Worth getting?

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Since quitting the MMO I've been playing for the last 7 years I've had some time to spare. I've been reliving my old favourites (Baldur's Gate trilogy, IWD) and recently purchased IWD2 which I'd missed when it came out (due to the MMO taking all my time) and have been enjoying that.

I'm wondering what to play next. I did play NWN but found it boring, to be honest. I enjoyed the city at the beginning, but hated not being able to have more than one companion (I just love all the character interaction and banter in BG2/TOB), and found the story bland and the level design sub-par. That whole Fire Giant area was tedious in the extreme!

On the other hand, I really enjoy games like IWD1/2 even though they don't have the character interaction, because they are, at least, more interesting in terms of design and presentation, and the background stories are good.

Bearing all that in mind, would I like NWN2? I gather you can have more henchmen and there's a bit more interaction with them. I also gather it's rather buggy, and a little demanding (I'm running an Athlon 2.8, 500MB RAM but quite a nice GeForce graphics card).

I should also add I'm not really interested in using the editor. I just want a game to play.

 

If you want to play D&D try the temple of elemantal evil. it is turnbased and sticks clase to the rules. Information about thsi game can be found on some treads on this forum.

For NWN2. It is more like NWN1 than BG2. It also plays a bit like the KotORS. Yes you can play whit a party, but you lack the control of BG2. More story than NWN1? Yes, better, but still not tip top. Freedom to roam/quest? No, one path to follow.

The core question is it worth it. Yes, it is. It is not the awe from BG2 but second best is not bad. The expansion is good, and the mods will improve it.

 

If you still have NWN, you might also try the community mods instead of the OC. The OC is way beyond dull. SoU is better, but the community mods are loads and loads better. Plus, NWN gets better as you find little tweaks and mods here and there. (There are ways around the henchmen limits...the OHS Henchmen System will even let you create your own henchmen.)

 

Diagnull is spot on. I would suggest at the very least playing Hordes of the Underdark through, as that's a huge step above the OC. Also there are some absolutely amazing mods out there for NWN1 (as there will be for NWN2 given a bit more time), which are definately worth trying. As long as you can put up with the NWN1 system (and I'm not talking about 1 henchmen limit - most mods will change that, including HotU), I would seriously suggest leaving NWN2 for a bit and looking at some of the NWN1 mods and expansions.

 

well, nowadays they simply don't make games like baldur's gate 2 anymore, so any comparison is totally pointless

with regards to nwn2, first of all you really want 1GB ram in your computer to run it half decent, and graphics card is quite important also (make sure it's not more than 3-4 years old)

nwn2 gives you a chance to play with a party, but the story is too generic for my taste (get story from LOTR and squeeze it into D&D) - nevertheless, it's a fairly decent game, the characters you meet have a lot of dialogue (hardly a match for any bg2 dialogues, but better than nwn1 or some other games), and there is partial nonlinearity as well

hmm not much else to say except if you buy nwn2, get the expansion as well

 

What exactly is your GeForce card?

I had a Celeron 2.4 GHz, 512 MB RAM and a GeForce 5900XT and there were huge problems, making the game near-unplayable, so I gave up on it. The best I could get was 20+ fps with ugly settings. Doubt I'd have been able to handle big battles. Your Athlon is better than my Celeron and your GeForce is probably a series 6 or 7 card, nope? But you'll still want a full gig of RAM.

At the moment I have a Pentium IV 2.6c with 1024 MB RAM (runs at full speed of DDR400 at the moment, which is an advantage over the previous setup) and a Radeon HD2600XT card. Handles NWN2 at 80+ fps, although I play in 1024*768 and no higher. This is to say if you have a full gig of RAM, loading times are less evil on you and a good graphics card can do you wonders.

 

Chev, I can see why was gameplay choppy on your old computer... Celeron is and old procesor, it just can't deal with demanding games... 512 MB is not even a minimum for today's games, that's what makes me sad, I can't play COD4 or The Witcher, and the graphics card you have is pretty old...

I too have problems playing NWN2, I have an Athlon 2500+, 512 MB and X1650XT (AGP version) card, and I just can't play a game where when I scroll the screen FPS falls by 50%...

 

Performance of NWN2 is quite poor, even if you have a high-end PC. On top of that, it just doesn't look very good, even with all the options turned up.

The other problem I had with it is the story is so freaking linear. It's like the designers decided they were George Lucas or something and story-boarded the whole thing out first like they were making a movie instead of an RPG. Half the game is cut-scenes and long, wordy conversations which all end the same regardless of which responses you click on.

 

No, NWN2 is not worth spending money on. It's crap.

 

Exactly. The Celeron processor is worse than a regular Pentium IV in some aspects that show up in demanding games (didn't in KotOR 2, for example), besides, it limits the RAM bandwidth. Suffice to say my DDR 400 chip worked at 266 at best. And the graphics card didn't have the new shaders and the like. Whatever it supported, it ran well, but NWN2 it merely ran, meaning it didn't look good, it would simply launch and that's it. So I upgraded the CPU, added another chip of RAM and a new graphics card, which was a GeForce 7600 GT. At that point I jumped to 50-60 fps with quite nice settings. Then 7600 GT went RMA and I used the option, courtesy of my immediate vendor who talked to his friend, to upgrade to HD 2600 XT for little money. As a result, I got 80+ fps in a module I loaded, although I suppose it would be less in the official campaign.

I'd say get another 512 MB RAM for loading times and the like, although if you're planning a whole new computer, it'd be better to save up because old tech is expensive. Currently, I've decided to get the best out of what I have, maybe just OC a bit, and play games. I can already play new games, which means money is better spent on games, not on old hardware. And since I don't have that much time for games anyway...

NWN2 has a knack for being extremely slow on high-end computers, while actually running quite fast on well-supported middle-aged hardware. For example, remember the problems people have with Dual Core processors and graphics in the range of 7800-7900? At the same time, guys with a PIV and a series 6 card were able to play quite well. At the moment, I have a 2003 processor, DDR1 memory, a budget graphics card and it still works great - 80 fps. I'll probably convert the excess power to nice looks and content myself with 40-50 fps, which will inevitably fall down to at best 20 in graphics-intense battles.

Grrr... I must un-learn the reflex to use multiple posts when replying to multiple posts.

 

That's what also making me sad I'm going to college next year, and my family is pretty low with money, so no new hardware, and while I'm away from home, leeching on my dad's hard earned money, I'm not going to have a PC that can play games (only documents and alike, that means a lot of RAM and a good procesor, with Vista) to take away my time for studying...

Well, no games after for me after July 2008 until I'm 23 Wish me luck, eh?

 

Get a job

 

Heh heh I understand that sentiment. I spent 4 years sat on my backside playing UO until I realised I had no money left and had to work... Thing was, I'd been a games journalist for most of the 90s, and the mag market kind of died thanks to the 'net becoming more popular (when I worked on my first mag, we didn't even have an office network - copy was delivered to the production editor on floppy disk, and we had to play Doom via a serial cable. Oh the hardship! ) Result is I didn't know what I wanted to do next as no job could possibly live up to that, so I ended up doing nothing for quite some time. (Working in the games industry also made me very disillusioned about the way things were heading - it really does break my heart that there are no more games like BG and I lost count of the rants I wrote in my column about games companies being more interested in doing stuff in 3D and/or flash graphics than actually bothering to make an interesting game...sigh. Aaaanyway...)
OK well I don't know what happened to my old copy of NWN - it was a review copy, ie not boxed, so I might well have thrown it out. I might pick another one up cheap if I'm bored and consider NWN2 for the future. I've noticed Amazon has a Fallout 1 & 2 pack going cheap that looks tempting - I never did play Fallout, and only got halfway through the sequel, so that's a possibility.
I've also got Oblivion sat on my desk - my PC is about the minimum spec it needs to run so I'm a bit wary of it. I'm also wary of it because I loved Morrowind and have a feeling it won't measure up. But then I guess I'll have to find out eh.

 

Rather than start a new thread I'll post my experience with NWN2 here. As some of you may know, I've played NWN, SoU, HotU as well as several premium NWN modules. I decided to give NWN2 a try. My computer is supposedly good enough to run it, with the weakest component probably being my 2.8 P4 processor. Otherwise I have an 8400GS video card, an Audigy sound card and 2G of RAM...should work.

I installed the game and started trying to play and immediately got sea sick. My frame rates seemed OK and the response was fine, but the camera was completely un-usable. Small movements of the mouse would cause huge swings in the camera. I had to take Dramamine to get through the tutorial. The tutorial caused further annoyance too as I had labored to create a character who was a grizzled warrior with long gray hair...only to find that the game dropped me into a village in my last year to compete in a talent contest for the village youth! Why do all CRPG's assume that players want to be a post-pubescent just starting out in life? Sheesh.

Anyway...my first hour of playing NWN2 was so frustrating that I put the game away and didn't play it for some time...until I read here somewhere how important it was to patch the game. Of course. How stupid of me...I forgot to patch and was playing the game right out of the box. Unfortunately I had one problem. The computer I had the game installed on with the specs to run it had no internet connection...with no easy way to get it an internet connection. No problem...just use another computer to download the critical rebuild and I'll be good to go. I can see already you all are sadly shaking your heads.

The Seventh Level of Hell is filled with poor schmucks like me trying to patch their NWN2 without an internet connection. Unrelenting torture. You even have to use a third party program, "NWN2 Patcher", to pull off the stunt...and there are so many patches you have to guess that you're taking the correct path to bring your version up to date. Not only that, but some of the patch files are corrupted so you can't take the most direct route through the various patch numbers. Eternal Damnation wasn't important enough for me to endure, so I set the game aside again.

Then...I had an epiphany. I'd simply go out and buy MotB, use the expansion to patch my OC and be set to play. Imagine my surprise to find the expansion didn't include the necessary patches to upgrade the OC. What? I've never heard of this in any other expansion I've encountered. On the upside, this experience led me to create six new curse words never before uttered by humankind. I look forward to substantial royalties.

Finally after hours of near trial and error patching I was able to patch the OC, install the expansion and patch the expansion. Feeling like I'd just slayed a Balrog, I loaded the game with bated breath to play this game that I thoroughly felt would now contribute to a changed life...and found the camera was worse than it ever had been.

I exited the game and haven't been back. I'm considering taking the DVD's to the park to try to train a dog Frisbee tricks with...but I've held off. After nearly $70USD and hours of frustration, not to mention the game serving as an impetus to set up a wireless router network to allow me to easily patch in the future...I'm at an impasse with NWN2.

Tell me good people of SP, my brothers (or sisters), why I should give this game even one more moment of my time

 

If we can settle on a suitable amt. for shipping charges...I'll throw my computer in the box with the discs...

 

you can set camera speed in the options menu, but also in the nwn2player.ini file

although personally i prefer to move camera with the keyboard (clockwise/anticlockwise), and camera tilt with the 3rd mouse button, while zoom +/- is on the mouse wheel

as for the patching issues, blame obsidian, because it's an old system taken from NWN1 which simply can't handle large files - so patches are often - TOO OFTEN - split into "smaller" chunks, each weighing 100+ megabytes easily

 

The OC kinda sucks until late in the game when you get to fight a pretty big battle. Then it quickly sucks again. The expansion is pretty good though. The story isn't a bad ripoff (like KoToR2 and they're lack of originality with "memory" from the first), but it does have it's problems, like any other game. The nice thing about the expac, is that despite how linear the story line is, it's really good, so you can get into it and forget about the bad .

Of course, I would have preferred to never have spent money on it. I've enjoyed kotor1 far more than NWN2. KOTOR2 was another obsidian flop of a good bioware game though.

 

There's no automated camera movement for me. It has to be manual or else I can't play. I liked the isometric view, I liked the KotOR camera, but I don't like what you get in NWN1 or 2 except for the near-isometric view.

 

Some treads on the bioware board help. Try strategic mode in the menu option. Whit a bit of tweaking and adjusting the camera can be saved. Honest.

And after that NWN2 is a decent framework for the expansion and al the mods.