Dungeons & Dragons: Heroes of Neverwinter Screenshots and Preview

When you’re finished taking in the four new screenshots over in our image gallery, you may want to pay a visit to Joystiq for another E3-based preview of Atari and Liquid Entertainment’s Dungeons & Dragons: Heroes of Neverwinter.

Players start out by creating a hero of their own design, blending one of four races (Dragonborn, Human, Eladrin and Halfling) with one of four classes (Rogue, Fighter, Cleric and Wizard). Each character has a number of aesthetic options you can change from the outset, but you’ll want to make sure not to make them look too ridiculous — much like in Dragon Age: Legends, your friends can borrow your characters and bring them into battle with them.

Players can enlist their friends heroes (as well as mercenaries-for-hire) at the town hub, an area which also allows them to purchase new items or customize their own personal estate. The game uses two forms of currency for these transactions: Gold, which you’ll find scattered across the 50-or-so dungeons of Neverwinter, and Astral Diamonds, which are purchased using Facebook Coins.

From there, players can hop into an instanced dungeon (each of which have three difficulty levels, with fittingly scaled rewards) and begin crawling their way through in D&D 4E fashion. All of the die rolling sadly still takes place behind the scenes, but the mechanics are the same: Players go in order of their initiative, choose one of the many, many skills they pick up each level to use against a monster, then pray their attack finds its mark.