Review SoU sweet talking at GameSpy

[Saint_Proverbius]

Tags: Neverwinter Nights: Shadows of Undrentide

For those who are interested in psuedo-intellectualisms in their reviews, <A href="http://www.gamespy.com/">GameSpy</a> offers up a <A href="http://www.gamespy.com/reviews/june03/nwnundrentidepc/">review</a> of <A href="http://nwn.bioware.com/shadows">Shadows of Undrentide</a> which concludes with <i>If you didn't like the first one, give this one a chance</i>. Here's one point he made:
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<blockquote> As fantastic as the new NPCs are, there's one notable omission: a tank character. A sorcerer, a bard, and a rogue-cleric are great companions if you're playing as a physical powerhouse, but if you want to play as a druid or a magic user you'll want some muscle for backup. Disappointingly, there isn't a complementary NPC if you want to play as anything other than a melee-focused character. This makes several areas of the game incredibly difficult. Parts of the Interlude and the end of Chapter Two are challenging with a balanced party; playing with two combat-deficient characters makes these portions of the game downright nasty. </blockquote>
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Oh my goodness, a good point from a <A href="http://www.gamespy.com">GameSpy</a> writer. Maybe that highschool psychology course he took last term fired up his synapses.
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Thanks, <b>Ibbz</b> for the word!

 

[Volourn]

Actually, according to BIO there is a melee character. The half-orc sorceror can be made a barbarian by the player when he levels up. It's too bad the reviewer missed that..

The rest of the review seems fair.

 

[Spazmo]

Bullshit. If you hire a sorcerer as a mercenary, you damn well expect a sorcerer, not a budding barbarian. There should have been a mercenary who was a fighter, ranger, paladin or barbarian from the start.

 

[Elwro]

Actually, according to BIO there is a melee character. The half-orc sorceror can be made a barbarian by the player when he levels up. It's too bad the reviewer missed that..
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He didn't miss that, see:

Disappointingly, there isn't a complementary NPC if you want to play as anything other than a melee-focused character (there is a character you can tell to level up as a tank, but it's not the same as a pure tank).

(taken from the first page of the review)

 

[Sabotai]

Straight from the BioBoards:

That is a very good review... and it talked a lot more about the campaign, too. Cool.

As far as not having a tank, though... Xanos serves that role perfectly well if you switch him to Barbarian. Though I suppose it's a feature that might be easy to miss. This reviewer probably would have been happier if we'd had the time to include Mischa as a henchman as we planned. Ah, well.

Seems Bio intended to include Mischa as a Paladin, but didn't have time and resources to include her. Well, at least we have a statue we can spit on. And why do these Bio employees use cool or neat every other sentence? Is it to communicate with their target audience? They better start learning 133t then.

In the same thread David Gaider on henchmen level ups:

Yes, just a clarification: the henchmen basically have three "modes" each. The default has them splitting levels between their primary and secondary classes.

Dorna splits between Cleric and Rogue evenly. Xanos takes one Barbarian level for every four Sorcerer levels. Deekin is a pure-class Bard, however.

Through dialogue, you can choose to ask a henchman to focus on one or the other class after that point (with Deekin you can ask him to switch to Rogue), or to return to their default level-up method.

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As for Mischa, the difficulty in adding her in with a patch (and the reason we didn't do it before) is that the SoU henchmen have a *lot* of dialogue. Open up their dialogue in the toolset and take a look. Consider that all of the NWN henchmen were written in a week... the SoU henchmen took a week each, not to mention lots of QA debugging time.

I wouldn't mind writing her, myself. Not sure where I would get a spare week, though. Certainly nothing stopping someone else from doing her up as a henchman, either.

So why didn't they take two more weeks to include a "tank"? It seems pretty important to have one in order to complement the non melee-classes.

 

[Volourn]

Elwro, oops, taht's what I get for skimming. My fault there. Though; if you concentrate the sorceror as a barbarian fully; he'd make a very good melee character I think. Thanks for correcting my misreview of the review.

People seem to forget that this is an expansion. How many npocs do you need/ The original had 7; the expansion has almost half, and suppsoedly they're more developed.

 

[Vault Dweller]

How many npocs do you need?

I dunno...how about just the right amount to ensure that a player can play with at least basic party setups? Miissing a tank NPC is a big oversight, but hey, why worry about minor details when you a have community eager to fix your mistakes?

Certainly nothing stopping someone else from doing her up as a henchman, either.

What's next? "Stop complaining, you worthless-good-for-nothing-lazy-morons, with the tools we've given you, you should have fixed all the issues weeks ago" I pity the fools.

 

[Volourn]

Yes; but like I said, there is an npc who can fulfill one's need for a melee character ifa player so wishes. I'd presume this is one of the reasons why they did the level up process the new way for the expansion. The half-orcs sorceror I presume starts as at level 1; the game supposedly goes to level 12 or so. That means it cna eventually be a 10th level barabarian. And, it can eaisly be role-played that he hasn't naturally had more spells come to him. Just a thought.

True, it would be far easier if they had just added a straigt warrior type. Besides, I surely wouldn't complain about an extra henchmen.