When the massively multiplayer online PC game Neverwinter was announced for consoles, it left a lot of fans and gamers excited and wanting to know more. Neverwinters combat oriented gameplay had always had an heir about it that made you think “What if this game had dedicated controller support?”. When the public beta launched in January for Xbox One it left more questions than answers and opened up a whole slew of problems for Xbox One owners wishing to experience the first true MMO on the console. It has now been a month since launch; has everything gone according to plan for Cryptic? Have they successfully squashed the bugs and ported over their insanely popular free to play MMO to the console market? Let's find out together.
Neverwinter is an MMO set in the Dungeons and Dragons universe that has been around for over 40 years. Players can choose from many different race and class combinations that are all true to D&D lore. For example, in the small group of friends we played with there was a Drow Trickster Rogue, a Dwarf Hunter/Ranger, and a Wood Elf Control Wizard. Each race has its own movement style and unique feel and each class is incredibly fun to play. The quest lines sample from all walks of a D&D campaign with players dealing with lowly bandits to massive dragons and the story of Neverwinter is one of its strongest suits. The quests draw you in and even side missions are connected in ways I haven't seen an MMO do since Star Wars: The Old Republic and the RPG KOTOR series from Bioware. The quick nature of the quests makes you want to play even more as they pack so much action oriented questing into each area. This makes leveling go by at a rapid pace and you can blink and suddenly you've gone from level 1 to level 10 and so on.
It's a refreshing experience as someone who has played MMOs knows that most of them are grind fests that never really seem to have a point. Neverwinter also bucks the normal MMO trends by featuring you as one of many adventurers in a story that plays out over time whereas most MMOs try to build you as this massive world saving hero while there are hundreds if not thousands of other players beside you who just did the same thing.
Neverwinter has never looked better than it does on the Xbox One. Cryptic did an amazing job with the console port and you can tell a lot of detail was put into making it look the best at any resolution on the console. Textures look even better than they did on PC and casting spells and doing combat maneuvers looks incredible. Even the way that your character moves and interacts with different types of environments—a sandy beach vs hard stone walkways—is impressive. It shows that Cryptic wanted to get this right the first time around and make the first true MMO to hit the Xbox One as big of a hit as possible.
The music and audio is also incredibly well done. The voice/lip sync issue found on the PC version at times is non-existent here. The characters are all very well done and they make you feel like you're a part of the world around you with the large screen TV the player is sat in front of.
Having played the PC version however, Neverwinter on Xbox One at this time feels stunted. Cryptic stated that the Xbox One version would receive the same content as the PC version...just not at launch. The Xbox One version of Neverwinter is just the same as the vanilla version of Neverwinter that launched on PC in 2013. Cryptic also is not allowing you to transfer your PC characters to the Xbox One. While this could be due to a number of factors this presents a problem for those who played on PC and want to enjoy the content on the Xbox One; you're playing the exact same game you've already played with no motivation or reward for having done so.
In game server lag and disconnection issues also plagued the game at launch and made it hard for a player to really enjoy the content especially in the group missions and dungeons. Players lagged across maps and spells would be cast and then suddenly not. Players would be running alongside their friends and then all of a sudden everyone was running in place and the all too familiar disconnection screen would pop up. These issues are few and far between now, but it doesn't bode well for new content releases if this is the experience that players can expect every time a new piece of content hits.
“Neverwinter is the best console MMO to date”