What is better, NWN or D&D Online?

[Dark_Ansem]

I'd like your opinion on which game is better, both on a gameplay and technical aspect: D&D online or Neverwinter?

[Psyren]

DDO isn't really D&D, it's just another MMO. NWN trims a lot of crusts, but it is much closer to how tabletop D&D is played. (Specifically, a small-scale multiplayer campaign with a DM who is crafting a specific story tailored to the PCs.)

[Dark_Ansem]

good to know :) and in terms of creatures\variety? D&DO has mind flayers, while until now Neverwinter has none, right?

[Psyren]

NWN and NWN2 both have mind flayers. I didn't play DDO long enough to know every creature it has.

[Dark_Ansem]

NWN is too old, and NWN2 is, well, I don't like it. more limited than the previous game.

[Kesnit]

I'd like your opinion on which game is better, both on a gameplay and technical aspect: D&D online or Neverwinter?

Are you asking about Neverwinter Nights, the single-player RPGs, or the MMO Neverwinter?

[NeoVid]

I'd like your opinion on which game is better, both on a gameplay and technical aspect: D&D online or Neverwinter?

I'd say that the biggest difference comes from DDO being based on 3.5's mechanics, and Neverwinter being based on 4e. 3.5's mechanics were meant to simulate real-time combat, which works way better as a video game than as a tabletop game. 4e's were made for turn-based, grid-based combat, which doesn't translate well to a realtime MMO.

I've played DDO a ton, but haven't tried Neverwinter, so keep my bias in mind. DDO really does feel like D&D, with the necessity of bringing a balanced party with a good array of skills to most quests. The adventures themselves are also good, many of the story arcs being ones I'd gladly steal for a tabletop game. The community's also the best I've seen since City of Heroes (at least on the server I played), though part of why I don't play these days is due to the drop in activity. One warning: another way DDO really feels like D&D is that it's easy to make an unplayably bad character if you don't do some planning and research before character creation. It is much, much more balanced than tabletop, however, with no classes being worthless.

[Brother Oni]

I haven't played 4th Ed, but I have played Neverwinter and what I can tell, the mechanics work just fine, with the At-Will, Encounter and Daily powers just being on different timers.

I haven't played DDO in a while and I can't remember much of its mechanics.

Neverwinter is a fun game while it lasts and is very pretty for a F2P (let's not get too bogged down here). It has a number of balance issues and a recent major patch has shaken things up a bit, so it's a bit unsettled at the moment. The economy last I heard was still screwed though.
You can hit maximum level cap and do all the content in Neverwinter without spending a penny, although some of the best end game gear is starting to be gated behind real money currency, which affects PvP significantly.

Neverwinter does feel and play much more like a standard MMO, so if Neovid says that DDO feels more like tabletop D&D, I'd take their word over it.


Ultimately I believe both are free to play, so there's no harm in trying each out for a couple of hours (unless you have download limits).

[Dark_Ansem]

thanks for the opinion :d
now, onto the technical... unfortunately.
which one has the better graphics\better technical aspects?

[Brother Oni]

thanks for the opinion :d
now, onto the technical... unfortunately.
which one has the better graphics\better technical aspects?

Neverwinter is prettier but you need a fairly hefty computer, especially with all the particle effects introduced in the post-Icewind Dale patches.

Neverwinter only has two servers, Dragon and Drider. Drider is Russian only, while Dragon is international with the servers in Boston. If you're not based in the US, be prepared for some latency, especially when you get lots of players in the same area (>20) trying to kill the same thing.

[Dark_Ansem]

it's THIS game aye?
http://www.systemrequirementslab.com...ter/11916/?p=r

[Brother Oni]

it's THIS game aye?
http://www.systemrequirementslab.com...ter/11916/?p=r

That's the game.

Bear in mind that recommended requirements are generally for 'average' settings plus tend to be on the optimistic side of that. If you want all the pretty options turned up then you'll need something with a bit more grunt (I've got a Radeon 5770, which is above the recommended of a 2900GT, and I lag badly in crowded scenes or if those damn particle effects are on).

[Psyren]

Now I'm confused - are you guys talking about Neverwinter, the 4e MMO, or Neverwinter Nights, the 3e/3.5 CRPG with small-scale multiplayer?

[CarpeGuitarrem]

Now I'm confused - are you guys talking about Neverwinter, the 4e MMO, or Neverwinter Nights, the 3e/3.5 CRPG with small-scale multiplayer?

Yeah, I feel like we've got discussion ongoing without a clear idea of which one it is.

[JadedDM]

The OP is definitely talking about Neverwinter Online, as he linked to it a few posts up.

[Dark_Ansem]

Thanks Jaded!

[Tengu_temp]

Most of the confusion stems from the fact that NWN is short for Neverwinter Nights, not Neverwinter.

Also, I'd say Neverwinter Nights is the best online DND-based video game, for the simple reason that it lets you play persistent worlds with DMs. It also had some pretty amazing player-made custom scenarios.

[Dark_Ansem]

Most of the confusion stems from the fact that NWN is short for Neverwinter Nights, not Neverwinter.

Also, I'd say Neverwinter Nights is the best online DND-based video game, for the simple reason that it lets you play persistent worlds with DMs. It also had some pretty amazing player-made custom scenarios.

I agree. but it has not aged well :(

[Psyren]

I agree. but it has not aged well :(

Graphically, no - but come on, graphics are the least concern for many great games. Just look at Minecraft or Planescape. Not to mention that the dated graphics mean both titles can easily run on cheaper PCs today.

Anyway, I couldn't tell you which of the MMOs is better as I don't really play any MMOs anymore (except the occasional hour or two of Firefall.)

[Tengu_temp]

The graphics of NWN1 were pretty ugly even when the game came out, so from a certain point of view it didn't age that badly.

[NeoVid]

which one has the better graphics\better technical aspects?

I've never played Neverwinter, and I can still say confidently that it looks better and works better under the hood than DDO. DDO's been around a looong time for an MMO, which is a good thing except for the graphics. Sadly, it's also had more than one dev team over the years, which has left some major things full of spaghetti code.

[wumpus]

First, my review (back when it was in beta) of neverwinter online:
http://kittykittyboomboom.wordpress....r-impressions/

Gameplay, I certainly prefer DDO.
Part of the diference is in simply that DDO started out with 3.x, while NVN (online) is based on 4e.
The bigger difference is that DDO feels like it follows design patterns from fps style games, where NVN and most other MMOs follow RTS patterns. If you wanted to dodge an attack (in beta at least), you hit the "dodge" button in NVN. In DDO, you just move out of the way (note this has been somewhat nerfed over the years. It is now limited to one physics check per "full attack", so if the Ogre was in range for his first clubbing, he can hit you from halfway across the room with his thrid).
NVN gives you the various at-will/encounter/daily powers. DDO lets you use all class powers, feat powers, spells (same spell slots as D&D 3.x), item powers, and enhancement powers (enhancements are a bit of DDO power creep that function like prestige classes). Since all these powers will easily overflow a button bar after a few levels, you can simply tear and move any/all of your 20 button bars (10 powers wide each).

Graphics, I'm pretty sure NVN wins. DDO was launched in something like 2006. NVN was at least 10 years later. I'm sure a quick check of youtube can fill you in.

Cost/pay2win:
One thing I liked about DDO was that costs appeared pretty much up front (hint: don't even think about paying a dime until about 8th level. Note that if you really feel a need to subscribe, it is the "no brainer" option.
Generally speaking, in DDO you pay for content (although there is much more free content than when DDO relaunched as f2p), plus a few races/classes (and if you want a few characters budget for the shared bank. It is that important).
I never say anything I felt I needed to buy in NVN. This worried me. I did see endless spams of "noob won the mighty nighmare stallion mount", crafted to act much as sirens announcing a casino jackpot. There was also a $200 option to pay for the drow race. I basically thought this was insane.
I'd check the player generated content. I was pretty sure that this would make or break NVN.

"D&Dness"
A lot of this depends on which edition you started with, and which edition you were playing at about age 12. There have been a few threads here asking "what defines D&D". While I feel that DDO pretty much nailed the rules (at least to level 10 or so, regardless of switching from Vancian to spell points), it long since stopped feeling like D&D. Basically, I am pretty sure that if you made a "living grayhawk" in real time, things would quickly devolve into players grinding the hamsterwheel in search of ever more daka and loot. This is where DDO has been almost since launch. I suspect that the playerbase of NVN is in a similar state or the game is dead. If you want to experience something a bit more like D&D, I would recommend getting the hang of DDO and then looking for any active permadeath guilds that are still around, hopefully with plenty of new (low-level playing) members. I haven't been active in the permadeath scene for awhile, but the careful teamwork and the way they cut themselves off from the rest of the rat race makes a completely different experience.

PS. Someone mentioned mindflayers above. DDO has mindflayers (mostly in the "madness" chain).

[Kesnit]

First, my review (back when it was in beta) of neverwinter online:
http://kittykittyboomboom.wordpress....r-impressions/

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:

Spoiler

Show

The good points of this game:

...

The bad points of this game:

Lousy graphics. Graphics are about on the same level of Asherons call2. In other words, it looks dated.

Lousy voice acting. It sounds like everything was narrated by the same guy and every time you enter a dungeon there is a little bit of narration. This gets irritating in the first hour. When the guy doing the voice overs tries to sound like a monster, you just want to turn your speakers off. It's really, really bad.

Game play. They tried to reinvent the wheel on game play by using the left mouse button to rotate your character and the right mouse button to attack. This makes it pretty much impossible to rotate your character and attack at the same time. They also added in some jumping and rolling stuff, which works about as well as the whole mouse setup.

The first quest are very repetitive, go smash things and fight an occasional monster. Repeat 50 times (literally). Monsters and creatures rarely drop anything... in fact I can't remember them ever dropping anything.

Healing. You can only heal in the tavern. You do not regenerate anything while in the dungeons. This means that at any given time there are a ton of people sitting in the tavern waiting to regenerate health. Can you say LAG? I knew you could. You can buy food to speed up health regeneration, but again, this ONLY works in the tavern.

The world. To sum it up, Tiny. If you are looking for expansive areas to explore and wander about in you will be very disappointed. This entire game seems to be one cramped city area after another. In fact, I believe the entire thing is inside a city, to no open forests or hilly grasslands to explore. At least, that's what it looks like from the maps tat come with the game.

Overall this is a lackluster game that tries to force you to play in a group the entire time and adds nothing new to the many MMORPGs that are out there. Unless you are diehard D&D fan, skip this game.

Turbine should be ashamed of themselves. This is a step backwards from Asheron's call2.

Dungeons and Dragons Online (DDO) is an above average dungeon crawler that has the potential to be a lot of fun for a while with enjoyable instanced quests and lively gameplay. Unfortunately, there are a lot of little things that will likely make the value of the subscription fee here questionable in a month or two, and even early on many will have issues with forced grouping. Having actually purchased the headstart, I am having a blast - but take a star off of fun for the grouping issue, and two stars off of overall for the rule implementations, lack of PvP, and value proposition, leaving this at 4 fun/3 overall, or 3.5 stars.

With Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) having spawned literally tens of thousands of imitations at the top of the family tree of RPGs, MUDs, and MMORPGS, publisher Turbine has both the blessing of an eager audience and curse of a really tough comparison. The good news is that they've done an enjoyable job of implementing the heart of the D&D experience, which is the dungeon crawl. Unlike many MMORPGs, support classes like rogues are a requirement for almost all dungeons - there's no uber single class build here - and a well designed group and careful gameplay is a more important than any particular player, item, or spell.

However, the group aspect is double-edged. Outside of the first 5 or 6 early dungeons (even less for certain weak combat classes), solo play simply doesn't work - meaning your entire gaming experience will depend on finding a suitable group or guild. The support for this isn't bad, with ingame voice chat and being able to select exactly what you want in terms of a class and level in group search, but even players within a good guild can have significant waiting times while everyone gets ready. Turbine could and should have come up with a way for solo players to do something to advance. All adventure is instanced, which in this implementation makes sense but does mean like Guild Wars the only 'massive multiplayer' aspect of the MMORPG feel is when you're at the taverns.

D&D purists will probably not like the rule implementations either. Monks, druids, and several races are left out as are any number of skills, but the biggest wildcard is adding 4 class and race 'enhancements' which provide benefits far above even the best feats (like +5 to all skills or +3 in a certain statistic). Given how the game is set up, it doesn't really affect balance much - can't solo anyway - but between that and loot drops that rival the taj mahal (down a bit from beta, but not much), it does annoyingly throw traditional character builds out the window. Why bother making an especially stout fighter with high constitution if you're going to get 25 free hit points from the start?

More significant is longer term viability. Advancement is quick enough so the current level cap (10) was actually reached by any number of people in the 10 day beta. This will shortly be raised to 12 and eventually to 20, but the real issue is the lack of any alternative to the dungeon crawl - PvP, crafting, or anything else - that encourages people to stick around to pay the $14.95 monthly fee.

Don't get me wrong. I'm having more fun playing this now than any game in a long time. The issue is that I can also easily see not playing this in 30 or 60 days from now, which is a real shame. Hence, why this is rated 3.5 stars, and why I hope Turbine thinks carefully about how to improve it.

The Good: It's D&D with close attention to the rules. Graphics are good and the user interface is well designed and fairly easy to use. There's a wide selection of quests and most of them are fairly interesting. The mapping is especially good. The penalty for dying is not too harsh.

The Bad: Unlike D&D you only get XP for completing quests or quest objectives. There are no random encounters so you are forced to repeat the same quest multiple times to get enough xp to level up and become strong enough to face newer, more challanging quests. You have to find and join groups to complete quests because most are too difficult to solo and there is no advantage to soloing (no extra treasure or xp). Finding a group can take a long time - together with the long login process I normally I don't get to adventure for at least 10 minutes after starting the program. There is an xp penalty if a member of the group is higher than the quest level. I just tried a level 4 quest where a level 7 rogue joined us for 5 seconds and left (literally). We all suffered a 35% xp penalty :-(

There are also some minor problems with some of the quests. If you don't do exactly what they expect sometimes you have to start again or can't even complete the quest. I expect these issues will be resolved soon.

The Ugly: Lag. There is terrible lag as you enter new areas that can stop you from moving for up to 30 seconds. This is especially frustrating when you're in a dungeon being attacked and you can't respond. I'm sick of dying because of it. At first I thought it was my box but I managed to connect to a server shortly after it was restarted after it crashed (two server crashes in as many weeks while I was playing) and I had almost no lag at all so I'm pretty sure the problem is partially at the server end.

I just cancelled my subscription. I'm wasting too much time waiting for the game.

I am astonished that D&D, of all people, can't put together a fun MMORPG game. The graphics are great, but it doesn't matter, because the frustrations are numerous.

I used to play D&D when I was very young, but let's face it, I'm not so young anymore, so I don't remember what feats I should choose *at the character creation screen before the game has actually started*!!! I shouldn't need to have a B.A. in D&D to figure out what 87 skills I need to start the game with.

This might be "true" to D&D but it is NO FUN. Want to regenerate health and mana during a dungeon? No. Oh you can, but only at one spot and only once. If you wipe, start over. You heard me--start over. Delightful. I was in a party with a mage. He used his spell power in the first fight. Can't get it back. In the 1,205 fights that followed, he stood around and watched us.

Let me mention the control system. Incredibly unwieldly. In the early stages, you're just never sure whether to right or left click. Oddly, right-clicking makes you attack, no matter if you have anything targeted or not. So the 6+ million of us who play world of warcraft (or everquest 2 or just about ANY first person shooter) who use the right mouse button for "free mouse look" are swinging weapons everywhere for no reason. I DARE you to stand in a town and watch people talking to NPCs. Almost ALL of them will randomly swing their weapon during a conversation, walking around, using the bathroom, whatever. Whoosh! Whoosh! The air is full of pointless mace swings that do 1d4 damage. My saving throw versus ineffective UI just failed!

Try this on for size: 4 or 5 missions in, you HAVE to be in a group, full of people who have only been playing the game for 2 hours, so no one knows what the heck they're doing, and the mission is classified as (get this) LONG! We're taking 30+ minutes on a noobie mission! No chance in H-E-double hockey sticks that's going to be any fun.

And the in game speech options? Sounds great, but it's pointless. I turned it on at the request of my party leader, so that I could hear a 17-year-old yell at me to WATCH OUT FOR KOBOLDS about a million times.

Kill a monster get experience points right? No. Only get XP from finishing "encounters" of groups. I played for 3 solid hours, and I got about 1/2 way to level 2. LEVEL 2!! Barely any drops, unless you like breaking 2,653,128 barrels per dungeon and picking up the pennies that spew out.

Trust me: I wanted to play this game so bad. I anticipated it forEVER. And it just stinks. Not like "Was that you?" stink, more like "Is that a dead raccoon in your mailbox" stink. AWFUL.

It is, in my mind, the defining reason that MMORPGs will soon *have* to give us a free trial period before we have to buy it. Most of these games are turning out to be dogs. I almost WISH someone would clone world of warcraft, because a mindless clone would be so much better than this garbage.

After my initial review I realized I may have been too hasty so I went back and gave it a little more time.

Unfortunately, after my second go around I had no better time with it overall so I still cannot give it a good review.

The earlier comments I made still stand about the clunky grouping interface. There is no way to tell which quest you are on or where it is unless everyone is standing around the entrance waiting for you. Finger gymnastics to identify items is still a bother. No way to see who is in your group outside of the group bar, ie, their names dont change color so you can see them.

This was my first game which had voice chat so this was a nice addition but even in groups where everyone had their little voice icon on, no one was talking. Plenty of texting but no talking.

Grouping is one thing, GOOD grouping is vital. I had a few good groups, the one most in my mind was rescuing the kidnapped pirates from the beach area. The problem? It felt like a guided tour of the mission. Those who had done it before knew where every camp was, what would likely be there, and where to go next. I know this happens in many games, but every quest was like that when I grouped with others. Those who didnt know the quest just wandered along behind those who did.

NO class specific content as far as I saw. Paladin stealing and conniving just like the rest. Steal a book, steal back some goods, and on and on.... with no repercussions as far as I could see. I guess I COULD roleplay and not take those quests, then my options for quests are real limited.

In short, here is a summary of what you will do in DDO after you get to harbor and pretty much before too.

Go to a tavern.
Click on someone standing around there.
Read flavor text which doesnt care what class or race or sex or anything your character is. Always the same and always short and forgettable.
Get quest.
If you are beefy you can solo first few, else you'll need a group. LFG time.
Sometimes you can get invited right away, I did get invites under a minute but other times I ran around for 20 minutes or so more before an invite.
Get invited.
Group is doing another quest than yours. Tells you which tavern to go to to talk to which individual to get the quest.
Do so.
Go to quest location in city, a sewer or door most likely.
Run through with group which has done it before, most likely, several times before.
Kill monsters, get loot from chests, wait for someone to train.
Finish or fail mish,
Sell loot, train, get another quest or do same quest over you just did.

Perhaps this is a criticism of most online games in this genre but it is especially evident in DDO because this IS all you do.
It was hoped that DnD would be realized as something more that Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance Online. Storyline just isnt there.

Other issues, city size...
Given the short runs from place to place, why even bother with a city to run through at all? Just have quest giver teleport you and party to the dungeon or building you are needed in?

Clunky combat. Sunder, trip, intimidate, and bluff work I guess, but its hard to tell. I tried tripping opponents a lot but they never went down whereas I was tripped quite often. In a big group it wasnt necessary to try tripping or sunder because bad guys usually went away pretty fast. I know I was able to pull bad guys off mages and clerics with intimidate, but wasnt able to see any difference with Bluff or Sunder.

This has been marketed as a game for DnD players to get together to spend a few hours playing DnD but honestly, as a DnD player for many years, I'll just call a game and well get together and roll dice. No need for a cash outlay of 49 dollars each for a game and 15 dollars a month for each of us to play.

The other comments still stand as well, lack of monks, druids, TONS of material from Eberron, like changlings, shifters, kalashtar, psionics. No political intrigue, no alignment shifting, ie. just because he's RED doesn't mean he's an evil dragon. I had debates with others about this and the primary argument is that this stuff will come in expansions. No. If all of this was in to begin with you might have convinced me to stay. These werent even prestige classes or classes from other books but core classes. And what of gnomes? The gnomes of Zilargo were a damn interesting class of balls-to-the-walls traders and merchants. No gnomes, no gnomes of Zilargo.

There is a lot lacking that makes this DnD in bare mechanics ONLY. As such, its nothing more than an online console game and not a very good one at that.

ORiginal Review

you may like DDO, if you can look past the clunky interface, lots of poor design decisions, and the 15 dollar a month just to play Dark Alliance online.

Clunky Interface:
--No way to turn off the intro keypad hint when you create a new character. It always shows up.
--No way to know which quests you and your team are doing.
--Finger gymnastics to see what an item actually is
--Generally cluttered interface even at 1024x768, tried 1240 and up and interface looked odd.

Poor design:
--If taverns are so important(outside of healing potions or clerics its the only place to heal up), why not allow you to auto zone back to them after completing a mish instead of forcing a haul back to tavern just to heal then set back out to another mish which may be right nearby.

--No use of Heal skill in dungeon except for unconscious characters?

--No wandering monsters?

--Lacking sound for monsters? While the DM voice tells you you hear spiders skittering towards you, it'd be nice to hear skittering.

--Rubberbanding of monsters similar to those in Dark Alliance.

--No knowledge skills, no dragon marks, no kalashar, no changlings, no shifters, no druids, no monks, no psionics. It may be Eberron but its Eberron light.

--If you can have a first and last name, why limit only the first name to being unique. Others might want to play someone with a first name of Mace or Mirth or Raven, would it be so bad to see 4 or 5 Raven soandso's? Any worse than seeing xxxplicit kronix?

Roleplaying community? Nonexistent. Just taverns full of people standing around mutely, occasionally emoting, but usually just quiet. Even when conversation attempts are started.

Overall, it is fun if you look past the frustration but in the end, I seriously doubt I will be paying a monthly fee just to play something that isn't much more than an online console game.

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.

[Metahuman1]

Hey, didn't we have a Neverwinter Online Forum around here somewhere? Can't seem to find it.

[wumpus]

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.

[Psyren]

What is the "permadeath scene?" And what is NVN?

[Brother Oni]

Hey, didn't we have a Neverwinter Online Forum around here somewhere? Can't seem to find it.

It's in the archive as the last post was the end of May: link.

There was a GitP guild, but given that people logged in so infrequently and the different timezones, I typically ended up playing by myself all the time.

[wumpus]

What is the "permadeath scene?" And what is NVN?

NVN is a typo of NWN.
Permadeath is a style of play in DDO similar to "hardcore" in other games, but not directly supported by the game. In its most basic form, you delete a character once it dies (typically raise dead spells are allowed to work, just not all the various means specific to DDO). In practice, there is also a certain amount of self-segregation (grouping with non-permadeath members and using the auction hosue) as well as either playing on higher settings by rule or custom (note that this may be an issue as at least one member of the party has to either have a subscription or played the quest before to open on a harder level).

The Sublime guild [Thelanis] seems to have a few players active on Sunday morning when I checked.

[wumpus]

it's THIS game aye?
http://www.systemrequirementslab.com...ter/11916/?p=r

One thing I recently noticed about DDO is that it appears to strongly expect to be on a SSD. The lag due to a lack of an SSD was enough to stop me from logging on to a few of the servers. LOTRO had some sort of "filedefrag" to fix some of this, but I don't know if it ever worked on DDO (I just moved the thing over to my SSD).

Around 2008 I was running DDO on a 2G Athlon XP (2GHz? single core) machine (with as nearly as wimpy GPU). Since then it has upgraded to DX10 (or maybe DX11), but I suspect it will still work with primitive machines (assuming they can handle the disk access mentioned above).

[Metahuman1]

Darn, I actually had a question to ask that thread too. Pity doing so now would be a necro.

As an Aside, does anyone know of a good guardian fighter build for Neverwinter's Update 4?