I’ll have to give this a go; the D&D aspect of it is probably going to make it more of a draw for me than GW 2, which I played four about three hours before I got appallingly bored with it.
First impression, the game is freakin’ gorgeous. At least as detailed as Skyrim, GW2 and Rift, with the advantage of using a color palette that contains colors other than drab, dark, muddy and gray.
Still to be determined: Is the game soloable? If not, how workable is the PUG system? Also, is there an in-game chat system, like there was with DDO? And, if so, does anybody use it?
All the normal quests are soloable, though some might be tricky depending on your class, how good you are at playing and whether you have a useful companion (every class should pick the cleric pet, IMO). Dungeons and skirmishes require 5 people, but using the in-game queue system to get a group for those is easy and mostly convinient. Not sure what sort of chat system you mean, but there’s the usual chat channels - no global LFG channel, but /zone works that purpose.
As for my own progress in the game, I finally finished the next dungeon after Wolf’s Den and it was again entirely doable with normal pug and enjoyable.
ah, by chat system I meant in-game VOIP chat, using headsets, rather than Ventrilo or Mumble. Something DDO got right and WoW got terribly, terribly wrong.
Oh that. The game does have one and it has a decent voice quality, but since I don’t have a headset I haven’t tried it myself.
I’ve been playing since the open beta started and I’m enjoying the heck out of the game. I have a level 22 rogue and level 14 wizard. Some of the quests are tough for the wizard, but once I get my healer companion it should be a breeze. The rogue is a crap load of fun. I’ve run one 5 man dungeon in a PUG. It was basically a dps-fest, not sure how the cleric kept up. I’ve done a few skirmishes and have fun with those.
I haven’t run any Foundry quests yet because I can’t tell if which ones are level appropriate. The same quests show for both of my characters.
I haven’t played an MMO since I quit WoW five years ago. I’m really liking the more action oriented combat.
I haven’t spent any money on the game yet, but will probably drop $20 at the end of the month.
I’m curious about how… burdensome the microtransaction aspect of this game is. I played STO for a bit, and disliked all of the limitations placed upon the FTP player (although they did offset that with the ability to “earn” Zen points in game, but that got tedious pretty quickly).
How does this game compare? How many character slots do you get without purchasing extra? Is the amount of inventory/bank space you get for free adequate? How wide is the gulf between FTP and subscription? Can a more-than-casual player feel that they have a strong character without pumping money into the game, even beyond a subscription?
TIA for any insight.
Haven’t played STO, but let’s see … you get 2 character slots for free. I haven’t had inventory or bank space problems yet at lvl 45 - it helps tradeskill stuff goes to its own tab and that you get some fairly big bags from story quests.
As far as I know NWN doesn’t have a subscription, only microtransactions. The only things I’d want from the Zen store are a faster mount (you can get a 110% mount with cash right away at low levels) and a companion that levels to rank 30. The cleric you get for free caps at rank 15 but that isn’t as bad as it sounds since the heal she casts does 10% of your max hp so it scales perfectly.
I think you can get more powerful enchantments easier with RL cash, but so far I haven’t felt that my actual raw power in dungeons was lagging behind of those who have spent cash. All in all, I don’t think NWN’s cash shop is perfectly or even especially well done right now, but I’d say you can have fun leveling up without spending a dime. Even at max level I doubt the power gap is crippling to a FTP player but I don’t have a lvl 60 so who knows.
That’s because the foundry quests scale to your level. Do any you want at any point.