Review of Heroes of Neverwinter (Facebook App) by Atari

What I find most annoying is the quest chains. Do quest A, get item X. Item X is required to do Quest B, which rewards item Y, which is required to do Quest C. IF for any reason you fail to complete quest C. You need to go all the way back to Quest A, because you no longer have the required item to do quests B or C. Unless you want to spend real money to skip the requirements.

Dannager said:

This review doesn't give me high hopes for the reviewer's future work. It seems to set the metric of the game at true-to-form 4e, and then dings it whenever it doesn't "live up" to the original game.

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Well agree with me or not, that's your prerogative, but its a bit low to call into question my ability to do reviews simply because I chose not to like the HoN app or disagree with your PoV.

As someone else aptly pointed out in a later comment, if you're going to put D&D on the cover of new product, then the expectation is that the game behaves like D&D 4E. And this one does not.

The changes made to the rules and character class structure broke the gaming experience, made Fighters and Rogues useless, and the treasure system is designed to be nothing but a big eff-u from the coders to make you feel frustrated you don't have astral diamonds. By removing the fundamental combat tactics of flanking positions, marking/taunting, and forced movement, the game has become nothing more than a DPS/Healing race between the player and the computer.

In other words, by not remaining faithful to the original game, they broke the system, and created a substandard gaming experience. I thought my points made that abundantly clear.

In fact, the optimal almost-never-will-fail group is 2 Clerics+2 Wizards. Try it out! You can run through the first 10 dungeons on Hard or Heroic with this combo and barely break a sweat. You have tons of AoE damage and tons of healing - assuming that your friends made their characters reasonably, and didn't take silly things like shield spells. If you add a Fighter or Rogue to the mix, you'll feel just how weak those classes are in the D-Atari-D game of who-can-deal-the-most-raw-damage-first-wins. The melee classes are gimped with substandard damage, no AoE abilities, and few combat effects that actually matter - and of course, they cannot heal the party.

As far as the Google+ quip, I see that I offended some Facebook users being a smart-aleck. Mea culpa. I've removed the offending remark. But it doesn't change my opinion of the app, and I certainly won't be spending my time playing it.

This is a PnP RPG site. So it is perfectly good and normal to have that PoV in the review. Presumably their are plenty of other sites that could review it as a video game.

And besides, I think the astral diamonds were the source of the hatred.

Neuroglyph said:

The melee classes are gimped with substandard damage, no AoE abilities, and few combat effects that actually matter - and of course, they cannot heal the party.

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While I won't disagree with you that you can nearly completely circumvent the difficulty of adventures with a non-standard adventuring party, and I don't disagree that decision to not build "stickiness" into the fighter, and increased damage output into the rogue are strange decisions, the developers are still inviting player feedback, and the issues you mention are high on the list of "fixes" requested by other players.

However - I've found a rogue's Stunning Blow is almost necessary for locking down the adventure Big Bad, or any spell caster, really. You slap a Stunned condition on something, and you can easily ignore that enemy for multiple rounds in most occasions. Couple that with Knockout and trap disabling, and you've got a more than viable party member in my opinion.

Additionally, a fighter with Sweeping Blow and Thicket of Blades can chop through multiple minions/melee baddies and keep them off the backline - especially since ToB slaps a Slowed condition on the targets (as does the fighter's At-Will power). I guess that's enough stickiness for now.

As for the over-importance of clerics, I think this is far more a problem with the fact that the class is the only one in the game that's 2-stat dependent. More times than I care to consider I've hired a cleric who has WIS as their primary stat and has nothing but melee powers based off of STR. Or vise-versa. It's far too easy to end up with a cleric who can't do their job. You probably *would* need 2 in some cases.

It sounds to me like your chief complaint against the game is that it's "breakable." You can abuse the intended system in ways it's not intended to be played. Sounds a lot like D&D to me, in that respect.

I guess, in the end, I'm happy to play the best game on the Facebook "platform", despite it's flaws. The fact that it's not "4e-pure" doesn't effect me in the least. The fighter is recognizably a fighter, the rogue a rogue, the cleric a cleric, and the wizard a wizard. That's good enough, in my opinion.

As others have pointed out, this review is really quite unfair, not to mention unnecessarily cynical. Yes, this game is not a perfect adaptation of the 4E ruleset, and yes, it obnoxiously asks for your money like every other FB game, but it's a lot more true to D&D than I was expecting anyway. Why the hate-on?

doctorhook said:

As others have pointed out, this review is really quite unfair, not to mention unnecessarily cynical. Yes, this game is not a perfect adaptation of the 4E ruleset, and yes, it obnoxiously asks for your money like every other FB game, but it's a lot more true to D&D than I was expecting anyway. Why the hate-on?

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I think you're confusing critique with hatred. I would argue that it isn't hatred to point out the areas of the game that failed to live up to my expectations as a gamer - offering that opinion is part of the review process. Certainly it isn't hatred to have the opinion that I will not be playing this game because I don't like it. And I'm fairly certain it isn't hatred to question why a software company would choose to make sweeping changes to a game system that works as it interprets those rules and powers into a video game format.

As a reviewer, my job is to praise the stuff that's good, and make mention of the stuff that is bad, and then form an opinion on the good-to-bad ratio. I mentioned several good things about the app in the review, and many bad things I disliked about the app. Based upon the fact that there was more bad things than good things, and that those bad things made me not want to play the app, I think my review was quite reasonable.

And I'd be curious to know what part of the review was unfair. Is it unfair to ignore (and not write about) the parts of the game that cause Heroes of Neverwinter to not be like D&D? Or is it more unfair to the reader who has never played the game, and then reads a review that doesn't tell all the facts about a game?

Neuroglyph said:

Well agree with me or not, that's your prerogative, but its a bit low to call into question my ability to do reviews simply because I chose not to like the HoN app or disagree with your PoV.

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No, it's not.

You are a reviewer. Your job, as I (and I imagine most others here) expect it, is to examine a product and tell me whether or not this website's audience would find it enjoyable.

Your job is not to compare a product to some other product in an entirely different medium (online) and format (Facebook-casual) and decide it sucks because they're not identical. That doesn't tell me anything worthwhile, except that the Facebook D&D game is not like playing D&D with five people around a table with a DM. I didn't need your review to tell me that. I need your review to tell me whether or not the game is fun, and why that is or isn't the case.

As someone else aptly pointed out in a later comment, if you're going to put D&D on the cover of new product, then the expectation is that the game behaves like D&D 4E. And this one does not.

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It behaves like D&D 4e in a lot of ways - far more than you give it credit for. It's obvious in playing it that it's based on 4e. Unmistakably. Yes, they removed some of the fiddly bits, because this is designed as a quick, casual experience.

Either way, though, slapping D&D on the "cover" tells me that it'll feature adventure, monsters, magic, and treasure. This game has all of those things.

The changes made to the rules and character class structure broke the gaming experience,

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I played during the beta and it was perfectly playable. Not broken at all. I'm sure it's even better now that the game is actually out.

made Fighters and Rogues useless,

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The Fighter's ability to remain standing and in the fight makes him a great addition. The Rogue doesn't deal enough damage, you're right. That's a valid criticism, because it judges the game on its own merits.

and the treasure system is designed to be nothing but a big eff-u from the coders to make you feel frustrated you don't have astral diamonds.

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lol

By removing the fundamental combat tactics of flanking positions, marking/taunting, and forced movement, the game has become nothing more than a DPS/Healing race between the player and the computer.

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Or it's supposed to be a casual game that you can play in 15 minutes. Again, you should not be describing the game with terms like "By removing..." because that demonstrates that you're judging the game by some other game's rubric. There is plenty of room for tactical thought in the Facebook game, it just doesn't take an hour to get through an encounter.

In other words, by not remaining faithful to the original game, they broke the system, and created a substandard gaming experience. I thought my points made that abundantly clear.

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You did. You made it very clear that you think this game sucks because it's not another game. That exists in a different medium. In a different format.

Here. Go to a game review website. Look up some Game Boy Advanced/SP game reviews for The Legend of Zelda Four Swords. Now look up some GameCube reviews for The Legend of Zelda Wind Waker. I want you to count how many of those reviewers decided to give the Game Boy Advanced/SP game a lower score because its graphics didn't live up to the GameCube game. Not many, right? You know why that is? Because it's silly to criticize a Game Boy game for having less advanced graphics than a GameCube game.

Now, that's silly. But you know what would be sillier? If someone wrote a review for a Legend of Zelda board game and criticized it for not having sound quality on par with the Wind Waker console game. That is what you're doing in this review.

As far as the Google+ quip, I see that I offended some Facebook users being a smart-aleck. Mea culpa. I've removed the offending remark. But it doesn't change my opinion of the app, and I certainly won't be spending my time playing it.

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You didn't offend anyone. I don't think anyone in here has any strong loyalties to a particular social network beyond convenience. It was just sort of a non-sequitor that isn't really supportable.

Neuroglyph said:

And I'd be curious to know what part of the review was unfair. Is it unfair to ignore (and not write about) the parts of the game that cause Heroes of Neverwinter to not be like D&D? Or is it more unfair to the reader who has never played the game, and then reads a review that doesn't tell all the facts about a game?

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It is unfair to say "This game is on Facebook, and therefore cannot be like a game that is not on Facebook. I only like my D&D games in a not-on-Facebook format, so this game sucks," and call that a review.

Here's what you should write: "This is a Facebook game. It is designed for casual play, and you can get through a dungeon on your lunch break from your work computer. If you are looking for an experience that is similar to playing Dungeons & Dragons around a dinner table with four friends and a DM, look elsewhere. But if you're looking for a way to get your adventuring fix in a spare 15 minutes, here's what you need to know about Heroes of Neverwinter..."

Oh, and Hard and Heroic dungeons are designed to be completed by characters at levels higher than the adventure's rating. So yes, if you go into the Heroic version of a 1st-level dungeon with a 1st-level party, you will encounter monsters of a much higher level than you. That should serve as a hint that you're not supposed to be there yet.

To the OP, I'm on your side. Don't make a "D&D" game if it can't even have the fundamentals of a D&D game, simple. The app is just pure crap and if it had been more in line with 4E-rules and the classes and races better, than yes, I'd be introducing this to my friends. However, it's exactly as you described it and I'm not going to waste my time on it anymore.

Atari needs to just...stop making D&D games. They clearly don't know what they're doing.