Last weekend's Xbox One beta for Neverwinter convinced me that the game probably should have been on consoles all along. Cryptic's free-to-play MMORPG left a poor impression in comparison to its peers when I reviewed its PC release back in 2013, but there were signs of console promise even then, lurking in its heavy instancing and its unwillingness to bury players under piles of bloated abilities. Here, a simple shift in perspective allows some wrongs to become rights (and, alas, some rights to become wrongs). True, the opening 21 levels I played through haven't changed much since I first passed sentence on Neverwinter, but they felt much more enjoyable while plopped in a recliner in front of my TV with a gamepad in my hand.
This is no small feat. Console MMORPGs that start life on the PC usually wallow in an awkwardness that suggests that the developers went through trials akin to getting dogs to walk on their hind legs in order to mash everything onto a gamepad, and the simplest non-combat actions sometimes get lost in a labyrinth of commands for bumper presses and trigger pulls. In the Xbox One closed beta, however, Cryptic's mapping works so well that I'm half tempted to write off the PC version as a rough draft for what I saw on Xbox One.
Combat-wise, as Thom Yorke might say, everything's in its right place. The two main abilities that once were tied to mouse buttons now occupy the gamepad triggers, and the secondary abilities correspond to the Xbox controller's colorful face buttons. There's some overlap, yes, but accessing rarely used skills merely involves holding the left bumper and mashing the face buttons. Potions, maps, and the like? They're all mapped to the D-pad. I was especially worried to see how my Hunter-Ranger would handle switching between melee and ranged under such a setup, but a simple tap of the right bumper switches the loadouts entirely.
It's a setup that allows basic combat to feel like something out of Darksiders or God of War; an ideal that many MMORPGs seek but never achieve. If there's a catch, it's that turning lacks the precision a mouse and keyboard provide, but that won't be a problem in PVP as Cryptic plans to keep PC and Xbox One accounts separate.
The near total domination of the controller by combat abilities means that Cryptic stuffed almost everything else under the Xbox One's version of the Start button. It's a sound design for the most part, but key elements currently take too long to access. Consider the quest log. On multiple occasions throughout the weekend, I either needed to change the path of the breadcrumb trail I was following to one goal or follow another quest entirely. On the PC version, keybinds make this a five-second job at most.
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