Just finished it.
I enjoyed it but that last dungeon can go fuck itself.
I had read so many absymal reviews that I really dreaded playing the NWN2 OC. Its reputation is a bit overdone. It never reaches at any point a level of excellence or even originality, but besides the character of Neeshka, nothing is trully terrible.
My biggest gripe was the gameplay. Playing it on normal, it's just a matter of spamming area effect spells (fireballs, meteor swarm) and not giving a shit about it. Switch to hardcore then ? Well, maybe not, considering I specialized my party in this kind of spell. So I finished it on normal.
And then, progressively, shit starts to go down. I'm not sure why I spent so much money on Crossroad Keep. It felt like the right thing to do, but what were the consequences gameplay wise ?
And then the bugs.
During the attack on the courtyard, the Shadow Reaver wouldn't die, even with reading the truenames. Googled it. Yup. Bug. Used a console command to kill it.
And then my party members refused to follow. "Issue command". Sure, now, they're following, but 30 meters behind me.
And then that final dungeon. That, fucking final dungeon.
They made you pretty much depend on the Rest mechanic on the entirety of the game, which is a retarded mechanic. Yes, resplenish my HP and Spells after each fight automatically please, since it's what I'm doing anyway. And now they take it away. A good idea for a challenge ? No, just annoying, considering you have to depend on healing kits scattered randomly and not in sufficient numbers. Fuck you.
Still, I managed to make it up to a point, despite the somehow more and more erratical behaviour of my companions who seemed completely puzzle by the pathfinding here, and by the absolute random encounter design which would spam enemies everywhere, anywhere, for no reason. And you cannot rest. Still, I made it.
And then, there were the three shadow reavers, the last encounter before Black Garius. Oh wow. Fuck that battle. It's at that moment where everyone in my party stopped to pretend to give a shit about what I wanted to do. Zhaeve and Amon Jerro kept self interrupting their true name recitation for NO REASON when they were not being attacked and the focus was on them. Rest of the party was doing random bullshit, AI turned on or off.
One try.
Two tries.
Five tries.
Ten tries.
DebugMode 1
dm_god .
And wait, guess what ? Even the debug mode was bugged. For some reason, the cheat codes only randomly assigned immortality to some characters and other not. The "instakill" function that I first tried because of my true name recitation issue when they were "near death" worked once, and never again.
I defeated the final boss with those cheats on and felt no pity for Neeshka, who somehow decided to act like an emo-teen "oooh you don't look at me then I will DESTROY THE WORLD". What the hell ? At least Qara was an actual bitch. And what about you Bishop ? You betray me, and then you don't ? You're the guy locked in a room with no escape during a battle between Good & Evil, and you decide to try to walk away ?
The fuck ?
I'm glad I cheated my way through that battle, because none of it made sense or looked interesting. It allowed me to go to bed before 1 AM, and see that wonderful ending. "You win, rocks fall, everybody die.".
I thought you guys were joking when I first read that.
Oh well, apparently MOTB has a better reputation.
Guess its a system compatibility issue since I didn't experience this when I played the game 7 years ago with the laptop I had at the time. fuck we're getting old
