Neverwinter - Item Progression System

In case anyone is still intereted in Neverwinter Cryptic Studios posted a new developer blog about the games Item Progression System.

Since Neverwinter launched, we’ve received lots of feedback about the way our current Fusing system – and everything that surrounds it, like Enchantments, Runestones, Unslot costs, etc. – works, and where it… doesn’t quite work. We gathered it all up and took a look at what some of the major issues were, and looked at how we could address those issues. Some of the biggest issues we identified were:

• No one wanted to Unslot an Enchantment, pretty much ever. They did if they had really high end Enchants, but this wasn’t very common. This had an additional negative of making people not want to bother with the whole Enchantment system while leveling up – if you were unwilling to Unslot an Enchant, then putting one into an item meant it was lost forever, so a lot of people just opted to not bother until the end of the game.
• You couldn’t Fuse Enchants that were currently slotted. With people not wanting to Unslot Enchants, this was a particularly troublesome problem.
• So. Much. Bag space. Since you needed to gather 4 matching Enchants of the same exact rank in order to Fuse them to the next Rank, you ended up with 2 or 3 stacks of each Enchantment and Runestone, filling upwards of 30 slots in your bag.
• High barriers to high end Enchants. While the system stayed consistent in that you always needed 4 of a given Rank to get to the next Rank, it would become progressively harder to get 4 of the same Rank, with compounding costs of needing to Rank up many Enchants of lower level before you could even get close to making progress on your current Enchantment.

With these issues in mind, we set out to solve some problems. We also kept in mind our upcoming system – Artifacts – which would be using another “rank up” style system, but we’ll get to that in another Dev Blog.