Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer Review
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While the original campaign told a story written and paced for teenage gamers, Mask of the Betrayer is better suited to more mature gamers: there are many disturbing themes, and the player is faced with tough decisions. A world of shadow hides unspeakable secrets, and the player will have to make choices between corrupting power and personal integrity. In some ways the story reads out like a drug addict's: after a certain point in the story, the player will constantly fight an urgent, consuming desire, and giving into it is destructive to both the player and whoever they face. This can get pretty creepy, and at times frustrating; Mask of the Betrayer is much more of an adult's game than the original campaign was [odd, considering ESRB gave it a teen rating - Ed]Also attached is an NWN2 retrospective.
The story is told mostly through interaction with Rashemen's various inhabitants, living and incorporeal. The writing is of high quality throughout, although I have to say it's somewhat wordy. To really get into the plot, you'll have to read page after page of dialogue, books, notes, and so on with a fair bit of focus. Perhaps then you get the satisfaction of guessing the various possible outcomes behind dialogue options, and make informed rather than random or alignment-dictated decisions. As in the earlier Neverwinter Nights campaigns, your actions affect your alignment, as well as the influence you have over NPC companions. Active and finished quests are marked in your quest journal, and you can always check there if you happened to miss an important bit of conversation.
I found the campaign itself rather long and repetitive, with a very linear structure, which seemed to be aimed at a young RPG naïve audience. It quite literally offered no storyline or experience that hadn't been done many times before. It offered up the typical scenario:Spotted on Blue's News.
* There is an ancient and all powerful entity that has awakened
* He is going to kill all living things
* All the bad guys want a piece of that action
* All the good guys want him stopped
More importantly to your play experience, though, was the central fact that almost every NPC in the game would tell you: "Only you can bring me this item", "Only you can look for the answer to this question", "Only you can save me/us/my children", and "Only you can save the village/town/city/castle/world". Apparently only you can do all this because no one else is willing to actually walk anywhere, probably due to the long loading time for map transitions. Strangely, given that only you can save the entire planet from dying, the people are not even willing to give you the best item sold in their town, you know, so that you will win when you try to save them. They are willing to sell you these items, provided of course you go out and find some cash somewhere first. Yeah that all makes sense to only me!
So the campaign game involved you travelling back and forth across the world map to do the many missions you expect of a CPRG so that eventually you will level up and be powerful enough to face some seriously nasty action. The main downside in this version of the franchise was the long load time for outdoor areas and the necessity to revisit and therefore reload the biggest areas, over and over. After playing through the original campaign I commented to one of my NWN buddies, who is about the same age as me, that I thought NWN2 was paced for a 10 year old. My friend informed me that not only did he agree, but that his 10 year old loved the game. In fact Obsidian appears to have produced a pretty good kid's game - pity it was so expensive and carried a label that read "Recommended for mature audiences" here in Australia.
