Then again, there is so much to Crusader Kings 2 that I could play forever and basically never be done exploring all it has to offer, even without the new expansion The Old Gods (which I will grab when it goes on sale, likely this summer) or the next two years of additional DLC that have recently been announced.

Despite some early attempts at adaptation, however, true historical simulation has never seen much traction in the video game world. There are plenty of games with themes that are military or historical of both… but mostly they’re shooters like, say, Day of Defeat, or vaguely historically themed RTS titles like Company of Heroes that don’t pretend to be authentic and which aren’t simulations or even strategy games, really.

There are exceptions, though, and the biggest one is the line of strategy games from Paradox Interactive. These are the heirs of the SPI line in computer game form, grand strategy simulations where you can play (in most cases) as any nation in the world, at any time in the relevant period, and they can almost, at least superficially, play themselves. They are, unsurprisingly, still pretty challenging to play, especially with an unfriendly interface, massive amounts of information and sketchy tutorials. But they’re not insurmountable.

I’ve been futzing of late with Crusader Kings II, the least military-oriented of the Paradox strategy games (Hearts of Iron being the most.) CK2 runs basically like a dynasty simulator, where a major focus is marrying off your family members is such a way as to build the proper alliances and ensure that your descendants (who you’ll play) are in better positions than you. You can expand your realm by military conquest but it’s a bit of a pain in the ass and seldom as simple as raising an army and marching it on in. And you don’t have unlimited freedom to do it; you need a claim on a neighbor’s province to make war over it, although such a claim can be fabricated.

It is difficult — my first game playing as the Petty King (Duke) of Gwynnedd ended with me dying in prison. But it’s pretty compelling. My second and third games, as Munster and Gwynnedd again, are still ongoing, and I’ve finally started feeling like I’m playing the game rather than letting it play itself.

What strikes me, though, having been doing a great deal of poking around lately, is how board wargaming has managed to survive — by changing. There’s still plenty of the of hex-and-counter stuff getting produced, as it turns out. You just have to be paying attention in the right places. But there’s also stuff like The Napoleonic Wars, which even ten years ago (about when I started to drift away) would have been huffily declared by hardcore wargamers to be “not a wargame.”

Nobody thinks that now. Furthermore, the crop of “card-driven” games starting with We the People seem to have invigorated the hobby. They’re more game and less simulation than the old school stuff, but there’s a ton of them on a wide array of subjects from the Napoleonic Wars (duh) to World War II and the Second Punic War or the Protestant Reformation. (A lot, but not all, of these games are from GMT, and the system itself is tight and relatively simple in the examples I’ve seen.) The common definition of “wargame” has drifted, and while the old stuff is still around, there’s now more in the category that would have often been excluded years ago.

The definition of “MMORPG” is changing in the same way. the old category wasfairly narrow and the current one is much broader. Some folks are still stuck inside the old borders of the category. Which isn’t really profitable for them, although it’s perfectly fine to prefer one particular corner of the field over the rest.

This kind of wargame has seen better days. SPI got itself seized by TSR, Avalon Hill sold out to Hasbro, and waves of RPGs, CCGs, EuroGames and video games have all taken their toll. What’s left is a tiny nubbin of what used to be.

But what’s left is not nothing. There are still a few companies turning out cool and even remarkable games. Which maybe aren’t the same kind of games we would have seen ten or twenty years ago, but one could make an argument that the EuroGames trend in particular has had a big impact.

Thinking about this lately has encouraged me to go through my very small stock of remaining war (and related) games. I no longer own anything from SPI, thanks to many years of selloffs and the water damage that claimed my copy of the StarForce Trilogy. A lot of my Avalon Hill stuff is similarly gone. And my GDW titles, except for the science fiction ones that I still have as part of my Traveller collection. Truth be told, I’m not sure where half of this stuff went.

But from Avalon Hill I still own Titan, Advanced Civilization and Republic of Rome, a particular favorite. I still own World in Flames and a bunch of the addons (but I forget which ones, and everything is mixed together.) I still have the first several Panzer Grenadier items from Avalanche, and that’s a damn fine game. West End Games’ Imperium Romanum II will leave my collection only when pried from my cold, dead hands.

And I have a stack of GMT titles, not all of which are even old; they were the one company that I still kept up with a bit as I’ve drifted out of wargaming for the last ten years or so. Those guys are doing some great things even today, especially in eras that have seldom been touched by wargame designers, like the (pictured) Onward Christian Soldiers, an operational-level game about the first three Crusades. Oddly enough I lack of interest in anything they do with World War II or the American Civil War, two of the three traditionally most fertile eras for wargaming, but the third is Napoleonic era, in which is set their impressive-looking (but unplayed by me) The Napoleonic Wars. They also did a couple of really nice and very out of print operational-level Roman Republic games which I have played and adore.

I’m in the middle of an itch to do some of this stuff again. I opened up Onward Christian Soldiers yesterday and finished punching, clipping and organizing it so that it’s finally ready to play. Which I may or may not get the chance to do soon. There’s a local club but I’ve lived here for four years and have yet to make it to a meeting. There’s also Origins in less than a month, a show I’ll be attending and maybe even blogging from. So maybe there’ll be a chance to push some cardboard counters around then.

Here we have a look at Neverwinter’s Neverdeath Graveyard, a zone you’ll hit in the high 20s. Still having fun with the game, although the desire to make videos about it is actually throttling my progress.

Now, I do have concerns about the game’s staying power. The actual amount of dev-scripted content in the game is actually pretty lean… but there’s lots of repeatable stuff, and the Foundry. And we’re seeing signs that some remarkable stuff will be coming from that. Which brings me to today’s video.

This is a reproduction, using the Foundry, of the classic D&D module The Keep on the Borderlands, adapted within the confines of the engine and suitable for solo play. It’s not how I would personally have tried to do such an adaptation… but that such things are even remotely possible is very exciting. The Forgotten Realms setting along with the possibility of revisting the classic adventure sites of old school D&D might make Neverwinter very alluring indeed.

No video game can capture the openness of tabletop RPGs, of course, and MMOs in particular have been moving mostly in the opposite direction for several years. But there’s still a potent D&D nostalgia that can be tapped, and the brilliance of the Cryptic approach is that they don’t have to pay devs to do it. Said content won’t have the quality control of professionally-developed stuff, either, but enough of it will be good enough. And in principle as assets get added to the game the Foundry should become more and more capable. If we can get this kind of stuff a week into “open beta,” the user generated content we see a year or two from now should be genuinely amazing.

Also, personally, I am enjoying the game. Lots of respectable titles have bored me right out of my chair well before 20 hours in, and I hit that (and level 25 on my Control Wizard) in Neverwinter over the weekend and have no intention of stopping now.

Today saw me running skirmishes and PvP instances for the first time since the closed beta. The latter in particular yield pretty nice XP. I now have a companion and am delving into “professions,” which are Neverwinter’s idea of crafting. I also have a ton more videos either already posted or coming as fast as I can get YouTube to take them.

The more of this game I play, the more impressed I am with it. I’ll be giving it some more time before committing any (if any) money to it, but so far aside from lockbox keys I’m not terribly tempted by any of the store offerings.

And there was a major issue early in the day — lag. Which shouldn’t be and wasn’t surprising, but in a game that plays like Neverwinter, which is a bit twitchy and where timing and positioning are very important to one’s effectiveness, it was exceptionally harmful, to the point where anything remotely challenging may have been impossible. A mid-day backend patch solved the lag issue at the cost of introducing (rather lengthy) login queues. But if you ask me, dealing with a queue is preferable to a shitty experience in the game.

Neverwinter, though it cries out for more, has five launch classes. My selection was the Great Weapon Fighter, but due to the lag and that the character felt a bit clumsy and underpowered to me, after about seven levels (beyond which, for all I know, those issues would go away) I switched back to Control Wizard, which was the class I played the most back in the closed beta.

Neverwinter is a contemporary themepark MMO, which is to say that it’s got linear content along with scaling, instanced and one-off content that’s available to you at whatever level, so you have the ability to mix it up. This can give a game a bit of sandbox feel if you squint hard enough at it, but I’m not sure that’s really the case here. This content structure feels more or less like that of Star Trek Online and Champions Online, Cryptic’s other offerings. I find that generally agreeable.

And the game, too. Neverwinter is fun to play, with fast, fluid combat that manages not to be too twitchy for arthritic graybeards like myself. It’s set in a world (D&D’s Forgotten Realms) virtually unmatched in depth of lore and the game seems to have enough stuff to keep one busy for a little while. How well it will hold up over the long term… well, we’ll see, but if the login queues are any indication there’s lots of folks wanting to play right now.

A compare and contrast could and should be done with the other D&D MMO, Turbine’s D&D Online, but that’s beyond the scope of this opening day post. Offhand, DDO is far deeper but Neverwinter is slicker and more modern in just about every respect. I’m not sure there is a real need for there to be two D&D MMOs, but then, neither really captures the open-ended nature of a tabletop game. No video game does, of course, but titles like Skyrim or EVE Online can come tantalizingly close.

But anyway. Neverwinter is worth checking out. Nice graphics and good gameplay and if it’s a touch rough around the edges you can tell yourself that it’s technically still in beta. I have new episodes of Ardwulf Presents dealing with it and more on the way, so check those out as well.