Neverwinter is a new action-MMORPG from Cryptic Studios. This franchise has its fingers in so many pies, I don't even know where to begin. Do I talk about how it relates to its Dungeons and Dragons tabletop game roots? I don't think that would be particularly interesting to our readers. Perhaps I should spend some time discussing the Forgotten Realms locale, popularized by writer R.A. Salvatore and the character Drizzt Do'Urden? The game is thick with references. But if you haven't heard of it, all I can do is recommend The Dark Elf Trilogy for a good read. Maybe we could dig into the mission creator, reminiscent of BioWare's (unrelated) Neverwinter Nights games? This is more for wannabe dungeon masters than players, though.
After all is said and done, it makes the most sense to compare Neverwinter to contemporaries like Dungeons And Dragons Online, Tera, and Vindictus.

Let's start with Dungeons And Dragons Online (DDO), a game from rival developer Turbine that's still going strong. DDO was one of the first "freemium" MMOs. It was designed around the old subscription-based method and retrofitted for free play. There is plenty you can do without paying a dime, but if you're serious about the game, you'll be constantly reminded about the adventures and features you aren't allowed to partake in unless you pay a subscription fee, or at least buy portions of content with cash. This is the revenue model that Star Wars: The Old Republic took, and it's irritating as hell. Yes, I know I'm suffering from slow XP gain because I'm not a subscriber, but thanks for telling me again, BioWare. As great as The Old Republic content is, I got tired of being pestered before I was engaged enough to spend money.

This is in sharp contrast with Neverwinter's revenue model. No content is gated, and progression isn't slowed for free players. Sure, you can use real money to buy in-game items, but you can also earn those items through by playing and trading in-game currency (Astral Diamonds) for paid currency (Zen, sold online through the game's publisher, Perfect World). This is an ideal way for a free-to-play game to operate: no restrictions on non-paying players, and everything in the cash store can be earned through play. [edit: we should clarify that DDO does allow you to earn Turbine Points in game, but they're relatively difficult to accumulate. More importantly, DDO requires players to purchase access to game content, but all of the content is free in Neverwinter]

Of course, none of this matters if the game sucks. Thankfully, that isn't the case. Neverwinter combines the fast pace of action-RPG games like Vindictus with the rich world and nuanced progression of traditional MMOs. The result is more fun than I anticipated, with surprisingly powerful character abilities right out of the gate, and a rate of progression that keeps you coming back to acquire more powers or upgrade existing ones. Neverwinter's combat system is a lot more twitchy and than I'm used to, and it removes a lot of the power-queuing typical of the MMO genre. It makes you feel a lot more involved and connected to the fight. I'm not a huge fan of Vindictus, so it's a little surprising that Cryptic Studios found a balance that really appeals to me.

What about everything else? For a brand new game, it certainly feels very mature, with rich environments, mini-games, and a plethora of different things to do. There are many standard missions to help progress your character, the PvP arenas are a lot of fun, and so are the group PvE quests, dungeons, and events. You can also manage and level-up your companions (mercenary and animal NPCs under your control). There's even a crafting profession system that's playable in-game or outside the game through a browser that awards the same in-game items (at gateway.playneverwinter.com). In addition, you can create your own adventures using the game's foundry tool, mentioned previously. Others are able to experience and rate those adventures through an in-game job board and NPC informants. As a result, this title feels quite rich. Of course, it's impossible to say how much end-game content there is at this early stage.

So, what about Neverwinter is weak? Well, there's not much of a story arch. The adventure plots are nothing special and you're not going to find any innovation in the narrative department. Don't expect many cutscenes or much spoken dialogue, either. As far as your NPC companions, a human cleric will demonstrate as much personality as a honey badger (read: none). Cryptic can only dream of the budgets that BioWare gets for writers and voice acting. Then again, you can't have a honey badger companion in Star Wars: The Old Republic, so +1 for Neverwinter.

It's impossible to properly rate an MMO without spending a life force-draining amount of time on it, but since the price tag is free-ninety-nine, I heartily encourage you to try it. Progress at least until you've picked up three abilities, since the title's very beginning is fairly weak. The good news is that it gets better quickly.

How does it look? How will it perform on your hardware? Glad you asked...
Neverwinter is built on a modified Cryptic Game engine, an offshoot of the code that powers Champions Online and Star Trek Online. These are the best visuals we've seen from this company to date, though.

The art style is vibrant and exaggerated. It's slightly cartoonish, but far more realistic than World of Warcraft. The shading, models, and textures are much prettier than Turbine's Dungeons and Dragons Online, even if it lags far behind the artwork in modern first-person shooters.

The Cryptic engine gives you a lot of control over graphics quality settings. The first tweak we'd like to talk about is the render scale detail slider. This appears to control the resolution of the game output: for example, if you're playing at 1920x1080 and lower the render scale to 50%, the result looks like 960x540. The only advantage over actually lowering the resolution is that interface elements like buttons and text boxes are displayed at 1920x1080. This isn't a setting we often see in games, but it's featured in the Cryptic engine (and other games that are designed to work on low-end hardware, such as Dota 2). Plain and simple, we don't like lowering render scale at all because it has a profound impact on clarity, and it only helps graphics performance if the CPU isn't already a bottleneck. Neverwinter employs built-in defaults that depend on the video card it detects. Whoever set them up appears to favor high details and a low render scale. We couldn't disagree more, so we're leaving the render scale at 100% for all our benchmarks and dropping the details instead.

For the most part, we're sticking to the minimum, medium, and maximum detail settings. We did notice that the character detail distance slider has a significant impact on frame rates, and we chose to reduce it to 50% for our medium detail benchmarks. This does mean that it's easier to see the transition from low- to high-detail models as they get closer. But without this concession, frame rates often dip too low, especially when we use mid-range processors. The good news is that anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering have little effect on this platform-limited title, so we added 2x AA and 8x AF to the medium benchmark configuration.

Clearly, the biggest leap in visual fidelity comes from jumping to our middle configuration from the lowest-level settings. The highest options yield little improvement over medium, despite the reduced frame rates (though that character quality level difference isn't noticeable at the higher-end options, which we like).

The game looks pretty crude at low detail, but it's a lot more attractive at medium detail settings.
Free-to-play MMOs are all about attracting as many players as possible, so we're hoping that Neverwinter can accommodate low-end rigs. On the other hand, gamers with high-end hardware should get to enjoy better-looking graphics for their platform investment. Therefore, we're testing graphics cards that range from the Radeon HD 6450 and GeForce 210 to the Radeon HD 7970 in CrossFire and GeForce GTX 690.
In addition, we're adding multiple CPU tests and even mobile AMD A10 and Intel Core i5 processors with integrated graphics to the mix.
| Test System | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CPU | Intel Core i5-3550 (Ivy Bridge) 3.3 GHz Base Clock Rate, 3.7 GHz Maximum Turbo Boost | |||||||
| Motherboard | Gigabyte Z77X-UP7, LGA 1155, Chipset: Intel Z77 Express | |||||||
| Networking | On-Board Gigabit LAN controller | |||||||
| Memory | Corsair Vengeance LP PC3-16000, 4 x 4 GB, 1600 MT/s, CL 8-8-8-24-2T | |||||||
| Hard Drive | Western Digital Caviar Black 1 TB, 7,200 RPM, 32 MB Cache, SATA 3Gb/s | |||||||
| Power | ePower EP-1200E10-T2 1,200 W, ATX12V, EPS12V | |||||||
| Software and Drivers | ||||||||
| Operating System | Microsoft Windows 8 | |||||||
| DirectX | DirectX 11.1 | |||||||
| Graphics Drivers | AMD Catalyst 13.5 Beta 2 Nvidia GeForce 320.00 Beta Intel Graphics Driver 9.18.10.3071 | |||||||
| Benchmarks | ||||||||
| Neverwinter | Custom THG Benchmark, 60-second Fraps run, Hall Of Justice area | |||||||
Our low-detail tests are performed with the render scale set to 100%, and the graphics slider set to the bottom-rung details.
While we're using a Core i5-3550 for our medium- and high-detail benchmarks, we're using a Core i3-3220 for the low-end benchmarks to better reflect the platform-oriented bottlenecks you might see from an entry-level gaming machine. Of course, the mobile Core i5-3210M has an integrated Intel HD Graphics 4000 engine and the A10-4600M APU features Radeon HD 7660G graphics.

Only two hardware combinations fall below the minimum 30 FPS threshold: the Core i3-3220/GeForce 210 and A10-4600M with Radeon HD 7660G graphics are unable to serve up playable performance at the settings we're using. Sure, you could slide back the render scale to garner some higher frame rates, but save yourself the effort and find some better hardware for this game.
The rest of the graphics cards are clearly bottlenecked by the platform.

Charting frame rate over time shows how far back the two outliers fall compared to the rest of the pack, even at the meager settings we're using to test.

The only frame time variance we're concerned about comes from AMD's A10-4600M, though its average frame rates are too low to matter anyway.
The detail settings stay low as we increase resolution to 1920x1080, seeing if any of these hardware combinations drop below the point of playability.

The only result that changes significantly from what we saw at 1280x800 comes from Intel's mobile Core i5-3210M with HD Graphics 4000. While this combination remains playable, its numbers are clearly lower than the platform-bottlenecked discrete cards on our socketed Core i3-3220. The A10-4600M looks a little better than the GeForce 210, but remains too slow to be viable.

The frame rates over time show us a clearer view of how these systems perform relative to one another.

Once again, the only significant latency comes from AMD's A10-4600M APU.
These benchmarks are generated on a Core i5-3550-based platform, allowing us to focus on the performance that different graphics cards produce. The following benchmarks are taken at the medium graphics preset with 2x AA and 16x AF, and with character detail distance dropped to 50%

All of the discrete cards we're using, except for AMD's Radeon HD 6670 DDR3 and Nvidia's GeForce GT 630 GDDR5, yield playable average performance. There's a very obvious platform bottleneck though, seeing that the Radeon HD 7790 and GeForce GTX 650 Ti yield almost identical results next to the high-end Radeon HD 7970 and GeForce GTX 680.
The Radeon HD 7750 and GeForce GTX 650 are a bit slower, though still reasonable at 34 FPS minimum.

We can see the bottleneck quite clearly looking at the frame rate over time chart.

None of these cards produce a significant frame time variance, with the results well below 15 ms.
The Cryptic engine supports multi-monitor resolutions, so we continue our exploration of the medium detail settings at 5760x1080 using three 1920x1080 panels side by side. All multi-GPU results are captured using our FCAT tools, so drops and runt frames are removed from the analysis.

The sheer number of pixels we're rendering shifts the bottleneck from our platform back to the CPU. That is, until we arm our machine with higher-end hardware like the Radeon HD 7950 and GeForce GTX 690. The GeForce GTX 680 does relatively poorly compared to the Radeons, but the GeForce GTX Titan takes a slim lead over its competition. Two Radeon HD 7970s in CrossFire should be faster. However, a low minimum frame rate, drops, and runt frames all contribute to a second-place finish.

Once again, you can see the platform bottleneck manifest at the upper end of our frame rate over time chart.

Only the Radeon HD 7970 CrossFire setup is hampered by a worrisome degree of frame time variance.
Finally, we're bumping the game up to its maximum detail settings at 1920x1080 using 4x AA and 16x AF. Far fewer graphics cards are able to handle this combination, so we're only including the ones that were OK at the medium-level configuration.

The platform bottleneck is painfully evident. Though, since all of these graphics cards achieve at least 40 FPS, the result is fine.

The CPU bottleneck is crystal clear on the frame rate over time chart.

There are no frame time variances of note in this group of hardware.
At this point, it's pretty clear that Neverwinter needs a pretty quick processor if you want the performance of a reasonably-fast graphics card to shine through. At 1920x1080, it doesn't matter if you have a Radeon HD 7790, GeForce GTX 650 Ti, Radeon HD 7970, or GeForce GTX 680 if you're only using a mid-range Core i5 processor. All of those cards are limited by our CPU, even though it offers four cores and a pretty quick clock rate.
Consequently, this is one of those games where our processor benchmarks probably mean more than the graphics card numbers. We drop in a Radeon HD 7970 and check to see how a selection of CPUs is affected.

It's a little surprising that the Core i3-3220, FX-4170, and Phenom II X4 960 aren't able to manage a minimum of 30 FPS, though they come close. The dual-core chips are stuck at about 20 FPS, and the FX-8350 does a bit better with a 31 FPS floor that averages closer to 41 FPS. Only Intel's Core i5-3550 demonstrates a significantly better result, and we have to assume that higher-end Core processors are really what it takes to let AMD's single-GPU flagship achieve its best showing.

In my opinion, Neverwinter is an enjoyable action-MMORPG, set in the most popular Dungeons And Dragons locale: the Forgotten Realms. The game has a lot of potential, so what do you need to run it?

When it comes to graphics horsepower, not much, actually. At the minimum graphics details and 100% render scale settings, a GeForce GT 630 GDDR5 or Radeon HD 6670 DDR3 generates about 40 FPS, at least. Increase details to the medium level with 2x AA, 8x AF, and character detail distance dialed down 50%, and a Radeon HD 7750 or GeForce GTX 650 gives you more than 30 FPS, minimum. Even with the details maxed out at 1920x1080, a Radeon HD 7790 or GeForce GTX 650 Ti kicks out at least 40 FPS when the going gets tough.
If gaming across three monitors is your thing, medium-level details are playable at more than 30 FPS on a Radeon HD 7950 Boost, GeForce GTX 690, or GeForce GTX Titan.

But the real limitation of those configurations isn't graphics performance; its the platform itself. Neverwinter likes fast CPUs, and to achieve a minimum of 40 FPS using medium-class details, you need a Core i5-3550, at least. A Phenom II X4 965, FX-4170, Core i3-3220, and FX-8350 give you a minimum frame rate around 30 FPS. But don't bother with a dual-core CPU that isn't Hyper-Threaded. This game doesn't like Athlon II X2s or Pentiums.

These frame rates are reasonable for standard MMOs. Having said that, we'd prefer to see minimums above 40 FPS in a twitchier title like Neverwinter. When your survival depends on reflexes, maintaining 60 FPS is ideal, so it's probably going to concern some folks that an Ivy Bridge-based Core i5 is necessary for greater-than 40 FPS at the game's higher-end quality settings.

To be fair, the game is in what the developers call "open beta," so performance issues might be addressed over time. We've mentioned our concerns and we're waiting for feedback; it'd be nice to know if the platform bottleneck is addressable. But when a game opens up to the public, it accepts real-world currency, and the developer makes it clear that characters are not going to be wiped, we aren't going to let it off the hook because of a beta label slapped on. It's too easy for that to become an excuse when things aren't quite right.

Lower-than-expected frame rates aside, the game plays smooth enough to enjoy with a decent CPU and graphics card. It's also quite a bit of fun, offering a lot of content for such a new MMO. If you're curious about Neverwinter, I'd recommend giving it a shot, which is easy since it doesn't cost anything, and no content is gated from players who choose not to pay.