Neverwinter reveals pre-order packs

Neverwinter’s closed beta is closer than you might think, as Cryptic has just posted the dates of the three weekend events coming up. The beta weekends begin on February 8th, with successive ones starting March 8th and March 22nd, and will be available to residents of North America and Europe to those lucky enough to be accepted.

To tempt people into shedding some cash up front, Cryptic is prepared to dangle guaranteed beta invites to those who purchase a $60 or $200 pre-order Founder’s Pack. In addition to the closed beta access, the $60 version contains a head-start to the open beta, a title, an armored horse mount, a mask, and a direwolf companion. The $200 pack has an even longer open beta head start, an exclusive Menzoberranzan Renegade playable race, a closed beta code for a friend, a spider mount, a panther companion, and priority access to the game.

Alternatively, Cryptic’s offering a $20 basic pack that will not contain a closed beta key, but will give players a few in-game items and 12 additional inventory slots.

So what we have here is one company that values the same stuff, if not more, at $10 and another company that has a value price of $60.  I don’t believe in any way that I have to pay for this stuff.  However, I would gladly pay some kind of price to have the things mentioned above.  Now I know you can say that TERA is a Korean game and that knowing they wouldn’t have as many customers in the U.S. as a U.S. developed game would, but these price differences are so dramatic it is cause for concern.  Now that I know just how badly Cryptic is trying to pay off all their development costs, I am 100% worried that they’re F2P plan will come with horrible restrictions that will need the use of cash to get by.  That’s speculation of course but in order to get 12 slots in my bag and a couple items I have to shell out $20?  That makes me even further speculate that my bag will be so small I’ll need to pay for this if I don’t want to go to a shop to sell useless junk every 15 minutes.