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:

 

I honestly don't know what those others might be. I don't use Mint or Ubuntu so I am not sure what those choices might be. You already have xserver-xorg installed, otherwise you would not be having a graphical desktop. I assume the others are just specific versions compatible with certain older versions.

I just ran a google and the driver you currently have installed seems to be a recent version. So according to this things should be working. The easiest way to check if you are having problems with just this game or other games, would be to install another game in PoL and check if it runs, preferably a recent game.

Otherwise, you can find the log for this game if you go to your home folder and open "PlayOnLinux's virtual drives", open the virtual drive for this game. There you will find a file called "playonlinux.log", it might help discovering what is causing these problems.

 

Good question... I'm not totally sure. Might as well try the Xserver-xorg-video-ati, but I have no idea if it will show improvement or not.
This is a very common gripe with AMD and their Linux drivers.
I'm glad that I have Nvidia

 

Hi, this is the first time I tried installing any game on linux using playonLinux. It all works fine untill I press the play button on the Neverwinter Launcher. Then it gives me this fatal error saying DirectX can't render and I need to either restart my computer, check if my drivers are up-to-date or contact someone....


I tried restarting the playonLinux, my computer and everything else I could think of. As well as trying to change the wine version to a more up-to-date one, changing the windows rendering to windows Vista and 7 and even trying to find the drivers for my Ati radeon graphics card... Nothing worked and it all gave me the same error.

Is there any way to fix this?

 

Sounds like a driver problem. Are you able to play any other games in Linux?
AMD drivers are known to be buggy depending on the Graphics chip and the Linux distro. What are you currently running?

 

Linux Mint Cinamon version... Don't know where to find drivers, but I'm going to check if Champions Online does work (now patching).

If thet doesn't work as well, I'm going to switch my SDD from my laptop into my desktop and I'll retry downloading and installing tomorrow.
Got no problems with Minecraft so far, and it was my first attempt to an all Windows/Mac game on Linux now.


God, I kinda feel like a Linux noob now

 

I have the same problem with Champions online though, there I got through to the "Yes, with lowered settings" part but it gave up after three times "Couldn't create D3D device."

I did re-do this entire checklist again and it didn't work...

 

Great, glad you are using Mint. I'm using Mint 16 right now.
What computer are you using?
It is Mint 64-bit?
Click Menu, Administration, Additional Drivers

This should list which drivers you are currently using. I have a feeling its the open source drivers.
You will probably need to install the fglrx drivers for AMD graphics chips.

 

Don't worry, I have only been Using Linux every day for a year now. I'm loving it, but still learning a lot.

 

It is 64-bit and for some reason the additional drivers doesn't show anything to me besides this huge grey block...

As for my computer, it's an old MSI EX610 but with a different, better CPU. Do you possibly know where and how to install working drivers for my ATI??

 

I'm going to try install Cataclyst from the ATI-driver search... Should be the one

 

Manually installing drivers is very difficult and can break stuff.
I recommend using the "Additional Drivers" already in Mint.
It might just be called "Drivers"

You can also use Synaptics Software Installer and search for fglrx or catalyst

 

I hate this stuff I installed the fglrx drivers through Synaptics and it did what it had to do... But when I try to open it, it "again" gives me an error being that I appear to not have the drivers installed or they don't work or they aren't compatible with my hardware which is like OLD

 

Did you reboot after installing?

Old huh? What kind of hardware are you running?
Is this a laptop?

 

It is a laptop, running on an ATI Mobility Radeon HD 2400 as graphics, AMD Athlon 64bit TK-55 (won't be much newer than that) I also rebooted 4 times since installing the graphics drivers and it didn't work at all... I'm going to check if it plays Sims Medieval though and if that doesn't work, I know my graphics card is pretty much dead...

If that happens, I'm going to re-do my Mint in my Desktop which is hard-disk-less at home at the moment, and retry to install Neverwinter once more

 

I'm doing some research on your mobility 4200 and not getting a lot of good feedback. It would be a good idea to post on the Mint forums about how to install the driver.

 

I'm probably going to re-install my linux mint while my SDD is in my desktop computer, it's a more recent one and I can always buy a nice NVIDIA and plug it in there

 

Believe me... you won't regret it!

 

I have a couple of questions regarding certain choices. I'm trying to figure out if I'm doing something wrong or if it's just the video drivers.

As I was going through your guide I noticed that you have us download 1.7.10 version of wine, but use 1.6-rc4 later down the road. Is there a particular reason for going with these compared to the 1.7.14 version?

I'm also wondering if you have tried doing this with ATI drivers? I am currently using a ATI Radeon HD 6850 and seem to have quite a bit of trouble. In fact I have only managed to make it to the character selection screen once.

 

Thanks for noticing my discrepancies. I have a feeling a screenshot is still showing 1.6-rc4 and I just didn't update it. Stick with Wine 1.7.10 or newer.

I don't have any AMD video cards so I have not been able to test with their drivers.
I have read numerous times that AMD drivers are still having problems in the Linux Realm. There is a chance you might need newer AMD drivers or even have to roll back to some older drivers.

 

I have completely updated the guide. I noticed some other problems and ended up posting the whole guide all over again. It should be more seamless now.