Neverwinter Free MMO Guide

There are already a lot of Dungeons & Dragons games out there. From board games to card games and video games. The Lore of D&D is nothing new to most of us...
But I am excited to see Neverwinter appear as a Free game with the ability to use everything available in the game without having to spend a penny. The graphics are beautiful, the the world is huge, fight along side friends, customize your character and all the rest of the expected RPG qualities.

Follow my step-by-step guide on installing, configuring and optimizing Neverwinter in Linux with PlayOnLinux.

Note: This guide applies to the downloadable version of Neverwinter. Steam and Arc versions may require additional steps.

Tips & Specs:

To learn more about PlayOnLinux and Wine configuration, see the online manual: PlayOnLinux Explained

Note: March 2017 Perfect World Entertainment ended support for Windows XP and Direct X 9. This guide no longer applies until we can pursue more testing in Wine.

Mint 17 64-bit
PlayOnLinux: 4.2.8
Wine: 1.7.40

Wine Installation

Click Tools
Select "Manage Wine Versions"

Look for the Wine Version: 1.7.40
Note: Try using stable Wine 1.8 and 1.8-staging

Select it
Click the arrow pointing to the right

Click Next

Downloading Wine

Extracting

Downloading Gecko

Installed

Wine 1.7.40 is installed and you can close this window

Download the Neverwinter installer here:
http://download.perfectworld.com/nw/neverwinter_setup.exe

Save in a folder on your desktop

PlayOnLinux Setup

Launch PlayOnLinux
Click Install

Click "Install a non-listed program"

Click Next

Select "Install a program in a new virtual drive"
Click Next

Name the virtual drive: neverwinter
Click Next

Check all three options:

• Use another version of Wine
• Configure Wine
• Install some libraries

Click Next

Select Wine 1.7.40
Click Next

Select "32 bits windows installation"
Click Next

Wine Configuration

Applications Tab
Windows Version: Windows 7
Click Apply

Graphics Tab
Check "Automatically capture the mouse in full-screen windows"
Check "Emulate a virtual desktop"
Desktop size: 1024x768
Click OK

PlayOnLinux Packages (Libraries, Components, DLL's)

Check the following packages:

• POL_Install_corefonts
• POL_Install_d3dx9
• POL_Install_tahoma

Click Next

Note: All packages will automatically download and install

Installing Neverwinter

Click Browse

Navigate to the folder on your desktop
Select "neverwinter_setup.exe"
Click Open

Click Next again

Select language
Click OK

Click Next

Click "I Agree"

Click Next

Uncheck "Create a desktop icon"
Click Install

Uncheck "Launch Neverwinter"
Click Finish

PlayOnLinux Shortcut

Select "Neverwinter.exe"
Click Next

Name your shortcut: Neverwinter
Click Next

Select "I don't want to make another shortcut"
Click Next

PlayOnLinux Configure

Select Neverwinter
Click Configure

General Tab
Wine version: 1.7.40

Note: Click the + to download other versions of Wine. Click the down-arrow to select other versions of Wine

Display Tab
Video memory size: Enter the amount of memory your video card/chip uses

Close Configure

Launching Neverwinter

Select Neverwinter
Click Run

Login with your account credentials

Neverwinter will begin downloading and patching
In total the game is about 13 Gigabytes

Note: This process can take several hours depending on your internet speed

When its done downloading click PLAY

Long Cryptic loading screen
At first launch, this Cryptic screen can literally take 15-20 minutes
Please be patient and take a break

Sometimes the login will fail and end up at this login screen
Enter your account credentials
Click LOGIN

Once in game, select your character
Click Enter World

Optimization

Click Options
Click Graphics Tab

Adjust resolution to match your Linux desktop

Adjust:

• Screen
• Detail
• Effects
• Lights

or

Use the Render Quality (Video Card) and Graphics Detail (CPU) sliders

Go to the Advanced tab for more settings
Click OK or Apply

Note: When in-game, settings will automatically change on the screen

Conclusion:
Neverwinter runs extremely well on my Geforce 550 Ti. I can turn almost all the graphical settings to high and still get a decent frame rate. This game is beautiful for an Online MMO and its best to play on a desktop with a modern graphics card.
Normally when I first Enter World, there is a bit of lag as the level loads.

Gameplay Video:

Screenshots:

 

@Namikaze Ruisu
"My issue was that of Arc not being able to install any games, and no pop-up window even after minimizing with taskmanager(wine)..."

This is what was happening to me. Arc installed it just wouldn't ever go past 0% downloading of Neverwinter. But Neverwinter works fine now, just had to wait for the initial long load time.

 

Awesome!
Thanks for working on this with me...

 

Still having the issue of not having an install button when installing arc, is there a fix to this? I have tried to run it in multiple versions of wine, also using playonlinux.

what should i do?

 

Welcome to the forum roboticyouth.
This seems to be a common problem. Maybe if you have a Windows machine, install arc and search for Neverwinter, then add it to your list of games.
So when you log into Linux Neverwinter, it will already be there....
Otherwise, I eventually got a pop up to install Neverwinter after installing Arc from the Neverwinter website download link.

 

Hi,

IS there any benefit installing wine 1.7.x double buffer version for Neverwinter ?


Thanks

 

I tested myself, I don't see any improvement (fps are about 20-25fps, with default settings). I also still need (on my computer) to disable GSGL to stop micro freezes.

 

I just saw that too. double-buffer helps with memory leaks... specially in Crysis 2.
It never hurts to try it!

 

Check this out!
I can actually browse games in Arc now!

This is the first time I've seen it work. I didn't change anything except updated to PlayOnLinux 4.2.2

I found that I could no longer launch the game. I get an MD5 error each time, so I tried launching the arc.exe, arclauncher.exe and then finally arcupdate and arcrepair.exe

Finally I got arc to launch and start Neverwinter. Not sure why PlayOnLinux won't launch the Neverwinter.exe?

Now I just need to try downloading a game from the Game browser.

 

Also, you no longer need to install Internet Explorer!
I have updated the Neverwinter guide to reflect these new changes.
Neverwinter is easier than ever!

 

All, I used Wine 1.7.11, works great.

Also, IE8 is required for Perfect World or you will get yellow questions marks for the icons.

The NeverWinter guide should be updated and one could be added for Perfect World. I am to busy to take that one on.

 

Welcome to the forums.
I updated the whole guide recently and found that Wine 1.7.10 doesn't require IE8 any longer for the Arc client. So its a good idea to do the installs from Arc instead of the old installer.

 

The game while launching freezes whole Linux Mint 16 for me. Any ideas how to solve this? I installed Arc, downloaded launcher and then whole game and when i launch the game i have to wait about 10 minutes and then it freezes before even displaying my characters (i have to do hard reset).

 

Thats strange. Can you play any other games?
Are you using 64-bit Mint 16?

When a game freezes like that try Ctrl+Alt+F2 and then use the shell to kill the game.
If the keyboard doesn't work, then the whole operating system is frozen.
Check out some of these tips for the shell: Beginner Tips for Linux

 

Yes, it's 64 bit Mint.

I never played any gams using POL, i'm fairly new to linux (but i have some basic knowledge). I have steam installed and Dota 2 works perfectly (I played several matches). No luck so far with POL and Neverwinter (i tried different versions of Wine and even tried copying files of Neverwinter from Windows partition to no avail).

Ctrl+Alt+F2 doesn't work, both keyboard and mouse stop working, the screen freezes and all i can do is only hard reset.

btw. ctrl+alt+f2 doesn't work at all, because i use fglrx drivers and it just shows me black screen when i try to switch terminals.

 

Oh, the drivers must be your problem. Have you tried proprietary drivers?
I also recommend installing 32-bit libraries for games that are only 32-bit. That happens to be most of them.
I bet DOTA2 is 64-bit compatible... which is pretty cool.
Use your software manager and search for ia32-libs
Install those.
What kind of video card do you have?

 

I have ATI HD 6850.
I have ia32-libs installed already (according to Synaptic Package Manager).
Games on steam work as they should - i just tried Rust, Starbound and Arma Tactics, they all worked without any crashes.

I thought fglrx are the proprietary drivers? When i first installed Mint i tried also installing newest drivers directly from ATI page, but it was too difficult for me and i failed miserably (they gave me so many different errors and i googled so many different solutions that i don't know if everything is ok now with these drivers)

 

Ok, good. I'm actually surprised that those games ran with fglrx drivers. That is good news.
Sounds like you will need to install the Catalyst drivers.
Try going to Menu, Preferences (or administration) and look for "Additional Drivers"
Is there anything with Catalyst on the list?

 

fglrx is the old name for the proprietary drivers, and the kernel module is still named fglrx, so it is the proprietary driver. I am not sure exactly when the name change occurred.

Installing through your package manager is always the ideal choice when you are not comfortable working with terminal and solving any issues that may arise. As booman suggests, look through what Mint lets you select.

Depending on what you did when you attempted to install the driver from ati website, this may be the source of your problem. Running commands from terminal without knowing exactly what they do is never a good idea. If you allow Mint to perform the installation from where booman pointed you, it should make sure things work properly in regards to the drivers.

 

Dota 2 works on fglrx driver with about 20 fps less than on windows 7 (90 vs 70 fps).
I don't have "additional drivers" in Mint 16 but i found "Driver Manager" which looks like this http://tinypic.com/m/hwjupe/1 - no "catalyst" here.
Should i change to "xserver-xorg..."? Or go to ATI page and try installing their driver according to their instructions?

 

I just installed DDM and it shows me these drivers: http://tinypic.com/m/hwjupt/1
Maybe i should install "xserver-xorg-video-radeon"?