Jim Kata
Arbiter
Ok, I have almost finished the game, but not quite. My expectations after NWN 1 were pretty much ZERO. but, after a lot of rave reviews here I decided to give the game a try. Now that I have basically finished it, I like it a lot more than I did initially, but it still has a lot of issues.
The Bad. It still bothers me that I did not really see any mention of the astoundingly horrible parts of the game in the vast majority of the reviews here. I have to wonder if this is turning into ESF or if people are just used to games being shitty by now.
1. Interface. This is worse than any game I have played. That's not hyperbole, either. The 'mode' buttons (such as combat casting and power attack) don't really work in a sane manner, for starters. You should be able to basically click them on/off like a checkbox and only have to fuss with them when you wanted to make a change. Instead, well it is hard to explain their behavior but it sucks enough to make using them not really worthwhile except in rare cases.
The quickspell thing WOULD be really nice, if you could get the fucking thing to stay up for more than 3 seconds, but unfortunately this is not possible, so it is mostly worthless. The 'quickbar' is nice, and you better like it because without using it the game is pretty close to unplayable.
The characters really don't give any feedback as to who they are attacking, if anyone. Most of the time, if you leave them to their own devices this will be no one. Sometimes characters will also just stand still at the dungeon entrace. Not sure why, but it seems they don't think they are in the party or something. In a different mission the same character will be fine.
The message area is also extremely small. Most of it is taken up by controles as well, instead of text. It is also EXTREMELY slow in updating so it is pretty worthless for seeing how things are going, and pretty frustrating for scroling through conversations.
Since the pathfinding AI is so bad and the feedback so poor, 'puppet mode' ie directly controlling them, is pretty much unworkable. Most of the time I feel like I am just watching my guys fight and trying to make sure they actually ARE fighting.
Ok, also the camera view is bad and causes a lot of problems. Really, there are too many fuckups with the interface to list them all, though.
The minimap is really disorienting, too. Any normal minimap has YOUR perspective be the top, but this one does the opposite and keeps the cardinal directions stable. Instead it has like a radarscope to show what direction you are in, which is very confusing. Even worse, the players are all shown as arrows, which adds even more confusion. In short, it is pretty worthless.
BUT, the inventory system is really nice! That is good, because you will be getting a LOT of loot.
2. Let ME select my party. What the fuck!!! Every other mission I have to take different people along. This would be fine if they appeared in a special slot or something, but they usually force you to ditch someone on the spot. Shuffling around your party constantly is a MAJOR pain in the ass. Sounds like a small complaint, but really I spend a lot of time figuring out who to take on missions. Also, a lot of the npcs are severely retarded and useless, which only makes it worse.
3. Let's cool it on the cutscenes, guys. Ok, so there are about 20 cutscenes for every single quest. EVERY. SINGLE. QUEST. They mostly suck, too. After the hundredth retard talking bout how badass they are it just gets kinda old. You don't need to voice out every line of dialog, and I can't imagine anyone but a mouthbreathing idiot would actually sit there and listen to the trite dialog being laboriously spoken out. There is some good dialog and even some good cutscenes but most of it (and all of it before the first half of the game) sucks.
4. Hey Jaheira, er, elanee, take this to dak'kon and Irenecus, er, zhaevia and ammon jero and then say high to ratgirl, er, goatgirl. If you are going to rip off your own characters, at least do them well. Also, could we possibly need another jaheira? I don't think so. The voice acting for the zhaevia character really sucks compared to dak'kon, too. More importantly, it seems like they just took out big lumps of other games and transplanted them over with little regard for them working together. The fact many of the characters are total retards (especially neeshka, elanee, and bishop) does not help matters much.
5. The first half of the game is a completely illogical grind. You spend a HUGE amount of time once you get to neverwinter just trying to get into a certain quarter of the game. It's just bizarre and illogical. It's also pointless, because it would have been very easy to level people up in some other way beofre throwing people into the plot.
6. You start off being pursused by githyanki and a powerful warlock, but they are completely unable to find you. It just seems ridiculous, and there is no real believable reason things would play out like this. Having some unrelated adventures before going directly into the cliched flee the village scene would have been nice.
7. At one point you get a follower. Well, cool, I thought! Awesome! I was looking forward to leveling her up just as I saw fit. Sorry! She starts off as a fighter the exact same level as you, even as you 'train' her. Makes tons of sense!
8. Dialog. Tons of useless dialog. Tons of it! In most cases your answers have no effect, either. You select a, b, or c and they all lead to the exact same response! What's the point? Most of the dialog is pointless and sucks, so I end up skipping tons of it and barely skimming it, and this has made me accidentally lose out a few times due to missing something or else clicking too fast and picking the 'no thanks I don't want a reward' option. I also say 'insure' in the place of ensure in every single place it was used. Pretty pathetic.
9. Discontinuities. After highcliff falls, you can walk right into highcliff and see the mayor. The bodies in west harbor never get cleaned up. Conversations are broken left and right if you talk to people in the 'wrong' order. Lots of discontinuities and in general things don't tend to make much sense. Eh, why am I going here? Ok...if you say so...I guess. Spoiler - it was also not clear to me that black garius and ammon jerro were two separate people. It made no real sense to me, the way it was done. It was supposed to be a surprise he is not really the king of shadows, but they basically just botched it.
10. Bugs. There are quite a few, but mainly they are tolerable. I would like to have the crafting ones fixed, though.
The Good. Ok, despite all this the game has a lot of good things, many of which you do not see right away.
1. I actually got fooled by an NPC. I feel pretty stupid, but I did not pay attention and it led to a really hard battle later instead of a really easy one. I don't thinkt hat has ever happened to me in a game before!
2. Crafting system. I like it. There are a few bugged items, but it is overall pretty interesting, though the use of molds is fairly illogical.
3. High levels and good rules support. The system is pretty faithful to DnD 3.5, and implements a ton of different classes fairly well. Only toee does a better job, but without going to turnbased or at least fixing the interface I don't think there is any way they could do a better job, really.
4. The keep. Well, it has some odd parts, but overall building and managing the keep is the part of the game I liked the most. It is pretty detailed and interesting.
5. In the sea of dialog, there *is* some really good dialog. The only problem is that you have so much dialog for even the most insignifigant quests that it can be tempting to just skip past it all. Some of the NPCs are very well done, especially some of the incidental ones you would not expect to be very interesting. Some are total crap, though, too.
6. Moral ambiguity. You are sort of forced along paths most of the time, but I somehow never felt totally comfortable serving lord nasher, and I was not really sure what the 'right' thig to do was in several quests.
Conclusion. Well, overall I like it. I am glad I stayed with it, though it was trying for some time. If they got rid of the interface issues and the party wrangling, it would be at least as good as the BG series, but as it stands I can only put it as 'pretty good'. I would still buy it, but knowing what I do now I would have waited for it to drop in price a bit.
PS
Cliche ranking: 9/10. You have a mysterious artifact you have to get rid off but cannot simply throw away. Your village is attacked and you must leave it to keep it protected (though it will be destroyed later on no matter what you do). There is an ancient evil only you can face. The chosen one must choose!!!!
Finishing up:
Well, it ends on a kinda sour note. After all the buildup of the castle defense thing, i expected quite a bit, but the actual battle was pretty retarded. I had 1600 troops and yet note more than 5 of them showed up at any one time! In fact, I would possibly make the claim that probably it would make absolutely no difference if you did NONE of the castle upgrades. In fact, I could have soloed every one of the fights with a geat deal of ease. I realize that the engine can only handle so much, but if you can't have hundreds on the sceen at once, at least dozens must be possible, or some way of givin the illusion of real size.
Immediately after that, you get to the end dungeon thing. It was kind of lame and I realized immediately how to win the final battle, but it's just not worth the hasle.
So, overall the game has a lot of good stuff, but most of it falls flat. If the interface were less fucked up then I would recommend it anyhow, but with all the flaws it has I would say there is no point to picking up the game except in the bargain bin. By then there will be some decent modules out, anyhow.
The Bad. It still bothers me that I did not really see any mention of the astoundingly horrible parts of the game in the vast majority of the reviews here. I have to wonder if this is turning into ESF or if people are just used to games being shitty by now.
1. Interface. This is worse than any game I have played. That's not hyperbole, either. The 'mode' buttons (such as combat casting and power attack) don't really work in a sane manner, for starters. You should be able to basically click them on/off like a checkbox and only have to fuss with them when you wanted to make a change. Instead, well it is hard to explain their behavior but it sucks enough to make using them not really worthwhile except in rare cases.
The quickspell thing WOULD be really nice, if you could get the fucking thing to stay up for more than 3 seconds, but unfortunately this is not possible, so it is mostly worthless. The 'quickbar' is nice, and you better like it because without using it the game is pretty close to unplayable.
The characters really don't give any feedback as to who they are attacking, if anyone. Most of the time, if you leave them to their own devices this will be no one. Sometimes characters will also just stand still at the dungeon entrace. Not sure why, but it seems they don't think they are in the party or something. In a different mission the same character will be fine.
The message area is also extremely small. Most of it is taken up by controles as well, instead of text. It is also EXTREMELY slow in updating so it is pretty worthless for seeing how things are going, and pretty frustrating for scroling through conversations.
Since the pathfinding AI is so bad and the feedback so poor, 'puppet mode' ie directly controlling them, is pretty much unworkable. Most of the time I feel like I am just watching my guys fight and trying to make sure they actually ARE fighting.
Ok, also the camera view is bad and causes a lot of problems. Really, there are too many fuckups with the interface to list them all, though.
The minimap is really disorienting, too. Any normal minimap has YOUR perspective be the top, but this one does the opposite and keeps the cardinal directions stable. Instead it has like a radarscope to show what direction you are in, which is very confusing. Even worse, the players are all shown as arrows, which adds even more confusion. In short, it is pretty worthless.
BUT, the inventory system is really nice! That is good, because you will be getting a LOT of loot.
2. Let ME select my party. What the fuck!!! Every other mission I have to take different people along. This would be fine if they appeared in a special slot or something, but they usually force you to ditch someone on the spot. Shuffling around your party constantly is a MAJOR pain in the ass. Sounds like a small complaint, but really I spend a lot of time figuring out who to take on missions. Also, a lot of the npcs are severely retarded and useless, which only makes it worse.
3. Let's cool it on the cutscenes, guys. Ok, so there are about 20 cutscenes for every single quest. EVERY. SINGLE. QUEST. They mostly suck, too. After the hundredth retard talking bout how badass they are it just gets kinda old. You don't need to voice out every line of dialog, and I can't imagine anyone but a mouthbreathing idiot would actually sit there and listen to the trite dialog being laboriously spoken out. There is some good dialog and even some good cutscenes but most of it (and all of it before the first half of the game) sucks.
4. Hey Jaheira, er, elanee, take this to dak'kon and Irenecus, er, zhaevia and ammon jero and then say high to ratgirl, er, goatgirl. If you are going to rip off your own characters, at least do them well. Also, could we possibly need another jaheira? I don't think so. The voice acting for the zhaevia character really sucks compared to dak'kon, too. More importantly, it seems like they just took out big lumps of other games and transplanted them over with little regard for them working together. The fact many of the characters are total retards (especially neeshka, elanee, and bishop) does not help matters much.
5. The first half of the game is a completely illogical grind. You spend a HUGE amount of time once you get to neverwinter just trying to get into a certain quarter of the game. It's just bizarre and illogical. It's also pointless, because it would have been very easy to level people up in some other way beofre throwing people into the plot.
6. You start off being pursused by githyanki and a powerful warlock, but they are completely unable to find you. It just seems ridiculous, and there is no real believable reason things would play out like this. Having some unrelated adventures before going directly into the cliched flee the village scene would have been nice.
7. At one point you get a follower. Well, cool, I thought! Awesome! I was looking forward to leveling her up just as I saw fit. Sorry! She starts off as a fighter the exact same level as you, even as you 'train' her. Makes tons of sense!
8. Dialog. Tons of useless dialog. Tons of it! In most cases your answers have no effect, either. You select a, b, or c and they all lead to the exact same response! What's the point? Most of the dialog is pointless and sucks, so I end up skipping tons of it and barely skimming it, and this has made me accidentally lose out a few times due to missing something or else clicking too fast and picking the 'no thanks I don't want a reward' option. I also say 'insure' in the place of ensure in every single place it was used. Pretty pathetic.
9. Discontinuities. After highcliff falls, you can walk right into highcliff and see the mayor. The bodies in west harbor never get cleaned up. Conversations are broken left and right if you talk to people in the 'wrong' order. Lots of discontinuities and in general things don't tend to make much sense. Eh, why am I going here? Ok...if you say so...I guess. Spoiler - it was also not clear to me that black garius and ammon jerro were two separate people. It made no real sense to me, the way it was done. It was supposed to be a surprise he is not really the king of shadows, but they basically just botched it.
10. Bugs. There are quite a few, but mainly they are tolerable. I would like to have the crafting ones fixed, though.
The Good. Ok, despite all this the game has a lot of good things, many of which you do not see right away.
1. I actually got fooled by an NPC. I feel pretty stupid, but I did not pay attention and it led to a really hard battle later instead of a really easy one. I don't thinkt hat has ever happened to me in a game before!
2. Crafting system. I like it. There are a few bugged items, but it is overall pretty interesting, though the use of molds is fairly illogical.
3. High levels and good rules support. The system is pretty faithful to DnD 3.5, and implements a ton of different classes fairly well. Only toee does a better job, but without going to turnbased or at least fixing the interface I don't think there is any way they could do a better job, really.
4. The keep. Well, it has some odd parts, but overall building and managing the keep is the part of the game I liked the most. It is pretty detailed and interesting.
5. In the sea of dialog, there *is* some really good dialog. The only problem is that you have so much dialog for even the most insignifigant quests that it can be tempting to just skip past it all. Some of the NPCs are very well done, especially some of the incidental ones you would not expect to be very interesting. Some are total crap, though, too.
6. Moral ambiguity. You are sort of forced along paths most of the time, but I somehow never felt totally comfortable serving lord nasher, and I was not really sure what the 'right' thig to do was in several quests.
Conclusion. Well, overall I like it. I am glad I stayed with it, though it was trying for some time. If they got rid of the interface issues and the party wrangling, it would be at least as good as the BG series, but as it stands I can only put it as 'pretty good'. I would still buy it, but knowing what I do now I would have waited for it to drop in price a bit.
PS
Cliche ranking: 9/10. You have a mysterious artifact you have to get rid off but cannot simply throw away. Your village is attacked and you must leave it to keep it protected (though it will be destroyed later on no matter what you do). There is an ancient evil only you can face. The chosen one must choose!!!!
Finishing up:
Well, it ends on a kinda sour note. After all the buildup of the castle defense thing, i expected quite a bit, but the actual battle was pretty retarded. I had 1600 troops and yet note more than 5 of them showed up at any one time! In fact, I would possibly make the claim that probably it would make absolutely no difference if you did NONE of the castle upgrades. In fact, I could have soloed every one of the fights with a geat deal of ease. I realize that the engine can only handle so much, but if you can't have hundreds on the sceen at once, at least dozens must be possible, or some way of givin the illusion of real size.
Immediately after that, you get to the end dungeon thing. It was kind of lame and I realized immediately how to win the final battle, but it's just not worth the hasle.
So, overall the game has a lot of good stuff, but most of it falls flat. If the interface were less fucked up then I would recommend it anyhow, but with all the flaws it has I would say there is no point to picking up the game except in the bargain bin. By then there will be some decent modules out, anyhow.
