NWN 2: mask of the betrayer is out now.

[Texas Red]

Where the hell are the comments of our resident NWN 1 fanboy Volourn? The guy rates NWN OC on the same level as NWN 2 OC which, despite the serious flaws of NWN 2 OC, is completely wrong and is not subjected to opinions.

 

[Volourn]

JUST A FRIENDLY WARNING: Don't start a fuckin' war you cAN't fuckin' win TWD or I'll destroy this thread with pics of me screwin' your mum!

 

[Texas Red]

JUST A FRIENDLY WARNING: Don't start a fuckin' war you cAN't fuckin' win TWD or I'll destroy this thread with pics of me screwin' your mum!

Oh no, no! I would not dream of starting a war with you. Just asking for your opinion, is all.

 

[Starwars]

I'm replaying the game at the moment, and I'm bringing along another companion than on my first playthrough. Sadly, I have to say that the game as a whole is much easier when bringing this particular character (and I suspect it will still be quite easy for people playing characters focused on meleefighting).
To bad, though I still feel a few of the encounters are good fun, and the combat overall is still a lot more fun than the NWN2 OC.

Still doing a "good" playthrough this time around. Turns out that I missed a few smaller things (one quest in particular that I thought was really fun), and the companion I didn't bring along last time is very likeable as well.
Was a bit worried that I might've liked the game just because of the drought of good RPGs, but when replaying it now I really do feel it's very solid.

After I finish this playthrough, I'm gonna do an uber-evil one as well (and bring along the final companion) which I'm quite looking forward to.

EDIT: Just saw the first(?) review of the expansion at this site.
http://computergames.ro/en/games/viewit ... eview.html

It goes pretty in-depth, and I agree nearly every point he makes. Personally I had an almost completely bug-free experience though, but I guess mileage varies. He warns before talking about the bigger spoilers, but there are some mentions of locales and quests as well, so you might not wanna read it if you wanna be *completely* unspoiled before playing.

 

[Trash]

Pretty good review actually. Though it seems the poor sob had a lot more bugs than I encountered. It's rather spoiler heavy though, especially page 2 and 3.

 

[Pegultagol]

I see as one of the negatives in how they treated the original party members of the OC. I wonder if they get to make any appearance during the expansion, or their respective presence leading to some closure on their part?

 

[Bossman]

Only 2 of the old companions make cameo appearances, and you can discover what happened to the rest if you do a particular side-quest while in the Academy of Shapers and Binders.

 

[aweigh]

Out of curiosity, on what difficulty are you guyys playing? The people that find MotB "too easy" or "just as easy" as the OC, I mean. I started out playing it on Very Difficult but it was way too punishing to my purposefully unoptimized character (was going for flavor, not stats), so I had to drop the difficulty down to Hard-Core, but then that was too easy. I finally ended up modifying the diffsettings.xml to a mix between Hard-Core and Very Difficult. If you want hard fights look no further than the optional Vault of the Death God on Very Difficult.

And yeah, if you take "that particular companion" the game switches to godmode. It's like using Orlandu in FFT.

 

[POOPERSCOOPER]

If i thought NWN 1 was shit will I like the second one?

 

[Andrej]

POOPERSCOOPER:

I thought NWN 1 was shit and I tolerated the OC of the sequel and actually liked the expansion quite well. As far as I can remember, there's not any actual fedex quests in the whole expansion - now that's something.

 

[Andrej]

Also, what? The narrator is identified in the end of the game? Someone PM me with this spoiler, i must have missed it - although I have a guess.

I see as one of the negatives in how they treated the original party members of the OC. I wonder if they get to make any appearance during the expansion, or their respective presence leading to some closure on their part?

Well, the only two interesting OC companions are in the game - even if one changes voice actor and the other has none. Closure kinda comes for one.

 

[butsomuch]

look for Voice Cast in MotB manual. Rodger Bumpass is the narrator

 

[Andrej]

look for Voice Cast in MotB manual. Rodger Bumpass is the narrator

Ugh.

Edit: What i thought.

 

[Catalina]

Motherfucker. I installed MotB over NWN2, and I still have the same bug where animatioons cutscenes don't trigger correctly. I was hoping that installing the whole patch at once would help, but I guess not.

 

[aweigh]

Use the offline patches. You have to do 1.0 -> 1.05 -> 1.06a -> 1.06b -> 1.10

just follow the version numbers from 1.05 onwards.

 

[Micmu]

I did: OC -> 1.10 (online) -> MoTB -> Hotfix and everything seems to be in order.

 

[Muze]

I'm intrigued enough to try MotB, but haven't bought/played the OC. Obviously I'll have to get both if I want to play the new campaign, but the question is should I play the OC? I don't want to get burnt out on NWN2 before I get to the better sounding expansion, but I would also prefer to actually earn that level 18. About how long is the OC?

Here's a simpler question that might be more important: Are the areas boxed off like in NWN1 with loading between locations? I really hated that... lack of continuity in the world. Is it any more seamless in NWN2 or are the areas large enough where it's not so much an annoyance?

 

[aboyd]

Ah, I was pretty much a NWN 2 defender here on these boards, but I've come to the conclusion that it was mostly because I powered through the beginning and lingered in act 2, where most of the openness is. I thought the trial and the keep were awesome.

But then my computer crashed and I needed to replay to get back to those awesome parts. Not fun. Not not not not fun.

So to answer your questions, the OC is 30 to 60 hours long, depending upon how obsessive you are. I ended upon the 60 hour end, because I will cart my items between merchants, writing down prices and going back & forth until I get the best deals. And I'll read and reread the dialogues. And I pause like crazy and micromanage my companions in battle. All of that combines to make the game looooooonnng. And it made act 1 unbearable when I went back to it.

The real problem is the railroading. I didn't notice my first time through because of the faux dialogue choices. I honestly believed that companions could be refused -- there is the dialogue choice that implies you're not open to taking on a companion, so I assumed you could opt to not take on a companion. But then I actually tried some of those and realized they simply force you to the same decision, like it or not.

On second play through, you realize how many of the areas are railroaded, too. You have to do almost all of them, every time, in the same order. This was fine my first time through, but again miserable the second time through (and flat-out unbearable the third -- I just gave up and put away the game).

The middle of the game is better. There are some real choices, not fake. But it also kills me that my favorite alignment (chaotic good) is shafted here. You have to choose between becoming the proponent of lawfulness, or engaging in evil. A lawful evil character would have a hey-day, because both choices could work for him. But chaotic good? Totally forced to act out of character for looong stretches.

As for whether there are boxed off areas as in NWN 1, yeah, I'd say that's pretty much unchanged. Well, there is a prettier interface for it all. But you'll still wait for locations to load, and click on exit points and all of that.

The engine itself is pretty great. I'd suggest that you buy it, play a few minutes of the OC just to get some background feel for the story (at least, until you're aggravated) and then download Purgatorio or whatever gamer-made modules are out & highly-rated. Getting a character to level 18 is pretty easy with just a couple fan-made modules. Then put that character into MotB.

 

[Admiral Rimjob POOBUM]

What are the good modules out now, anyway? I had a brief look at the vault, but considering the state of some of the top modules for NWN1... I really can't be bothered picking out the inconvenient razor blades from the mighty broth of the mod scene.

 

[Texas Red]

BTW, how is the module Crown of Cormyr for NWN 1? Much roleplaying, interesting characters, plot and combat etc.? Would you say its better than Darkness over Daggerford(or hows its called) Havent seen it being discussed here before.

 

[aweigh]

Eh, MotB automatically levels any PC you create up to level 18 as soon as you start its campaign. There's no need to export anything.

 

[Texas Red]

Does MotB improve the performance in addition to the 1.10 patch or does the patch containt everything the expansion does? Im playing with the latest patch and I felt no difference. In some place the game still lags as hell on the lowest of lowest settings even though Im over the minimum requirements .

 

[Andrej]

Does MotB improve the performance in addition to the 1.10 patch or does the patch containt everything the expansion does? Im playing with the latest patch and I felt no difference. In some place the game still lags as hell on the lowest of lowest settings even though Im over the minimum requirements .

Dunno 'bout the preformance but for me, the main preformance hog on my system (AMD 3ghzsomething, 1gb DDR2, GT 7900) is shadows. Disabling shadows makes it a shitload better. I also noticed that a good defrag made wonders for my loadtimes (duh!).

Also, you will make me happy if you use the word "lag" to refer to latency related things, and chuggy when it's, well, chuggy.

 

[fastpunk]

Does MotB improve the performance in addition to the 1.10 patch or does the patch containt everything the expansion does? Im playing with the latest patch and I felt no difference. In some place the game still lags as hell on the lowest of lowest settings even though Im over the minimum requirements .

Do you by any chance own a GeForce card from the FX series? Anyway, like Andrej said, try to disable shadows. Or better yet, take a look here:

http://www.tweakguides.com/NWN2_1.html

It's a tweak guide, it helped my frame-rate a bit, you should try it.

 

[aboyd]

What are the good modules out now, anyway?

I don't know anymore... I haven't played any in a while. I'm still partial to Avendale as a short one, it seemed OK and the author really cleaned it up over the course of a few upgrades.

BTW, how is the module Crown of Cormyr for NWN 1? Much roleplaying, interesting characters, plot and combat etc.? Would you say its better than Darkness over Daggerford(or hows its called)

Oh, I liked it a lot my first time through it. I've never finished it, though. WCoC is the module with all the horses, and that's very fun... once. My second time through I really didn't like the almost-mandatory jousting competition. I won't do it a third time just because of that, which is sad because it's maybe a two-hour chunk of a good 20-30 hour story. But my first time doing it was pretty fun, so don't let me turn you off of it.

It's also very good for the sense of knighthood and royalty. The castle seem like a real castle, with all the trimmings that go with that. He pulled it off well, even if it wasn't a specific design goal.

Eh, MotB automatically levels any PC you create up to level 18 as soon as you start its campaign. There's no need to export anything.

I think the person asking the question understood that. He was speaking about it more from a "I want to fully experience this" standpoint. I think it's reasonable to want to do it from start to finish. I just might suggest trying other modules to cover the "start" part of it.