Quote Originally Posted by Kesnit View Post
I think it's a little unfair to compare Neverwinter's beta to a DDO that had been out for years at that point. DDO when it first came out was, IMO, beyond horrible.

This is my amazon review of DDO from when it came out.
I wanted to play D&D growing up, but there was no one to play with. When I heard about this game, I rushed out to buy the Player's Guide and DM Guide, selected what race and class I wanted to play, and even worked on Skill and Feat progression a little.

I should not have put that much time into my planning. As other reviewers have said, some races,classes, skills, and feats were left out. There are no prestige classes (yet), so feat and skill progressions aren't as important as I thought.

I find the "ranks" and "Actions Points" to be annoying. Why didn't they just use the standard level progression and set the max lvl higher? And they aren't always useful anyway. I find that I waste at least 1 AP per level because the enhancements I have are better than the ones I can trade for.

Finally, grouping. I am shy by nature and it took a while before I was comfortable inviting people to join me or asking if I can join them. Also, the group you are in can affect how much fun the dungeon is. If your group mates just want to run through and beat the monsters and you want to search for hidden rooms (r if you have a problem with the controls and fall off a bridge while running), there is a problem.
Here's some other amazon review from that same time period:

Granted, there are positive reviews, but they are the minority. For obvious reasons, I didn't quote all the reviews from March 2006 (when DDO came out). However, the same things mentioned above are found in a lot of other reviews.
Ouch, tough audience. Most of that seemed to have worked out by 2008 (the f2p relaunch that got me addicted).
The differences:

"Ranks" are still there. They were presumably added to match other MMO's levels, but the enhancements (what you spend action points on) are much improved (to the point that you build your character around them as much as class features).

solo/group. Sometime before 2008 a "dungeon scaling" feature was added. Depending on the difficulty you could choose between normal/hard/elite. A solo player playing on "normal" would face a much easier time than a whole group (this is slightly buggy to the point that some groups avoid adding players on certain quests). A solo player at the highest level should (I don't think this is always true) face the same dungeon as a full party. - Note that around when this was added, there was a difficulty called "solo" for the solo adventurer. It was removed after a few years and eventually replaced with the "casual" difficulty (that allowed parties to face easy dungeons).

Classes/feats: "Feat taxes" seem to be pretty much gone. Note this is a pretty new thing, from 2008-2012? the feat "toughness" was pretty much mandatory (since it gated racial/class toughness enhancments, it allowed swings from 40-100 hit points). Also melee rangers had to spend three feats just to start the tempest enhancments, now the whole tree is available with ranger classes (note you are limited to 5? trees to spend points on). Character building has been pretty wide open since the early days, but don't assume that knowing the pen&paper games gets you any advantage (hint, pure casters seem more rare than multi-classed ones (with missing caster levels)).

The thing about NVN is that it didn't seem like a great game with flaws. It seemed like a reasonably well executed heap of meh. I never really felt engaged with the combat, nor my character (4e is just too far from my old AD&D rules), nor the flow of the story. I did feel that allowing the players to create dungeons was huge, and that I could safely ignore the issue that while I was playing they were being used to create "exploit/monty haul dungeons", and that cryptic was dealing with that issue. I just don't get the warm fuzzies when typing "player created dungeons nvn" and seeing the first 5 hits refer to the single player games.