Game News Neverwinter Nights 2: Storm of Zehir is Golden

[Darth Roxor]

Well, for crying out fuck's sake. Gossip on the street has it, that our beloved CDP will be releasing localized SoZ in Poland around january/february. If they won't release it on day one in an English version (unlikely), I'm afraid it's torrent time, and I'll probably buy it later when it's possible. This lazyness is pissing me off. I bet if that was an AAA title anticipated by shitloads of people, as opposed to SoZ which is rather 'niche' it would be available in a localized version after a week, max a month.

Argh, and try to be a legit customer out here.

 

[HanoverF]

Have they fixed the camera?

 

[Shagnak]

Despite the absolute boredom of the OC (my character is still stuck somewhere in the Orc caves), I have high hopes for this.

I've pre-ordered; which means I get almost 17% off the retail price and free courier delivery. Nice.

 

[Black]

god dammit we have enough fallout 3 thread already, fucktards.

...
oshit

Anyway, I hope faggy CD-Project won't be as retarded as always and I'll be able to play the english version with motherfucking english voices.

 

[DemonKing]

Not every CRPG should (or could) be a Torment or MotB...I certainly don't mind a bit of dungeon crawling every now and again.

I do agree though that the NWN2 engine is pretty dire, particularly with regards to combat. Both the OC and MotB would have been improved a lot by a decent combat engine ala the IE series...

 

[deuxhero]

Despite the absolute boredom of the OC (my character is still stuck somewhere in the Orc caves), I have high hopes for this.

I've pre-ordered; which means I get almost 17% off the retail price and free courier delivery. Nice.

Not surprising, the OC is shit, pretty much every issue with MoTB can be traced to the OC or whatever the engine NWN2 uses is called. MoTB is great though, more then makes up for the OC.


The OC gets slightly better after the orc caves.

 

[Lesifoere]

Yeah, I just reinstalled NWN2 and to try out some mods, and oh my god the combat is so very shit (maybe it's the mod, but I also remember that the OC was much the same). Given how combat-heavy SoZ sounds, I hope it either rehauls or improves the engine a lot.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

Personally, I think the biggest cripes with the combat were the AI and the encounter designs. And those could be improved on. As an engine, it most certainly can work.

 

[Shannow]

Personally, I think the biggest cripes with the combat were the AI and the encounter designs. And those could be improved on. As an engine, it most certainly can work.

D&D + real time = meh (at best). And the camera and the point of view and the loot/crafting overkill. All damaged the combat, but the single worst part is real time.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

Personally, I think the biggest cripes with the combat were the AI and the encounter designs. And those could be improved on. As an engine, it most certainly can work.

D&D + real time = meh (at best). And the camera and the point of view and the loot/crafting overkill. All damaged the combat, but the single worst part is real time.

Indeed, but the real deal here is saying that IE is somehow magically better (since we are talking RTwP here)... Since it's not much outside of IWD series and the dragon/mage fights in BG2.

EDIT: And the camera still doesn't hamper me at all. Since the game is pausable, after all...

 

[vrok]

The camera isn't close to being as bad as it would need to be to deserve this much hate. Learn to use a mouse and get some decent mousing skills already. Try practicing with shooters. *declineofgamers*

 

[janjetina]

I'm cautiosly optimistic on this title, but there is a seed of doubt as it will be more combat oriented than MotB. Challenging combat and permanent character death are desirable, however implementing them requires a good tactical combat system. Combat in NWN 2 engine is bad and making it more difficult without completely retooling the combat system will only make it worse.

 

[Shannow]

The camera isn't close to being as bad as it would need to be to deserve this much hate. Learn to use a mouse and get some decent mousing skills already. Try practicing with shooters. *declineofgamers*

You are asking people to acquire twitch skills to play RTwP games?
Not to mention that you are of course a fucking idiot as my "mousing skills" are quite good. Loose camera + 3d pov will never be as simple as scrolling in an 2d environment. Some people prefer the "immersion" of 3d some prefer the gameplay advantage of 2d-simplicity. Of course, I'm one of the latter but in this case that is beside the point since we were discussing combat gameplay. And for a game that does not use the z-axis 2d provides better gameplay.


@Vaarna_Aarne
IE isn't good but you don't have to adjust the camera when changing regions, party-control is better, it is easier to overview the situation (no change in camera angle needed to find chests/enemies/traps...). And I like the UI much better.
And the IE games have proven that they can be "fun" with the right encounters. I haven't had much fun with NWN2 combat, no matter the encounter.

 

[vrok]

You're funny.

PS. All realtime combat games require twitch skills to some degree.

 

[Demnogonis Saastuttaja]

I think RTWP is generally made out of suck, but, say, NWN2 could be good if it was still grid-based, had waypoints and a really good UI for chaining commands, and provided the player with ETA's and other necessary information on what will happen and when. Now it's just kind of chaotic and you either have to rely on dumb AI or play it really slow. Nevertheless, I thought the combat in PoR : Remastered was fun, so I suppose good encounter design would also help a lot.

 

[Xor]

With Tony K's AI there were only a handful of battles in the OC and MOTB where I had to micro-manage my PCs. I'm glad they're making this a standard feature in SoZ.

Actually, it almost made the game too easy - I played with the core rules difficulty and I think the only time I actually died was to that ridiculous dragon on the top of the fire giant mountain.

I had to micro-manage my party in every fight in IE games. Then again, I've never looked for a companion AI mod for any of those games.


Also, I never really had issues with the NWN2 camera. I just messed with the options until it felt like NWN1's camera and kept it overhead the whole game.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

Why is everybody intent on toying around with the camera without pausing the game? The whole issue with the camera isn't really there because with pause you can always fiddle with it in peace. Not to mention there are option (including completely IE camera).

Agreed with you Shannow, the UI in NWN2 could use a little improvement. Though didn't SoZ have that?

But Shannow, personally I haven't seen a well-made encounter that uses Tony K's AI yet. Unless you count that blasted Red Dragon.