Things we'd like to see in the expansion

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I assume most of you have read the interview on the main page. By the sounds of it Bioware have been taking a lot of feedback from gamers about new tricks for the expansion. Perhaps if we can come up with some good ones we'll get to see them on the up-and-coming game.

Personally I'd like one of those kill counters we saw in the Baldur's Gate series. How many creatures the character has wasted, what the biggest kill so far is etc. etc.

So folks, what do we want?

 

Here is the link:
http://www.sorcerers.net/Games/NWN/expansions.php

I'm looking forward to the ('new') Prestige Classes. I hope there will be a Divine Disciple for my cleric.

 

Are the prestige classes like the ones on the Faerun Campaign Setting Handbook?

 

Tiger animal companions

 

To build a party in the solo game. That's the best d+d feature that's in BG1+2. This single henchman game is a blow over

 

The monster ratings sorted out, they suck IMO, effortless means I should not have to use as much resources as I have had to use fighting them. Giants and Elemantals eh? A group of them slay you effortlessly but they're effortless so worth close to no XP. What a great XP calculation
A quick addition here, less than 500XP for an very hard ancient red dragon? now something is wrong here, even if they had to scale the XP awards down.

[ January 17, 2003, 19:48: Message edited by: Vermillion ]

 

More commands for companions. For instance - Ignore enemies - sometimes I want to get into (and out) enemy fortress without alerting enemies, but my companions don't understand it . Also - "Don't use offensive spells" would be also nice... It isn't funny, when - I know I'll face an Ancient Red Dragon and my companion wastes his/her spells on some lesser monsers that I can slay without much effort...
Asking for memorizing a specific spells - and casting them at specific moments ("Can you cast Haste ans Stoneskin on me" ) isn't a bad idea I think...

Ability to get level at least as high as monsters can get... (that dragon I mentioned - 4get his name - have 34 lvl... and I got only few hundreds XP's for him... that is really frustrating)

More interaction between companions and PC, multiple henchmen...

 

Hmm....well I think the one thing we really need to see in the expansion is a good focused single player campaign. Myself, I could care less. But for all the people who bought NWN for the SP experience, which I imagine is most, Bioware really needs to come through on this for them.

Now, for the other good stuff. For starters, rolling frickin' hills. Good lord the stuff in the Wayland rolling hills hack looks great, and it took me less than a minute on 56 k to download. Now that's not saying that actually doing it is easy. But they have a ready made how to do this from their community. If they don't take adavantage and put it in (especailly after all the "the engine can't handle it...it's too hard...etc" excuses, then it will be a real disapointment. Especially since we're getting a desert tilset. Those hills with a sand texture look awsome (another hak I dl'ed).

Hmm...what else? Well better henchman A.I. of course, and with better control. Multilple henchmen support would be really nice, but I doubt we'll see it as Floodgate is just adding more icing to the cake, not changing how's it baked. I can't say I care too much for the prestige classes since we'll only be getting two, and one is the harper scout (?!). There's other stuff I'd like to see, but like I said, I'm betting we'll just be getting more of what we already have....tiles, monsters, spells, skills, feats, etc. I doubt they will really be making too many improvements to how the game works with this one.

[ January 21, 2003, 06:01: Message edited by: Crawl ]

 

For me the real treat of Baldur's Gate was the romances... there was real role-playing involved, not merely "work for evil man in bar if you are evil", "work for good cleric in temple if you are good." I hated the whole God-spawn thing, but relationships between characters made me feel like I was playing a story. NWN disappointed me in a couple of ways, but the most important was the distinct lack of story-line. If the expansion can do something about that (and I expect it won't), I'll be first in line to buy.

 

That's very true. Maybe NWN is not at IWD's RP level, but still it's not what I like. If they added some true interaction... and yes, a romance too. Maybe some more character developing? Some non-standard resistances, skills etc like in Hell trials...

 

Here's hoping they scrap the useless 3E XP and go back to the superior ones from 2E. Seriously, fighting an ancient red dragon and getting a miserly 513 XP is so lame I can't understand why the designers didn't change it at the time. And effortless enemies should be effortless. I had a hell of a struggle defeating Morag's chosen and yet they were only counted as "effortless" enemies.

What I'd really like more than anything else would be a graphics option that allowed you to play the game in the same kind of format as they had in Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale. All this new-fangled 3D technology might look amazing but it really lets the gameplay side of things down. Having to adjust the camera angle every time my character goes around a bend in a corridor was a pain, as was adjusting it every time I got into a fight and didn't want half the fight to be obscured by walls.

Speeding up the rest times would be nice. Unlike Baldur's Gate, there's no little movie to watch while you're resting so what's the whole point of making you wait 30 seconds before you're healed? There's only so much tediousness I can take and that pretty much had me reaching for the uninstall programme. The same with picking locks and disabling traps - why such a long wait? You can either open the lock or you can't. Why make the player wait just to find out. I seemed to spend half of the game just waiting around while my player picked a lock open which made playing Neverwinter Nights about as thrilling as watching paint dry. I was pretty close to tearing my hair out in the end.

 

I didn't think it would be really. The designers get so carried away with how wonderful the graphics are in games like this that something as simple as gameplay gets pushed to the back.

 

What amount of experience would you really like for a red dragon that you defeated with your single buddy? Couldn't have been too hard. The problem with the dragons as is in the toolset is they are too easy. The problem with the chosen as you mentioned is how the engine computes challenge ratings. There are lots of extra things you can add to a creature, specifically in the equipment department that either don't affect that CR at all, or they don't affect it much from what I've seen. The class levels given a monster also have a lot to do with it.

I like 3d graphics, I just don't like all of the tilesets offered by bioware. Some look pretty good, and some are just downright sad compared to other 3D games. The resting does take too long, but I can see the MP reasons behind it. Lockpicking and disarming traps also take a while to do, but I guess they just wanted to make the animations a bit more lifelike.

 

realistically sized dragons, for a start!

 

How much experience for an ancient red dragon would I like? Well, I beat Firkraag in BG2 and got 64,000 so for Klauth - supposedly the strongest dragon in the world - I'd imagine 100,000 should do it. And you've got to admit that the old experience system was a lot more interesting than the new one. I mean, an XP cap of 2.95 million sound thrilling. An XP cap of 191,000 just comes across as lame by comparison.

While we're still on the subject, I'd like the challenges in expansion packs to be as hard as they're supposed to be. The Klauth you fight in NWN is a seriously weak version compared to the one in the official FR campaign setting. In fact, the majority of the fights in NWN were disappointing. There never seemed to be as much thought put into them as you got in BG or even Icewind Dale; most fights could be won by nothing more thought provoking than charging into the fray and hacking away as best you can. Get wounded? No problem. Just use the built-in cheat mode (the recall stone) and rest up miles away.

Final point: no recall stone. It just makes the game unchallenging. Every time you face an enemy who might cause you problems you can just teleport out of there at the first sign of trouble. Where's the fun in that?

 

How about for killing Klauth, no matter how near levelling up you are, you get a level up?

 

first of all NWN use a unique xp system, not the 3E XP award system. And as for Klauth, you probably would get many thousands of XP if you took the one from the book and used the "real" system.