Neverwinter’s Gateway

Posted on April 24, 2013 by Arlee

During Beta Weekend 4 Neverwinter let players preview their Gateway web-portal which is basically your access to all your character info from a webpage.

After you first log in you are taken to the Character Select screen where you see a listing of your characters and can pick which one you want to select. In this example I only had one character made. After you select which character you want to look at you are taken to the Gateway Home Screen.

As you can see my character was only level 9 at the time I took this picture so Professions is greyed out because you need to be level 11 to learn professions. Also I was not in a guild when I took that screen.

Here’s the Character Sheet page. I am assuming at some point the red outline of what looks vaguely like a minotaur will be replaced with an actual 3D model of what your character looks like. You can see all your stats in the bottom section and if you mouse over your items you can look at what the stats are (which helps for finding upgrades through the AH).

If you look at the left edge of this screen you will also see there is a menu which will take you to any of the other pages without having to go back to the home screen.

A unique feature of the Gateway is you can level your professions through it! The interface is really similar to what it is in game, the only downside is the duration to complete each task is longer through the gateway. You would really only want to level professions through the gateway if you are not able to login for some reason and you want to still want to level your professions.

You can also post and buy things off the AH through the gateway.

This is the view of your inventory you get when you want to put something up. Of course when you mouse over an item you get a pop-up that tells you all the detail of the item.

If you are in a guild there are a variety of things you can look at and check on from the gateway.

You can add events from the Gateway and update the information (if you have the ability to do those things in game).

What else could you possibly want to do through a web-portal? Well how about send mail to people in game!

I am not sure if once this goes live you will be able to look-up other players. You couldn’t during the beta weekend but it could have just not have been active.

Gameplay Screens

Posted on April 16, 2013 by Arlee

Just wanted to take a quick minute and post some screens that I took during gameplay this past weekend. Quick disclaimer though. My computer is nowhere near top of the line and the graphics settings were not even close to set to max. With that knowledge in hand lets look at some pictures 🙂

This is a picture of what it looks like when you talk to people to pick-up quests. You also see this screen when you turn in a quest as well. Also this NPC is one you interact with a bunch and depending on what part of the story you finish you sometimes get an extra piece of loot from the chest in the backround to the left there. There is voice over, but you are not stuck looking at this screen the whole time. You can immediately Accept the quest and then either listen to VO as you go to do something else (or even start on the quest) or you can just cancel out the VO all together if you don’t care to listen to it.

I took this screen during a foundry quest I was doing (my character is in front the npc following me is the one you can really see there). You see that gold and purple sparkly path there? That is the quest tracking path. You can turn it on and off using “Z” and it will show you the way to go to whatever quest you are tracking, even where you need to go to turn in quests.

That’s just a picture of my Great Weapon Fighter Half-Elf in town at level 12.

There are also Harper Agents at most of the quest hubs. You can talk to them to find out about local rumors and they will open up the foundry menu for you.

Action shot of me fighting during one of the Foundry quests. That person to my character’s left is my Companion whom I named Trevor. You can also see two piles of loot on the ground from mobs I killed before this picture.

Lastly, near the end of beta a bunch of people gathered up and took a picture in town. You can see a couple of the mounts (look at the bear in the middle!) and a few different spell effects.

Hope the pictures were fun and interesting for everyone 🙂

Professions

Posted on April 16, 2013 by Arlee

Over this past weekend I got a chance to play around with the professions system in Neverwinter some. At level 11 you can start learning the professions. You don’t need to find a trainer or anything, all you do is press “N” and the menu opens right up.

This is the default menus for professions. As you can see the options are Leadership, Mailsmithing, Platesmithing, Tailoring, and Leatherworking. The first step for every profession is to hire someone who actually does the crafting for you. After you do that they will be listed in the bottom section under the “Profession Assets” Section. Also as you both level your character up and level your professions you will unlock more Task Squares. Eventually you will be able to have nine tasks going at the same time.

The next few screens show the process of hiring your first miner for Platesmithing.

The first task takes 5 seconds, but after that they start increasing durations. The longest duration I saw during the beta was two hours but I also did not get much past level 3 of crafting. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Rare Tasks at higher levels had multiple day duration. You can also pay Astral Diamonds to finish any task immediately. Higher level tasks obviously cost more to finish immediately

Overall I am a big fan of this system. I really like being able to craft anywhere, and that I don’t have to stand around crafting because for me crafting is a side thing to do, not really a main aim for me in a MMO. The option to be able to go run a dungeon while crafting is a huge plus.

Circles in Wildstar!

Posted on April 8, 2013 by Arlee

You think Wildstar’s guilds will be the same as every other MMO? Not so fast there. Wildstar has taken guilds a step further than the normal run of the mill set-up in most MMO’s.

The Wildstar Devs recognize that while most people have their guild they are a part of and they view it as the central avenue into whatever aspect of the game they are most interested in; people often form friendships outside of their guild as well and look to those people to do other activities. This is something other games have tried to address by allowing you to join multiple guilds at the same time. The main drawback of those systems is that you can usually only view the guild chat of one guild at a time. As a result you are severely limited in your ability to interact across your different guilds.

What Wildstar is doing instead is in addition to your guild they will also have something they are calling “Circles”. These will be different from guilds but have some of the same features guilds do: roster, private chat channel, name tags, and other undisclosed features. Say for example you are reading guild chat and notice there is activity in your “Firefly Appreciation Circle” well you won’t miss any of the conversation and will be able to jump right in.

Currently the limits are set at 1 guild and 5 Circles. They have not been specifically clear on if it is per character or across an account as yet, but they did say they are open to possibly increasing the limits if they find during beta 5 Circles just are not enough.

Honestly Circles is a great sounding feature which has a lot of promise. One thing I am a little concerned with, and we will have to see how it is handled, is Circles might help to contribute to fracturing in guilds. This would probably mostly be a potential issue for larger guilds, but it also could be something which might destroy smaller guilds. Also imagine being in the middle of a raid and having people not paying attention because so and so is being funny in their Circle chat.

The potential peril is all guilds develop groups of people who play together more than other people. This is a natural thing which develops among groups of people. Some people will get along better with certain other people, while different people will like others. Sometimes it is as simple as some people’s playtimes line up more than other people’s. The issue with circles though is it could very easily give people a place to talk to those friends freely without other guild members seeing. Which could be fine, or it could sow discord.

Solving those issues will probably fall to guilds themselves, and I am not sure doing otherwise would be a really good idea on the Dev’s part. For instance completely disabling Circle chat during raids by default might be an issue for people who can handle raiding with some distraction. They could give us some tools on to handle the issues on our own. Personally I think in the long run a player choice focused solution would probably be for the best.

As always though it is all very up in the air until Beta is over and we know more about where everything is falling. Overall Circles have some great potential, and very few obvious drawbacks.

For more information about guilds in Wildstar please check out their Dev Post “What is a Guild?“.

Neverwinter Open Beta

Posted on April 4, 2013 by Arlee

Neverwinter announced today they will be doing their final closed beta weekend April 12th -14th. During this weekend we will finally get a chance to tryout all four professions (Leadership, Mailsmithing, Platesmithing, and Leatherworking). If you played during Beta Weekend Three you will be able to pick-up your characters where you left it and continue your adventure. You will be able to level up to level 50, and there have been many improvements based on the feedback they received from beta weekend three.

In addition to announcing their fourth closed beta, Neverwinter also announced that open beta will start on April 30th. All characters from closed beta will be wiped before open beta. They have also confirmed there will be no wipe of characters between open beta and the game launch.

Also as expected they are continuing to push their founders packs by offering the Hero of the North purchasers 5 days of early access to the open beta. People who have purchased the Guardian of Neverwinter Pack will receive 3 days of early access.

My speculation is also the Drow race is supposed to be held for 60 days after the game’s start. I am now thinking since they are doing a “Soft Launch” the Drow will be available based on the start of Open Beta and we’ll see them on or around June 28th.

mmoarlee

Monthly Archives: April 2013