It's been a long and winding road for Neverwinter.

Since its announcement back in 2010, Neverwinter has survived the sale of

its developer, Cryptic Studios, legal battles between Atari and Wizards of

the Coast, and a bunch of delays. But it has persevered against these long

odds, and goes into open beta at the end of the month.

And from what we've seen in the closed beta weekends over the past couple

of months, Neverwinter has come out stronger for all the adversity. There

are a lot of reasons why this is a game worth playing, but we'll save you

some hassle and give you our top five.

1. D&D Action

Like Neverwinter, Dungeons & Dragons itself has changed a lot over

the years. The game system that started out as a fantasy subset add-on for

a miniature wargame has become the industry standard that has defined an

entire genre of entertainment, and has blossomed into a billion-dollar

intellectual property.

The artists, writers and content designers who built Neverwinter are fans

of D&D, and the game they built uses that license well. It is perhaps

a bit more liberal with its translation of the current rules than some

other D&D games, but it manages to impart a feeling of high-adrenaline

adventure, right from the moment your character washes up on shore after

an unfortunate sea storm. The story carries on the lore set forth by

Salvatore, Greenwood and the other writers who built the Forgotten Realms,

leading the player through well-known city settings and outlying regions,

and sending the player into battles against iconic monsters.

2. Dynamic Gameplay

The gameplay in Neverwinter has a strong focus on action. Combat is

dynamic and reactive, and requires active participation rather than just

standing still and clicking number keys. Players are not swamped with a

bewildering array of situationally-useful skills - your toolbar at the

bottom gives you access to no more than 8 at once, and swapping these

skills for different ones can dramatically change how the character plays.

Even the classes themselves have been sharpened-up for a more action-y

feel. The Devoted Cleric, for example, is the primary "healer" class in

the game, but it is not a heal-bot that just stands at the back and spams

one or two heal skills. The cleric has to be as good at kicking asses as

he is at fixing them, or it just doesn't feel like a dynamic, engaging

class compared to the others.

The questing system may feel a bit old-fashioned, but even that lends to

the D&D flavor. Tabletop D&D is where that system comes from,

after all - NPC townies request help, itinerant heroes perform the task

and return when finished for their reward. Quite frankly, any other system

would feel wrong in a D&D game.

3. The Characters

Personally, I'm a fan of the aesthetics of the player characters. Dwarves

are nearly as wide as they are tall, with beady little angry eyes and

beak-like noses. Half-orcs are bulky brutes with death-metal scowls and

massive under-bites. Elves look haughty and arrogant, halflings are wee

and wily. And tieflings are probably one of the more interesting races

available in any game - the bastard offspring of demons and mortals, with

crazy goat-horns and spear-tipped tails.





Character models have a cool blend of cartoony stylization and gritty

warts-and-all realism, and some of the armor looks fantastic. Even at low

levels, the armor looks elaborate and cool - none of that dull,

color-mismatched bargain-bin lowbie armor like you find in other games.

And it's not just the player characters that look awesome. Even the

early-game mobs like orcs and wererats have a cool look to them. Sharp

eyes will be able to pick out visual details from their favorite book

illustrations. The monsters are just as detailed and visually interesting

as the player characters.

That's not to say that Neverwinter uses bleeding-edge graphics tech that

will burn your GPU out. That's not what MMOs do. But it does manage to

look good without chewing up huge amounts of system resources.

4. The Price

Yeah, the game is free. Big deal, so is everything else these days,

right? Well, that's only part of it. According to Perfect World

Entertainment's infographic, playing Neverwinter could potentially save

you millions of dollars. Provided you play the game instead of driving,

use only your computer to heat your house, don't drink or smoke at your

game desk and ordinarily throw lavish parties in Dubai.

5. The Foundry

One of the most exciting features of Neverwinter is the ability for

players to create their own adventures, using a content-creation tool

called the Foundry. This has proven to be an awesome tool in Star

Trek Online, with some users creating new adventure modules

as good as or better than the stuff created by the studio. Dungeons &

Dragons has a long history of published adventure packs, starting all the

way back in the 1970s and continuing on today, and many of these will

surely be recreated by enterprising players.





Obviously it won't all be masterpieces and conversions of the Tomb of

Horrors. There is also certain to be a flood of unplayable crap as well,

from the buggy, unfinished experiments of enthusiastic but unskilled

neophytes to the pointless, punishing pranks of seasoned trolls. That's

the nature of the beast, though, and one of the things that makes it so

awesome. Giving a powerful tool with no quality control to a large group

of interested amateurs can produce some unpredictable results. Finding

those few diamonds in the piles of slag and offal makes it all worthwhile.

Neverwinter starts open beta on April 30, with pre-order customers

getting up to a 5-day head start. Check it out then, and add your own

reasons to this list.

Got another reason why players should check out Neverwinter? Let us know

in our comments!