Top 5 Reasons to Play Neverwinter

It's been a long and winding road for Neverwinter.
Since its announcement back in 2010, Neverwinter has survived the sale of
its developer, Cryptic Studios, legal battles between Atari and Wizards of
the Coast, and a bunch of delays. But it has persevered against these long
odds, and goes into open beta at the end of the month. 

And from what we've seen in the closed beta weekends over the past couple
of months, Neverwinter has come out stronger for all the adversity. There
are a lot of reasons why this is a game worth playing, but we'll save you
some hassle and give you our top five.


1. D&D Action

Top 5 Reasons to Play Neverwinter - D&D Action

Like Neverwinter, Dungeons & Dragons itself has changed a lot over
the years. The game system that started out as a fantasy subset add-on for
a miniature wargame has become the industry standard that has defined an
entire genre of entertainment, and has blossomed into a billion-dollar
intellectual property. 

The artists, writers and content designers who built Neverwinter are fans
of D&D, and the game they built uses that license well. It is perhaps
a bit more liberal with its translation of the current rules than some
other D&D games, but it manages to impart a feeling of high-adrenaline
adventure, right from the moment your character washes up on shore after
an unfortunate sea storm. The story carries on the lore set forth by
Salvatore, Greenwood and the other writers who built the Forgotten Realms,
leading the player through well-known city settings and outlying regions,
and sending the player into battles against iconic monsters.

Top 5 Reasons to Play Neverwinter

2. Dynamic Gameplay

The gameplay in Neverwinter has a strong focus on action. Combat is
dynamic and reactive, and requires active participation rather than just
standing still and clicking number keys. Players are not swamped with a
bewildering array of situationally-useful skills - your toolbar at the
bottom gives you access to no more than 8 at once, and swapping these
skills for different ones can dramatically change how the character plays.

Top 5 Reasons to Play Neverwinter - Dynamic Gameplay

Even the classes themselves have been sharpened-up for a more action-y
feel. The Devoted Cleric, for example, is the primary "healer" class in
the game, but it is not a heal-bot that just stands at the back and spams
one or two heal skills. The cleric has to be as good at kicking asses as
he is at fixing them, or it just doesn't feel like a dynamic, engaging
class compared to the others. 

The questing system may feel a bit old-fashioned, but even that lends to
the D&D flavor. Tabletop D&D is where that system comes from,
after all - NPC townies request help, itinerant heroes perform the task
and return when finished for their reward. Quite frankly, any other system
would feel wrong in a D&D game.

Top 5 Reasons to Play Neverwinter

3. The Characters

Personally, I'm a fan of the aesthetics of the player characters. Dwarves
are nearly as wide as they are tall, with beady little angry eyes and
beak-like noses. Half-orcs are bulky brutes with death-metal scowls and
massive under-bites. Elves look haughty and arrogant, halflings are wee
and wily. And tieflings are probably one of the more interesting races
available in any game - the bastard offspring of demons and mortals, with
crazy goat-horns and spear-tipped tails.

Top 5 Reasons to Play Neverwinter - The Characters

Character models have a cool blend of cartoony stylization and gritty
warts-and-all realism, and some of the armor looks fantastic. Even at low
levels, the armor looks elaborate and cool - none of that dull,
color-mismatched bargain-bin lowbie armor like you find in other games.

And it's not just the player characters that look awesome. Even the
early-game mobs like orcs and wererats have a cool look to them. Sharp
eyes will be able to pick out visual details from their favorite book
illustrations. The monsters are just as detailed and visually interesting
as the player characters.

That's not to say that Neverwinter uses bleeding-edge graphics tech that
will burn your GPU out. That's not what MMOs do. But it does manage to
look good without chewing up huge amounts of system resources.

Top 5 Reasons to Play Neverwinter

4. The Price

Yeah, the game is free. Big deal, so is everything else these days,
right? Well, that's only part of it. According to Perfect World
Entertainment's infographic, playing Neverwinter could potentially save
you millions of dollars. Provided you play the game instead of driving,
use only your computer to heat your house, don't drink or smoke at your
game desk and ordinarily throw lavish parties in Dubai. 

Top 5 Reasons to Play Neverwinter - Savings Infographic

Top 5 Reasons to Play Neverwinter

5. The Foundry

One of the most exciting features of Neverwinter is the ability for
players to create their own adventures, using a content-creation tool
called the Foundry. This has proven to be an awesome tool in Star
Trek Online
, with some users creating new adventure modules
as good as or better than the stuff created by the studio. Dungeons &
Dragons has a long history of published adventure packs, starting all the
way back in the 1970s and continuing on today, and many of these will
surely be recreated by enterprising players.

Top 5 Reasons to Play Neverwinter - the Foundry

Obviously it won't all be masterpieces and conversions of the Tomb of
Horrors. There is also certain to be a flood of unplayable crap as well,
from the buggy, unfinished experiments of enthusiastic but unskilled
neophytes to the pointless, punishing pranks of seasoned trolls. That's
the nature of the beast, though, and one of the things that makes it so
awesome. Giving a powerful tool with no quality control to a large group
of interested amateurs can produce some unpredictable results. Finding
those few diamonds in the piles of slag and offal makes it all worthwhile.


Neverwinter starts open beta on April 30, with pre-order customers
getting up to a 5-day head start. Check it out then, and add your own
reasons to this list.

Got another reason why players should check out Neverwinter? Let us know
in our comments!


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

Last Updated: Mar 29, 2016

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