I'm having a real hard time getting into Neverwinter Nights

[CPA]

Just purchased Neverwinter Nights Diamond Edition (nope, didn't get it through GoGamer 48 Sale - missed out) and have now just left the Academy headed for the Peninsula in the City. But, I'm having a tough time convincing myself the game is worth the hours.

I loved Baldur's Gate and Titan Quest. I think part of my problem is that I loved the ease of controls and the UI for Titan Quest and Neverwinter Nights, while similar (the F Bar at the bottom of the screen) is just more clumsy. Plus, the camera angles aren't always the best, don't reset to my prefered angle after NPC conversation, the story is slightly dull at the moment, combat is slow, and characters sometimes get hung up in their pathfinding.

I've read quit a few posters proclaim that NN is an awesome game, but don't really explain why. So does the story get better, the characters more interesting and combat pick up as the game goes along? Or am I in for more of the same?

 

[rudder]

More of the same... I got halfway through the game and dropped it.

 

[aCynic2]

I had a hard time motivating myself to play NWN also. Is this the original, with the female elf paladin with the strapless platemail armor and jigglies?

 

[mundane]

Originally posted by: aCynic2
I had a hard time motivating myself to play NWN also. Is this the original, with the female elf paladin with the strapless platemail armor and jigglies?

You mean Aribeth?

I liked the original campaign, but many people feel the same way as you, OP. Those people seem to have enjoyed the expansion packs more, and don't forget the numerous mods.

 

[shortylickens]

It was supposed to be a sequel to Baldurs Gate 2, they even had plans to import characters but dropped that idea before release.

Their slogan should have been:
"If you loved Baldurs Gate then you'll HATE Neverwinter Nights!"

It is a horrible game for those of us who remember the quality 2D RPG's from earlier days. When they made the move to 3D they lost a lot of gameplay and even with NWN 2 they never got it all back. Its inferior in just about every manner you can think of.

-You can only have 1 main party member and 1 hireling, and the hireling has extremly limited control. Difficult to access character abilities and spells and even more difficult to interact with objects and people.

-The nifty little 3D rotation and zoom never has a great angle or lets you go way out to see things. More often than not your view is partially obstructed even with the so-called "intelligent" building see-through feature. You cant pan around the map independantly from the party to check out the landscape. You actually have to move your PC's there and they walk hideously slow.

-The world is very plain and sparse on detail compared to BG2. Fewer things and people to interact with, fewer side quests and optional areas. Also, when you move between chapters you can't go back to previous areas. The dialog and quest quality is much worse than the other games. You never really get the same Epic feel throughout the story.

The ONLY real improvement was a mixed blessing: They went to D&D 3rd Edition rules, which many people dont like anyway. NWN 2 had better implementation of the rules, more character classes and prestige classes, more spells and skills and powers and goodies to play with. NWN 2 also alllowed much larger parties and slightly better control over those parties, but it still feels clumsy compared to the Baldurs Gate games.

NWN 2 had graphics that look decent, but the game performs relatively poorly.
I honestly can not think of anything positive to say about Neverwinter Nights, at least not anything encouraging you to play it. If you have a good gaming system you may want to check out NWN 2, they fixed a lot of the bugs and now its just a mediocre game instead of a bad one.

 

[CPA]

Originally posted by: shortylickens
It was supposed to be a sequel to Baldurs Gate 2, they even had plans to import characters but dropped that idea before release.

Their slogan should have been:
"If you loved Baldurs Gate then you'll HATE Neverwinter Nights!"

It is a horrible game for those of us who remember the quality 2D RPG's from earlier days. When they made the move to 3D they lost a lot of gameplay and even with NWN 2 they never got it all back. Its inferior in just about every manner you can think of.

-You can only have 1 main party member and 1 hireling, and the hireling has extremly limited control. Difficult to access character abilities and spells and even more difficult to interact with objects and people.

-The nifty little 3D rotation and zoom never has a great angle or lets you go way out to see things. More often than not your view is partially obstructed even with the so-called "intelligent" building see-through feature. You cant pan around the map independantly from the party to check out the landscape. You actually have to move your PC's there and they walk hideously slow.

-The world is very plain and sparse on detail compared to BG2. Fewer things and people to interact with, fewer side quests and optional areas. Also, when you move between chapters you can't go back to previous areas. The dialog and quest quality is much worse than the other games. You never really get the same Epic feel throughout the story.

The ONLY real improvement was a mixed blessing: They went to D&D 3rd Edition rules, which many people dont like anyway. NWN 2 had better implementation of the rules, more character classes and prestige classes, more spells and skills and powers and goodies to play with. NWN 2 also alllowed much larger parties and slightly better control over those parties, but it still feels clumsy compared to the Baldurs Gate games.

NWN 2 had graphics that look decent, but the game performs relatively poorly.
I honestly can not think of anything positive to say about Neverwinter Nights, at least not anything encouraging you to play it. If you have a good gaming system you may want to check out NWN 2, they fixed a lot of the bugs and now its just a mediocre game instead of a bad one.

Gah, where were you before I laid down 20 bucks for this game

 

[Fenixgoon]

the NWN1 default campaign is a relative borefest, IMO. i didn't really pay attention to the story (hooray for lack of dialogue and party members). HOTU expansion pack is 10000x better in terms of pacing and fun

 

[ayabe]

*Shrug* I had to start over a couple times because I wasn't motivated either, but once I did, and played through the expansions I felt my time was well spent.

I rather enjoyed the story at least more than NWN2 - which was terrible towards the end, IMHO.

 

[rangda]

The NWN games are totaly different than BG, if you go into them wanting another BG then you will end up being sorely disappointed. They are (somewhat liberal) conversions of the d20 ruleset to an action game format; with the intent of supporting multiplayer. This forces some changes to the d20 rules and of course makes for a totally different game experience from a turn based classic RPG (which seem to no longer exist). Action games aren't better or worse than turn based, they are just different; and may be better/worse for a particular person depending on what they want. NWN 2 isn't quite so solo (you can have parties in the campaign instead of a single player with henchman; note HotU for NWN does the same as I recall) but the AI is not as good as NWN which can force you to micro-manage your party in certain fights (which is very hard in an action game) making some fights more frustrating than they should be.

As far as the stories go; the NWN initial campaign is so-so; but the expansions are much better (HotU being the best IMO). NWN 2 stars out great (better than any of the NWN's IMO) but falls apart at the end when it starts to get really cosmic (the 'good' ending in particular is the worst ending I have ever seen in any videogame ever and I've been playing games off and on for 30 years). It does, however, touch upon a lot of the things you might see in a PnP campaign and has some interesting ideas in it. A lot of effort was put into the other party members and consequently they are much better than any of the NWN npc's you'd have.

 

[Schadenfroh]

Dont even play the original campaign of neverwinter nights, it is garbage by Bioware standards. Chapter 1 of the expansion pack Shadows of Undertide is tolerable (2nd chapter sucked) and the 2nd and 3rd chapters of Hordes of the Underdark are good (1st chapter was a hack and slash grindfest)

Download and play this module and its sequel if you want a great story driven game with focus on plot / character development, but action RPG lovers beware, there are only about 3 "forced" combat encounters in the entire first module.

The module
http://nwvault.ign.com/View.ph...modules.Detail&id=4046

It's sequel (and a better game)
http://nwvault.ign.com/View.ph...etail&id=29643&id=4047


A more action oriented game (that still has great story / roleplaying) would be:
http://nwvault.ign.com/View.ph...Modules.Detail&id=4290

But, I highly suggest the first two modules that I linked.

See The NeverWinter Nights Module Thread for more:
http://forums.anandtech.com/me...y&keyword1=neverwinter

 

[shortylickens]

Originally posted by: CPA
Gah, where were you before I laid down 20 bucks for this game

Sorry, I have been bashing this game for so long I got tired of it after a while.
Near as I can tell the search function is still useless on Anandtech but if it did work you would have found about 500 threads on Neverwinter Nights over the years and most of them are less than favorable.

If you dont mind the action-game camera angles and can tolerate the D20 system I would recommend you play Knights of the Old Republic.
Its made by some of the same people as the Baldurs Gate series and features quality voice acting and an EXCELLENT story along with good character interaction. Its not quite as freeform as BG but is a hell of a lot more open than either of the NWN games.

If you've already played KOTOR and its sequel then guess what?: You're SOL.
I have not played any RPG's that come close to the quality of the ealier Bioware/Black Isle/Obsidian games.
Perhaps Anacronox from Ion Storm might be acceptable to you, if you can stand the cheese factor.

 

[MarcVenice]

After I installed all the patches on NWN2 I actually like the game, the story is pretty good for like 90%, but yeah the end kinda sucks. It's also pretty good for ppl who want to just kill stuf with some rpg stuff mixed into it, and it's really good for the turn based dungeon and dragons rules freaks who love to make a perfect character and stuff The graphics are pretty okay too to boot.

 

[Ryland]

I couldnt' stand NWN. What the final problem for me was the horrible pathfinding in that game.

 

[DaveSimmons]

I enjoyed the original NWN but would rate it as more of an Icewind Dale dungeon crawl than a Bladur's Gate epic. I liked the 2 expansions better. FYI they are linked together but start you over with a new level 1 character they aren't a continuation of your NWN character.

Neverwinter 2 with the 1.04 patch was fun and pretty much bug-free for me. Another weak story but the new classes, rules and crafting were fun. I enjoyed it partly because I played it after Oblivion, which was even more story-free.

Star Wars: KOTOR 1 & 2 were both better than all 3 parts of NWN, even with the botched ending to KOTOR 2.

I'm playing Vampire: Bloodlines now, fun game if you don't mind being a little evil now and then (feeding on humans, for example).

 

[coloumb]

Back when it was first released, I had a blast playing NWN. I recently re-purchased the Diamond edition and also found myself trying to find a reason to get out of the first town...

I blame it on how games have improved since NWN was released - I've become spoiled by full vocal dialogue, improved graphics, and overall gameplay.

 

[Sureshot324]

It can be fun if you make a character that's fun to play. If you pick a warrior and do nothing but hack and slash all game then yeah it's gonna be boring.

 

[aCynic2]

Originally posted by: mundane

Originally posted by: aCynic2
I had a hard time motivating myself to play NWN also. Is this the original, with the female elf paladin with the strapless platemail armor and jigglies?

You mean Aribeth?

Yes, that's the name. I haven't played it in a while. I should reinstall it. Does bioware still support it now that someone else has the rights to the NWN franchise?

 

[aCynic2]

Originally posted by: shortylickens
The ONLY real improvement was a mixed blessing: They went to D&D 3rd Edition rules, which many people dont like anyway.

I for one didn't mind the to hit system, since it still allowed you to hit, but I hated the spell resistance. It was so non-existant as to be the total opposite of 2nd Ed magic resistance.

NWN 2 had better implementation of the rules, more character classes and prestige classes, more spells and skills and powers and goodies to play with. NWN 2 also alllowed much larger parties and slightly better control over those parties, but it still feels clumsy compared to the Baldurs Gate games.

Sound like NWN2 was an improvement, but I heard a lot of people complain about the support for the game.

 

[shortylickens]

Well, the To Hit system was pretty much the same as D&D and AD&D, but they reversed the Armor Class so the numbers went up with improved armor instead of down and into the negatives (which really makes more sense if you think about it).

The damage resistances were OK, but the spell resistance was kind of messed up, true.

Support improved a LOT over time. The original game was full of bugs not the least of which were several that broke the main quest in the campaign, ensuring you couldnt beat it.
I found workarounds for many of them, they usually involved running scripts in the console that the game was supposed to do automatically.

With the latest version they patched all those holes and fixed a bunch of game balance issues as well.
It still isnt Baldurs Gate, but it should tide us over until somebody makes a proper Old-school 2D role playing game with a good main quest and lots of optional stuff to explore.

 

[Acanthus]

NWN2 dramatically improved some things.

However, the mod toolset is substantially less user friendly, and theres very little user-content out there in comparison.

The persistant worlds (like mini MMOs) that were around in NWN1 have not made it to NWN2.

 

[Drift3r]

I miss the days of Baldur's Gate, Planescape Torment, Fallout, etc... I guess since 2d graphics could only do so much they really had to focus on the story with those games instead of the graphics like they do with modern RPG's.

P.S. I also loved the Ice Wind Dale series and Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura game as well.

KOTOR is the only game that really had some nice story telling elements in the modern 3d era of RPG's with Vampire: The Masquerade taking up the second place spot IMHO.

 

[effee]

KOTOR was good, KOTOR2 was boring stuff

 

[Harabec]

I really liked KOTOR, much better use of the NWN engine than, uh, NWN itself.

Still - I had a lot of fun playing NWN as well.
It was not bugged for me and I enjoyed the many things you did in the campaign besides the long, boring talks with Aribeth while trying to get into her pants. That obviously didn't work, she turned evil instead.

 

[Bateluer]

Originally posted by: shortylickens
It was supposed to be a sequel to Baldurs Gate 2, they even had plans to import characters but dropped that idea before release.

Their slogan should have been:
"If you loved Baldurs Gate then you'll HATE Neverwinter Nights!"

It is a horrible game for those of us who remember the quality 2D RPG's from earlier days. When they made the move to 3D they lost a lot of gameplay and even with NWN 2 they never got it all back. Its inferior in just about every manner you can think of.

-You can only have 1 main party member and 1 hireling, and the hireling has extremly limited control. Difficult to access character abilities and spells and even more difficult to interact with objects and people.

-The nifty little 3D rotation and zoom never has a great angle or lets you go way out to see things. More often than not your view is partially obstructed even with the so-called "intelligent" building see-through feature. You cant pan around the map independantly from the party to check out the landscape. You actually have to move your PC's there and they walk hideously slow.

-The world is very plain and sparse on detail compared to BG2. Fewer things and people to interact with, fewer side quests and optional areas. Also, when you move between chapters you can't go back to previous areas. The dialog and quest quality is much worse than the other games. You never really get the same Epic feel throughout the story.

The ONLY real improvement was a mixed blessing: They went to D&D 3rd Edition rules, which many people dont like anyway. NWN 2 had better implementation of the rules, more character classes and prestige classes, more spells and skills and powers and goodies to play with. NWN 2 also alllowed much larger parties and slightly better control over those parties, but it still feels clumsy compared to the Baldurs Gate games.

NWN 2 had graphics that look decent, but the game performs relatively poorly.
I honestly can not think of anything positive to say about Neverwinter Nights, at least not anything encouraging you to play it. If you have a good gaming system you may want to check out NWN 2, they fixed a lot of the bugs and now its just a mediocre game instead of a bad one.

Man, I really need to set this straight, you've got some inaccurate information in there. If you are referring to NWN1 before its expansions, than you are more correct, but the OP bought the Diamond Edition, so he has all the expansions.

1. With the Hordes of the Underdark expansion, you gained a second party member and increased control over them. In addition, the ingenious mod makers figured out how to add more companions. PreSoU henchmen had extremely limited control, not allowing you to even open their inventory or equip them. Each expansion added more control. With HotU, you can do most everything cept have full party control. While I definitely prefer full party control, we can thank shoddy, high selling console RPGs and Diablo clones for the henchmen method today.

2. Pure BS. Learn to use the camera in NWN and you won't have a problem. Initially coming from the 2D games with fixed cameras does take some getting used to, however, thats all part of learning a new game.

3. This is true, the world does lack some detail compared to the Infinity engine games. This obviously has to do with the computer hardware available at the time. While you could make an Aurora engine game's background look as detailed as an infinity engine game's background, your computer would explode. With both expansions, the community expansion pack, not to mention all the other gigabytes of community developed 'stuff', and the increased power of computers today, this isn't quite so true any more. And in NWN2, its totally bogus. NWN2's back grounds can be just as detailed and delicious as those found in 2D games.

4. Won't disagree with you here, there were some aspects of the 2e rules that many people liked better than the simpler 3e and 3.5e rules. NWN2's party control is far from perfect, but its still far better than the standard henchmen system found in most 'RPG' titles today. At least I have full control over my party members inventory, equipment, and movement. Their AI needs some work though, which has been addressed in community mods, so its not really as big an issue as some would claim.

5. NWN2's visuals were far from the best at the the time, and the game at release was very poorly optimized. However, with the 1.03 patch, performance was substantially improved. And each patch since, 1.04, 1.05, and 1.06 has included some optimizations to make the game perform better.

This is something that I noticed when running NWN2 on my X1900XT, the benchmark numbers from websites with my card and faster CPUs didn't match the numbers I was seeing on my machine. With my X1900XT and E6600, I was getting close to double what some websites were reporting with the same video card and a X6800. I didn't think much of it until I bought my 2900XT and started seeing my numbers 4x to 5x what some websites were getting. Really causes me to doubt those websites in the future. Xbit, I'm looking at you.

To conclude, NWN2 is a diamond in the rough. With some polish, it could be the greatest RPG since Planescape Torment. NWN1, with its unrivaled quantities of user made content places it in the top 3 CRPGs ever made, right behind Torment and BG2.

 

[Fenixgoon]

<div class="FTQUOTE"><begin quote>Originally posted by: Bateluer
<div class="FTQUOTE"><begin quote>Originally posted by: shortylickens
It was supposed to be a sequel to Baldurs Gate 2, they even had plans to import characters but dropped that idea before release.

Their slogan should have been:
"If you loved Baldurs Gate then you'll HATE Neverwinter Nights!"

It is a horrible game for those of us who remember the quality 2D RPG's from earlier days. When they made the move to 3D they lost a lot of gameplay and even with NWN 2 they never got it all back. Its inferior in just about every manner you can think of.

-You can only have 1 main party member and 1 hireling, and the hireling has extremly limited control. Difficult to access character abilities and spells and even more difficult to interact with objects and people.

-The nifty little 3D rotation and zoom never has a great angle or lets you go way out to see things. More often than not your view is partially obstructed even with the so-called "intelligent" building see-through feature. You cant pan around the map independantly from the party to check out the landscape. You actually have to move your PC's there and they walk hideously slow.

-The world is very plain and sparse on detail compared to BG2. Fewer things and people to interact with, fewer side quests and optional areas. Also, when you move between chapters you can't go back to previous areas. The dialog and quest quality is much worse than the other games. You never really get the same Epic feel throughout the story.

The ONLY real improvement was a mixed blessing: They went to D&D 3rd Edition rules, which many people dont like anyway. NWN 2 had better implementation of the rules, more character classes and prestige classes, more spells and skills and powers and goodies to play with. NWN 2 also alllowed much larger parties and slightly better control over those parties, but it still feels clumsy compared to the Baldurs Gate games.

NWN 2 had graphics that look decent, but the game performs relatively poorly.
I honestly can not think of anything positive to say about Neverwinter Nights, at least not anything encouraging you to play it. If you have a good gaming system you may want to check out NWN 2, they fixed a lot of the bugs and now its just a mediocre game instead of a bad one.</end quote></div>

Man, I really need to set this straight, you've got some inaccurate information in there. If you are referring to NWN1 before its expansions, than you are more correct, but the OP bought the Diamond Edition, so he has all the expansions.

1. With the Hordes of the Underdark expansion, you gained a second party member and increased control over them. In addition, the ingenious mod makers figured out how to add more companions. PreSoU henchmen had extremely limited control, not allowing you to even open their inventory or equip them. Each expansion added more control. With HotU, you can do most everything cept have full party control. While I definitely prefer full party control, we can thank shoddy, high selling console RPGs and Diablo clones for the henchmen method today.

2. Pure BS. Learn to use the camera in NWN and you won't have a problem. Initially coming from the 2D games with fixed cameras does take some getting used to, however, thats all part of learning a new game.

3. This is true, the world does lack some detail compared to the Infinity engine games. This obviously has to do with the computer hardware available at the time. While you could make an Aurora engine game's background look as detailed as an infinity engine game's background, your computer would explode. With both expansions, the community expansion pack, not to mention all the other gigabytes of community developed 'stuff', and the increased power of computers today, this isn't quite so true any more. And in NWN2, its totally bogus. NWN2's back grounds can be just as detailed and delicious as those found in 2D games.

4. Won't disagree with you here, there were some aspects of the 2e rules that many people liked better than the simpler 3e and 3.5e rules. NWN2's party control is far from perfect, but its still far better than the standard henchmen system found in most 'RPG' titles today. At least I have full control over my party members inventory, equipment, and movement. Their AI needs some work though, which has been addressed in community mods, so its not really as big an issue as some would claim.

5. NWN2's visuals were far from the best at the the time, and the game at release was very poorly optimized. However, with the 1.03 patch, performance was substantially improved. And each patch since, 1.04, 1.05, and 1.06 has included some optimizations to make the game perform better.

This is something that I noticed when running NWN2 on my X1900XT, the benchmark numbers from websites with my card and faster CPUs didn't match the numbers I was seeing on my machine. With my X1900XT and E6600, I was getting close to double what some websites were reporting with the same video card and a X6800. I didn't think much of it until I bought my 2900XT and started seeing my numbers 4x to 5x what some websites were getting. Really causes me to doubt those websites in the future. Xbit, I'm looking at you.

To conclude, NWN2 is a diamond in the rough. With some polish, it could be the greatest RPG since Planescape Torment. NWN1, with its unrivaled quantities of user made content places it in the top 3 CRPGs ever made, right behind Torment and BG2.</end quote></div>

sorry, but i'm gonna have to back up shorty on this one.

1) "henchmen" and "party member" are hardly the same thing. in HOTU, there's about 0.0000001% of the party interaction present in BG2. sure i can equip my henchmen, but when will they really interact with each other in a BG2 fashion? never.

2) NWN's camera wasn't bad, but i've had some camera angle issues. not many

3) im just plain confused, so i'm not going to say anything

4) they should have just used BG2's implementation of party control. it's perfect. they tried making it different, but it's more a pain than bg2. also, I hate party AI (again, BG2 FTW). why don't they have a formation system like they used to? and yes, 2e > 3/3.5e

5) yeah, nwn2 isn't perfect (no bg2 ) but i did enjoy it, and i think i got $25 worth of gaming out of it. if they ported bg2 to aurora2 (or whatever nwn2's engine is called), i'd buy it in a heartbeat


btw - any idea what the multiplayer scene for nwn2 is like? what about modules?