(The trick is to have the inconveniences not be game-breaking and encouraging quitting out of frustration over maybe sometime converting into a paying customer.) Here, I’m paying a big fat $0, so little inconveniences are to be expected.
The difference to me is that I’m paying $15 a month in those games, same as everyone, and would rather not have my preferred playstyles treated like second class citizens. Others may find it more difficult to ignore, similar to how I personally have trouble ignoring the existence of raids in traditional MMOs being heralded as the pinnacle of existence and all the good gear being available only there. (I did manage to sell off 8 of them on the auction house, so -someone- out there is buying them…) It’s all rainbow colors and much blue and purple, it must be neat stuff, I guess!įortunately, I have no idea what any of those words mean, so it’s eminently ignorable for my vacationing purposes. One generally ignores those and lets them scroll by as stuff I won’t understand as a newbie vacationer anyway, but everyone’s personal mileage for tolerating those is different.Īlong with the ubiquitous lockboxes, whose drop rate is fairly insane. Let’s see: goldseller spam, high-end microtransaction trades and holy trinity/need correct class and gear for group problems of some sort or other… Tradespam was running rampant in the big city, being spammed faster than I could move, along with cryptic LFGs of strange abbreviations for content I assume was for super max leveled elder game players. (I generally don’t need shadows or a gazillion physics particles flying around just to make things look ‘better’ and more busy, for example.) This at least gives broader options for people to adjust what they can or can’t give up for smoother gameplay. Landmark’s FPS indicator taught me that my CPU tended to be the weaker of my pair, so I cranked it down to near minimal, giving up view and draw distance, and was able to get my GPU settings up to a nice looking medium. One pretty neat thing that Neverwinter has is the ability to adjust graphics card-dependent and CPU-dependent graphics separately. I’m sure it’s a nice city… if the textures loaded in, and if I could actually move…įramerates alternated between 9-1o FPS if I was lucky, and this is probably the first MMO I’ve encountered whose FPS indicator bothered to show FPS below 1 in decimal points.
The bad news is that I managed to pick the day some new update dropped to try the game, so the central city of Protector’s Enclave – where the game first drops you right after completing the tutorial (kinda neat in that you don’t have to go through numerous starter zones to get there) – was an utter rubberbanding lagfest of epic proportions.
The good news is that these personal instances are great on FPS.Įven on my ailing computer, I can hit 40-60FPS in these places. Quest gameplay-wise, it feels like a version of DDO where you talk to NPCs, get quests, then run to ye olde dungeon or adventure instance where you then get your own personal dungeon crawl. (Somewhere out there, the dev that spent their time coloring in the icon graphics and backgrounds is celebrating.) I may have overcompensated a little, but at least I can see some of the icons now. It joins LOTRO as being the second game where I felt the need to bring up the UI beyond 100% and magnify it to like 1.3x.
The default UI is remarkably reminiscent of LOTRO with its text font and tiny size with elaborate button graphics on the skills you can barely make out at the default size. If Dungeons and Dragons Online and Lord of the Rings Online had a baby, that baby would be Neverwinter…Īnd when I say “baby,” I mean exactly that.Īs in, it seems to be the much more simplistic version of either game named above.