Cryptic loves to reskin their games.
Take the name of a popular franchise, mix in some well established parameters, dumb erverything down to the most forgettable and most pointless metric possible and voila, ready is your shitgame. The mastercooks at Bioware concerted a multi-course dinner using this recipe with Knights of the Old Republic, and Cryptic certainly isn't the kind of company that lets others cook their turds alone.
So, Cryptic has
released digested Neverwinter. The main difference is that Neverwinter is a completely unrelated franchise. The cake is a lie. Misleading premises alone are obviously not a good reason to hate a game, but luckily there is a wide range of inadequacies to select from in this cocktail of failure.
Like about every other F2P "MMO" you'll be instanced start-to-finish and you'll never actually get to play with the other players. A penny-pinching syndrom, and while not entirely unexpected, it does get annoying to be in the same zone as a friend and still have to load into their instance.
Talking about loadtimes, they sting. I suppose that's because of this whole foundry quest model, so while you're playing the generic and terrible Cryptic content your load times may be a few minutes. But if you're waiting on a player-made quest to load, better go fetch a coffee. It doesn't exactly matter if that's a bug in the engine or just the result of lazy development. In this era of computing these load times shouldn't exist.
Load times are forgivable if playing the game is fun. But it so happens that it isn't. TERA is certainly to blame for the recent surge of faux-tab-targeting MMORPGs, but Neverwinter makes painstakingly sure that strategy and action are not as fun as holding down the left mouse button. Therefore, Cryptic ensured that you can defeat nearly all encounters by doing exactly that.
Typically for this kind of game you aquire boring skills and abilities to help you kill the droves of profoundly inept trash-mobs, but those are really just there to provide entertainment when you finish reading the newspaper before your dungeon crawl is complete.
The PvP is horrible. When I am struggling to enjoy a MMO, I jump over into the competitive side of things and stomp some people out. So far, the mere existence of PvP in Neverwinter makes the game far worse. Everything in this game is instanced, PvP is no exception. But that was to be expected. No, the problem with Neverwinter's PvP system is the pace. The combat is excruciatingly slow and even if you completely dominate your opponent you still need minutes to actually kill him. This *could* be easily remedied of course, but a quick troll in general chat later it looks like Derplord McSlow actually wants PvP to be as slow and boring as killing non-players. Young people sicken me these days.
There will be the hapless Nerd that played a D&D ruleset game and will therefore understand that D&D and in-depth character development go hand-in-hand. Unfortunately, he will quickly discover that Cryptic has whittled the model down into a generic F2P hack/slash abortion that makes a mockery of the name itself and makes me question why they even chose to license the IP from WotC. You have some general trade-skills and stats, but the effects of being charismatic or strong are completely lost on the game. That is probably because the game is a re-skin of STO and Champions.
There is however one good thing that comes along with the ride that actually fits the D&D tradition: The foundy. The foundry is a toolkit within the game client that allows you to develop your own adventures for yourself or others. The creation of this tool was obviously kickstarted by Star Trek Online and while the project is lost on the shallow canon of Star-Trek, the foundy is gushing wild potential for prospective DM wannabes.
I found the foundry to be extremely simple and even somewhat flexible. If you have a quest in mind you can usually get the job done, unless you want NPCs to sit in chairs - then you're fucked. Yes, most player created content is beyond terrible. Thankfully, this is combated by a reviewsystem that helps the good stuff to float to the top. The game may be shite, but the foundry is worth a shot, but I doubt most of you will actually get to level 15 before boredom kills you.
Graphics:
Meh.
Gameplay: -
Plays like Diablo except that it's shit.
Originality:
Not even the title.
WoW clone:
Some WoW stuff.
PvP:
Instanced.
PvP Risk: -
Risk of falling asleep
Pandering: -
Dungeons and Lies.