Review Mask of the Betrayer reviews

[Vault Dweller]

Tags: Neverwinter Nights 2; Obsidian Entertainment

Let's start with the <a href=http://au.gamespot.com/pc/rpg/neverwinternights2maskofthebetrayer/review.html?tag=tabs;reviews>GameSpot review</a>. GameSpot liked "deep role-playing experience and intriguing story with plenty of replay", but disliked "frustrating" spirit-eating mechanics. The score is 8/10:
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<blockquote>Not every new feature in Mask of the Betrayer is a home run. The game's most controversial addition is undoubtedly the spirit hunger that consumes your character. This hunger acts like a drug addiction, and it can be completely frustrating at first because the mechanics are confusing.</blockquote>What's confusing about them? You must consume spirits to stay alive. You can embrace the addiction or you can fight it. It really doesn't get any more simple than that. God forbid that a game has a feature that makes you think for a second.
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<blockquote>It's too bad that developer Obsidian doesn't let players opt out of this mechanic entirely.</blockquote>I agree. People play RPGs to kill monsters and level up to kill even more monsters. Anything that interferes with this totally next-generation feature should be optional, even if it's an important part of the main quest.
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<blockquote>This hunger system is probably a boon to hardcore role-playing fans who enjoy making tough decisions, but those who enjoyed NWN2 as a <u>fun romp</u> are apt to be frustrated.</blockquote>Let's hope Obsidian learns its lesson and produces only dumbed down games in the future. FUN ROMP FTW!
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Anyway, here is the <a href=http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/neverwinter-nights-2-mask-of-the-betrayer/827039p1.html>GameSpy review</a>. GameSpy's infamous Allen Rausch enjoyed the story, quest, and characters, but had some issues with combat and the spirit meter thingy. He generously gave MotB 3.5 out of 5.
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<blockquote>On a purely mechanical level, the spirit meter ends up being more annoyance than fun. First, unintended loops in the mechanics make it much easier to control the meter by doing things that would be classified as "good." That puts evil characters at a tremendous disadvantage as they are forced to choose between playing their alignment and staying alive. Not only does that unfairly advantage one set of player choices, from a role-playing/story standpoint it's actually the reverse of what the mechanic was supposed to accomplish.</blockquote>I haven't finished the game, so I can't comment on that.
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<blockquote>Mask of the Betrayer's campaign is at its best when presenting the player with non-combat options.</blockquote>Completely agree with that.
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<blockquote>While they don't rise to the level of the quirky companions in Planescape: Torment, the Red Wizard, crusading angel, murdered soul, son of a hag with a Casanova complex and rainbow-colored bear with anger-management issues are three or four cuts above the standard fantasy campaign sidekicks. Some of the non-combat quests and set pieces are also standouts. There's a very clever mirror puzzle inside a Thayan wizard's academy, a game of "mastermind" played in a dream with an inveterate gambler and a truly brilliant series of dialogues in which the player looks for a loophole in a contract for a man's soul signed with a devil.</blockquote>The dialogues are great indeed and the amount of different stat/skill checks alone is enough to make you want to replay the game with different characters.
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[Jedi_Learner]

Vault Dweller you are the worst newsposter on the Codex. Stop acting like a hypocrite!

 

[Sir_Brennus]

Vault Dweller you are the worst newsposter on the Codex. Stop acting like a hypocrite!

:shock: Why? He actually improved so much in the last weeks it is nearly unbelievable he's still the same Vault Dweller...

Got work, man. Keep the news comin'. :D

 

[Oarfish]

Not only does that unfairly advantage one set of player choices, from a role-playing/story standpoint it's actually the reverse of what the mechanic was supposed to accomplish.

He's right, the ascetic path is much easier than the hungry hippos approach to spirit consumption. It can also cause you to be trapped in a region until you wait the spirit meter down to the point you can satiate.

3.5 is way too low though, especially in the world of next gen scoring where good games are between 4.5 and 5 stars.

 

[Starwars]

While I agree that supressing your hunger and going the 'Lawful Good' way should be much harder than it is, you still have different ways to go about it if you play evil.
Just because you play an evil character doesn't mean that you should necessarily devour everything in your way. I mean, the game makes it pretty clear that giving into your hunger is not considered a good thing, and I think it plays out well generally if you do overindulge.

But I played through with a Neutral Evil character who chose not to devour any spirits outside of certain conversations. While Supress does give Lawful and Good points (I don't agree with that, but to be completely honest I'd rather have WotC throw out the entire alignment system at least for cRPGs), it's still very possible to play your character within the alignment chosen.

The biggest flaw of the Spirit System is that it is to easy to beat as a good person, I would much rather have a system where you're forced into a difficult situation both if you overindulge and if you choose not to devour any spirits.

 

[Vault Dweller]

Vault Dweller you are the worst newsposter on the Codex. Stop acting like a hypocrite!

Care to explain?

 

[Oarfish]

I disagree - it's hinted that there are power advantages to the wanton consumption of spirits. The largest increases to your craving levels are also caused by devouring spirits through dialogue options - plainly the evil path in the game. Using suppression to reign in your craving for telthor frogs and whatnot after guzzling the soul of a god is inconsistent in my opinion.

 

[inwoker]

gamespot

Mask of the Betrayer is a much more mature expansion, both due to its content and because it demonstrates how Obsidian Entertainment is maturing as a developer.

so that's why OC got 8.6 and MotB got 8.0....
hmmmm......

gamespy

The Obsidian team tries, but most of the fights in the game are either ridiculously easy or absurdly difficult.

it's better when everything is scaled down to your level

As beautiful as they are (even assuming one doesn't get weird graphical artifacts around them as often happened to us), we'd trade all the eye candy in the world for the ability to accurately select a target.

but would it be next-gen?

so, because all of this and new feature - spirit meter gamespy put game 3.5, while OC had 4. Great.

 

[spacemoose]

Vault Dweller you are the worst newsposter on the Codex. Stop acting like a hypocrite!

Care to explain?

it is joke I think. considering the recent incident with percolator fish. or furryisms.

 

[Sir_Brennus]

Vault Dweller you are the worst newsposter on the Codex. Stop acting like a hypocrite!

Care to explain?

it is joke I think. considering the recent incident with percolator fish. or furryisms.

I just read the peculiar thread ... Erm. Sorry.

 

[Vault Dweller]

While I agree that supressing your hunger and going the 'Lawful Good' way should be much harder than it is, you still have different ways to go about it if you play evil.

I don't really see it as good / evil paths. Let's say that you play an evil character who just realized what his situation is. You are told about the hunger and that it depends on your appetitive. Only a fool would start devouring every spirit in sight just because he's evil. The true "good/evil" choices are in dialogues (whether you devour or spare the bear-god spirit or how you handle the spirits in the crematorium - you have 3 or 4 choices there, I believe, etc). Anything else I see as two reasonable options:

a) you don't want to devour spirits, so you'll suppress or satiate.
b) you'll devour spirits when you have to, but you'll watch the hunger.

In Bloodlines, for example, you don't attack and kill everyone in sight just because you are evil. There are rules that you understand and follow. Same here.

 

[Vault Dweller]

Vault Dweller you are the worst newsposter on the Codex. Stop acting like a hypocrite!

Care to explain?

it is joke I think. considering the recent incident with percolator fish. or furryisms.

Or it's still related to this thread:
http://www.rpgcodex.net/phpBB/viewtopic ... 413#425413

 

[Starwars]

I don't really see it as good / evil paths. Let's say that you play an evil character who just realized what his situation is. You are told about the hunger and that it depends on your appetitive. Only a fool would start devouring every spirit in sight just because he's evil. The true "good/evil" choices are in dialogues (whether you devour or spare the bear-god spirit or how you handle the spirits in the crematorium - you have 3 or 4 choices there, I believe, etc). Anything else I see as two reasonable options:

a) you don't want to devour spirits, so you'll suppress or satiate.
b) you'll devour spirits when you have to, but you'll watch the hunger.

In Bloodlines, for example, you don't attack and kill everyone in sight just because you are evil. There are rules that you understand and follow. Same here.

Agreed. The spirit eater system is taking a lot of flak at the Bioware forum (I guess from D&D purists) because Supress might move their OMG evil characters towards Lawful Good. I think many people play the game "through the alignment system" to much so to speak. In the end, who gives a shit about what your characters alignment end up as? Obviously some classes are alignment restricted, but like I said, I found it to be very easy to stay within my alignments on all my replays so far.

 

[Oarfish]

Only a fool would start devouring every spirit in sight just because he's evil.

It's not stuffing yourself full of spirit rabbits that's likely to cause the major increases in craving, its the plainly evil dialogue options. The easiest option after devouring a major spirit is suppression - which causes a lawful good alignment shift, not good if you want a chaotic character. The game also hints at power increases for those that devour large amounts of spirits, obviously a legitimate temptation for an evil PC.

 

[Jedi_Learner]

Or it's still related to this thread:
http://www.rpgcodex.net/phpBB/viewtopic ... 413#425413

That Behemoth sure had a attitude problem, I'm suprised you didn't edit the posts out and ban the troll from posting. I don't see why it is relevant to this topic though.

 

[Volourn]

"so that's why OC got 8.6 and MotB got 8.0....
hmmmm......"

Expansions tend to get the short end of the stick simply because they're just 'expansions'. Most people - including reviewers - prefered HOTU to NWN OC yet it got lesser scores as well. It's called getting lesser return for a tagalong product. Expansion don't really bring anything new, and we all knbow how 'originality' matters. *puke*

 

[ricolikesrice]

"so that's why OC got 8.6 and MotB got 8.0....
hmmmm......"

Expansions tend to get the short end of the stick simply because they're just 'expansions'. Most people - including reviewers - prefered HOTU to NWN OC yet it got lesser scores as well. It's called getting lesser return for a tagalong product. Expansion don't really bring anything new, and we all knbow how 'originality' matters. *puke*

unless they are called shivering isles or knights of the nine :p

i still remember a 2!!!! page review about knights and a 6 page one about shivering isles singing the highest praises in a german magazine. gonna see next week what their 1/4 page about MOTB is gonna say^^

 

[Volourn]

Heh. yeah. I guess there's always an exception to a rule.

 

[pug987]

I found the spirit meter a very nice addition. It helps to eliminate the bad trend of resting after every battle and adds a nice gameplay mechanic that ties the roleplaying with the metagaming. It can be irritating at times, especially till you learn the ropes, but it a major inconvinience for your character as well so it serves its purpose.

One thing I think they should have done differenetly (and I hope they change it with a patch) is the fact that suppress gives you good and lawful points. I understand the lawful but not the good points. A lawful evil character would probably use suppress quite often as he wouldn't want to be controlled by his hunger. That doesn't make him good. There are two other abilities that justly give good points, eternal rest and the healing ability. On the other hand only one ability gives evil points. (Devour soul doesn't give evil points!) So all I'm saying is that from a roleplayer's points of view it would be better if suppress only gave lawful points.

It's not too much of a problem in game if you want to play evil since there are so many dialogue options that give a lot of evil points. Afterall, unless you play a class with an alignment restriction, alignment isn't that big a deal as the game reacts mostly to your choices and in very few occations to your alignment.

 

[puppyonastik]

VD are you planning on writing a review of MOTB?

 

[Jedi_Learner]

He is puppyonastik.

PS. I would have made a longer and more thoughtful post, but I must get back to playing. The game is THAT good. A raving review is a-coming. (Ref)http://www.rpgcodex.net/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=20857

 

[Jaime Lannister]

Why do people whine so much about reviews here? MotB got decent reviews, but that's to be expected, niche games rarely get raving reviews.

 

[Azarkon]

That's what they're whining about - the fact that niche games get lower scores, even though they're often better than the mainstream.

I do agree, btw, that expansions tend to score lower than originals as a general rule, so this shouldn't really have come as a surprise. The problem is when critics purposefully twist this rule when reviewing expansions to over-hyped mainstream titles, thus giving the false impression that those expansions are better even when the higher score is coming only from the higher score of the original, or the fact that it's a mainstream expansion with much publicity. Criticism should be more objective, or it fails in its purpose, which is precisely the problem with much of game criticism.

 

[puppyonastik]

Thanks jedi.

 

[Volourn]

Want a reviww? here's a review? At least a very early one - At least one major bug kinda ruins one of the main aspects of the game. HAHAHA!