Neverwinter Re-Review

mmorpg.com:

Mylast stint with Neverwinter was back in 2021, just before Cryptic Studios announcedthe MMO’s great level shrink. I had booted up Neverwinter as part of our MMO Reroll series, and at the time, I found it an enjoyable romp that ultimately failed to keep my attention. We just celebrated Neverwinter’s 10th anniversary, and with the recent switch of the publisher from Perfect World to Gearbox, it felt like the right time once again to revisit the most fantastic city of the Sword Coast. 

Translating the Dungeons And Dragons ruleset to an online MMO environment is tricky. Made for offline, in-person gaming sessions, D&D’s intricate ruleset is made for slow, turn-based combat between a group of players and their enemies, which a Dungeon Master controls. Spells are limited, levels and loot come slowly, and most importantly, the DM can adjust the battle on the fly to ensure the party has a tough, but hopefully non-fatal, experience.

Neverwinter is none of that. There’s no DM to control the battles, though the backend calculations and enemy AI are controlled server-side. And instead of a turn-based combat system, Neverwinter uses a soft-targeting action-based combat system that focuses on movement and dodging skill telegraphs while laying down damage. Functional as it may be, Neverwinter’s action combat is standard fare, and nothing makes it stand out from the combat of other action-based MMOs.

That doesn’t mean combat isn’t fun, though. Neverwinter still sticks to the holy trinity style of character creation, making group combat an actual co-op event. Tanks still need to get aggro so that the DPSers can deal damage, and healers are still required to keep everyone alive. All the while, you’ll be positioning and aiming to hit your