Review TNO Reviews Neverwinter Nights 2

[Jaesun]

Tags: Neverwinter Nights 2; Obsidian Entertainment

TNO has written up another review, and this time he did not like Neverwinter Nights 2:

For an Obsidian game, NWN2 has a remarkably BioWarean pedigree. Not only in the structure and the plotting (the '4 quest hub design has been linearized, but the tutorial + linear segment before the game opens out is still there, DA:Os plot bears remarkable similarity to Act 3, etc.), but also in the gameplay: the gradual wasting away of non-combat options, the rise of 'pick up token and kill enemies' sidequests, the dumbing down of combat to a difficulty slider between 'easy' and 'tedious', and the confusion between 'playing it safe' and smearing everything in generica.

NWN2's small archipelago of interesting features are drowned in a sea of the forgettable, the poorly executed, and the pervasive sense that you've done this all before (and done better, too). Avoid wasting 30 hours of your time on this game.​

Read the review here.

 

[commie]

I hear that there's a happenin' new piece of interactive computing entertainment software out for the Apple II called Akalabeth. Apparently it allows you to 'role play' a character and fight monsters and stuff!

Look my review coming soon on the RPG CODEX!


RPG CODEX: FIRST WITH THE REVIEWS FOR ALL THE LATEST GAMES!!!!

 

[Darth Roxor]

Thanks for reminding me how horribly horrible was nwn2 oc : x

 

[Volourn]

So you udnerrated and LIE about both NWN2 and DA1 in just that little snippet. Because of that I did not bother with the actual full review.

One thing to have an OPINION but it's another to write FALSE 'FACTS'.

Stop the bullshitz, and start the truthz!

 

[Zomg]

I felt like the trash combat in NWN2 was actively designed to cause pain, like they were saying, "FUCKING BIOWARE MESSAGE BOARD NERDS WANT A 300 HOUR GAME WELL EAT THIS FATSOS. DOES IT TASTE SO FUCKING GOOD JUST LIKE ENDLESS SHIT COMBAT IN INFINITY GAMES, MMM MMM MMM." So having now driven into the ditch they can make 10 hour movie games with proportionally 10% less worthless filler content without guilt.

 

[Morkar Left]

I'm surprised you bothered with a review for this lame game after such a long time. But the review is pretty spot on with everything

If someone still haven't tried the game and wants to play it, he should try this mod: NWN2 OC Makeover SoZ Edition

It reduces resting to only every 8 hours and your partymembers can die. It's at least combatwise a big improvement. But it can be annoying sometimes (warehouse) because the game is absolutely linear and if a combat is too hard for you you can't levelgrind somewhere else. A similar mod is available for MotB, too.

The game still feels very unfinished, though.

 

[hoverdog]

Updated my journal.

 

[Surf Solar]

The horrible camera made me rage-uninstall the game shortly.. A bummer, maybe it could've even been good (and I couldn't play MotB either). This is even more rage inducing since the fucking installation with all those updates took almost 5 hours for me.

 

[Andyman Messiah]

I love Neverwinter Nights 2. Fuck TNO. He can go TNO himself. Fucking TNO. Get a real name, you fucking fuck. So angry at you dissing my favorite game of all time.

 

[Ebonsword]

While the reviewer is spot-on with many of his criticisms (the filler combat did get irritating), I think he left out one of NWN2 greatest strengths: its character building system.

With all of the classes, races, and prestige classes available, you can create some really unusual and cool combinations. Heck, even just playing clerics of different gods is interesting because of the various bonus spells and abilities you get.

For my first playthrough I had a warlock/thief/assassin who could turn invisible at will. Was it optimized for beating the game? Hell, no! (Especially as increasing amounts of undead enemies started to appear). But it sure was fun.

When I played through the OC, I found myself wishing I could create a whole party from scratch instead of having to use the provided NPCs. Luckily Storm of Zehir came out which enabled me to do just that.

 

[Metro]

BioWarean

Best adjective I've seen to describe the game. Especially the linear level/map design. Awful.

 

[Zed]

I thought NWN2 was a pretty solid game.
3/5

Pretty solid character gen. Lots of choices.
Story wasn't very good, but some stuff like the keep was fun I thought.
Average combat. People say the camera was bad but I don't remember.

 

[Oriental European]

COMBAT (caps, lol) part of the article is really good.

 

[zeitgeist]

While the reviewer is spot-on with many of his criticisms (the filler combat did get irritating), I think he left out one of NWN2 greatest strengths: its character building system.

With all of the classes, races, and prestige classes available, you can create some really unusual and cool combinations. Heck, even just playing clerics of different gods is interesting because of the various bonus spells and abilities you get.

When I played through the OC, I found myself wishing I could create a whole party from scratch instead of having to use the provided NPCs. Luckily Storm of Zehir came out which enabled me to do just that.

I only played it recently, but this is pretty much the reason why I did, the character building system is great (with Kaedrin's PrC pack). However, I used a mod to create party characters in the OC instead of being stuck with the mostly uninteresting NPCs. Too bad about the game being so iffy, it would be much better if SoZ features were present right from the start, and it was a semi-open world game (with random encounters, randomized dungeons and so on) from 1-30. As it is, the browser-based DLC is more fun and replayable than the actual game.

 

[Mister Arkham]

Really a very good breakdown of what was wrong with 3.5 D&D. A good DM could always get his players around most of those problems, but the Aurora engine never did a whole lot to let writers be good DMs. A lot of the major gameplay problems (ie: rest spamming) transferred over from the first NWN, too...which is probably why this feels so much like a Bioware game.

I don't even know how many times I've installed and uninstalled this wreck, but I do know that I've never once gotten to Neverwinter. That's how utterly bland and boring I find it.

 

[Roguey]

Great review, agreed with pretty much everything. NWN2 still remains one of the shittiest games I've ever had the misfortune of trying to play, I only bought the gold version because I heard so many good things about Mask. That was worth it.

You know it's bad when you get something like this from the (second) lead designer. Meanwhile good old Ferret continues mucking things up in Dragon Age land where he belongs.

 

[Cynic]

While my OC game is on hold due to the awesomeness of ToEE, I don't think the game is so shitty. I agree the combat is popamole and the characters are very bland, but the story has its moments. The main thing is that it's very quaint, in an old school D&D kind of way. Perhaps I find that nostalgic rather than good, but to D&D fans that has a certain kind of appeal. The characters you can choose to put in your party really ruined the OC. They just plain suck. The only one I found mildly interesting was Bishop, the rest feel like they were created by some 13 year old fan fic writer. Listening to their shit and putting up with their jaw grating personalities really gets tiresome after a while.

 

[Metro]

Sand was awesome!

 

[bishop7]

I give the review about 4/10, what a rhetoric-fest. By this persons standards pretty much every RPG is terrible, I can think of many excellent games which have these same kinds of flaws in abundance.

 

[Zomg]

I hated the characters at the time but it's basically a repeat of Baldur's Gate cartoon character NPCs. They got the tone of that "right" and the voice actors were nice and expressive even if you want to fault the writing as stupid just for being silly. The real problem is that there was no reason to put a single trash fight in that engine with the absurd resting mechanics, and then 95% of all the content in the game is trash fights and walking the shitty cut and paste maps filled to the gills with those trash fights. It's just fucking insulting. I have very little idea what exactly you would criticize about what would be left if you took out the abusively shitty trash combat. Like let's criticize a shit sandwich if you took out the shit. Maybe the lettuce is wilted? I'm not that focused on that part

 

[Vibalist]

I wonder if any RPG developer will ever have the courage or vision (or sense, really) to just cut out all trash encounters. I would've enjoyed both NWN2 and DAO if the amount of orc/darkspawn slaying had been reduced just moderately.

Why not just do like Mysteries at Westgate and MoTB (to a point) did and add fewer combat situations that are in turn more interesting? What would a game lose other than length, which doesn't matter if the game is boring anyway?

 

[Clockwork Knight]

Too bad the whole thing is irrelevant. It turns that in this trial, the loser of a case can demand trial by combat. So, if you win the case, Torio demands trial by combat, and so you have to squick her chosen thug in one on one. If you lose the case, your adviser has a sudden flash of insight and demands trial by combat for you, which leads to you… having to fight that thug in one on one. This defeats the point previous hour or two of questing (not to mention the 20 or so minute trial itself), is objectively implausible, and further shafts talky characters - this is pretty much their only chance to shine, but they are funneled into the combat pit either way. The motive of ensuring meat-heads can survive is reasonable, but there are better ways than making the entire trial an elaborate preamble to a combat encounter.

Ahn...should it be mentioned you can ask one of your bros to fight for you? It's not really needed as even talky characters should have enough firepower by that point of the game, and it doesn't change the fact that the trial still ends in combat either way, but it's there.

"So don't abuse the rest mechanic, and stop munckining the rules, moron".

Besides rest use being surely how the designers intended the game to be played (should I dump 1000 gold each time a party member drops to LARP a resurrection cost too?) This is not a case of the game having one hidden mechanic that breaks it. Any vaguely coherent attempt to build a character or play strategically breaks the game.

Another nitpick I'm not sure is even relevant - I think that "LARP" expression (as we use it, which is not the common meaning) is too cryptic to people not used to the forum shenanigans (like "popamole" and "tasteful rape"). A few lines after that there's "Sadly, this is the best incline you get in NWN2.", which is similarly arcane.

One could say these reviews are made for codexers anyway so it'd be a moot point, but if that was the case a simple thread in GRPG would suffice. If these reviews are supposed to augment the magazine's prestigiousness obviously for outsiders, then making them as readable as we can would be nice.

 

[Cynic]

Rest spamming ruins D&D completely. It is not how the game is meant to be played. It's like giving you a perfect hand at will in poker, it just takes the fun out of it. You cannot rest spam in ToEE and it feels so much better. Sure, you can always run out of the place, travel back to town and rest, but if you're really damaged, maybe you get attacked on the way and have a hard time. Even though mostly the random encounters are bugbears or kobolds, I've been ambushed by 3 ettins when I was level 4 and very barely got out alive having not saved for ages. It was exciting, tense and exactly how combat should be.

NWN2 resting was a joke. The game was indeed designed with this broken abusable mechanic in mind. I can only remember 2 encounters from the game whereas for ToEE, yeah I remember almost all the good ones I've had so far. There's been around 10 of them and I'm only on level 2 of the temple.

Sorry I'm turning this into another ToEE thread...I'll stop now.

 

[Ebonsword]

I wonder if any RPG developer will ever have the courage or vision (or sense, really) to just cut out all trash encounters. I would've enjoyed both NWN2 and DAO if the amount of orc/darkspawn slaying had been reduced just moderately.

Developers make those kind of games all the time. They're called SRPGs.

Final Fantasy Tactics is probably the best known example. I find that I have an increasing fondness for them precisely because they cut out alot of the drudgery of a normal RPG while keeping the good stuff (i.e. awesome turn-based tactical combat).

 

[racofer]

The Neverwinter games are all about the modules.