Mod News Neverwinter Nights: Siege of Shadowdale module gets an Enhanced Edition after twenty years

[SunKing]

When does Neverwinter Nights receive enhancements that make it not shit? Still waiting for that.

Never

 

[AdamReith]

The Player Tool 1 thing in Aiuland Saga makes party control a lot better. You can order your party forward easily and along with the regular party controls gives you a decent amount of control.

It's still far from as good as it could be. Enhanced Edition also seems to have added bugs like a party members details not rendering properly until a reload.

Still worth it for the great custom content.

 

[SunKing]

Gentleman can you play this on the diamond edition classic or do I need ee to play it?

 

[Crescent Hawk]

OC was fine, but SoU was the best. Clean and nicely execututed campaign, has the right amount of everything. HotU is a mess in my opinion. It mixes up too many different themes and playstyles. And I don't like finding +5 Longswords in barrels at every corner.

I agree SoU smaller scale helps it a lot, it could have some more companions but its great, the intro also reminds me of Thief cutscenes. they put you in the mood. HOTU is a mess not even a dedicated drow waifu can save sadly.

 

[Gargaune]

Gentleman can you play this on the diamond edition classic or do I need ee to play it?

This is for the EE, on the DE you've got the old version of SoS, see the OP. Mind you, NWN EE is on sale right now for the price of a McChicken meal. Literally.

 

[═█═]

Neverwinter Nights was made to be played multiplayer and with a DM, this is why you're only making one character in a game about adventuring parties with classes that compliment each other. If you're playing with yourself you're doing it wrong.

 

[Stokowski]

I seem to recall mostly enjoying the original despite it being extremely miserly with xp (you gained maybe a level and a half if you sought out every sidequest) and a railroaded final sequence that, because of the fatigue accruing travel system, meant always arriving at the final battle in a fatigued state without the opportunity to rest. Almost tempted to see if the EE really does improve things. Almost, but I'm not about to give any money to the cunts at Beamdog to rebuy the base game(s) again.

 

[luj1]

Almost tempted to see if the EE really does improve things.

It introduces new bugs.

 

[AdamReith]

The main thing you really notice with the EE is the x-ray effect when your character is obscured by scenery.

It also has some nice changes for UI scaling which are very welcome.

 

[huskarls]

NWN is like PoE and Kotor, bad gameplay and bad story that has a small committed group of tasteless fans pimping out the idea that is good. You never see any fanatics trying to convince you outer worlds or spellforce is good

 

[Luke Scull]

Siege of Shadowdale Enhanced Edition v1.1 is now available!

https://neverwintervault.org/project/nwnee/module/siege-shadowdale-enhanced-edition

 

[luj1]

NWN is like PoE and Kotor

Only an idiot would put Pillars in the same sentence as them.

NwN and SWKotOR are the last good RPGs of the Renaissance era.

They show signs of early casualisation and are not as good as peak Renaissance. But still better than modern "RPGs".

Pillars has a shit ruleset, shit writing, shit lore, and shit core systems.

 

[Crescent Hawk]

Btw this is way fucking late, but any recommendations for NWN modules? I see aeilund Saga and a dance with rogues mentioned a lot. I honestly never tried back in the day.

 

[luj1]

Btw this is way fucking late, but any recommendations for NWN modules? I see aeilund Saga and a dance with rogues mentioned a lot. I honestly never tried back in the day.

Swordflight. But there is a huge list of NwN modules on Lilura's blog. There are countless great ones.

 

[Jack Of Owls]

Maybe I should give NWN another chance? I always start with the OC but can't complete it because of boredom so I never get to the good content.

The good content was user created modules like Honor Among Thieves, Tales of Arterra etc. and the multiplayer servers.
I played through the OC because I was a dumb kid who didnt know any better but you should skip it tbh.
SoU and HotU campaigns were a little better but still nowhere near the custom modules.

The merciful thing about the OC was that it was short, IIRC, so it made a good tuitorial for the mechanics of the game in preperation for playing online or the best player-made modules (which was a peak DnD-type cRPG experience for me).

 

[Crescent Hawk]

The OC campaign was complete trash even with Aribeth's tit jiggle. I knew so fast back then I installed BG2 again. But it still has a special place in my heart, I played it semi coop splitting my pentium 2 300 with a friend and I managed to turn him into a big D&D tabletop nerd forever, still play tabletop with him today.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

SHADOWDALE! Stay awhile .... and visit.

So, I glanced at my GOG account and search and it is a FREE upgrade so they didn't charge. I didn't look at their forum entry on this announcement as I really hate the GOG forums. When you look at the add-ons for Neverwinter Nights in the search it is quite a few. When I first grabbed NWN on GOG I am pretty sure there weren't that many.

 

[AdamReith]

The OC campaign was complete trash even with Aribeth's tit jiggle. I knew so fast back then I installed BG2 again. But it still has a special place in my heart, I played it semi coop splitting my pentium 2 300 with a friend and I managed to turn him into a big D&D tabletop nerd forever, still play tabletop with him today.

I had the editor open, about to create my masterpiece.

Then I discovered you could rotate her model in the editor and trigger the jiggle effect.

Many nights I am haunted by the spectre of what I could have been.

 

[Darkwind]

I was heavily into NWN when it came out and remembering thinking at the time- "we have arrived". My fantasy of tabletop RPG being played via the highly visual environment of modern (at the time) PCs and the internet was here.

What I did not realize as a very young and naïve lad was as technology was rapidly progressing, IQs were rapidly declining. So the small, and quickly vanishing audience of people interested in TTRPGs or games that require any actual thought or more than mashing 4 buttons on an XBox controller was already in steep decline. This just got progressively worse as the 00s wore on and by 2010 it was clear to me that Idiocracy had arrived about 500 years earlier than Mike Judge had predicted.

You can track this same trend across MMOs and RPGs in general as every Codexer is well aware. But the Sight of What Might Have Been™ that NWN gave is still painful because I just assumed we'd get better and better versions leading to a full on virtual tabletop experience. It is only now, 20 years later, that some movement towards true VTTs is actually being made again.

 

[Lutte]

I bought an imported version of NWN because I was too impatient for it to come to my country back in the day. It was one of the first gaming purchases I heavily regretted.

Yes, later, some modules made it somewhat more worth it. Somewhat. Particularly the ones that are restrictive in what class you can play and have linearly designed challenges.

The biggest issue with NWN gameplay is that it's a D&D game where you can only control one character. IMHO all three main campaigns made by Bioware are total garbage: they were designed to be playable no matter what class you played. This wouldn't mean anything bad in a game where you control a full party, because you would be able to recruit characters that make up for your deficiencies, but in a solo game with an uncontrollable companion that means.. that every challenge must allow the lowest common denominator, the dumb fighter with a dumb feat build, to still be able to complete the game without too much thought or metagaming. Meaning, if you have any trouble while playing something superior like a Cleric or a Wizard, you're a total dumbfuck and should format your hard drive and gift your computer to your betters.

And then there's that tiled early 3d look that is so boran to look at. Morrowind had funny, badly done character faces but the environments looked interesting, unique and mysterious. There was no atmosphere in NWN. And the writing is just soporific. The UI also sucked major dicks. Reading dialogues in NWN is just painful.
It's also interesting to note how soulless the soundtrack is compared to Morrowind's despite being made by the same composer in the same era. Of course, Morrowind was one of the last noteworthy soundtrack by Soule, who progressively became more and more like a chinese counterfeit of Hans Zimmer. I wonder where the Soule who made the Icewind Dale and Total Annihilation soundtracks went?

As for the people who are arguing here that "NWN's every faults in its single player should be forgiven it's all about muh multiplayah".. you guys don't even remember that NWN was marketed as BG2's successor, that at one point biowhore even implied you would be able to import BG saves ( of course it didn't happen ), and that as a platform for persistent worlds.. meh, better play some Ultima Online more.

 

[Netch]

Idk about this "NWN is bad" stuff, I did drop the original campaign pretty quick but I just started playing Darkness Over Daggerford as a wizard and I'm having a fucking blast.

 

[Jack Of Owls]

Idk about this "NWN is bad" stuff, I did drop the original campaign pretty quick but I just started playing Darkness Over Daggerford as a wizard and I'm having a fucking blast.

I played DOD as a wizard and while indeed fun, it turned out to be a bit of a faceroll with that class (I took out that entire brigade of orcs early in the module with just 2 or 3 fireballs) and the only thing that served as any kind of challenge were the puzzles.

 

[Netch]

Idk about this "NWN is bad" stuff, I did drop the original campaign pretty quick but I just started playing Darkness Over Daggerford as a wizard and I'm having a fucking blast.

I played DOD as a wizard and while indeed fun, it turned out to be a bit of a faceroll with that class (I took out that entire brigade of orcs early in the module with just 2 or 3 fireballs) and the only thing that served as any kind of challenge were the puzzles.

It is certainly a strong class for that module, when you have two companions + two summons it gets pretty crazy. You can just sit back and sling some AoE spells.

 

[Gahbreeil]

When does Neverwinter Nights receive enhancements that make it not shit? Still waiting for that.

Last I checked the port to the new engine allowed elves to have chest hair.

Canadian elves, you know.

 

[Faarbaute]

I was heavily into NWN when it came out and remembering thinking at the time- "we have arrived". My fantasy of tabletop RPG being played via the highly visual environment of modern (at the time) PCs and the internet was here.

What I did not realize as a very young and naïve lad was as technology was rapidly progressing, IQs were rapidly declining. So the small, and quickly vanishing audience of people interested in TTRPGs or games that require any actual thought or more than mashing 4 buttons on an XBox controller was already in steep decline. This just got progressively worse as the 00s wore on and by 2010 it was clear to me that Idiocracy had arrived about 500 years earlier than Mike Judge had predicted.

You can track this same trend across MMOs and RPGs in general as every Codexer is well aware. But the Sight of What Might Have Been™ that NWN gave is still painful because I just assumed we'd get better and better versions leading to a full on virtual tabletop experience. It is only now, 20 years later, that some movement towards true VTTs is actually being made again.

This is how I envisioned CRPGs evolving as well. Alas, it was not to be.