Neverwinter Nights 2

[Chainsaw Hobbit]

I remember that a few years ago, I spent quite a lot of time playing Neverwinter Nights 2. I cannot, however, remember if it was good. I may have liked it, or I may have simply wanted to like it. I'm wondering if I should buy it again.

Was it good?

[Drasius]

I was in much the same position as you, I remember liking it but could find the disks and wanted to give it another go so grabbed it off steam. My Wizard has sat idle in chapter 2 for a very, very long time now.

Still, depends on what you like. I loved the baldurs gate trilogy but hated everything but the intercharacter banter about DA:O.

TL;DR? Pass.

[Craft (Cheese)]

The main campaign? Act 1 is a solid (and promising) start but the game quickly falls apart during Act 2, and Act 3 is simply unbearably bad.

The Mask of the Betrayer expansion is significantly better... until it falls apart at the end, again. This seems to be a pattern for Obsidian games.

Storm of Zehir I've heard good things about but I haven't actually played through it yet, so I can't say.

[Edge]

Yeah, the main campaign is rather lacklustre, in my opinion.


The Mask of the Betrayer expansion is significantly better... until it falls apart at the end, again. This seems to be a pattern for Obsidian games.

This I cannot disagree with enough. I firmly believe Mask is on par with Planescape: Torment.

Storm of Zehir is better than the main campaign, but lacks party interaction, given that the party will usually consist purely of characters of your own creation.

[Azaran]

I remember Act 1 ended up as one big dungeon crawl ( remember "attack of thousand dual wielding half elf rogues in an secluded thief guild warehouse")

Act 2 and 3 had their nice moments: the trial, rebuilding the keep, defending it and felt more focused.

[Rising Phoenix]

Are there any good player created campaigns for it?

[Selrahc]

The main campaign? Act 1 is a solid (and promising) start but the game quickly falls apart during Act 2, and Act 3 is simply unbearably bad.

I disagree.

The entire campaign is spotty, with some nice bits counteracted by blargh bits. The quality lines aren't really split across the acts.

Things like the Trial and the Keep were great, definite highlights. But the thing was bogged down by way too many characters who were mostly sketchily defined, and plotlines that stayed in stasis for long periods.

The ending is very much an anticlimax. Everything before then? Occasional spots of good stuff, otherwise mediocre.



The Mask of the Betrayer expansion is significantly better... until it falls apart at the end, again

Falls apart at the end?
I think the ending works rather well.

Assuming you don't get too attached to Kaelyn's objective of tearing down the wall. If you believe that your character would be utterly and unflinchingly committed to that, I can see being a bit disappointed.

I would have appreciated an unbeatable fight against Kelemvor, with a special denouement upon your defeat for those who really won't compromise. A "Bad End!", but also serving as an emphasis that you really can't tear down this wall, so you don't feel bittersweet about accepting the "compromise" endings that leave the wall intact.

It's making an intentional thematic point that some things really can't be changed.

[Lorn]

The first campaign has high points and low points.

Low points, sadly, mar the experience quite badly - fighting your way through a warehouse entirely populated by dual-wielding sneak-attacking evasion rogues, orc genocide, the crafting system and so forth. It also nerfs spellcasters pretty badly (mostly via cutscenes), and you won't get a healer beyond a druid for a fair while.

Mask is fantastic. I played it as a steadily-becoming-more-evil monk, and.. yes. Would advise not playing it as a caster, you'll get several in your party anyway, the spirit eating mechanic *will* destroy you (unless you're evil) and there's a lot of fun can be had with the melee there.

Zehir... I got bored with, to be honest. Got away from the first area and back to the Coast and bleh. Seems to be one giant grind to make money via a trading empire so you can buy more stuff to make more money and occasionally poke the plot. It's a long while since I played, though, I could be wrong.

[Craft (Cheese)]

Assuming you don't get too attached to Kaelyn's objective of tearing down the wall. If you believe that your character would be utterly and unflinchingly committed to that, I can see being a bit disappointed.

I would have appreciated an unbeatable fight against Kelemvor, with a special denouement upon your defeat for those who really won't compromise. A "Bad End!", but also serving as an emphasis that you really can't tear down this wall, so you don't feel bittersweet about accepting the "compromise" endings that leave the wall intact.

It's making an intentional thematic point that some things really can't be changed.


Well, I *was* dead set on it, so for me the ending was a bit of a kick to the face. Honestly it felt less like they were trying to make a thematic point, and more like they were forced to do so by WotC twisting their arm on the issue. Can't go slaying gods and shuffling the cosmology around without an edition change! Though I will grant it's not as bad as some of Obsidian's other disaster endings like KOTOR 2 or the NWN2 main campaign.

[Selrahc]

Mask is fantastic. I played it as a steadily-becoming-more-evil monk, and.. yes. Would advise not playing it as a caster, you'll get several in your party anyway, the spirit eating mechanic *will* destroy you (unless you're evil) and there's a lot of fun can be had with the melee there.


Spirit eating is really easy to handle on a suppressing playthrough.

Have Kaelyn and Gann summon an elemental. Stand with the two summoned elementals and Okku. Then suppress. Rest and repeat until sated. With minimized craving, each cycle will end you five points points above where you started. If you do it in a spirit heavy area (Like alongside the two Telthor leopards in the Berserker lodge), it will be even quicker.

Handling the spirit meter is a far far far thornier problem for a devouring playthrough, with maxed craving.

[Edenbeast]

Storm of Zehir I liked quite alot, especially in multiplayer. But then again I did the original campaign and mask of the betrayer in multiplayer as well. Whatever campaign you chose, you will enjoy them more in multiplayer imho.
The first campaign is enjoyable the first time you play it. The second time can be a bit boring so playing it with a friend will compensate for that.
Mask of the betrayer has a good story, and in multiplayer will be quite rewarding too. Mind you, only the host player will have to eat spirits. I remember my friend cursing several times because he forgot to eat, while I had a relatively easy time.
Storm of Zehir is most fun when each character is played by someone else, so 4 players. If you have a good connection.

[Azaran]

Mask of the Betrayer had indeed a very nice story, the whole thing felt more epic in its presentation as the NWN1 epic campaign "Shadows of the Underdark".

Storm of Zehir had a nice gimmick with its open world map and the dialogue system checking all party members' skills.
Like most Obsidian games there are always some interesting features but the whole thing is not very polished. I think they have gotten better with the endings. Fallout: Alpha Protocol was pretty satisfying and Fallout: New Vegas was neat, too.

[Giegue]

Neverwinter Nights 2 was.....interesting. The 1st campaign was....typical. It had some good lines and characters, but the whole thing just felt...typical. The ending was a BIG letdown, though the final boss looked cool. The gameplay, however, was very fun, and I preferred it over NWN 1's gameplay. I mean, they actually had GOOD PrCs for casters, and the plentiful race choices freshened things up. Also, the quickcast bar was, and still is GODLY. I don't know how I ever played NWN 1 without it.

My main character was a wizard/red wizard/arcane scholar/pale master focused on, you guested it, Necromancy. I've yet to plat Storms of Zher, or mysteries of westgate, so I can't say if either of them are any good. I heard mysteries of westgate is more on the evil end of things and I'm thinking I may want to play a dark cleric, worshiper of Velsheroon with the Magic and Undeath domains...either that or a Blackguard of some sort.

[mistformsquirrl]

I personally enjoyed NWN2 a lot - not that the first campaign was brilliant, but it was good enough in a "cheap novel" way; it kept me entertained basically, which is what I wanted it to do.

What I really liked about it was that like the first game there's quite a bit of fan content, and the 3.5e ruleset is the one I know best so that helped quite a bit too.

Basically: It depends on what you're after. If you're after brilliant storytelling you'll mostly want to look elsewhere, but for a fun D&D experience... well I enjoyed it.

[Winter_Wolf]

I rather enjoyed NWN 2's original campaign. No, make that parts of it. I did not care for most of act 1, and I was always more interested in the goings on at the end of act 2 and beginning of act 3 to ever go out and throw down with the Shadow King.

My biggest gripes are:
the near constant cutscenes - I should be able to play for more than two minutes before having to sit through an animated scene that functions like a minimally interactive storybook;

Unlike NWN 1, the acts are not separate modules, so you have to play through the whole bloody thing from the beginning every time, so if you naturally dump Khlegar and Neeshka ASAP, you have to suffer through them a lot;

You get no more than 4 companions at once. Some of the intraparty banter is interesting, but you'll miss it unless you A: replay the game a LOT and take suboptimal members with you for most of the game, or B: cheat and use the console code to bring them all with you, which creates a kind of clusterfrag and pathfinding nightmare situation on a lot of maps. A: is not really an option, because I've never met a module that I enjoyed more each time I played it, and certainly not anything in the NWN line.

[Squark]

Well, I *was* dead set on it, so for me the ending was a bit of a kick to the face. Honestly it felt less like they were trying to make a thematic point, and more like they were forced to do so by WotC twisting their arm on the issue. Can't go slaying gods and shuffling the cosmology around without an edition change! Though I will grant it's not as bad as some of Obsidian's other disaster endings like KOTOR 2 or the NWN2 main campaign.

While I believe executive meddling was the ultimate reason the tear down the wall ending was cut, if what I've heard was true, Defeating Kelemvor as a crusading Spirit Eater is kind of a lost cause. The only resources the Spirit Eater has that Kelemvor can't get rob him of as a standard action (Time Stop+Shaped Mordankien's Disjunction, with a contact spell to the player's Deity/Mystra to stop any divine/arcane spellcasting on the player's part) is the spirit eater curse and Gith's sword. The former probably isn't being used anywhere near enough by a crusading Spirit Eater, while the latter was in Akachi's hands, and Akachi was fighting Myrkl, who didn't have the advantage of being the god of Magic's Lover. Given the powers of an intermediate or greater diety... Kelemvor basically has Deux Ex Machina as an at-will spell like ability, usable as a standard action. A full attack from him forces the spirit eater to make four DC ~65+ fortitude saves (Much higher if one of his attacks is a critical hit) or be instantly reduced to -10 hit points (Death magic immunity doesn't get around this), and, being the god of the dead, Kelemvor has auto-veto power against resurrection spells.

[warty goblin]

Just say no to Neverwinter Nights II. It was so bad it took me years to realize I didn't actually hate real-time-pause RPG combat, just Neverwinter Nights 2.

The first thing to infuriate is the camera, which has a vested interest in letting your party be abused by lizardmen. Want to switch characters because your fighter is getting bent into a pretzel by some trolls? Hope you like looking at a wall, or else a super up-close and incomprehensible jumble of polygons.

This is particularly grating when combined with the AI, which likes getting abused by lizardmen. Whomever you aren't controlling can only find personal fulfillment by getting beaten to within an inch of their life. Remember when you selected your fighter, who now has an S-bend? Well your rogue saw another chance for masochist nirvana and just charged through every trap in the dungeon. So she's dead, and in the process has attracted the attention of another couple trolls.

What I'm saying is the camera and character AI are locked in a terminally unhealthy S&M relationship, and you have to try to keep it from spiraling into total destruction. It's a really messed up version of the Sims.

Unfortunately your only tool for that task is the interface, which gets off on watching the antics of the camera and AI. Think lots of inscrutable little buttons (if you play a spellcaster I hope you like lots of little purple pictograms), an inventory rejected by several leading demons as being 'just plain not OK' and the general usability of a rabid wolverine.

The AI's fixation on self-harm finally starts to make sense when you encounter the script. If it's a tiresome dead horse of a cliche, expect Neverwinter Nights to dress it up in spiked leather and flog the dickens out of it. The characters seek pain because the agony of multiple compound fractures is the only feeling they have left. After a while you too begin to sink into a numb lethargy which only another combat encounter can break.

Your slide into oblivion starts slow, just a couple side-quests you think to yourself. A bit of combat will get you away from the main quest, spice things up a bit. But soon enough you're doing every damn fetch quest just so you can get into a fight. Not because you enjoy fighting, but simply because the constant frustration and bitterness is the only feeling you have left. See, while the camera and AI like abusing each other, what really gets them going is turning you into a meat puppet for their sick little games.

Eventually you'll wake up on a desolate moor somewhere, wearing a black leather thing that leaves some important bits exposed to the elements, and surrounded by bits of troll. Next to you the AI is reattaching its arms and muttering about the sanguine beauty of the grave. Overhead the camera spins erratically around a blank wall, cracking a whip and shrieking with mad laughter. You can't remember how you got here, or why those trolls had to die, only that Mistress Questlog said it must be so, because you were a naughty PC who needed punished.

Then, as you pull troll fingers out a place you aren't comfortable with, you remember how it came to this. It all started out so innocently; you just wanted to make friends and save the world. And now you're staggering across a withered heath, trying to keep the AI from carving 'death is love' into its forearm, and flinching every time the camera twitches at you. Up ahead you see a quest marker surrounded by spiky things you have to kill.

This, you realize, is absolute rock bottom. The only place to go is up, because it doesn't get any more down than here. Reach up! Up, up to the escape key! Yes, exit to Windows, no don't save! And you're back on your desktop, your wonderful desktop. You've never been so happy to see an ironic cat picture in your life.

As you click on the uninstaller you reach for the whiskey. Now the healing can be begin.

[Morty]

While Mask of the Betrayer is superbly written, it takes place on epic levels in D&D 3.5, which in itself would be enough to make combat an absolute chore - but it also gets NWN2's awful engine and interface on top of it, making it truly horrendous. I loved the story, but groaned each time I had to fight a bunch of epic-level undead and sift through three ginormous spell lists.

[sana]

The biggest reason to get NWN2 is so you can play Adam Miller's Dark Waters mod (http://www.adamandjamie.com/mod/default.aspx?NewsID=27)
It includes a pirate card Game and the really fun Lute hero. Also pirates!

[Lord of the Helms]

Just say no to Neverwinter Nights II. It was so bad it took me years to realize I didn't actually hate real-time-pause RPG combat, just Neverwinter Nights 2.

The first thing to infuriate is the camera, which has a vested interest in letting your party be abused by lizardmen. Want to switch characters because your fighter is getting bent into a pretzel by some trolls? Hope you like looking at a wall, or else a super up-close and incomprehensible jumble of polygons.

This is particularly grating when combined with the AI, which likes getting abused by lizardmen. Whomever you aren't controlling can only find personal fulfillment by getting beaten to within an inch of their life. Remember when you selected your fighter, who now has an S-bend? Well your rogue saw another chance for masochist nirvana and just charged through every trap in the dungeon. So she's dead, and in the process has attracted the attention of another couple trolls.

What I'm saying is the camera and character AI are locked in a terminally unhealthy S&M relationship, and you have to try to keep it from spiraling into total destruction. It's a really messed up version of the Sims.


I found the AI very easy to deal with. There's something called puppet mode. Since I'm a rabid control freak and want to tell my party absolutely everything they should do (unless I have very well-worked out scripting options for their actionas a la Dragon Age), it worked for me, since they all only do exactly what I tell them and nothing else.

Other than that, it's a mixed bag. Act 1 in general is inconsistent at best. Trial and defending the keep are good arcs. Crafting is decent. Your companions vary in quality, with the most boring ones being your love interests, whereas some of them - Sand and Bishop especially, but also Neeshka, Khelgar and Grobnar - rather appealed to me.
The endgame was mostly terrible, except the very final battle. The good version appealed to me because, for once, you got to control all of your NPCs at once, with no arbitrary headcount limit. The evil one did because, well, it was pretty badass.
What really drove me nuts in terms of mechanics was the D&D-typical buffing. When you got to Mask of the Betrayer, you'd be casting somewhere around a dozen buffs on all of your characters before combat, one after another. REALLY tedious and really distracted from the fun, and at the same time those buffs, without fail, made the difference between your character being a weakling that's crushed within seconds or a nigh-invinceable juggernaut (except in the case of Monks, who were somewhat durable without buffs and completely and utterly incapable of getting hurt in any way whatsoever when buffed).

Overall? I'd say I mostly enjoyed the main campaign. Not Baldur's Gate-enjoyed or Planescape: Torment enjoyed or Vampire: Bloodlines-enjoyed, not even The Witcher-enjoyed or Dragon Age 2-enjoyed, but probably somewhere around Shadows of Undrentide-enjoyed or Vampire: Redemption-enjoyed, or maybe DSA: Drakensang-enjoyed. Actually probably slightly more than Drakensang, in that combat was more fun and class balance seemed better in NWN 2, and slightly less than Vampire Redemption, in that that game had better characters and a cooler story.

Mask of the Betrayer is a love-hate story. The story is brilliant. But gameplay-wise, it's really tedious.

[warty goblin]

I found the AI very easy to deal with. There's something called puppet mode. Since I'm a rabid control freak and want to tell my party absolutely everything they should do (unless I have very well-worked out scripting options for their actionas a la Dragon Age), it worked for me, since they all only do exactly what I tell them and nothing else.

I'm not a huge fan of micromanagement. I'm really happiest if the AI's default action is mostly appropriate, and I only intervene to give special orders. My experience with NWN 2 was that the AI's default action was almost always really, really stupid, and I had no interest in managing every single action they took. Drakensang, combatwise, hits the sweetspot for me in this regard; in part because DSA is a much more melee focused system than D&D 3.5. I find three Drakensang fighters easier to manage than one NWN 2 caster. Admittedly this may also be because of NWN 2's crazy ass interface.


Other than that, it's a mixed bag. Act 1 in general is inconsistent at best. Trial and defending the keep are good arcs. Crafting is decent. Your companions vary in quality, with the most boring ones being your love interests, whereas some of them - Sand and Bishop especially, but also Neeshka, Khelgar and Grobnar - rather appealed to me.
My issue with the companions was that there was too many of them by a factor of two at least. I recall a period where I couldn't go more than ten minutes without tripping over another one. This was when the game really started to go downhill for me, that number of companions was just more than the script combined with a three companion limit could handle. It went from adventures with reasonably characterized archetypes (aka what I wanted) to Choose Your Game Mechanic. Between the two I'd much rather have a slightly different spellcaster companion than my dream NPC if they come with a character attached.


The endgame was mostly terrible, except the very final battle. The good version appealed to me because, for once, you got to control all of your NPCs at once, with no arbitrary headcount limit. The evil one did because, well, it was pretty badass.
What really drove me nuts in terms of mechanics was the D&D-typical buffing. When you got to Mask of the Betrayer, you'd be casting somewhere around a dozen buffs on all of your characters before combat, one after another. REALLY tedious and really distracted from the fun, and at the same time those buffs, without fail, made the difference between your character being a weakling that's crushed within seconds or a nigh-invinceable juggernaut (except in the case of Monks, who were somewhat durable without buffs and completely and utterly incapable of getting hurt in any way whatsoever when buffed).
I never got to the endgame. By the time I had slogged my way to the bit where I got my keep, it had pretty much broken my spirit. I've heard that's when it gets good, to which I respond any game that takes that long to get good is still bad.



Overall? I'd say I mostly enjoyed the main campaign. Not Baldur's Gate-enjoyed or Planescape: Torment enjoyed or Vampire: Bloodlines-enjoyed, not even The Witcher-enjoyed or Dragon Age 2-enjoyed, but probably somewhere around Shadows of Undrentide-enjoyed or Vampire: Redemption-enjoyed, or maybe DSA: Drakensang-enjoyed. Actually probably slightly more than Drakensang, in that combat was more fun and class balance seemed better in NWN 2, and slightly less than Vampire Redemption, in that that game had better characters and a cooler story.

Drakensang's campaign is sort of pleasant snoozefest. I much prefer the pseudo-sequel, River of Time. It hits the high stakes but not apocalyptic adventure perfectly, the companions are better realized in a broad-strokes sort of way, and you get to go to some pretty cool locations. Plus with the improved engine it's probably the nicest looking game in the genre. It's more or less a playable Larry Elmore painting.

[Squark]

Not sure when you played it, but the AI improved enough by the time I got it that generally fighters and rogues only needed basic direction, so you could focus on managing the arcanist and divine spellcaster in your party. And with good spell selection or Normal difficulty, you could probably leave both of them on auto-pilot.

[Giegue]

I played the first campaign multi-player, so I had less of an issue with the AI. My friend played a Monk/Cleric/Sacred Fist and I played a Wizard/Red Wizard/Arcane Scholar/Pale Master so we had the "arcane" and "divine" rolls covered ourselves enough that putting the AI on auto-pilot didn't hurt us that much even if they where spellcasters. Between my friend and I, we had literally every roll somewhat covered just by out two characters. My friend was our main melee fighter while also having access to fairly powerful divine casting and I was our arcanist who thanks to able learner and some serious skill-planing was the party face(Bluff, mostly, with some diplomacy as well) and our guy to pop traps(summons) and open chests/doors(Knock spell).

However, if I where to play again without my friend, I can imagine the AI players being much more important, and managing them all could be an issue.

[Chainsaw Hobbit]

I really don't know why they didn't make very many D&D Fourth Edition computer games. The system seems like it would lend itself much better to the medium than Third Edition did.

[Giegue]

Because 4e was not as popular? Personally, I liked 4e. My only complaint where the mandatory feat taxes how bad the official Necromancer was. Luckily, the Nethermancer was pretty darn good for the whole "dark wizard" thing, and there is a LOT of third party and homebrew attempts at the Necromancer that can be used in place of the (crappy) one wizards made. Especially the "shadow done right" necromancer. That one was really awesome. Other then poor necromantic options and annoying math-fixing feats that where practically mandatory 4e was good, and yeah, it would make an excellent videogame.

NWN 1 and 2 where fun too, though. There is even a good NWN 1 lets play made by a serious RPer who takes the same character(A LE female elven wizard named Lilly) through older games like Baulder's Gate and then NWN. Interesting watch since despite being a sarees of lets plays it's more akin to watching a fan-made film since he gets so into the RP of it all....

[Zen Master]

This I cannot disagree with enough. I firmly believe Mask is on par with Planescape: Torment.

I've heard this a lot. It worries me.

Because, on the one hand I find Torment to be not only the best game ever made - but quite possibly the greatest tale ever told.

But I simply cannot find the qualities in Mask. I find the interface frustrating, the npc's annoying, and the endless repeat-castings of buffs tedius.

However, I never did get past that first city. Whatsit? Mel-mul-something?!

[Squark]

They're talking about the story. Besides, no one plays PS:T for the gameplay (Which is typical but not exceptional infinity engine fare).

Mask does get a bit better outside of Musalantir, although your problem with it might be more fundamental.


On the topic of recasting buffs: That's what Safiya's 9th level spell slots (Persist spell) and long duration spells are for. The game discourages frequent resting anyway (Baring supression/eternal rest* spam)



*Eternal Rest really bugs me. The whole idea of the Spirit Eater curse is it's supposed to be a challenge to control, but all you really have to do is go directly to Shadow Musalantir after the battle and get Eternal rest, and you can Feed on the connection to the negative energy plane all undead have to your heart's content, no craving increases or shifts toward evil involved. :smallsigh:

[Provengreil]

My biggest beefs with NWN 2 are these:

1. the orc caves. I already cleared out an entire orc tribe. why, exactly, do I have to do it again? and what does any of it have to o with my duties as a city guardsan?

2. The loading screens: there are simply too many of them. Many shops are buried in its own building, behind their own loading screens, which themselves are nestled in an area I'm only going to to get to the shop, then I have to load that area back up to leave, then load the next area I actually wanted to go to. the party switch also does this. thus, I have to see 4 loading screens, two of them for the same area I don't (usually) need to be in, to swap members.

3. There's something going on behind the screen that taxes my computer a lot harder than It should. I can custom make a map (harder than it should be, BTW) and fill it with enemies, and it won't tax my computer hal as bad as simply standing there at level 18 with 3 classes and some constant effects and buffs up. The game actually starts to run worse as I level up.


Aside from the drag with the orcs, and that I don't like the ending chapters containing a metric ton of undead, I rather liked most of it.

[Giegue]

Yeah, I can see how the undead-loaded chapters would be annoying, especially if you where playing a rogue or something else that has issues fighting them. Luckily, I was playing a Necromancer wizard so for those parts I basically spammed undeath to death, control undead and sunburst. It was quite effective, actually. However, single player, with a rogue, those fights would be an absolute nightmare to say the least.

Also, as for the Orcs, it's D&D, your expected to at some point be forced to take part in a genocide which is "morally justified" because the creatures you're murdering are of a race that is ALWAYS evil, no matter what logic has to say about that.

[Winter_Wolf]

I thought the orcs was part of the Old Owl Well situation. I just viewed it as a political thing for Neverwinter: "we want that land, figure it out." Lord Nasher seems like the kind of guy that you'd kick in the head if he weren't your liege-lord. Guy is a complete Richard Cranium. Of course that brings up the question as to why you're helping him at all.

There are a LOT of loading screens. And the cutscenes! By Selûne above, the cutscenes!

[Aotrs Commander]

I really don't know why they didn't make very many D&D Fourth Edition computer games. The system seems like it would lend itself much better to the medium than Third Edition did.

It actually kinda doesn't. The opposite, in fact.

We thought that at first, and then we realised how so much stuff is based on picking multiple targets and other situational movement gubbins. My cleric's base sacred flame laser beams, for example, require two targets to use; one enemy target (so laser in the face) and one ally target (to get the doohickys); and it's the same with a lot of the powers that grant allies [stuff] while hitting enemies in the internal organs. Even something like the fighter's Tide of Iron requires at least two player decisions; which target to thump and which of the three possible ways you can push it if you hit.

It's not a problem on the tabletop, but I imagine trying to model it outside of a turn-based adaption would be really quite hard, or at least clunky. (And, of course, if you use the short-cut of "nearest ally" or whatever, you've then opened a whole new kettle of fish, and meant that a the usefulness of those powers is degraded.)

I suspect that in part, is why we haven't seen many (any?) 4E adaptions.

Look at it this way; aside from the Turn-Based ToEE, the 3.x adaptions generally didn't even do Power Attack accurately; almost all of them gave it a fixed value.

[Chainsaw Hobbit]

I would buy a turn-based Fourth Edition computer game that focused on tactics. That would be pretty great. Kind of like Lair Assault: the Digital Game.

[Reynard]

I'd love a Turn-based game that used 4e's rules. Even if it was light on the RPG/story elements, it could still be really cool. I'm surprised a legally-dubious ones doesn't already exist somewhere on the internet.

[Maeglin_Dubh]

What makes NWN and NWN2 great for me is the persistent worlds.

Now if only I could find a decent one. One of the ones I'm in, the whole point is to grind to 30 and do raid bosses. The other one, the primary method of leveling is pretending to be the cast of 'Cheers' and having a gabfest in the tavern for literally hours on end.

[Chainsaw Hobbit]

I'd love a Turn-based game that used 4e's rules. Even if it was light on the RPG/story elements, it could still be really cool. I'm surprised a legally-dubious ones doesn't already exist somewhere on the internet.

I've actually considered sharpening my programming skills making one such game. Very graphics light. I've just never gotten around to it.

[ThiagoMartell]

I tried very hard to like NWN2. What killed it for me was how the animations sucked compared to NWN1. In NWN1, you had different animations when an attacked missed, when an attack hit and when an attack missed due to Dex bonus. In NWN2, you shake your weapon at the target weirdly and then some numbers roll on the screen. Oh well.
Storms of Zehir had a world map system that actually made me like it and lack of boring cutscenes with characters standing around looking at each other and making you realize how awful the rendering was. I had a lot of fun exploring in Storms of Zehir but eventually I simply got bored.

Fortunately, BGEE is out there. :smallbiggrin:

[Giegue]

If your looking for dynamic combat animations for NWN 1 there was a hack/mod that made melee combat look "martial arts" style aka a lot more dynamic and showy. I don't download hacks/mods anymore after bad experiences with the PrC pack but there may be something out there for NWN 2 that's similar, I don't know.

[Provengreil]

Yeah, I can see how the undead-loaded chapters would be annoying, especially if you where playing a rogue or something else that has issues fighting them. Luckily, I was playing a Necromancer wizard so for those parts I basically spammed undeath to death, control undead and sunburst. It was quite effective, actually. However, single player, with a rogue, those fights would be an absolute nightmare to say the least.

take one guess at my favorite class.


Also, as for the Orcs, it's D&D, your expected to at some point be forced to take part in a genocide which is "morally justified" because the creatures you're murdering are of a race that is ALWAYS evil, no matter what logic has to say about that.

I objected to doing it twice in a row, is all. With the same race.

[Kesnit]

My biggest beefs with NWN 2 are these:

I have to load that area back up to leave, then load the next area I actually wanted to go to. the party switch also does this. thus, I have to see 4 loading screens, two of them for the same area I don't (usually) need to be in, to swap members.

That's easily fixable two different ways. There is a console code you can enter that brings up your party select menu. (It's been a while since I played, so I'll have to dig out the piece of paper that has the code written on it...) Or you can click on the area change icon, select party members, then when the travel map comes up, back out of it. Either one gives new party without the load screen.

[JediSoth]

I played most of the game and thought it was OK, but my most prominent memory of the game was playing & beating The Simpsons Game on my Nintendo DS entirely during the loading screens.

Seriously, loading times were bad enough when the game came out (with the hardware I had) that I kept a handheld console around with which to entertain myself while I waited.

[sana]

That's easily fixable two different ways. There is a console code you can enter that brings up your party select menu. (It's been a while since I played, so I'll have to dig out the piece of paper that has the code written on it...) Or you can click on the area change icon, select party members, then when the travel map comes up, back out of it. Either one gives new party without the load screen.

Debugmode 1
RS KR_roster_edit

opens a window for party select and other things

remember to use Debugmode 0 before continuing the game