself a companion NPC to quest with you. Kind of like the heroes in GW. You can also get yourself your first mount at lvl 20 (I didn't do that). The companions level up and you need to send them away fro training for their traits to change as they level. The amount of time it takes to train them can vary. Level 5 took 10 minutes but then once the npc got to 10 it would have been 40 minutes. I did a couple of the player created events and wasn't too enamoured with them. But such is the nature of user created content. Some had really good reviews and I just didn't get a chance to do the ones that people rated highly. It was a little frustrating because i was given a quest in one zone and then had to go all the way back to the starting city to do the quest (2 zones away). The zones are large and when you have no mount or no fast travel it can take a bit of time. There are teleportation scrolls in the game but I only came across 2 of them in the time I played. I couldn't fathom why the idiot that created it thought it would be a good idea to send you all the way back to the main city :/ I enjoyed the experience and I think I read there is an open beta coming at the end of this month, weekend of the 22nd I think.
Is the player created events this foundry stuff I read about? So players create instances and quests? Other players rate them? What else can you say about them? How rewarding are they?
Yeah it's the foundry stuff. Players can create a series of events that form the foundation for their foundry missions. They can be player created instances or take advantage of the existing game world and NPCs. When you enter a zone, near the main campfire, there is generally a "spy guy" that alerts you to any foundry related content in the area and you can choose to begin it in that manner. There is also a "home screen" so to speak that you can access by pressing "L" which brings up all the foundry content and I believe you can accept missions from there. I didn't have a ton of time to explore everything that I would have liked to as I had other things that required my attention. When you are done playing one of the foundry missions you are asked to rate the content and provide feedback so other players can have heads up. It's a good system and the ones I participated in didn't have great ratings so my dissatisfaction isn't all that surprising. I'm not actually sure how loot works out in the foundry missions. Based on your level and the type of enemies you encounter there is likely a pre-existing loot table that determines what you get. The final chest that gives you items may be a bit more controllable by the content creator. One large annoyance is that it seemed like 60% of the items dropped were for the great weapons fighter class which wasn't in the game during this beta, just guardian warrior. So a large majority of the items were junk. Obviously won't be an issue at launch. At the end of the foundry missions you are also able to "tip" the content creator with astral diamonds and maybe zen (PWs currency), maybe in game gold too, I can't remember. I didn't tip any of the content creators whose missions I completed.
My experience with the rough astral diamonds and "praying" or whatever you want it call it is the more you do in the time between pray sessions the more rough diamonds/better loot you get. Nothing to really back this up other than what I think I saw.
http://nw.perfectworld.com/news/?p=849741 CBT4 - April 12-14 OB - April 30 It is looking like Open Beta will be more like the launch as headstarts will start up before Apr 30th (25th and 27th depending on which founder's pack you have). Not uncommon for F2P games. Edit: press release confirms no wipes after Apr 30th.
Forget it and just treat it as an MMO? You don't really need to know anything about DnD rules to play the game.
Impossible. There's a reason I have been playing and still play DDO for the past god knows how many years. I freaking love it. One of the biggest reasons being because it's 3.5 with some changes to make it make more sense in a video game.
I've been reading the forums a bit and see this topic a lot. As someone who hasn't played D&D I have no real insight on now involved the game is with any edition, but the devs have said many times that they use 4th edition terms as a baseplate while making the game all it's own, that they have the freedom from Wizards to pull from whatever inspiration they desire. Basically they have said this isn't a 4th edition game. This is a copy-paste from a forum goer and fellow beta-tester named gillrmn* who I will consider more knowledgeable than I on the subject and how he words the game's setup: "Unlike how the devs want you to believe: this is an MMO telling a story based in Forgotten Realms. It is not a game based on D&D Mechanics - it is a game with mechanics of its own which mask themselves as D&D Mechanics. However, that said - it is a good D&D game. I feel like I am playing one of the Forgotten Realms novel. No it does not feel remotely like PnP in terms of gameplay mechanics - but its still D&D game. Just not a game based on D&D gameplay. As forgotten realm novels are called D&D novels, so is this a D&D MMO." *On an a sidenote, the guy is also a foundry tester and since the NDA lift he has been putting together a manual on how the foundry works which is in his sig if that interests anyone. Also there are a few sig links directed at people more newbie like myself.
D&D 4 is the biggest mistake ever happened to a RPG. I hope 5th edition will be good. About NWN, i dunno, DDO was pretty bland in terms of gameplay, NWN seems pay 2 win. So, meh, prolly waiting on something else and keep D&D as a pen & paper game. If they add the tome of battle in DDO, maybe, just to try out some builds i never got to play in PnP, other than that, nope.
Bland? What? In what possible way is it bland? There are so many options avaliable, the combat is different on every single class you play. More so than any other mmo. The game itself is definitely a lot more challenging than any mmo even though that's not saying much. I mean I guess you have your own opinion but I've never heard that before. I've heard casuals complain that it didn't hold their hand enough (paraphrasing) but never heard it called bland.