Neverwinter Jewel of the North is Now Available on PC | MMORPG.com

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Neverwinter Jewel of the North is Now Available on PC | MMORPG.com

Jewel of the North is the latest update for Neverwinter and it's out now on PC bringing a more streamlined leveling system, a new class, and more. Read on for more details.

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Po_gg

So, two days already and not a single peep here - that tells a lot  

There's not much to say after the preview server experience prior, the live is almost an exact copy of that... the content removal, the streamlining/hand-holding, it's all there.

The client facelift looks decent, more "crisp", but also lost some of its charm.

To the bit more positive side, the bard is the same too, still a fairly interesting class to play.

The free play mechanic (out of combat) is clunky, clearly just an afterthought so there won't be LotRO-esque concerts and bands with ad-hoc street performances in Neverwinter, but at least a good start for something to the off-time.

There's the usual Neverember recruitment drive for the new class, an extra incentive to trying out the bard (and the streamlined leveling progression), that's also kinda positive.

But pretty much that's it.

Mod21, the new "king" of ill-fated Mods...

Sarla

I tried it and found the Bard, weak, boring and pain to play the songs with. Also the game is boring in general anyways.

[Deleted User]

The user and all related content has been deleted.

Nebless

Po_gg said:

So, two days already and not a single peep here - that tells a lot  

Part of that might be the fact that unless you create a new character you don't see any of the 'Jewel of the North' stuff, just the same old game.

I know I've spent the last 2 days just going through all the stuff they gave my (old) level 80.  While most was useless; lower level achievement rewards, there was some nice high level stuff.

The Steam forums are more active about the latest mod.  Standard bug ridden.  I hit one last night while going through the 'intro' quests meeting the stable master (free mount) etc....  I got 'ported to a boss fight and after getting the boss down 4/5th it just frozen and I couldn't do any more damage, heck I couldn't even target the boss anymore.

Po_gg

Nebless said:

Po_gg said:

So, two days already and not a single peep here - that tells a lot  

Part of that might be the fact that unless you create a new character you don't see any of the 'Jewel of the North' stuff, just the same old game.
[...]
Standard bug ridden.

They even tied those two, to make things worse...

The recruitment drive I've mentioned above, to incentivise new characters (preferably bard, as the new shiny) backfired into their faces, due to bugs in said incentives.

To their credit they've fixed the bugs, but then called it a day. If you already on the leveling, or even leveled to 20 in these few days?

Tough luck...  But you're more than welcomed to delete that character and roll a new one if you want the leveling rewards from the recruitment event.

Nebless

OK, impressions on the new set up.

On the good, after the intro stuff you go to the city and all the trainers, info npc's etc.... are now located in one place with the main NPC (SGT. Knox) overseeing it all.   He'll tell you to go see 'X' to learn about 'Y' and you'll get something afterwards (a mount, a companion, gear etc.....) so that's a nice info flow to introduce you to aspects of the game.   From running through them on my old 80 I can look forward to some other info things as I level up and that knowledge fits in with the level I'm at.

Leveling now comes at certain points in your play, vice based on xp.  So in the first zone I went from lvl 2 to lvl 5.  Not sure how I feel about that as it was always nice to see your xp bar slowly fill up (well atleast until you got to those levels where it seemed like it took forever    ).

On the bad, it seems they took out all the zone bounty vendors so no more getting equipment and stuff from them.  Now it looks like your equipment will only come from quest rewards.  Granted all the stuff was always free, but I kind of liked having a say in what I got.

Content has been stripped down (heck even whole zones are gone).  I'd say I got half - 2/3rds of the content that used to be in the Graveyard.  The whole zone dragon has been pulled which was both a fun and frustrating feature since it only took about 5 sec to kill it and if you were late off the mark he'd be dead before you got to him.

I'm liking the game more than I used to.  It was never bad but it was very wack a mole-ish.  It really hasn't changed, I'm just feeling better about it, enjoying how it looks and feels.

I guess I'm kind of cheating as I've been stripping my old lvl 80 of usable stuff and giving to my new character, but from what I've seen so far, it's not like I needed to do it to make it through the content.  The game really does give you enough to play the lvl 1 to 20 stuff totally free.

Of the biggest thing from my point of view is it seems like they cleaned up the code ? as the main city is no longer a lag-fest for me.  Used to be I'd drop to 1 frame a sec with looonnnngggg freeze pauses inbetween whenever I went there and there were more than 5 others present and that was on a LOW graphics setting.

Well on LOW I now can freely move around and upping my graphics to MED still lets me move OK, if a bit slower.  If for nothing else, I'm thankful for that bit of change.

Po_gg

Nebless said:

On the bad, it seems they took out all the zone bounty vendors so no more getting equipment and stuff from them.  Now it looks like your equipment will only come from quest rewards.  Granted all the stuff was always free, but I kind of liked having a say in what I got.

Content has been stripped down (heck even whole zones are gone).  I'd say I got half - 2/3rds of the content that used to be in the Graveyard. [...]

Yep, I still can't wrap my head around that decision, removing that much content from the game... true, they've axed before the Foundry, and the whole Fury of Feywild, but at least there was a reasoning behind that.

Stupid and quite unacceptable one, the pure laziness (Foundry is too buggy and we're lazy to fix it, Sharandar we go back to and it's easier to remove the old story and re-use the place), but there was something.

Mod21 is just: "we want to rush players faster to the endgame -where they hopefully spend cash-, so we remove half the content between 1-70".

And to add insult to the injury, or just to throw a bone to all the people worked on those content (since those zones had a lot of lore, story and achievements), there's now a vendor selling those removed lore pieces for gold, and they added NPCs who tell the condensed stories of the removed zones.

Anyhow, didn't bump it for bashing...  but for an impression on the more important segment, the music. (ok, more important for some players )

From above,

Po_gg said:

The free play mechanic (out of combat) is clunky, clearly just an afterthought so there won't be LotRO-esque concerts and bands with ad-hoc street performances in Neverwinter, but at least a good start for something to the off-time.

Looks like players are still trying, and some efforts are really good.

Since just one instrument and the scripting is almost non-existent, it clearly can't be close to LotRO's easy .abc notation and band composition.

Still, I'd dare to say in actual free play it's maybe better. Sharps/flats, and octave change is pretty user-friendly.

It's clunky, don't get me wrong (playing music on the keyboard always is), I just mean LotRO's free play is even worse   that's why most players use .abc files there for music sessions.

Nice to see the song transcripts started to circulate in Neverwinter as well, more games should learn that lesson, a small and easy mechanic can invoke a lot of creativity within the playerbase.

Scot

Po_gg said:

Still, I'd dare to say in actual free play it's maybe better. Sharps/flats, and octave change is pretty user-friendly.

We can't forget those sharps/flats can we? Have not got a clue what you are talking about but you know your stuff so sure you are right.

Akulas

I can't play it for too long without getting bored with it. The 3 1 hour sessions I played it for had active users on it so games alive.

Nebless

Po_gg said:

Yep, I still can't wrap my head around that decision, removing that much content from the game... true, they've axed before the Foundry, and the whole Fury of Feywild, but at least there was a reasoning behind that.

Stupid and quite unacceptable one, the pure laziness (Foundry is too buggy and we're lazy to fix it, Sharandar we go back to and it's easier to remove the old story and re-use the place), but there was something.

Mod21 is just: "we want to rush players faster to the endgame -where they hopefully spend cash-, so we remove half the content between 1-70".

They had something in their official announcement on the removed zones.  It was something like 'after looking at the zones and reviewing play we've taken out the under utilized zones' and of course they did have a part in there about how some zones were liked better than others.

OK, I'll give them the better liked part, because that's pretty much the case with everything in the world.

The underutilized part ..... not so much.  I mean after completing a zone, there really was very little reason to go back to ANY OF THEM.  Sure you might want to farm the zone special tokens to get an item from the vendor, but you're not going to just stay there forever.

They lowered the cap to 20 to 'bring it more in line with traditional D&D' and then threw D&D out the window with the whole speed level thing.

You hit it right on the head Po_gg, it was all about getting players to the point where they'd spend money.

Po_gg

Maybe I'm just biased as a story player... I believe there's no valid reason for content removal, and definitely not in this magnitude.

Unprecedented too, I fail to remember any other games doing that, if anything they add new content with updates/expansions/etc.

Nebless said:

The underutilized part ..... not so much.  I mean after completing a zone, there really was very little reason to go back to ANY OF THEM.  Sure you might want to farm the zone special tokens to get an item from the vendor, but you're not going to just stay there forever.

Exploration, lore gathering, filling the achievement list, grinding out gear pieces for their looks / to transmute, roleplay, etc.
With the forced scaling added in Mod16 there was even some moderate challenge to it.

But that's besides the point, which is the removal. They could've just made it optional for the new players, or added bypass, masked out from the map through a toggle, etc.

Of course that's a bit more work, and as the previous years have presented, they're lazy.

And sloppy too, to make it worse, there's a bunch of references and pointers left in the game for removed mechanics, levels higher than 20, etc.

Well, I wasn't too active in Neverwinter after Mod16, this change made it even worse if it's possible, so I'll just hang my lute on the wall and move over to CO and STO instead.

Bard's free play music is the only good thing in this Module. (imo)

Scot

Po_gg said:

Maybe I'm just biased as a story player... I believe there's no valid reason for content removal, and definitely not in this magnitude.

Unprecedented too, I fail to remember any other games doing that, if anything they add new content with updates/expansions/etc.

Nebless said:

The underutilized part ..... not so much.  I mean after completing a zone, there really was very little reason to go back to ANY OF THEM.  Sure you might want to farm the zone special tokens to get an item from the vendor, but you're not going to just stay there forever.

Exploration, lore gathering, filling the achievement list, grinding out gear pieces for their looks / to transmute, roleplay, etc.
With the forced scaling added in Mod16 there was even some moderate challenge to it.

But that's besides the point, which is the removal. They could've just made it optional for the new players, or added bypass, masked out from the map through a toggle, etc.

Of course that's a bit more work, and as the previous years have presented, they're lazy.

And sloppy too, to make it worse, there's a bunch of references and pointers left in the game for removed mechanics, levels higher than 20, etc.

Well, I wasn't too active in Neverwinter after Mod16, this change made it even worse if it's possible, so I'll just hang my lute on the wall and move over to CO and STO instead.

Bard's free play music is the only good thing in this Module. (imo)

The removal of content is detrimental to any game, I have not looked into this and I can only think they were trying to "streamline" the game.

[Deleted User]

The user and all related content has been deleted.

Po_gg

Scot said:

The removal of content is detrimental to any game, I have not looked into this and I can only think they were trying to "streamline" the game.

Yep, "streamlining" was one of their key words used a lot in dev letters and trailers... not just removed half the leveling zones, but even "streamlined" the remaining ones, took out sections, and when they couldn't (due to the geography of the zone) they just left it in without a purpose.

In other games those still could be useful for exploration, sidequests, or for simple farming, but not in Mod21 Neverwinter... for new players (without knowing how the zone looked/worked before), it's quite puzzling why some sections are there.

With xp is gone there's no point killing there, with gear coming from the main questline (due to streamlining) there's no point even farm there for drops.

What I also noticed is the overall tone is much more dull, mainly because of the zone selection - which they said was according to popularity, but I concur.

Vellosk, really? I always skipped that zone, boring, uninspiring story and the one of the longest (time-wise, and being tedious) dungeon at the end.

The original leveling had a lot of variance, day and night, towns and open, a wide array of enemies... and most of it is gone, "thanks" to their odd selection. Gone most of the sunny zones, most forests, towns and valleys, the floating islands in the sky and the volcano (at least they kept Icespire). Same with mobs, gone the orcs, brigands, pirates, gnolls, fire giants, etc.

What's left is a nighttime cemetary with evil raising the dead,

nighttime swamp/cemetary/barrows with evil raising the dead,

nighttime rocky wolf terrain with evil turning werewolves and summon their dead,

the Chasm with spellplagued and dead (ok, not entirely dark, there's some light up above),

and the Whispering Caverns (the name tells all... plus cthulhu people, aka mind flayers).

If not Icespire Peak along the road (also not too sunny, but at least snow for change, with frost giants and finally not something undead or demonic) the whole ride would feel like designed for Debbie Downer.