Neverwinter Nights 2: Storm of Zehir E3 Preview
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The titular "storm of Zehir" refers to the game's storyline, which concerns a party of adventurers on board a ship bound for Samarach. When an unnatural storm and an act of sabotage strands the characters on a tropical island, it plunges them into an adventure that brings them face-to-face with jungle goblins called Bahiri (a new addition to the game's bestiary), the sinister snake-people called Yuan-ti, and a conspiracy involving a new god of serpents, poison and darkness named Zehir that has some pretty deadly designs on many of Faerun's divine powers.
The party's struggle for survival in the jungle gave the Atari demonstrator the opportunity to show off the game's new overland map. This new "living map" stands in stark contrast to the standard static map that merely offered a representation of the land available to explore and static "teleport" buttons that would jump a character between set pieces. Now the map shows off tiny moving representations of the party as well as any friendly or enemy NPC s in sensory range of the party moving about in real-time. By steering the party around the map, the adventurers can hit or avoid a number of randomly generated monster encounters. Depending on which character is in the lead, the map can also use seldom-utilized skills like survival to reveal treasure caches, hidden ruins or even little side-quests that the party can explore. While these won't be terribly extensive in the official campaign that accompanies Storm of Zehir, the developers expect this to be one of the big new features for adventure creators and modders in the Neverwinter Nights 2 community.
