Dungeons & Dragons: Heroes of Neverwinter (HON) for Facebook is an adaptation of Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) 4th edition rules in the Forgotten Realms setting, centering around the Neverwinter city-state. Liquid Entertainment simplified the D&D paper RPG by limiting details and choices and hiding dice rolls. There are numerous races and classes in the D&D paper RPG but in HON, you can create one character from a permutation of four races: Human, Eldrin (elf), Dragonborne, Halfling (hobbit) and four classic classes: Rogue, Fighter, Cleric and Wizard.
Most of the action happens as dungeon crawl adventures underneath the city of Neverwinter. The dungeons are faithful to the paper RPG rules, using square grids for movement and initiative rules for combat. You can borrow instances of your Facebook friends' characters or hire ones from a recruiter to form a party up to four members. However if you want to maximize experience points, you should take fewer than four but know the monsters and exploit their weaknesses. When an another player's character is in use, a message is sent to the owner and the owner may participate by spectating and giving resources to the party. The loot system is unique in that one is presented with ten cards to draw from varying quality of treasure cards. That said, you can mitigate luck by buying luck potions which gives more card draws. Once you reach level 10, you can use a level editor to make your own dungeon and charge an entrance fee. The level editor was not available during the demo.
HON does a great job at faithfully recreating the complex D&D paper RPG experience and yet remain simple enough for most casual players to pick up and play. I look forward to making my own dungeons and exploring fan-made dungeons. HON is scheduled for release this year but neither the developer, Liquid Entertainment nor the publisher, Atari have any details online.
Not much to say, as not much is clear yet...
...but that actually sounds really good - like, you know, something I'd want to play.
The social aspects sound well thought out (borrowing characters, etc..). The actual "core game" could be a viable, fun game rather than clearly just a hanger-on to a "social metagame" subscriber grab. The player contributed levels will be difficult to property motivate/balance, but the core idea seems sound - and if some thought goes in they could become very popular/interesting.
Overall, this sounds like the end to one of those "why doesn't anyone ever make a game where...." questions that I always hear/ask when talking to gamer friends. Interesting.
DWARVES
No Dwarves? You can't have generic fantasy without Dwarves!
Boycott!
Dwarves Needed
They should replace Dragonborne with dwarves. What were they thinking?
Well...
Sounds good, but I still want a real 4E CRPG. 3.x got Neverwinter Nights, 2e had the masterpieces that are the Baldur's Gate series, Icewind Dale, and Planescape: Torment, but 4E so far just has the now-defunct Tiny Adventures (fun but not filling), Daggerdale (just bloody disappointing) and this (which looks to me like they just redesigned and expanded Eye of the Beholder GBA and put it on Facebook).
Hopefully this will be a bit deeper than it looks, but when your character creation options are just four races and four classes (which even Eye of the Beholder GBA exceeded by having Half-Orcs in there) out of the VAST number of character options present in D&D 4th Edition, it's a bit troubling. Neverwinter's coming later this year, but THAT will only have five classes (Fighter, Cleric, Wizard, Rogue, Ranger). 4E is nearly perfect for a serious tactical RPG adaptation (something along the lines of Final Fantasy Tactics). Why isn't Wizards going for it?
At the very LEAST they could try to call up Obsidian Entertainment and Atari to get them to collaborate on a NWN or BG-style story-driven epic 4E adaptation.
Beta Keys for Neverwinter
Heroes of Neverwinter is beautiful, and my blog OSG1 is here with four Beta Keys! We're giving away four of them, so if you want a beta key, leave a comment on my blog! http://osg1.com/2011/09/heroes-of-neverwinter-beta-keys/
Not really sure
been trying to play for the first time on facebook for over an hour but the load screen wont go passed 49%. So i have no idea if it's cool or not.