You should always try a game for yourself before you listen to internet strangers, but don't expect to be amazed. Neverwinter leaves a decent very first impression, but scratch the surface anywhere and it's plywood underneath. It's clear that it's designed after Perfect World's formula (and a formula that is tragically common in today's MMORPG market): they serve you a three-course meal, the first dish tastes great but the second one is crap; then they tell you that the third course will taste as good as the first one if you pay, but you have to take their word for it. Oh, and in this case, the third course costs like $200 for a dish that you can get elsewhere for $60.
It's really quite bad. The dungeons look neat at first glance but it's a cardboard facade. The combat mechanics are absolutely primitive, and the "difficulty" lies not so much in challenging fights as in just not giving classes the tools to do their jobs. Clerics can't heal anywhere near as well as traditional MMORPG healers can, but the other classes don't have the survivability that you'd expect them to have as compensation for the cleric being more like a GW2 support mage. The guardian can't hold aggro for shit, but the other classes can't really tank the mobs they invariably get on them as a consequence of some of the worst aggro mechanics since EQ. The great-weapon fighter is just a weird and largely useless failure of a tank/dps hybrid.
Everything is directed at the cash shop and towards making you feel forced to open the ol' wallet. You want more than the two small bags you get as quest rewards while leveling? $10 in the cash shop (or like four weeks of grinding dungeons if you won't pay). And that's per bag, which will bind to your character, so you'd have to spend like a hundred bucks to get bags for two characters. Want more than two character slots for your account? Pay up. Want more than fifteen bank slots, which you absolutely must have because you'll find DOZENS UPON DOZENS of items you have to save up and combine later? Get out the Mastercard. Want a fast mount so you can actually win the battlegrounds? $40 please. Do you demand the conceited right to respec your character? $5 per! The list goes on and on with shit that all other MMORPGs offer as basic features but Neverwinter expects you to pay extra for. When creating your character, you have to pick from a number of preset stat sets and the creation process deliberately refrains from telling you what the stats actually do, so when you find out later on that you have to reroll, I hope you haven't already spent $40 on BoP bags. That can't possibly be intentional, though, right? The game boasts of being free to play, but you'd have to spend a few hundred dollars to get the standard features that you take for granted in other games. It's like being offered a free soda but the bottle costs fifty bucks. Hey, you can always drink it out of your cupped hand! Aren't they generous?
It's theoretically possible to get most of that shit via gameplay and the accumulation of a currency called Astral Diamonds, but we're talking months of farming to get the aforementioned fundamental gameplay necessities, let alone any actual luxuries. Keep in mind that ADs are also the currency used on the auction house, so if you want to save up for bags or bank slots, you have to literally opt out of trading. Even identify scrolls and enchanting your items costs AD, so saving up for bags or whatever is a huge sacrifice in character power. They've done their very best to present the appearance of everything being obtainable without paying while making it so unrealistic that one might as well not even acknowledge the possibility.
People keep praising the Foundry feature which is basically a map creation tool where you can make a dungeon and allow others to play in it. I don't buy into that; players are not game developers and can't make content that meets even the lowest conceivable standard, so I expect the hurrah will die down once people start to realize that all of these dungeons are actually horrible. There's no approval process, you can just make a big room with a turd-shaped cluster of treasure chests in the middle and run the "dungeon" over and over again, which people are exploiting the shit out of. Meanwhile, the game itself has practically no meaningful content after the leveling phase; it's just a collection of dungeons, about twelve or so, and then they have three difficulty tiers (including normal which is depleted while leveling). The endgame consists exclusively of extra heroic 5-mans, the world is your oyster!
Everything else is equally shit. Everybody can roll need on everything, and everything including endgame purples is BoE so everybody just rolls need so they can sell it if they win something that isn't for their class. If someone leaves your group, you just have to leave and start over after replacing him. Mobs just spam-CC in PvE so that the poor fucker who's trying desperately to tank will enjoy being stunned about 75% of the time. Wanna know what the main taunt mechanics in this game is? It's an ability that you cast on your target which then amplifies the threat you generate, but if the mob hits you the debuff disappears, so the tank must not get hit by the mob he's tanking. Brilliant design.
The list of criminally poor game design could go on like that for five pages, but the worst part is that you get to suffer through it while being constantly bombarded with reminders that everything would be better if you paid. When you die, you're given the option of rezzing instantly at full health if you pay a little. Crafts tend to take hours, but you can click a button to make it instant for a price. Your companion needs to go home to the farm for an hour in order to level up, but you can do it instantly with a small injection of sweet problem-solving cash. You can swing your credit card at literally everything in this game and fix the gamebreaking issues that the developers have intentionally implemented in order to tempt you into doing just that.
But the controls are kinda neat and also leveling is fairly cool for the first few hours because there's a lot of solo quest instances and it almost feels like playing NWN during that delicious first course of the dinner. The developers seem to have been under the impression that they were developing an action RPG, because the few places where it emulates that genre is the few places where it's decent whereas the game fails spectacularly whenever it tries to be an MMORPG. After making a mockery of Star Trek Online, Perfect World must not have felt like they'd ruined quite enough beloved franchises, so I guess they set their sights on Dungeons & Dragons this time around and they certainly did their part to ensure that nobody else will try to put D&D and MMORPG into contact with eachother again for a long, long time.
