Rock, Paper, Shotgun

I spent some time typing experimentally into the headline bar “…Wants You To Founder Its Beta Weekend… Founders Keepers… Beta Found Than Neverwintered” and so on. But none of it made any sense. And that is what I came up with. You know. Because drow. Sorry. My powers are gone. Fortunately, by returning to a nest made of shredded RPGs, held together with mucus and bad dreams, those powers can be regenerated. I’ll retreat there, probably around February 8-10, March 8-10, and March 22-24, which is when Neverwinter‘s beta will take place. With its user-generated content and D&D trappings, it should be a healing sort of environment for discombobulated old nerd-wraiths like me. The more excitable among our kind – and those with wallets full of platinum – will like invest in Founders Packs, which are fashionable pre-order garments of the online-gaming catwalk. Or something.

Trailer can be found in the Underdark below! Giant armoured spider mounts from Menzoberranzan! Look over there! *vanishes*
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I asked Adam if the Neverwinter remake was out, and he said he thought it was. Then I checked and it turns out it’s not. We were both wrong. I was thinking of the Baldur’s Gate remake, and Adam just got confused and believed every game ever was released. The boy’s been planning a Half-Life 5 marathon, and I had to break it to him. That is the worst part of the job, believe me. He can make a puppy face like no-one else. The best bit is when I get to show you all trailers of upcoming games, especially when they toss around terms like “Great Weapon Fighter”. Click your strong internet browser and use your average eyeball lookers to watch it.

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No good ever comes from having a creaky old lady narrator. Take Helm’s Hold, a healing monastery in Cryptic’s upcoming Neverwinter MMO. Its original purpose is to wipe magical curses from the afflicted. A noble place. A safe place. Then the portentous, wobbly narrator starts to speak and you know she’s basically invoking trouble. Fiendish cultists have taken over, and now all the people are suffering with itchy magic skin. The recording studio was probably built on an ancient shark burial ground, and her script was likely scrawled on the back of the pattern of the Turin Shroud. Do everyone a favour: take a lozenge and check for bones sticking out the ground whenever you’re at a recording session. Neverwinter was such a nice place before you came along.

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I’m still feeling pretty on-the-fence about Cryptic’s Neverwinter MMO-that-wasn’t-but-then-was-again – primarily because 1) it’s another fantasy MMO and 2) Neverwinter Nights was kind of the greatest. But, if nothing else, Neverwinter’s looking to at least preserve a bit of the BioWare build-o-tron classic’s spirit. That is to say, you can make anything your heart desires – so long as your heart desires an MMO mission that can be designed within Neverwinter’s (impressively robust) Foundry toolset. Follow a user-created web of lies, deceit, breath-taking plot twists, intrigue, and charmingly rogue-ish quips after the break for precious, precious details.

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It’s been a little while since we caught up with Neverwinter – the last glimpse being the Blackdagger Keep trailer at the start of this month – but things are continuing to tick along towards the game’s “early 2013″ release. D&D types will know what to expect from the Guardian Fighter class, which appears below as the first part of Neverwinter’s class profiles series. He is, pleasingly, a tanky bastard.

Look below!
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There’s eventually some nice in-game footage of the combat in Neverwinter in the new trailer, revealed via PAX this weekend. The game is set for release early next year, but in the meantime you can find out more about skull-faced pirate, Blackdagger, below.

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I came here to tell you about something pertaining to Cryptic’s Neverwinter MMO-that-nearly-wasn’t, but then – at the 11th hour – my post got delayed into 2013. The news is, of course, disappointing for many of you, but we’re confident that we can use the extra development time to bring you a more polished, visceral post with double the number of guns and sextuple the number of puns. In the meantime, though, I can discuss the delay of another, entirely unrelated game. Let’s call it Neverminter. And imagine that the N is upside-down.

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If you can ignore the bizarre choice to spend 30 seconds showing the faces of a crowd looking at a screen showing Neverwinter footage you can’t see, then the video below will eventually show some “pre-alpha” (which I always thought meant drawings on a whiteboard) in-game content for the Cryptic MMO.

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It might just be me, but the tone of this first Neverwinter MMO trailer seems like it’s about to break into being a send-up at any moment. I was sat waiting for the punchline that never comes. Anyway, it’s basically illustrating that the game’s dungeons will be heavy on the story elements, which seems to make sense, given the Dungeons & Dragonsness of it all. Also appropriate: a dragon. The game – which was recently reworked as a free-to-play MMO – will appear next year.
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It’s not quite clear what IGN’s source is for this, but according to them the Dungeons & Dragons online-RPG Neverwinter, which Cryptic said originally was “an old-school tactical Western RPG”, but online, is apparently an now MMO more “closer to a game like Nexon’s Vindictus”. So a free-to-play one where action dominates. Quite how this contrasts against what Cryptic’s Jack Emmert told us previously is detailed in part through the link (and mainly consists of learning the lessons of Star Trek and Champions going free), but it doesn’t actually seem like that a big a change to me.

Nevertheless, word is that the game has been delayed to the end of 2012 to make the necessary changes. It would seem that these changes might have come about thanks to Cryptic’s acquisition by expanding F2P giant Perfect World, who also bagged Runic, and are planning to make a Torchlight MMO at some point.

You might recall that last year I talked to Cryptic’s Jack Emmert about the MMO he called “an old school Western tactical RPG”. It’s Neverwinter, a game that also, apparently, marks a new direction for the studio. You can see some of the fruits of that new direction over on the official site, and also in the teaser trailer below.

Looks like a fantasy action-RPG to me! Yes sir. The most interesting aspect of this, of course, is that Cryptic are planning to let people come up with their own dungeons, with their own fictions, to be installed in the world. If they pull it off it could be a genuinely interesting spin on the way these kinds of games work.
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