Yes the OC of NWN1 wasn't great, but it's still a lot better than the shit we have now. It has that old school fantasy feel as opposed to the nutless and gutless style that's so popular now.
The NWN OC is one of the worst campaigns ever made for a PC game. Yes, worse than Ruins of Myth Drannor.
You only control a single character. In a D&D game. A system designed for a party. You can have ONE follower but he's uncontrollable so he'll always get himself killed, how fun.
This means the game has to be balanced to be beatable by any single class. You can't add encounters that challenge a diverse party of fighter-mage-cleric - every encounter has to be defeatable by every class on its own.
Which leads to the NWN OC's utterly terrible encounter design: trash mob, trash mob, trash mob, and yet another trash mob. I never managed to get out of the first chapter because of how soul-drainingly boring the game was. I remember spending 30 minutes to an hour in that fucking prison, mowing down mook after mook in torturously slow RTWP combat where my girl only swung her sword once every six seconds. And there were a dozen enemies to fight through. And most of them would take two to three hits to bring down. And not every swing was a hit, of course. That's three minutes of just sitting there, watching my warrioress trade blows with a bunch of weak prisoners who could barely hit her, occasionally quaffing a potion when I was low on health. Wow... so very engaging gameplay... amazing.
And then the lockpicking, trap disarming, and resting. All that shit took a lot of time. In Baldur's Gate, these actions were all instant. Select thief skill, click on locked chest, the game rolls the dice and tells you either "yes" or "no". In NWN, each attempt at unlocking something would have your character do an unlocking animation and it also took 6 seconds or so. Now imagine playing a thief and going through a location with a lot of locked chests and trapped doors. You'll be spending a LOT of time staring at lockpicking animations.
Resting is dumb too. You sit down, and again a 6 second countdown starts. In every sane RPG, resting is instantaneous: the screen goes black for 1 second and time skips ahead to when you wake up. In NWN, you have to
fucking wait for no fucking reason.
I have played many, many RPGs over the years. I've been playing RPGs since the early 00s and encountered a lot of really bad shit. Horrible Russian Diablo clones that were a complete waste of time. Unoptimized Eurojank with more glitches than features.
And yet none of these trash games were as mind-numbingly slow and boring as NWN. It's like the devs deliberately set out to create the most sluggish and un-engaging game possible. It has a solid system at its core - D&D 3E - but not even the system can save the game because it only shines with a party. And you don't get a party. It's a solo character game, like a Diablo clone, except using a system that is completely unsuited for a Diablo clone.
As much as I try, I can't imagine how to make the experience even worse, other than by introducing game-breaking bugs. When it comes to gameplay design, NWN is a shining example of how
not to do it. It takes a solid system and ruins it with the most mind-bogglingly terrible design decisions I have ever encountered. Everything in the game feels like it exists only to waste the player's time. Nothing feels fun to do. Everything is too slow. Walking across the map takes a long time and there is no speedup/fast travel. Unlocking doors and disarming traps takes a long time for no reason. Resting takes a long time for no reason (and doesn't even advance the time of day unlike Fallout, Arcanum, Elder Scrolls etc). Combat is slow and boring and lacks options because you're confined to a single character.
The only good thing is character building because the game has a decent implementation of the D&D 3E ruleset, but if I wanna do that I can just grab a character sheet and some D&D books and skip all the bad gameplay that NWN throws at me in-between levelup sessions.
