It was probably inevitable that there would be a massively multiplayer online RPG with the word "Neverwinter" in the title. After all, the very first Neverwinter Nights computer game from 1991 was a ground-breaking pre-World Wide Web online title delivered through AOL, and a decade later the more well-known game with the same name (i.e. the one developed by Bioware) obviously had significant online features as well.
This week, genre veterans Cryptic Studios (City of Heroes, Star Trek Online etc.) launched the Open Beta for its own Dungeons & Dragons-based MMO - an action-oriented, Guild Wars-esque kind of game which tries to move away from the worst excesses of sterile cooldown management á la World of Warcraft while at the same time keeping the fundamentals of modern MMO design such as PvP options, Auction Houses and Guild functionality.
After having checked out quite a few MMOs over the past 2 years I'm still not sure what the long-term appeal of the genre is supposed to be, and the undeniable empirical fact that some people get hooked for years on end is very hard for me to wrap my poor brain around. For what it's worth, though, Neverwinter appears to be a respectable entry with generous amounts of Free 2 Play content, comparatively non-exploitative micro-transactions and an ambitious Foundry toolbox with which players can design their own raids and dungeons and share these with the wider community. The game's dialogue and voice acting unfortunately comes off as amateurish and badly produced compared to the mostly competent and occasionally great writing in Bioware's The Old Republic (still the MMO I'm most familiar with to date), but the combat feels a lot more snappy and the environments are good-looking and nicely varied if also a bit on the generic side. I don't know how much more I'll play after the first 20 XP levels (roughly an afternoon's worth of gameplay time), but if a new Dungeons & Dragons online game sounds cool then Neverwinter should definitely be worth checking out.
