Neverwinter!

I allowed myself to get sucked in to the new Neverwinter game over the weekend. Since it pretty much filled our RPG time - Apprentices Who and Blaster joined me -I thought I would discuss it a little bit. The high points:

• It's free to play, full access to current classes and races except for Drow - they're tied up in some kind of early spending deal right now but are supposed to free up 60 days from launch. If that's a big deal for you, now you know.
• It has a good tutorial, running through the basics of characters and controls without being ridiculously tedious, repetitive, or boring. Everyone ends the tutorial at 4th, the games goes to 60th right now.
• It looks very pretty. I thought it looked more like LOTRO than some of the more cartoony fantasy games out there. The lighting is nicely done
• It's based on 4E D&D but in practice it works more like an MMO than any particular tabletop edition of D&D, including 4th

The setting is the ruined city of Neverwinter (Forgotten Realms), pretty much right out of the 4th edition D&D Neverwinter sourcebook. Having read the book I don't think there's any mechanical advantage but it is cool to recognize the names of characters and factions and locations and have an idea of what/who/where they are. If you liked that book you will probably be more inclined to like the game.
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The character options are somewhat limited right now in that there are only 5 classes and there doesn't seem to be a ton of variety within a single class. So once I've created and played my Great Weapon Fighter I'm probably not going to create another one anytime soon, but I will probably create a Wizard.

They did have some problems over the weekend with some auction house exploit and rolled things back a little bit. I lost a few levels. It's annoying but it is a very new game and I would expect a few bumps - I'm not paying anything for it so I can't complain a much.

I'd say if you're at all interested in D&D themed videogames it's worth a look - it's free and you can play 24/7 so the flexibility is certainly there. If you dislike online games I don't think there's anything here that's going to change your mind about them.