The Major Changes Coming To Neverwinter

Neverwinter, the free-to-play, Dungeons & Dragon-inspired MMORPG from developer Cryptic Studios, is getting a major overhaul to both its combat and character customization systems. The developer is hoping to add balance and flexibility to the gameplay experience.

Publisher Perfect World made the announcement on Arc, its in-house social media platform and community forum. The update will have five goals. The first is improving level-scaling to make it more seamless, so that players don't have to constantly fiddle with their gear when entering a new area. Next, the update aims to make the game's enemy combating ratings easier to understand. The update will also make it so that the levels assigned to various items are more accurate, it'll be easier to gear up, and players will be given more flexibility when building their characters, which will give them even more ways to max/min their stats.

Players can check out an early look at the Neverwinter update on Perfect World's preview server, and they can find more blog posts on Arc detailing the Neverwinter changes in the future.

Devoted Neverwinter players have long wanted an overhaul of the game's combat system. The biggest fan complaints have involved the complexity of the game's rules and a lack of viable character builds. Sinking hundreds of hours into a character who can't effectively fight higher-level enemies a big problem for a game built on its player community. The new update should address some of those concerns, but some fans have found it just as confusing as the game itself.

Cryptic Studios has tried to address these fan complaints before, but the developer has had a tough time keeping fans happy. In February 2019, Cryptic announced a slew of changes to the game mechanics in conjunction with its Undermountain expansion. These changes were supposed to improve level scaling, balance character builds, and tweak many of the game's stats and mechanics.

The Neverwinter overhaul comes three months after Cryptic released its latest content update, Avernus: The Redeemed Citadel, which launched September 16th, 2020. Redeemed Citadal was a limited-time event that allowed players to defend the Citadel against assault by demonic forces. Before its launch, Senior Systems Designer Doug Miller told GameRant that the company was shifting away from releasing new content three or four times a year to a more frequent release schedule. The hope was this would give longtime players more reasons to keep coming back.