Free-to-Play may be the dominant business model in MMO gaming these days, but few titles truly own it quite like Cryptic Studios’ Neverwinter. Perhaps the only other development studio in existence to provide as much free expansion content is CCP with EVE Online. With the release of Elemental Evil, Neverwinter has not only risen to the challenge, but is raising the bar on what it means to be a truly free-to-play MMO in the modern era.

The first few hours spent consuming the new content not unlike Pac Man greedily gobbling up countless pellets were filled with moments of both joy and abject horror, but the overall experience has proven to be distinctive and enjoyable. A surface level glance at the absurdly long patch notes for Elemental Evil might give the impression that this is simply a paint-by-numbers MMO expansion, and in some cases that assessment may be apt. Then again, it's not every day you come across a new MMO expansion that features a miniature giant space hamster...

Badass to Bad in the Blink of an Eye

The biggest bullet point to be aware of for Elemental Evil is the increased level cap, up to level 70. Since Neverwinter is a game steeped in character progression and improvement systems, the level cap increase has a rippling effect that touches nearly every aspect of your character’s life in-game. Companions, artifacts, enchants, runestones, and pretty much any aspect of the game linked to some form of progress bar has seen that bar extended by a few notches, pushing beyond the typical baseline need to obtain higher level gear.

That baseline need did manage to fuel one of my biggest “oh crap” moments in an MMO in recent memory. While plenty of people logged in to immediately begin leveling up the newly introduced Oathbound Paladin class or consume the new content added with Elemental Evil, I initially opted to go about business as usual.

That entailed bopping along through the forest on my scourge warlock to continue my progress through the Sharandar and Dread Ring campaigns. Picking up my daily quests I innocently dove headfirst into one of the mini-dungeons only to find a very painful dirt nap waiting for me at the very first encounter. When I logged out Monday night my warlock felt fairly badass, but by Tuesday night the same character began suffering some truly bad beat downs.

Above: One day earlier these creatures were trivial on the same character

This is the result of a new level bolstering layer added to the previous campaigns which are now balanced for level 70 rather than the original level 60. My Gear Score had been somewhere around the 11,000 mark – more than high enough to make most early campaign content seem almost trivial – but I suddenly found myself woefully undergeared for the exact same content.

As one might expect, those epic items my warlock was sporting have suddenly become obsolete, immediately replaced by green trash mob drops in the new content. The net result is that it essentially funneled me directly into the new Elemental Evil content regardless of my original intent upon logging in.

As a brief aside, the longstanding Gear Score in Neverwinter has been replaced by a very WoW-like item level system. If nothing else this makes it much easier to understand since your gear now displays its base item level directly within the tooltip. Probably a smart move by Cryptic either way.

Raising the Bar

Your first steps into Elemental Evil entail a somewhat comical romp through some dungeons with Minsc, the hamster-loving oaf in the role of Vin Diesel. These reward you with some substantial gear upgrades depending on how far you’d progressed a character at level 60 to date. Unlike previous campaigns, Elemental Evil opens up into more of a standard MMO expansion once you’ve completed some introductory quests that help establish the overall storyline and need to take up arms to fight a new group of bad guys.

Above: An example of previous epic campaign gear compared to Elemental Evil starting quest rewards

In many ways, Elemental Evil is a culmination of everything that came before it, repackaged and repurposed to provide players with a substantial new chunk of content to consume. In previous releases, you’d hit a brick wall fairly quickly due to daily quests at the core of the campaign progression system, though that did improve over time.

The new content does factor in daily quests this time around, but there are far more available than the Dread Ring era “3 quests + 1 dungeon = done for the day” model. The new overland content is also thankfully scaled appropriately to assume fresh level 60 characters will be consuming it over time, so my warlock was right back to feeling like a proper badass. I still found it a bit irksome that I’ll have to level up to unlock my permanent Soul Puppet a second time, but that does seem a small price to pay for how much content Cryptic has crammed into its latest release for Neverwinter.

Were Elemental Evil released as a traditional boxed MMO expansion, it might be easy to say that it is pretty standard fare. The fact that it is completely free – as is the base game itself – does raise the bar on what it means for an MMO to be truly free-to-play.

I’ve only scratched the surface on what Elemental Evil has to offer, but so far it’s been nothing but good vibrations through and through. Not counting my painful dirt naps, mind you. 


To read the latest guides, news, and features you can visit our Neverwinter Game Page.

Last Updated: Mar 29, 2016

About The Author

Reuben "Sardu" Waters has been writing professionally about the MMOG industry for eight years, and is the current Editor-in-Chief and Director of Development for Ten Ton Hammer.

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