Neverwinter - 5/20 hours

My biggest problem with Neverwinter so far has been the shift key. You use if for your dodge move, sprinting (or teleporting or rolling or whatever) in the direction that you are moving with WASD keys. The issue is that in order to pull this off, I have to move my pinky off the "A" key and subsequently shift my whole hand to move. I'm sure old hands at PC controls find this a natural and comfortable thing to do, but I have to think about it too much. And that's the last thing I need when the situation calls for dodging.

So I spent a half-hour configuring joy-to-key so I could play with my xbox controller. It just feels more natural to me. Although I'm not sure why I had to do it myself. This game is available for the console, so the professionals have already figured out how to make it work with a controller, but for some reason have decided not to implement it as an option on the PC version. It may be that "PC players who stubbornly refuse to grow accustomed to standard PC controls and insist on using the controllers they've cut their teeth on during decades of playing on console exclusively" is a smaller niche than I've been imagining

Anyway, my quixotic jousting with modernity aside, I've been having fun playing Neverwinter. I've tried out all the classes, and they all have something to recommend to them, though my favorite so far has been the Great Weapon Fighter. I love just rushing into battle and laying down massive damage. Unfortunately, I'm not sure if I am going to stick with the class for my larger playthrough. When you go solo, you need some reliable self-healing and this class just doesn't have it. On the other hand, I have been getting potions slightly faster than I've been using them, and if that trend keeps up, I think I'd rather just play the reckless barbarian dwarf (interesting side-note on that - the Great Weapon Fighter's sword is bigger than the Dwarf model, so when it's sheathed across her back, the tip clips through the ground - a bit of an oversight, there).

In other news, I think I've completely tuned out the game's plot. It's probably a side-effect of playing the intro eight times in a row. I've skipped over the opening dialogue so much I've conditioned myself to barely hear any of the game's characters at all. I know there's a missing crown, and worries that it might embolden rebellious political factions, and there was a slightly daffy seer trapped in the dungeons that I had to rescue on most of the timelines. It may all evolve into something later, but I didn't gather enough to even venture a prediction.

Overall, I'm pretty optimistic. Neverwinter definitely has more of an action feel than some other MMOs I've played, but I've found from playing as an aggressive class that there's not a lot of dynamism in that action. It mostly comes down to slugging it out directly. Though perhaps I would feel differently if I were playing a rogue . . .