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Originally posted by Bloodmist hear hear! It bugs me that its been "cool" to hate NWN, just like it's cool to hate R. A. Salvatore. though it will never scrape the dirt of BG2's boots it is still a very good game in itself. The Easy-To-Use Aurora Toolset was a great thing indead! It really made the game stay on my pc after i was getting tired of Online play and downloading MODS.
Thank you for listening!
I didn't knew that it is "cool" to hate Nwn and R.A. Salvatore. I thought you disliked R.A. Salvatore A LOT, and got a little tired of Nwn.
I think Bioware can still redeem themselves if they produce some high-quality single player campaigns for the aurora engine. Since most of the criticism I have heard was directed at the story-line, not at the game features themselves, producing games with a good story would make a lot of difference.
These campaigns could be marketed without the game design features at a substantially lower price. In this sense NWN could be looked at as the "rulebook" and any new games would be "modules" to use the old PNP D&D concept. Even though they would be competing with all the freeware MODs desinged with NWN, I think they could still make this profitable. I would certainly pay $15-20 for a MOD that had all of the richness of the BG series.
I say all of this without having played NWN yet, so take it with a grain of salt.
I think BioWare would be hard-pressed to come up with anything substantial. Any attempt at storywriting for NWN is hampered by a lack of control over things. Lack of control over henchmen, lack of control over weapon effects, lack of control over player characters, lack of control over traps... The scripting language is great, but what good is it if half the game does not use it?
[url="http://www.sorcerers.net/Games/BG2/SpellsReference/Main.htm"]Baldur's Gate 2 Spells Reference[/url]: Strategy, tips, tricks, bugs, cheese and corrections to the manual.
BGII was my very first RPG and D&D game ever, which I have been re-playing for the last two years over and over again. A couple of months ago I thought it was about time I tried something else, and I was seriously considering NWN or Icewind Dale II (because I can't find IWD I anymore). I came here looking for some info on what NWN is all about, and more or less I've got an idea. And I'll try Icewind Dale II.
I know that my opinion doesn't weight a lot since I have so little experience to these kind of games; however, I should tell that BGII has been the best game ever for me. I don't expect Bioware, or Black Isle, or anyone else for that matter, to repeat BGII's success, but after what I read here, I wouldn't like something less or inferior.
I haven't played Icewind Dale before, (save for the Demo disc which was inside BG's case) but I believe it couldn't be a disappointment, could it?
• "You cannot pass."..."I am a servant of the Secret Fire, Wielder of the Flame of Anor, You cannot pass. The dark fire will not avail you, Flame of Udun. Go Back to the Shadow! You cannot pass."
Gandalf the Grey
It's still on my hard drive, but I feel like *****ing some more.
Another thing that annoys me about NWN is that it was promised to be many things but turned out to be none of them.
3rd Edition? Only if you discount the way fundamental things such as movement, resting, stealing or summoning work.
Recreation of the D&D pen & paper roleplaying experience? Yeah, right! Too hard for DMs to make a good module. A toolset is supposed to save you time.
Great single player game? Only if you like inferior Diablo clones...
On top of that, even though it wasn't promised, the game has horrible persistent world support. One server crash and there goes the whole world (that wouldn't be as much of a problem if servers never crashed, but, erm...). Like it was so hard to imagine that huge numbers of people would be more interested in persistent worlds than one-shot modules...
[url="http://www.sorcerers.net/Games/BG2/SpellsReference/Main.htm"]Baldur's Gate 2 Spells Reference[/url]: Strategy, tips, tricks, bugs, cheese and corrections to the manual.
I think it is the poorest part in NWN. The reason I really liked BG2, even more than BG is that there was some kind of role-playing, with all this secondary characters asking you about magic or whatsoever. In NWN henchmen are just like clones, it does not matter if they die and you can date all of them they don't care (promiscuity rules!). Honestly, I don't like the idea of free healing (recall stone), even if it saved my life a lot of times. I've finish the game without resting once. And what about the end? They could have made different endings like in throne of bhaal, for the aribeth plot or henchmen plots. When you finish, there is no time to talk to anybody. They just put the last scene and credits (By the way, the pictures are great (IMHO) but I would liked a video like in BG2)
