Looking to buy Neverwinter nights 2. But I'm just worried the game play won't be as awesome as Baldur's Gate, much like say Dragon Age. Post your thoughts.
it is nothing like BG. I gave up on it too, may install it on this laptop and give it another go after replaying BG, BGEE, IWD2 (never finished that one either) and any console games I pick up in the future....
NWN 1 wasn't too bad but II... ehhh... there was a *massive* slant towards a paladin/cleric or even ranger PC with what seemed a really badly cliche story.
My biggest annoyance was... the "best" items for clerics, combined with quest items you must wear at some point... add up to making my cleric look like the unholy lovechild of Batman, Zorro and carnival in Rio. I'm all for humor in games, but I prefer it in dialogue and plot, not making my character look like a joke.
I enjoyed NWN2 a lot. I would put it on top of my list as one of my most played games. The plethora of class combinations (even more so with PrC packs from modding sites) is a huge factor for its replay value. I don't want to spoil the game, but watch out for "Crossroad Keep" - much of my enjoyment of the game came from that. The NPCs are also made with good quality. But judging by your post you didn't seem to like Dragon Age that much; I can say that they have about equal quality in terms of companions. The sequel is also equally fun (many say even better). So if you'd ask me if it will be worth the pay? Definitely yes! But that's just me. :-)
I'm with Illustair here, as I also enjoyed (and still do) it a lot especially for the things he mentioned plus there are so many good modules (extra adventures) for it on the vault, which sometimes are worth to buy NWN2 already even if it wouldn't have an own story. That said you really can't get wrong with the current offer at gog.com (NWN2 complete for $14,99).. http://www.gog.com/gamecard/neverwinter_nights_2_complete !!! BTW.. there's a fantastic conversion of IWD for NWN2 (http://nwvault.ign.com/View.php?view=NWN2ModulesEnglish.Detail&id=346) !!! In any way.. just be certain to check out the vault for various mods and you should read about how to handle "camera settings" in NWN2, because it could be a real pain and for many people it was even the main point to stop playing the game.
As Kurumi said, aside from the OC, there are many good modules to choose from, not to mention the persistent worlds. The awesome conversion of IWD alone makes it even worth buying. And woah, I'm shocked with the $7.49 price! I'd buy that in a heartbeat had I not have bought my copy already.
Beamdog is where I first bought my digital copy of a game, does Gamestop work the same?
I actually really love the NWN games. It doesn't quite have the same hard core factor as BG, but it's still quite enjoyable. They are a lot easier than the BG games, that could be good or bad. Asides from the classes they add, the expansions for the second one kind of suck. The main campaign and the first expansion are pretty linear and less free roaming than the BG series.
I also don't think it's bad at all that they rush through the lower levels. That is one of the things I definitely think they got right. You get to avoid the "woops a wolf bit me right out of the gate, I'm dead" kind of crap.
There's some really fun banter between some of the NPCs, like Neeshka teifling thief. It's also tons of fun to take Khelgar the dwarven fighter, Bishop the evil ranger, and Grobnar the Gnomish bard all at once. Khelgar and Bishop are just down on Grobnar, it's hilarious. "Grobnar, you miserable little half man, strike up a tune, before I strike you"
As has been stated, there are some fantastic mods out there for both NWNs.
For NWN 1, the blackguard modules are loads of fun. The twilight (not related to the awful books) series of Paladin modules are really great as well.
My favorites for NWN2 are Path of Evil and Dark Waters. Path of Evil is a great campaign centered around evil characters (are you sensing that I play evil a lot ). It's really well done, and a great representation of how evil characters should be. NPCs are evil, but they do have real motivations and care about different things. Dark Waters is pretty cool, it's got psionics for a start. It mainly centers around you getting a pirate ship. There's ship to ship battle, and you even have the opportunity to lose a hand and get it replaced with a hook. Considering it's a fan made mod, the fact that it's fully voice acted is amazing. The voice acting is actually pretty decent too, better than a lot of "professional" games have.
You should know that there is also an awful issue with the game. It can't handle multi cores well. And like @bigdogchris said, you can easily abuse resting. But that's about it. If you're okay with those, then you should be good to go.
You should know that there is also an awful issue with the game. It can't handle multi cores well. And like @bigdogchris said, you can easily abuse resting. But that's about it. If you're okay with those, then you should be good to go.
Ah, that might explain why some areas run slow on my rig. I'll have to try setting a cpu affinity the next time I play it and see if that helps.
NWN2 is better than NWN1 in every regard...but it still has its troubles. The game runs sluggishly, even on good, modern PC's, the camera angles aren't always optimal but the biggest problem is that the plot has several big lulls in it where you really have to tell yourself "It's going to be worth it" to progress. You eventually get a stronghold, which is where the game picks up a bit, but they could've easily culled a large portion from the game.
It does, however, have some of my favorite NPC's, like Sand the Wizard and the expansion to it (Mask of the Betrayer) ranks close to Planescape: Torment for well-written RPG'ing (not to mention, it's possibly the best game ever to play as an Evil character). I heartily recommend NWN2, just know that you occasionally have to suck up some dull portions.
NwN2... The mechanics sucks, mostly because the unwieldy camera and impossibly stupid AI. The story was bland and unimaginative.
The expansion pack, Mask of the Betrayer, however. It still suffers from the mechanics issues, plus the whole Spiriteater mechanic which some people find unbearable (I had no problem with it personally). But it basically offers the best story and RPG experience any DnD-based game (I have ever played) have ever provided. Much better than Baldur's Gate.
Storm of Zehir was a bit interesting. Tried to be a little different what with the whole trade thing. Never finished it though, because of how fed up I was with the camera and AI at this point.
Never tried Mysteries of Westgate. I regularly play at a NwN2 persistant server called Baldur's Gate the Sword Coast Chronicles, though (or rather I did before my computer broke), the fact that you only play as one character helps with the whole camera/AI mess. It's set just before Time of Troubles, and have recreated many of the areas of BG. Here is a thread about it. It has a very active playerbase and you should totally check it out if you ever do buy the game
Having played Neverwinter Nights 2 I have to say it isn't "like" Baldur's Gate in an immediately noticable sense.
If you give the game a chance however, and stick it out, then it gets pretty good. Although the OC for NWN2 has an ending almost as bad as the ME3 ending.
Its a pretty game with a decent storyline, and pretty fun gameplay. Much like NWN1 the expansions are where NWN2 really shines. Really really shines.
I can guarantee that everyone that is saying NWN2 sucks never gave it a proper chance. I can say this because I was in the same boat; I was expecting something like BG/NWN and it was different and took some getting used to. And at first I completely didn't give it the chance. It took going back to it 3 times to finally get through the intial slog stages and really get a feel for it.
Once I did I began to rather like it.
It isn't the best game certainly, but it's definately worth a shot. Overall I would say it was better than NWN1.
That is probably the single most off topic post I have seen on these forums to date. Seriously what has it got to do with the price of sliced bread? I really want to be condescending here but I should probably just leave it to @Aosaw to deal with.
NWN2 is not like BG in my opinion. I dont know where to start why i dislike this comparison because there is no similarity then both games are D&D games.
NWN2 is okay. Sometimes I still play it. It's got interesting character builds and interesting npc's. Lots of cutscenes if you're into that.
It's like Baldur's Gate in that you can control your party members and enjoy tactical battles. The controls are difficult to learn and adjust, but you get used to it. There are camera settings in the options menu that can give you a more top-down view, and solve a lot of problems in the default camera. There's a mod called "Tony K's AI" that vastly improves the AI.
It probably won't be in your top ten favorite games, but it's definitely worth playing and checking out if you've never tried it, especially since it can now be bought at discount.
Weird.. Many people say it's buggy. But I've only encountered a very few, and they were only at the beginning. In fact, I could only recall three bugs. Two of which are just journal updates, the last one is an error message that keeps popping up in dialog window (can be easily remedied when you talk to a specific person, and the error message will go away). None were game breaking at all. I even had mods installed, that should have had increased the chances of having to see bugs to say the least.
It's pretty bad. The mechanics are horrible, it's incredibly ugly graphic-wise, even when it first came out, voice acting is pretty god awful in places, though some are ok. Most of the classes that returned from NWN were just copy-pasted rather then having their actual mechanics added, aside from a handful of updates to bring them from 3.0 to 3.5. Combat was perhaps even worse then NWN.
About the only, slight improvement above NWN is that you can directly control henchmen to a degree, but no where near like BG allows (anyone you're not controlling acts on their attack script).
Items are even more broken and Monty Haul then BG is...something I didn't think was possible....they sure showed me.
Everything is level scaled..which is actually kind of annoying. That's something I dispised about NWN, and 3rd edition in general (though it's not nearly as bad in PnP, since the DM gets the final say on your encounters and only needs to use the tables if they need to find a reasonable challenge). While I do agree that you need to be challenged periodically to keep the game from being boring, at the same time, you need breathers where you can feel how legitimately powerful you've become...and not because of the gear you've crafted/bought/found that makes you damn near immortal which makes even level appropriate challenges a joke.
Even in BG, Bioware doesn't know $%&* about balancing encounters after the first few levels. They did great in BG 1...the gear level was decent, and while there were magical items about, there was only 1 or maybe 2 reasonably powerful examples of each kind, and usually found in reasonable areas (not counting the silly extras added in strange places when TotSC came out), the level cap was low, the challenge the enemies applied was just right. BG 2 though they dropped the ball. The challenges are reasonably appropriate to the levels involved (without ToB), but the gear that is falling out of trees basically, most of it could pass for minor or even major Artifacts (hell, the Staff of the Magi IS a minor artifact, as is Crom Faeyr), the things you only find 1 or very rarely 2 of in a life time, and you can build an armory of them, EASILY.
They also went way overboard on kits or multiclasses, several of which are ridiculously stronger then they are in 2nd Ed PnP (Berserkers, barbarians, Swashbucklers, Blades, Inquisitors, undead hunters, Avengers, Archers, all multiclasses), and others got screwed (shapeshifters, wizard slayers, Bards especially (though all rogues to some degree), specialist mages). And then they added an extremely rushed ToB to that mess that turned the high level game into utterly boring crap.
If you don't like Baldur's Gate, then it stands to reason that you won't like Neverwinter Nights 1 or 2. If you do like Baldur's Gate, there's at least a greater than 50-50 chance you'll like Neverwinter Nights 1 and/or 2.
NWN2 has a horrific cliché storm of a story, annoying, one dimensional characters, who are often forced on you (you have to carry the most annoying asshat for pretty much half the game), overcomplicated crafting, and is still buggy as hell. there is NOTHING good in vanilla NWN2...
*however!*
then came Mask of the Betrayer, and pretty much changed everything. the original writers of NWN2 were probably fired (and promptly went to work on the ME3 team), and instead of the horrible mess that the original was, we get... well, basically *one of the best CRPGs of the goddamn decade*.
seriously, MotB is un-fucking-believably awesome. great story, all around interesting characters, some planehopping, awesome dialogues, and it's immersive as hell. only complaint I can list is that you're gonna have to pay copious amounts of attention, because it's story can get very confusing, very quick.
the second expansion pack, Storm of Zehir, is... alright. it's along the lines of Icewind Dale + jungles + trading, but it's cool, though somewhat difficult to control thanks to the fucked-up scheme NWN2 went with.
tl;dr: buy the game, skip the original, play the expansions, prepare to have mental orgasm.
I can't stand Mask of the Betrayer. The spirit-eater thing ruined it for me. I might try it again sometime when I'm in the mood for roleplaying an involuntarily turned vamp, but I don't know when that might be. There are too many other games and stories that interest me more.
I can't stand Mask of the Betrayer. The spirit-eater thing ruined it for me. I might try it again sometime when I'm in the mood for roleplaying an involuntarily turned vamp, but I don't know when that might be. There are too many other games and stories that interest me more.
Ya, I agree. The whole way they handled the spirit eater thing was a lame hook, and the hook is hack. Storyline wise it was decent and offered more closure on the ending of the main campaign, though. The spirit eater crap just felt like they were trying to gimp just your character, and not the npcs, instead of providing an appropriate challenge for a character of that level.
I actually thought the crafting system was cool. It didn't seem overly complicated to me at all, but that's probably because you can find all the recipes online. I thought it provided a great deal of customization to your character's gear. The gear does get pretty obscene, though. Having +5 weapons not much after the halfway point is pretty crazy, since those are supposed to be weapons of the gods. It is pretty neat to be able to craft a zalantir or mithril shield that has no spell failure, so multiclass wizards can use it. It's that kind of customization that I think the crafting brings to the table.
I never really had any bug problems with it except in Storm of Zehyr, and I've played nwn2 from when it first came out. I have noticed a handful of areas that run kind of laggy, but that's it. An occasional crash here or there, but nothing exceptional or quest breaking, except in mods.
It definitely could have been more challenging, though. You probably want to crank the difficulty slider way up.
Also the scripts for NPCs are pretty customizable. not to the degree of dragon age, but I see them do far less stupid crap than in Baldur's Gate. Nothing like running straight up to a huge baddy when they have bow or sling in their hand.
Comments
I gave up on it too, may install it on this laptop and give it another go after replaying BG, BGEE, IWD2 (never finished that one either) and any console games I pick up in the future....
Dragon Age II: Déjà Vu was a case study of just how much you can cut back costs in an attempt to maximize profits.
http://www.gamestop.com/pc/games/dungeons-dragons-neverwinter-nights-complete/99052
Beamdog is where I first bought my digital copy of a game, does Gamestop work the same?
I also don't think it's bad at all that they rush through the lower levels. That is one of the things I definitely think they got right. You get to avoid the "woops a wolf bit me right out of the gate, I'm dead" kind of crap.
There's some really fun banter between some of the NPCs, like Neeshka teifling thief. It's also tons of fun to take Khelgar the dwarven fighter, Bishop the evil ranger, and Grobnar the Gnomish bard all at once. Khelgar and Bishop are just down on Grobnar, it's hilarious.
"Grobnar, you miserable little half man, strike up a tune, before I strike you"
As has been stated, there are some fantastic mods out there for both NWNs.
For NWN 1, the blackguard modules are loads of fun. The twilight (not related to the awful books) series of Paladin modules are really great as well.
My favorites for NWN2 are Path of Evil and Dark Waters. Path of Evil is a great campaign centered around evil characters (are you sensing that I play evil a lot
The game runs sluggishly, even on good, modern PC's, the camera angles aren't always optimal but the biggest problem is that the plot has several big lulls in it where you really have to tell yourself "It's going to be worth it" to progress.
You eventually get a stronghold, which is where the game picks up a bit, but they could've easily culled a large portion from the game.
It does, however, have some of my favorite NPC's, like Sand the Wizard and the expansion to it (Mask of the Betrayer) ranks close to Planescape: Torment for well-written RPG'ing (not to mention, it's possibly the best game ever to play as an Evil character).
I heartily recommend NWN2, just know that you occasionally have to suck up some dull portions.
The expansion pack, Mask of the Betrayer, however. It still suffers from the mechanics issues, plus the whole Spiriteater mechanic which some people find unbearable (I had no problem with it personally). But it basically offers the best story and RPG experience any DnD-based game (I have ever played) have ever provided. Much better than Baldur's Gate.
Storm of Zehir was a bit interesting. Tried to be a little different what with the whole trade thing. Never finished it though, because of how fed up I was with the camera and AI at this point.
Never tried Mysteries of Westgate. I regularly play at a NwN2 persistant server called Baldur's Gate the Sword Coast Chronicles, though (or rather I did before my computer broke), the fact that you only play as one character helps with the whole camera/AI mess. It's set just before Time of Troubles, and have recreated many of the areas of BG. Here is a thread about it. It has a very active playerbase and you should totally check it out if you ever do buy the game
Having played Neverwinter Nights 2 I have to say it isn't "like" Baldur's Gate in an immediately noticable sense.
If you give the game a chance however, and stick it out, then it gets pretty good. Although the OC for NWN2 has an ending almost as bad as the ME3 ending.
Its a pretty game with a decent storyline, and pretty fun gameplay. Much like NWN1 the expansions are where NWN2 really shines. Really really shines.
I can guarantee that everyone that is saying NWN2 sucks never gave it a proper chance. I can say this because I was in the same boat; I was expecting something like BG/NWN and it was different and took some getting used to. And at first I completely didn't give it the chance.
It took going back to it 3 times to finally get through the intial slog stages and really get a feel for it.
Once I did I began to rather like it.
It isn't the best game certainly, but it's definately worth a shot. Overall I would say it was better than NWN1.
EDIT:
@ScytheKnight
That is probably the single most off topic post I have seen on these forums to date. Seriously what has it got to do with the price of sliced bread?
I really want to be condescending here but I should probably just leave it to @Aosaw to deal with.
It's like Baldur's Gate in that you can control your party members and enjoy tactical battles. The controls are difficult to learn and adjust, but you get used to it. There are camera settings in the options menu that can give you a more top-down view, and solve a lot of problems in the default camera. There's a mod called "Tony K's AI" that vastly improves the AI.
It probably won't be in your top ten favorite games, but it's definitely worth playing and checking out if you've never tried it, especially since it can now be bought at discount.
About the only, slight improvement above NWN is that you can directly control henchmen to a degree, but no where near like BG allows (anyone you're not controlling acts on their attack script).
Items are even more broken and Monty Haul then BG is...something I didn't think was possible....they sure showed me.
Everything is level scaled..which is actually kind of annoying. That's something I dispised about NWN, and 3rd edition in general (though it's not nearly as bad in PnP, since the DM gets the final say on your encounters and only needs to use the tables if they need to find a reasonable challenge). While I do agree that you need to be challenged periodically to keep the game from being boring, at the same time, you need breathers where you can feel how legitimately powerful you've become...and not because of the gear you've crafted/bought/found that makes you damn near immortal which makes even level appropriate challenges a joke.
Even in BG, Bioware doesn't know $%&* about balancing encounters after the first few levels. They did great in BG 1...the gear level was decent, and while there were magical items about, there was only 1 or maybe 2 reasonably powerful examples of each kind, and usually found in reasonable areas (not counting the silly extras added in strange places when TotSC came out), the level cap was low, the challenge the enemies applied was just right. BG 2 though they dropped the ball. The challenges are reasonably appropriate to the levels involved (without ToB), but the gear that is falling out of trees basically, most of it could pass for minor or even major Artifacts (hell, the Staff of the Magi IS a minor artifact, as is Crom Faeyr), the things you only find 1 or very rarely 2 of in a life time, and you can build an armory of them, EASILY.
They also went way overboard on kits or multiclasses, several of which are ridiculously stronger then they are in 2nd Ed PnP (Berserkers, barbarians, Swashbucklers, Blades, Inquisitors, undead hunters, Avengers, Archers, all multiclasses), and others got screwed (shapeshifters, wizard slayers, Bards especially (though all rogues to some degree), specialist mages). And then they added an extremely rushed ToB to that mess that turned the high level game into utterly boring crap.
*however!*
then came Mask of the Betrayer, and pretty much changed everything. the original writers of NWN2 were probably fired (and promptly went to work on the ME3 team), and instead of the horrible mess that the original was, we get... well, basically *one of the best CRPGs of the goddamn decade*.
seriously, MotB is un-fucking-believably awesome. great story, all around interesting characters, some planehopping, awesome dialogues, and it's immersive as hell. only complaint I can list is that you're gonna have to pay copious amounts of attention, because it's story can get very confusing, very quick.
the second expansion pack, Storm of Zehir, is... alright. it's along the lines of Icewind Dale + jungles + trading, but it's cool, though somewhat difficult to control thanks to the fucked-up scheme NWN2 went with.
tl;dr: buy the game, skip the original, play the expansions, prepare to have mental orgasm.
I actually thought the crafting system was cool. It didn't seem overly complicated to me at all, but that's probably because you can find all the recipes online. I thought it provided a great deal of customization to your character's gear. The gear does get pretty obscene, though. Having +5 weapons not much after the halfway point is pretty crazy, since those are supposed to be weapons of the gods. It is pretty neat to be able to craft a zalantir or mithril shield that has no spell failure, so multiclass wizards can use it. It's that kind of customization that I think the crafting brings to the table.
I never really had any bug problems with it except in Storm of Zehyr, and I've played nwn2 from when it first came out. I have noticed a handful of areas that run kind of laggy, but that's it. An occasional crash here or there, but nothing exceptional or quest breaking, except in mods.
It definitely could have been more challenging, though. You probably want to crank the difficulty slider way up.
Also the scripts for NPCs are pretty customizable. not to the degree of dragon age, but I see them do far less stupid crap than in Baldur's Gate. Nothing like running straight up to a huge baddy when they have bow or sling in their hand.