And NWN2 was poorly optimized, the controls were still awkward and it forced party members on you. Neither games are perfect.

The game was so beloved at the time because of the multiplayer. To this day I don't believe I've played a better, or more engrossing, multiplayer game.

I haven't seen a decent Bioware game since Baldur's Gate 2.

The Witcher is quite possibly the best RPG I've seen made since Planescape (I'm not saying its better though, just that its fantastic; I wish Fallout 3 (barring that it should have been an improved Fallout 2) had been essentially the Witcher set in the Fallout game world).

I subscribe 100% to what you said there. NWN and NWN2 were totally useless. The worst was the lack of control of the other member of the party.

NWN2 had a LOT of issues, including one really nasty game-stopping bug I had to console past. However, the OP mentioned wanting to understand the plot of MotB, so NWN2, not NWN, is the game he's looking for.

I'm the same way... except... that in an RPG, you aren't watching yourself fight (as say in Doom or Quake).
In an RPG you are watching your carefully designed PC fight; as such (and personally), I just don't like watching myself fight from my PC's personal point of view.
(It doesn't make any sense, and is not very realistic IMO.)

NWN2 svcks.



Its multiplayer was amazazing. I hope they can do another one with betterer graphics.

I really quite enjoyed NWN. Unlike most people, however, I found the first chapter was the best. It was the grim setting that really appealed to me. Overall I loved the old school AD&D combat and levelling system. I found it got a bit dull as it went on due to the stupidly unrealistic exteriors and the daft amount of magical items (oh look, leather armour +4 for sale).

NWN let me play as what would become my favorite RPG character of all time: A shifter. There's nothing like finally getting those epic dragon shapes and just wreaking havoc everywhere.

On a custom server I played (hybrid LOTR) they had to actually alter endgame encounters because of me, because I was soloing endgame dragons. I also pumped up animal empathy enough that I could charm some of the endgame animals when I equipped certain items. I made him a druid/shifter/monk, but not the classic build with just 1 level of monk since that wasn't allowed. At one point an admin roleplayed a captain of the guards to come arrest me because I was standing on a hill outside of town throwing boulders over the wall, in Stone Golem form. He chased me, I changed into a red dragon and whooped his butt. So much fun.

I also had a very fun character built around druid/shifter/dwarven defender who used the risen lord shape and epic damage reduction feats. He was practically immune to everyone in PvP save clerics, but that just enhanced the roleplaying. They "arrested" me in normal dwarf form, threw me into a jail where I turned into a risen lord, and broke out. Only clerics could beat me, and none of the jail guards were clerics

They're all gone now since that harddrive failed, and I haven't reinstalled it. I never even got past the beginning of the first single player expansion, I jumped right in custom mulitplayer servers.

NWN multiplayer was so fun, and some of those modders so talented, that I always wanted The Elder Scrolls to have a multiplayer custom server option. People do some amazing things for TES with custom scripting and the construction set, so imagine if they were able to make their own multiplayer worlds?

Hm, I must be one of the few people who really enjoyed this game. And that comes from someone who severely dislikes isometric view. I also found the character creation to be one of the best ones I've ever seen (a long with the one in Daggerfall).

What I did find funny, though, was when my Barbarian team member repeatedly bashed against a door or chest to open it without any luck, until he would yell in frustration: "BY UTHGARS BLOOD!" while continuing bashing the door. Hilarious.

I decided to try the SoU expansion after giving up in the original campaign, but it's still pretty boring. Better than the OC, since there are loads of persuasion checks and stuff. I got past the 1st dungeon and recovered one artifact (the lich's hand).

I think it might just skip it and go on to NWN2. Thanks for the help, guys.

The NWN Main Quest is pretty lame. Go here, fetch that. Back track. Rinse and repeat. Listen to Aribeth be naive. Bo-oring. :yawn:

The two expansions are MUCH better. The plot is better, the quests more diverse (and more interesting, even if many do boil down to "go here, kill/fetch that), and more meaningful dialog choices and consequences.

I think NWN (no expansions) is probably more fun if you play with other people. Otherwise, it can be a rather dull experience slogging across the known universe back and forth, fighting the same enemies, and so on and so forth. If you have a high Wisdom or Persuade, you can get some interesting dialog/quest choices (more so in the expansions). Also, in the main game, none of your choices affect law/chaos alignment, if I recall correctly. The expansions will have law/chaos alignment shifts as well as good/evil.

The companions (you can have up to two) in the expansions are also more enjoyable and will even talk with each other (with funny results). I really like the expansions much more than the main game, especially Hordes of the Underdark. Maybe there are mods out there that make the main game better. If I ever install NWN again, I am definitely going to play with mods, and I would even dare to say that you should try modding the game with popular mods even if this is your first play-through.

EDIT: Personally, I hated NWN2 (haven't played with expansions). You have a lot less roleplaying freedom, but maybe expansions and mods fix that, I dunno. I just feel that it was the same game as NWN1 but with prettier graphics and less fun psuedo-DnD rules (I love the Shapeshifter class!). Also, you will be forced to take certain companions with you at certain times, even if they hate your guts. And you will lose companions at certain times, which REALLY svcks because the game is practically unbeatable if you try to go solo (unlike NWN1 where you can totally go solo and do fine). And companion AI svcks in NWN2, I had to constantly pause in combat and micromanage my "units" so they didn't kill themselves. The economy system was also pretty effed up, it cost an arm and a leg to get even a puny healing potion. And the best healing potions don't fill up enough of your health at high character levels, so I was constantly guzzling the dumb things when my character was acting as meat shield. And oh, did I mention the uber enemies that will decimate your party from time to time and force you to reload again and again? And the nonsensical unintuitive alignment shifts that are attributed to certain dialog lines?

NWN2 is the only game I physically destroyed on purpose and threw out in the garbage.

2d & 3D are just presentation methods, you pick one or the other depending on your needs (as a developer). 3D Isometric (as its been called), is for when you need to convey a "better than personal" view of the action (for when a 1st person view is too limiting).
*Which... IMO is actually most RPG's ~ though not all.

The Witcher is by far the best RPG I've seen in the last decade.

I'm not sure what you mean here.

I don't think isometric view is really a good answer to that problem. A dynamic cinematic camera would work better. Heck make it third person. I would still play it. Isometric is the ultimate limitation, especially when there is only one character to control. Although these party based RPGs can make use of it, I guess. Still cinematic camera views would work better.


I meant stuff like dice-rolls, text based dialog, isometric view, turn based combat, hack&slash, leveling, sixism, story>graphicseverything atrocity... so on and on. I would like to believe at least some of those were because of technical limitations of that time, others were just bad design. They somehow became trademark for RPGs later. I have a clear hatred against RPGs, apparently. Those games do everything possible to turn me off. Only Bethesda's creations suit me.

I would like to review my 75 minutes of The Witcher but http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/22-The-Witcher pretty much sums it up for me.

+1

Good times huh. I wish there was another game like it with prettier graphics, you know, a game that has the same amazing multiplayer feature as NWN, but there are non



If your about that single player business you should just jump into NWN2. NWN is for multiplayer and playing around with the toolset and playing others mods

I disagree. I've always played NWN solo, and I still enjoyed it. But, as I said in my previous post, the main NWN campaign can be rather tedious and dull without someone to talk to and raid dungeons with.

NWN2... maybe you can play it single player, but you aren't really alone, since the game burdens you with a surfeit of companions. =/

If you want a more action-oriented experience, I would suggest the game Demon Stone, which is also in the Forgotten Realms setting. It isn't as long as NWN and there aren't any RP dialog and quest options, but it is faster-paced and more exciting. You'll still get to build your characters and purchase equipment at the end of each level/chapter in the game.

Still, before you give up entirely on NWN, I'd suggest downloading mods and modding your game to see if that livens things up.

EDIT: Or just jump right into HotU. It will automatically level your character up to, what, level 15 or 20? I forget which. And all your equipment is removed anyway, so it doesn't matter that you have no previous loot (except that you won't really get anything once you find the chest where all your stolen stuff went to later in the game).

That's the kind of thing that should put in spoiler tags

What, the HotU bit? It happens within the first 3 seconds of the campaign, it really isn't a spoiler. Literally the 1st few seconds, I'm not kidding. You don't even get to have your character do anything before your stuff is stolen.

But you get new loot that is usually better anyway, so it doesn't really matter that much, except for maxing out the number of Bags of Holding you can lug around.

I meant finding it later. I haven't played HotU yet.

Real Isometric, is not what we usuall have in games these days... The devs for Witcher described it as Isometric. When someone says they want and Isometric Fallout (for example), its almost assured that they mean a 3D game that presents you with a classic isometric view, but rotatable with pan & zoom. *Like Dawn of War, and the Witcher.

Well.... I can see sixism being a limitation of the times (and even of the game setting). Games these days are still Hack-n-Slash and are built with a "graphics are everything" mentality; but seeing as the first first person game that I saw was in the early 80s, and that Turn based video games came about long after realtime games :shrug: I look upon them as more an evolution than a limitation. Even today Fallout 3 can't have large scale combat, but in Fallout 2, you could be outnumbered by Enclave 6 to 1; and I recall playing fights in D&D cRPGs outnumbered 9 to 1. (Meaning 18 to 2, and 27 to 3 ~as these games often supported more than just one PC ~in addition to the NPC's; That's a sad limitation of the recent games that they cannot match this. )

As for dice & text :shrug: ... Technology limits prevent consumer games from synthesizing acceptable voices, and without them, PC & Consoles cannot match the freedom and diversity ~and detail, afforded by using text... And when it happens that computer apps (on the consumer level) can produced "sculptured" voices that match a human performer ~they will still be using text to direct it.

*Of Dice: No RPG should be made without them, and without strong influence from them.

I misread you and thought your your review was 75 minutes, but it seems that you only played Witcher for an hour?
Witcher is a complex game with a slow-start tutorial ~the game doesn't really start until after you leave the castle.

If the developers deprived their playerbase of their hard-won loot permanently, there would be a mass uprising and riots. And I guarantee that once you learn that your character's stuff is stolen, the first thing you do when you exit the game is to google whether or not you'll get it back. At least, that's what I did.

I remember when Warcraft decided to go 3D with W3. I was happy because I got to see the action as I wanted. The outcome was a very limited pan & zoom. Generals was well done on the other hand. For the Witcher, I just don't understand it. Arkham Asylum style action TPS camera or a dynamic cinematic camera would work. Isometric and 3D doesn't work in an RPG game of that kind. It is an idea I'm having hard time to grasp. If it was a brainless action game, maybe...


I didn't mean sixism as a limitation. Sorry for confusion. I'm just saying those things has nothing to do with what defines an RPG. I am not against them individually. I just hate them to come in one package.

http://paizo.com/image/product/magazine_issue/dragon/326/cover_500.jpg

This is still what I consider art. I admit it is kitsch but so what? sixism as a theme can be used just fine too.

For the outnumbering, it is kind of an AI and performance problem. It will get better.


As I said, I am not against them individually. And I meant the real "dices" and showing them openly. I love random numbers and skill checks in my games. But I want them to be a little complex, not 6-12 sided table-top versions, and expect them eventually reaching simulation state. Also seeing them openly is like seeing someone's intestines, video games as being run on computing machines, should avoid this. If text moved to voice acting, that means we are at an acceptable level. It will get better from now on.


My gameplay problems seem to be addressed in Witcher 2. So I guess, they listen. I would like to give it a second chance with some mods, but it has a technical problem which is not patched, as a 16:10 monitor user, the game suffers from graphical glitches. Here is a 23 page thread in their official forums:
http://tw1.thewitcher.com/forum/index.php?topic=2867.0

No patch whatsoever. That's a big :thumbsdown: on their part.

No offense, but if you think "pause-and-issue-orders" is "cheating" then you simply do not understand tactical combat games.