If you’re trying to play Neverwinter at the moment, you’re out of luck — the game is completely offline at the moment due to a massive bug in the auction house that saw players receiving free money simply by bidding negative amounts.

Last night, some clever chap found that if you bid negative amounts on your auctions the game freaked out and handed you not only the item you were bidding for, but all of the money you bid as well. So if you slammed down negative two million Astral Diamonds on an item, you’d not only end up with the item, but with a further two million Astral Diamonds on top. Nice!

Then players discovered that you could take those Astral Diamonds to the Zen market, where players were offering real life currency in exchange for Astral Diamonds, and… well, needless to say, Cryptic immediately shut the game down.

They’re now working overtime to investigate who exploited the economy, and are currently promising a “high likelihood of character-specific rollbacks” and are “investigating the possibility of a shard-wide rollback” — something which would make the hundreds of thousands of completely innocent players pretty unhappy, as this 100-page thread on the official forums shows.

Neverwinter‘s official Twitter account claims the game should be back online within the next hour.

Source: Neverwinter Forums (thanks, Nemesis_22!)

NeverWinter is still “technically” in beta (although characters will not be wiped before launch), meaning much of the foundation content may change before full release. Please consider this more of a “detailed hands on” than a comprehensive review, especially since it’s likely to rapidly change over the course of the next few months.

When it comes to the MMO genre in 2013, a particular saying instantly comes to mind — “The more things change, the more they stay the same”. The formula for success has been been well and truly established, over the ashes of a plethora of failed titles. Developers now know what works and what doesn’t, replacing potentially risky gameplay mechanics with small refinements to well trodden, successful systems such as real-time combat and dungeon crawling.

So if anyone should be in a position to know precisely what failure looks like and how to hopefully alleviate it, it’s Cryptic Studios, reborn under the Perfect World banner to develop the second Dungeons and Dragons MMO – Neverwinter. With three (and a half) titles under its belt, Cryptic are one of the most experienced development houses in the industry, coupled with a publisher (Perfect World) considered a rising star after a host of successful free-to-play efforts in both Asia and the US. Can this team strike gold with one of their most ambitious projects yet?

Let’s face it, if you’re thinking about playing Neverwinter, then you’re in one of two boats. Either you’re a complete MMO tragic and pretty much jump at the chance to dip your toes in yet another virtual world, or you’re a bit of a DND fanboy, secretly harboring fantasies about shooting magic missiles and shouting “Huzzah!” while you adjust your wizard hat. The good news is that both boats won’t be disappointed to dock at this port — Neverwinter is a remarkably polished and well-designed playground. Very little has been promised, in terms of majestic sandbox elements or siegeable guild halls, and so as a result, you don’t feel gazumped once you realize that these are the same old quests, you’re the same old warrior and that red dude over there probably wants to skewer you with his long sword.

Dig a little deeper, however, and things aren’t quite as they seem.

Cryptic have gone back to the drawing board when it came to designing Neverwinter‘s combat system, which is not only clever in its operation (easy to learn, hard to master), but actually manages to inject some much needed strategy into the same old dance. The removal of automatically regenerated health prevents you from using time to barge your way through dungeons, and instead forces careful movement during battle, actually thinking about each thrust, cast, block or dodge in order to preserve precious (and expensive!) potions or managing cooldowns on healing spells. Everything is in real-time, with both mouse buttons dedicated to raw strikes while the keyboard maps certain skills that require selection before combat begins. There are no enormous skill mazes here here — taking a page out of the book from Guild Wars 2 and TERA, the game offers a limited set of abilities that can be learned or upgraded via skill points assigned during leveling.

Unfortunately, progression is remarkably linear, with the main questline following a reasonably straight path of missions above and below ground, coupled with a talent tree that doesn’t enjoy much branching out. If you decide to be a Guardian Fighter, for example, you’ll likely find yourself doing a lot of blocking. All of the time. Thankfully, the various dungeons are long, sprawling and varied in their design and structure, with difficulty levels curving at an acceptable rate. Cryptic have also thrown in timed events that reward you for completing certain quest or mission types within a certain period; such as fighting back a player-created invasion via the Foundry, or competing in a skirmish with other players. The only problem with this system is that some of this content can take much longer to complete than the time allows — I remember rushing through dialogue and battles as the seconds ticked away, eventually losing my 150% experience reward.

It’s also quite difficult to feel like you’re part of a community — while the cities are (currently) bustling with commerce, people and a surprising lack of spam, the game feels a little lonely. Entering dungeons, where you will spend a significant amount of your time, are instanced affairs that feel cut off from the wider fight. Unless you’ve made a conscious effort to find other players, whether via chat, your guild or matchmaking, you’ll probably take advantage of the companion system, which allows you to purchase allies to fight alongside you.

Many might hail this as a clever addition for players who enjoy playing it alone, but its quite a blow to building a community of social raiders that are forced to rely on one another to expand. None of the content is especially enthralling in a solo context, and while it is certainly a challenge to try and complete it without a team, it’s also a little boring and disheartening to take down a tough boss without a single other player to share it with.

And then there’s the supposed killer app, chopped and changed from its original incarnation in Cryptic’s other offering – Star Trek Online. Neverwinter‘s Foundry system unlocks for players once they hit level 15, which probably takes about seven or 8 hours of play on average, and unlocks a very detailed and easy to use editor that sits on top of the main client. From here, players can essentially customize an entire story based quest-line from painstaking building a plot and characters, to building maps, items and even costumes. Feel like basing your adventure inside a tall and ominous tower? Sure. Want all of the NPCs to speak Farsi? Why not. Feel like recreating the plot of the 1997 masterpiece, AirBud? Well… that could be a little difficult. But my point is that creating strings of quests alongside a team of NPCs inside an environment of your own choosing is astonishingly accessible. If you ever tried creating your own quests and dungeons in Skyrim, you’ll probably feel at home here, although the Foundry does a much better job of containing your ridiculous fantasies inside a relatively open sandbox.

Sadly, not as much kudos can be given to a lot of the content created by the current crop of players. While there are some obvious standouts (An adventure called “I am Slayer” is a fantastic demonstration of how the system can be easily adapted to existing environments) others are just messy, broken and plain stupid attempts at cashing in on memes, recreating quests from other games or building poorly designed, maze-like dungeons with duplicated assets. In order to combat a sea of crap, however, the game allows a voting and rating system to push most of the garbage out of plain site, and even allows approved player made content to be played as a “daily”. But already, players are exploiting this system in order to easily farm equipment, gold and experience by developing clever, easy, environments that meet the specific requirements on the surface to become “reward quests” but allow for easy, repeatable extraction.

But these are largely teething problems, and the concept of the Foundry feels like a much better fit within a world and gamestyle focused on contained and rigid environments than a title promising deep and wide space exploration. The tweaks to the editor make using it breathlessly easy after a few hours of experimentation, and the ability to explore and play your creation in real-time, as the developers would, is very cool and allows for almost unlimited content. The developers are obviously planning for expansions and dynamic content to be introduced into the game, but as yet it’s unknown how this will be offered. Being F2P, Neverwinter has a cash shop and a number of “packages” that offer extra items and bonuses to experience. At present, free users are restricted to 2 character slots per server, a surprisingly small inventory and reduced bank slots. Personally, I found no impediments of disadvantages for not paying a cent, and like other Perfect World games, there are very few pokes and prods for you to purchase anything.

For a game that almost came out of nowhere with very little fanfare, I’m very pleasantly surprised with Neverwinter. It does little to overhaul or revolutionize the MMO roadtrain, but where it excels is within its challenging and strategic combat system, that encourages players to mix up their parties and reduces the traditional disadvantage of healing or tank characters. The addition of the Foundry makes this title almost mandatory for gamers who enjoy customising and building their own experiences, and offers it in a manner that is very polished, user friendly and accessible. Sure, the quests aren’t much and the road to endgame is about as non-linear as Call of Duty, but who cares?

Maybe MMO developers need to stop promising the world when they can only offer a city, and instead focus on making what they have just plain, good old fun for everyone.

Sound like fun? You can download the Neverwinter open beta client from our file library right here, and save yourself 3GB of quota (iiNet group customers only!).

Our good friend and file library overlord Cas Bitton has uploaded the current beta files for Neverwinter to the games.on.net file library! You can download them here.

Please note that our file library is of course only quota-free for customers of the iiNet group — everyone else only gets to enjoy the fast speeds instead.

Neverwinter just went into open beta yesterday and is free-to-play, so jump in if you’re keen. Sign-up here.

A lot of people are shrieking at me lately about how much they’re enjoying the beta for Neverwinter, the D&D MMO from Cryptic and Perfect World. Well, Neverwinter has now entered open beta — so you, like me, can download it and find out for yourself exactly how much fun it is.

There will be no further character wipes, and the game will be free to play, so… essentially, Neverwinter has pretty much just launched. There you go! It might be a bit unbalanced or unpolished as it’s technically still in beta, but hey, it’s free.

If you’re interested, you can sign up right here. Are you already playing it? Share your experiences with our GONnites in the comments below.

Perfect World have announced that Neverwinter, the 4th-edition-based D&D MMO, is set to head into open beta at the end of this month.

Starting April 30, you’ll be able to jump straight in and play it for yourself. Before then however, existing beta-testers will enjoy another gameplay weekend from April 12-14 where they can test out the new professions, among other things.

Looks good? Hit up the registration page here and get ready for the 30th.

The first closed beta event for Neverwinter has begun, and to celebrate Cryptic have announced a new character class — the Devoted Cleric. As you would expect, the cleric is mostly a support class with healing powers and AoE buffs and debuffs, but they are definitely capable of dealing some holy damage as well. Check out the trailer below, showcasing the clerics and their many talents, and tell us what you think.

I’m sure that there will be much moaning and groaning about this entirely CG trailer. But let me tell you, I play a lot of D&D and seeing these ideas come to life, even if it is 4E, is pretty spectacular to me.

We have a dracolich and an army of otherwise undead creatures attacking Neverwinter, and a group of adventurers trying to stop them. They seem a little outnumbered to me — perhaps that’s where you come in, eh? — followed by Valindra the lich queen being all evil and undead and stuff.

This is apparently the third part in a three-part series of CGI trailers, but I cannot find the others for the life of me. Watch it and tell us what you think. And if you happen to know where I could find the other two, please link me! In other news, the beta events start this week, for those of you lucky/rich enough to get in.

Source: VG247

If I’m going to play Neverwinter, I say to myself, I might as well play as Drizzt, right? With the ‘Hero of the North’ Founder’s Pack, you essentially can be! Between being a “drow renegade” and having your own unique panther companion, I hope to see lots of characters named ‘Not_Drizzt’ and other variations in the opening days.

There’s lots more in the Founder’s Pack though, including a new costume, treasure, a respec token and some other bits and pieces. Most importantly however, it will buy you VIP access to the game, jumping you to the front of queues as well as access to the three beta weekends and five-day early access to the game when it’s launched. And an armoured spider mount. FYI.

That’s all very exciting! What do you have to do to get your hands on all this cool stuff? The answer is very simple: go here and pay $200. Yes, it seems a bit steep doesn’t it. Bear in mind though that it’s got over $500 worth of stuff in it. So perhaps not for the casual player, but if it’s your thing, it seems definitely worth the price of admission. For more – and better animated – details, check out the trailer below.

While still cautiously optimistic about the prospects of upcoming MMO Neverwinter, I can’t help but feel that, in this trailer at least, the story seems very similar to that of the original Neverwinter Nights. Of course, it’s the Spellplague instead of the Wailing Death, and the cultists are devil-related instead of creator race-related, but the similarities are definitely there. Perhaps this is just one aspect of the story, I’m not really sure.

I’m still waiting for Neverwinter to wow me (WoW me, perhaps?) and, to be honest, this trailer doesn’t really do it. But check it out anyway, see what you think! And of course, let us know what you think in the comments.

I am cautiously excited about upcoming MMO Neverwinter. I sure loved the Neverwinter Nights games, and I sure love D&D. But Fourth Edition? And an MMO? I am yet to be convinced. This video looks pretty nice, though, and makes combat look pretty dynamic for an MMO, so I guess we’ll have to wait and see. Coming courtesy of IGN, this video shows off the Guardian Fighter, the game’s tank class, doing what he does best.

Flower arrangement.

If you’re reading this you’re probably not at PAX going hands-on with Cryptic’s new MMO, Neverwinter. Neither am I. A moment of sympathy and camaraderie then, before we paw eagerly over what snippets have escaped from the event. The developer is showing off the Blackdagger Keep zone via a new trailer, which I invite you to view below. There’s also a pile of screens through the source link, should static images be more your thing.

Neverwinter is expected in early 2013, having been delayed earlier this month.

Source: VG247

Source: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

As is custom with Gamescom we are beginning to be overloaded with new screens, and these ones from the upcoming Neverwinter MMO are particularly gorgeous. With its strong focus on community-created content and toolkits, I’m very excited to see what Atari can do when this launches.

Source: Press Release