"Does ANYONE like THIS game??!!"

Remove all ads!

Making NWN mods doesn't interest me in the least - the game's tedious and no amount of mods is going to change that IMHO. Making BG mods interests me. So the fact that NWN mods are easier to make then BG mods isn't, as far as I'm concerned, any great point in NWN's favour.

 

In both games you go around killing stuff for experience points while advancing through a scripted story, whats the big deal? BG2 and NWN both have decent gameplay as far as I'm concerned.

 

I like NWN very much. I think I played the game something about seven times to the end.

 

Yes,

I like it.

If you are unimpressed, I would sugest going to nwvault.com and d/loading some of the modules.

 

It's not so much the modules I've played and the official campaign I find disappointing but the whole game engine. It's tediously slow and not very exciting to play. The BG engine hooked me from the start, NWN left me thinking "wow, great graphics, shame about everything else." I don't think any number of modules is going to convince me that NWN is a good game.

 

@ dshadow

Alright, you're going to have to explain to me exactly what is so "tedious" about NWN. The entire game is in real time, and battle strategy is even more straight-forward because of this. What's so "tedious" about "point, click, slash?" You say it's too slow, yet no BG engine game allows characters to run (unhasted anyway), and the pathfinding AI has been buggy as hell for every single IE game. It's smooth as silk on my machine; do you just have a slow computer or what? Inventory management is simpler, because you only have to worry about one character's stuff and thanks to 6 inventory screens and all the available bags of holding. Every time you need more supplies, you can just warp back home. And as stated above, the built-in world/adventure builder is unprecedented in how easy it is to use and implement.

Isn't it possible our standards are just a tad too high?

 

Okay, seeing as you've asked:

Wandering around a mansion in the original NWN, I came to several rooms with chests. Now in BG I'd just have clicked on the chest and it would have opened or not opened. Does it do that in NWN? Hell no. You have to sit around twiddling your thumbs while your character either picks the lock or futilely whacks away at the chest. And this doesn't happen just once. Nope. It happens EVERY SINGLE TIME you come to a chest. As such you generally spend more time waiting for your character to open a chest than you do playing the game.

Take sleeping. In BG you get an amusing little picture to look at when you sleep. Even better if you don't want to look at the picture you just bash a key and that's it. Sleeping over. Your party are restored to full health. How does NWN handle this? Simple. It makes you sit and wait for 30 seconds with nothing to do while your character rests. Tedious just doesn't come into it. After a few hours of playing this game I was trying to survive for longer and longer without resting (half dead from wounds that I was) because I just couldn't face the sheer excitement of having to rest again.

My computer meets the specs for NWN and it runs reasonably smoothly but it's still slow as anything. In BG there was option (via the config program) to speed up the frame rates which made the whole thing zip along at a merry pace. There's no such option in NWN (or not one that I've found anyway). As such, moving from one place to another often takes forever.

So there you have it. Point out a way to make all the chests open quicker, sleep times to be over with in the blink of an eye and to be able to speed up the frame rates and... well, I'll still think it's a tedious, monotonous game. But let me know, okay?

 

Hmm. I suppose I see your point, but then again the time it takes to pick a lock never bothered me. Few (if any) of the locked objects are mandatory for the game, and it would take even the best thief a few seconds at least to pick a lock anyway (as opposed to instantly, like the BG games). "Every single time" is exaggerating, but I guess it would seem so if it annoys you that badly. 30 seconds to rest is exaggerating too (try 10), but the same thing applies. I don't rest all that often because I don't need to - I don't use resting as a means to heal, I don't like NWN mages and I focus mainly on melee.

As far as speeding up the game, can't help ya. I think it's plenty fast, myself. Just a few weeks ago I went through the whole of chapter one, with all side quests, in less than 3 hours. Handy because my busy schedule as of late doesn't allow much playing time. But then again, I play the game for the quests, the battles, the cool items I find, and the constant stimulation and gratification that comes with the development of my character. I don't let little things like lock-picking times ruin my game.

But that's me.

 

The official campaign itself lacked imagination, and was as boring as cheese but I do like the gameplay, developing my characters, and building.

No other game allows me to A) download that much useable customized content, and B) open it, analyze it, and try to recreate it, in an included toolset.

I don't even play the OC, I play modules, both single player and online. So, yeah, I like NWN, but not for the actual game. As far as I'm concerned, that's like a demo or a tutorial for the really good player made stuff.

 

Well, perhaps a bit more popular than pool of radiance!

 

Can't stand the game. So much effort on 3d graphics the gameplay is poo. Can never get into it (Scuse the pun) Never even got past the Waterdhavian Creatures quest.

 

Thank you for that informative and intelligent post! I look forward to many more from you in threads that are dug up from a year old festering heap!

Keep up the good work, you are an inspiration to us all!

God Bless!

 

I love NWN since I have found a nice Finnish NWN community with some good builders, DM's and players. I never finnished the three official campaigns and probably never will. It's the multiplayer that matters to me. The single most important thing with NWN is a good multiplayer community. After you find one that suits you the once sucky game becomes a masterpiece.

 

Neverwinter Nights was a huge dissapointment.

I struggled through endless Tedium to go through the OC, and at the third chapter I was bored beyond repair.

Then there came the wonderful expansion of Hordes of the Underdark, which made the game about 1024x better (rough approximation). I actually had a lot of fun with that and finished it promptly; it totally redeemed the game for me.

I'd like to quickly outline a few of the reasons why other people and myself dislike the NWN OC:

-- Drab setting. A PLAGUE!!! How EXCITING! In truth it was almost as exciting as the Bubonic Plague itself. If any of you as a DM (in tabletop D&D) sets the beginning of his campaign in a plague-stricken city prepare to have your players fall asleep from boredom and never play with you again.

-- Unimaginative quest design: You must find these four items to make the cure! You must find these three items to blah blah blah, you must blah blah blah *falls asleep on the keyboard*. I know that I am not the only one to find this extremely unexciting. NWN tries to put you "in the action" right at the beginning, but the result ends up feeling more like work than a fun experience. Many other games have found ways to actually make these types of quests exciting, NWN definitely didn't.

-- The feeling of being a powerless puppet in a cardboard world: Although NWN is fairly linear in its design, this is not exactly the problem, since many other extremely linear games have been truly fun. This is not an argument of linearity, but one of lack of malleability of the gameworld. Way too many doors were locked beyond unlocking, or way too many areas were impenetrable simply because the plot does not allow you to enter them at this time. For one who comes from a tabletop D&D background, where stuff is actually fun, I find it extremely dissatisfying that my character is limited by more than his abilities, but by the restrictive options imposed upon him.

-- Lack of awe: Little story: I tried playing at RPGA Living Greyhawk about two months ago, an event which was a forceful reminder of certain designers'/DMs' lack of imagination. You mean we get to fight some hobgoblins? Wooo! That sounds just swell! The game was led with absolutely no character development or meaningful interplayer interaction, it was pretty much "kill some things, loot, move to next level, complete quest, reward". Oddly enough, while playing I was reminded of NWNs similar feel. Not necessarily that the quests are all of that variety, but they all FEEL that way: uneventful, unexciting, with complete and utter lack of any awe. And don't tell me you can't awe a player at low levels, 'cause many other games have done it and done it well.

There are more, but I'm getting bored just thinking of them. Instead, I'd like to close with a little thought:

BioWare showed an unarguable improvement from NWN to HoTU to KotOR, which has left me with the following observation, which, albeit being very optimistic, seems reasonable:

NWN: Developers concentrated on a solid, flexible engine and toolset, largest part of the work put into core engine design and little into the gameplay itself.

HoTU: With the engine already fleshed out, only having to add minor improvements allowed the developers to focus greatly on a better game experience.

KotOR: A modification of the Aurora engine, KotOR really allowed the guys at BioWare to show off their skills. Once again, having to do relatively minor modifications, the developers had time to put much more effort into the gameplay and associated areas.

I feel that (and I know I'm definitely not alone in this) KotOR was the game NWN should have been, and with the BG series' presedent, the game people were expecting.

This, however, is good news and leaves me eagerly awaiting NWN 2, as I think(hope) that it will already have a mature core engine needing minor adjustments, which will leave much time for the design of a great game.

Thank you.

 

I agree. I just started playing NWN and I'm not all that into it and I'm surprised. It is kind of boring. I noticed a similarity with KoTOR, but didn't know the engines were related.

 

Gotta play multiplayer on a hak'd server Orkrist!!! The only time I've had fun in this game is playing multiplayer online - And so far, ALFA has been the best!!

 

Maybe I'm a mutant, but so far I'm enjoying the original campaign. True I'm still in chapter 1 (and have been for the past few months due to a lack of playing time).

 

Great Snook, Just give it a couple of chapters. You'll find yourself having deja vu.


A lot.

 

I really liked the OC - until I started playing HotU, and realized just how much slicker and svelter the expansion is. The OC is in serious need of better pacing - it's great that it's so long, but it has too many slow stretches interspersed with parts that go too quickly. Even IWD2 was better-paced. I'm in the last chapter of HotU, and its timing is much sharper.

I'll grant that the plot to the OC was a li'l drab, but the characters were interesting, with their emotional entanglements and moral dilemmas. Or maybe I thought that because I went to NWN straight after ToEE...!

 

The moral entanglements and dilemmas, as you put it, are definitely a step up from ToEE, which, despite being a very fun game, lacks any and all form of story/character development.

But that is like saying that eating a piece of drywall is better than eating nothing at all.

I come from a tabletop D&D background, and I'm sure most of the developers do as well. Now, granted, no one is expecting NWN, much less any game, to give that organic, dynamic gameplay that a real D&D session gives you. We were all expecting it, however, to be a step up from BGII; which, admittedly, is a pretty hard position for any developing company to have to be in. But it is only natural that your next product should be better than your last, even if that means having to surpass BG, BGII, and Torment: we all were expecting them to pull out something breathtaking.

And they didn't. They fell way low of the expectations, WAY low. It's obvious that NWN had some appeal, most notably to those unfamiliar with BioWare's previous work, but to those whose very perception of gaming was changed drastically by BioWare's other games it was truly mediocre.

When I buy a computer RPG (non-MMORPG), I'm dishing out 100% of my money for the single player campaign, period. Forget mods, forget multiplayer, forget all those peripherals: if the SP isn't solid, the game is not worth it to me. I know, however, that not everyone is this way, that many actually were largely interested in having a versatile, flexible editor, and equally flexible multiplayer. But the question is as follows: Would you have rather them not packaged the editor or even had multiplayer, but instead put the respective effort into putting together a more solid single player experience? For me it is a solid yes, and I'm interested in hearing how you all feel on this matter.