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I think people who preorder is earlier get it a bit sooner. Ordered this back in August, so I'm lucky to have received it a day early.

My impressions so far...

Good:

The graphics are lovely.

The animations (including combat animations) aren't as bad as I thought they looked from the videos.

The music is fantastic, as always!

The character creation is a joy to use, the wealth of options will make it hard for me not to be starting a new game every day just to test out different characters. I'll stick with Farivald, my plain old Human Paladin, for the first play-through.

The voice acting is great. Usually I'm not a fan of American accents in medieval style games, but I accept that the Forgotten Realms are in fact, not earth, so accents needn't be regional or time-scaled.

You can fully control all party members, so it feels a lot more like BG than NWN.

Storyline is good so far, and I'm only about an hour through.

Bows have strings! ¬_¬

Bad:

There's an irritating slashy effect to weapon swings. I find it intrusive, hopefully it can be modded out.

The level of blood per hit is a little extreme.


That's all I can think of for now. No doubt I'll be playing all day! Thank God I booked this week off, eh?

 

Play.com has a bit of a reputation for delivering games a little earlier than their release date.

EDIT: Literally 30 seconds after making this post, NWN2 arrived! W00t!

 

While I only actually got around 10 minutes of actual gameplay in last night, most of which was spent messing with camera views and getting comfortable with the controls, so I haven't seen any combat yet, I do remember seeing an option to control the level of violence. I think the settings are something like "none, partial," and "full." So if the gore is too much, you might try to lower the violence setting and see what that does for you.

 

Like the rest I pre-oredered from play.com

 

Hehe. Congrats. I think the level of blood is part of the Fallout legacy from BIS times.

What about the Hardware? What kind of machines do you run it on and in what resolutions? I have a relatively weak computer, Celeron 2.4 GHz with 512 MB RAM and an FX5900XT... I can play NWN1 on max settings in 1024*768 but will I be able to play NWN2 in such a resolution with at least an acceptable quality-to-speed ratio or should I upgrade ASAP?

 

I'm running on an AMD 3800+ (dual core), 256MB ATI 800XL, 1GB RAM,and I'm running it at medium-high with a bearable amount of choppiness (very little), like when I first got NWN1.

Unfortunately I think NWN1 is better. Controlling the character AI is kind've stupid sometimes, because they don't explain what each option is clearly enough and some of the NPC's get set to not do anything unless you command them to.

Other than that, I'm kind've bored of the story-line and a few things.
#1 - do not force party members on me.
#2 - do not force me to leave a zone before I'm done looting.

On to the good. The game is completely worth the money. It's entertaining, the feeling of it is truly D&D. It's fun, you don't have to play for 10 hours to get to level 5 (I'm level 5 after like 2-3 hours partially spent learning the game. Level3 after the tutorial which was about an hour long). There's a lot of customization available which rocks too. One thing I wish they had is more feats. I want way more feats - like heavy armor optimization! but maybe that'll come with patches or xpac's. The game does lack combat/tactical feats quite a bit and as usual, I wish they had a better way of doing power attack (ie: the actual limitation of +1/base attack max and the ability to choose how much in a pause screen... as well as keeping it on until you choose to turn it off).

The game is fun. I wish I could've gotten the collectors instead of just the limited edition.

 

Fascinating stuff so far.

 

I have a Radeon X800 Pro, an AMD64 3800+ processor and 1gb of RAM, and I can run it at almost full spec; I just have to turn off individual light points, or something like that. It runs with no choppiness whatsoever. It looks absolutely wonderful. I play it quite zoomed in, especially in caves and dungeons, so I can see the chains and cobwebs hanging from the ceiling.

 

@omnigodly: You got choppiness in NWN1 with that kind of hardware? And yeah, I know it didn't exist when NWN1 came out, but have you played NWN1 on it? In my case, with a system like I described, I didn't get any problems except the biggest battle or maybe the Daggerford module with Patch 1.68 etc.

OK, guys, maybe I'm asking too much, but does it seem to tax the RAM more or the processor?

 

I'd say it taxes both, but you'll benefit from having more RAM than a better CPU.

I would, personally, get that Celeron upgraded to something a bit more cutting edge, though.

 

I find that both NWN games are exceedingly RAM hungry.

Onto the game itself, i'll start with complaints. First, i'm finding the camera to be exceedingly irritated (all 4 modes have issues). Its even harder to get a nice angle than in NWN. As to the NPC's, other than being forced on you, which is rather irritating, i've found, just 30min into the game, that my party member will stand in place and stop following my character. i have him set to follow me closely, but its like he just goes brain dead, leaving me to run into a room full of baddies without support.

One thing i noticed, and i don't mean this in a negative way, was how much this game reminds me of ToEE (the possitive side of that game!). The animation, inventory, even feel of the game remind me more of ToEE than of NWN. It's very peculiar.

 

There's a few things that are a bit too much like KoToR for my liking. I want to kill two of the NPCs I've met so far, but I can't. Damn lack of freewill. The whole "Leave 'em 'ere while you go and choose three to take on your way." thing is KoToR all over, as are a lot of the conversation cut-scenes.

And the voice acting is bordering on too modern, despite what I said earlier. (Though this isn't the case with all characters, just a couple of the NPCs... immature teeny girly crap I'm afraid.)

 

I agree the tiefling is rather valley-retardedish.

My current system spec can run NWN1 at 100% everything going and never lag once while also running winamp, AIM, MSN Messenger, 10 IE windows, Norton, Steam, etc. lol...

I guess the only thing keeping me from running NWN2 at full graphics is the shadows. There are too many shadows (the individual blades of gras...) and it lags me out, so I have my graphics to max and shadows turned down low and there is absolutely no choppiness.

The game is getting a lot better, but the acting and personalities are bothering me. If you're going to make snake people speak common, for the love of god make them speak faster... I died once so far the entire game and it was against a lot of lizardfolk. One thing to keep in mind is the game is kinda bugged and different from what the manual posts.

I'm going for frenzied berserker and in the manual frenzy/rage don't stack, but in the game they do stack and instead of taking 2 points of subdual like you're supposed to, you take 12 points per round of frenzy. DUMB.

Nonetheless I still find the game more enjoyable than not. It sounds awful from what we're posting here, but it's really not that bad. Some minor annoyances for lots of fun gameplay.

 

i have an ATI 9200. so i have to upgrade to play the game. beybey 1000kr (125 euro).
but i got the game, just cant start it

 

Just a nitpicky note, but subdual damage is called "non-lethal" damage in 3.5.

My biggest grief with the game so far, and I'm still in west harbor due to persoanl time constraints, is that I'm battling with the camera. I can't seem to find a camera angle that feels right. Hopefully this is just indicative of my learning curve with the game, but it seems that there are many who are frustrated with camera options, the speed at which the camera can be rotated, etc.

I'm not a WASD guy. I like to point and click with the mouse, but finding a happy medium between doing this and being able to view the game at the angle/perspective that is most enjoyable for me is, so far, rather challenging.

By the way, what's the difference between collector's and limited? I'm familiar with the limited edition, but don't think I've heard of the collector's edition.

 

I think they're the same thing, just a different way of saying it I guess.

 

No they're not, the collectors is bigger and comes in CE or LG. The limited has the rings from both versions of the collectors, but it doesn't have the figurine or the 10 pre-gen'd characters. It does have the map/art book and feat (bless of waukeen) though. It is by no means as large as the collectors edition, which they weren't selling at Fry's.


FYI about the camera angle, I found the best way to work with it, is to not keep it the same all the time. I get tired of not being able to see far enough ahead so I move it down, then once I'm searching for stuff, I put further up. I don't change the camera mode with '*', but I do use the mouse to move and change the camera angle, though you can use the up/down arrows as well as page down/up. It takes a little getting used to, but I did the same thing playing through NWN1 last week (in preparation for NWN2).

Btw, did anyone else notice how often the expac's made fun of the original game/main character in NWN1?

 

Picked up the game yesterday and have gotten through the tutorial and into the beginning of chapter one.

Graphics are great--I'm glad I picked up that 7800GS card for this game--it was definitely worth the money I ponied up for it. Be warned, this game isn't for the marginal machine though. I have an Athlon 64 3000+ machine with 1 gig ram and I still have to throttle back somewhat on the graphics--even with my new video card.

Chevalier: I'm sorry to say that you're probably going to want to upgrade if you want to see this game in all its glory. You're definitely going to need to upgrade your video card and ram--I'm not sure about the processor.

Character creation is very, very good--unfortunately, I'm not made of the stern stuff that Sir Farivald is made of . I have succumbed to the temptation of making new characters. The variety of races and classes is truly outstanding.

The voice acting is very good--no complaints there at all.

It's just like BG and KOTORs 1 and 2 in that you can control all party members--makes life a whole lot easier for you. Also, there's some nice dialogue with the NPC's.

The storyline up to the point I'm at has been very good so far--I like the fact that background feats and your character's race figures into reactions and conversations. I ran the obligatory drow character through and yeah, people took notice...

Some negatives:

I thought the combat actually flowed much more smoothly in NWN classic than in NWN2--In many respects, the combat had a "Final Fantasy" feel to it in NWN2 which I didn't quite completely like.

All in all, definitely worth the money.

 

Gah, just installed it and there appears to be a corrupt texture file on the disc. An error occurred during installation and I opted to continue regardless, hoping the updater would sort things. The updater failed halfway through and recommended the critical rebuild, which is not yet available on Obsidian's site.

Going to try a reinstall, although I'm not getting my hopes up. Anyone else had this? Should the critical rebuild should fix the problem or should I bite the bullet and seek a replacement from Amazon?

 

I see some links between the Daggerford module and NWN2, no? The stronghold thing, the manga-ish feel...