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NWN People who like NWN remind me why I bullied some people in school

Gargaune

Magister
Joined
Mar 12, 2020
Messages
3,136
People who are in love with NWN really weird me out. They're like the furries of this community.
Talk like that will get you disinvited from my yearly Village People retreat. 'Sides, you're the one who paged Cpt. Pedicure in here.
 

The_Mask

Just like Yves, I chase tales.
Patron
Joined
May 3, 2018
Messages
5,898
Location
The land of ice and snow.
Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath I helped put crap in Monomyth
The only part that I remember from NWN 1 even after all these years is the village stuck in time. And I care so much about that shit, that I forget the town's name.

Everything else about that game needs to be forgotten. Just... don't devote any mental capacity to it. Simple.
 

purupuru

Learned
Joined
Nov 2, 2019
Messages
414
For me the only fundamental flaw of NWN is no party control, the rule set is competently implemented, the UI is good, the camera is OK (but NWN2 somehow fucked it up despite adding more camera options), sure the main campaign is boring and the game looks horrible but those are hardly fundamental aspects. If it were the first game of a obscure studio I'd rate it as a diamond in the rough, but sadly it was a Bioware game and Baldur's Gate 1/2 exist...
 

BruceVC

Magister
Joined
Jul 25, 2011
Messages
7,698
Location
South Africa, Cape Town
I play NWN AND NWN2 and I do it almost exclusively singleplayer AND I generally enjoy it.

Cope/seethe/REEEEEE/ect.
This is a common view to have, I played all NWN games SP and I had a great time. In NWN1 EE the expansions were much better than the OC but overall I gave this game a solid 70/100 on the globally respected " BruceVC game rating system "

I enjoyed NWN2 the most and even Storm of Zehir was entertaining with the map and jungle exploration mechanics and fighting dinosaurs
 

God

Augur
Joined
Sep 27, 2008
Messages
131
Location
Heaven
Is it just me or did codex recently have an influx of nwn defenders

Is this you, God. Are you testing our faith
This is the work of the new intern we hired recently as part of the User Testing department. Not my best hire, I admit, but the market is really tight right now.
 

Suicidal

Arcane
Joined
Apr 29, 2007
Messages
2,208
Nothing wrong with enjoying NWN and other bad games but claiming that it's an objectively good game probably means that you like eating your own boogers.
 

Skdursh

Savant
Joined
Nov 27, 2018
Messages
734
Location
Slavlandia
I play NWN AND NWN2 and I do it almost exclusively singleplayer AND I generally enjoy it.

Cope/seethe/REEEEEE/ect.
This is a common view to have, I played all NWN games SP and I had a great time. In NWN1 EE the expansions were much better than the OC but overall I gave this game a solid 70/100 on the globally respected " BruceVC game rating system "

I enjoyed NWN2 the most and even Storm of Zehir was entertaining with the map and jungle exploration mechanics and fighting dinosaurs
NWN's and NWN2's OG modules that came with them at release were both pretty lacking, but the expansion modules (pre EE era) are pretty much universally great, though besides all that, the real reason I play is the wealth of content from the community. Community modules can be a bit hit-and-miss, but the good ones are usually very good and well worth the exploration.
 
Self-Ejected

underground nymph

I care not!
Patron
Joined
Jun 9, 2019
Messages
1,252
Strap Yourselves In
sure the main campaign is boring
I don’t understand how people can say things like this. Main campaign is literally about a hidden cult of lizard tribe who manipulate non-lizard people into attacking each other for the benefit of the lizard tribe god. That’s just hilariously based to start with.
 

Jasede

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Jan 4, 2005
Messages
24,793
Insert Title Here RPG Wokedex Codex Year of the Donut I'm very into cock and ball torture
And I'll tell you something else. On these servers I've found better DMs, better writing, better PvP and better storytelling than in hundreds of RPGs and pen and paper sessions. It's amazing what talented DMs can do with NWN.
 

FriendlyMerchant

Guest
I really don't like the NWN because of its bad gameplay. It's just the worst implementation of RTwP ever. Why?

Single character controlled by the player and possibly a character you don't control (this was shit in Fallout 1+2, we never needed more of that). On top of that the timer-based gameplay leads to boring waiting for a few seconds before your character takes an action. If I wanted to play a cool-down simulator where I only control one character, I'd play Runescape. BG1+2 kinda had this problem, but at least you have six party members so it doesn't stand out as much since you can do things during that time and there's usually a reason to and you could increase the game speed in the settings. Even if you get a campaign where you can get more party members, it's still the same cumbersome crap where I have to interact with some orders system instead of being able to directly control the characters and they're libel to walk into traps or take forever to realize its time to disarm them if they have the skill points. Whereas in BG1+2, controlling characters seemed just like making tactical decisions more like an RTS, NWN in the attempt to control multiple characters is just cumbersome crap.

The controls in general just feel clunky.

Terrible console controller inspired camera with movement keys for your character almost like they were tried to go for console games and used this to experiment with the engine.

Weird cool-down based rest system that's designed to be abused between encounters. It was better was NWN2 had a more traditional and meaningful rest system in MotB (with stakes in the module) and carried it over to SoZ.

I never really liked the inventory or character screens either.

Because of this, any "great" module for NWN becomes at best mediocre because the base game drags it down.
 

Gargaune

Magister
Joined
Mar 12, 2020
Messages
3,136
The controls in general just feel clunky.

Terrible console controller inspired camera with movement keys for your character almost like they were tried to go for console games and used this to experiment with the engine.
The lack of henchmen controls is inexcusable (especially with the EE now), but other than that, NWN's interfaces are among the more solid in the business. A clean, snappy GUI with a consistent layout, plenty of accelerators and quick access slots, one of the best radial menus out there (the other being ToEE). And the camera is fit for purpose with the original NWN's gameplay in mind.

I mean, I like my BG-style skeumorphics and stuff, but NWN's GUI manages to be practical without looking as clinically abstract as something like Solasta.

Weird cool-down based rest system that's designed to be abused between encounters. It was better was NWN2 had a more traditional and meaningful rest system in MotB (with stakes in the module) and carried it over to SoZ.
It was designed for co-op multiplayer. That's why it sucked in its original incarnation, same as the henchmen, really. But you didn't have to wait until NWN2's MotB for a rest upgrade, HotU swung back to a fade-to-black and random encounter tables. Later, DoD also brought back fatigue mechanics.

There were some shy steps to make henchmen more singleplayer-friendly too (inventory access since SoU, multiple henchmen since HotU), but they sadly never went far enough. BioWare should've at least rolled out a scripted solution like Balkoth's Minion Control across the board and, with the benefit of hindsight, Beamdog should've leveraged the DM Possession mechanic for an engine-level KotOR-style implementation in the EE. They were talking about it at one point, but it just languished in a #TODO list until it died of old age.

Ah, well.
 

Volourn

Pretty Princess
Pretty Princess Glory to Ukraine
Joined
Mar 10, 2003
Messages
24,924
Another page of bullshit spam yet the indisputable fact remains: NWN is the best RPG ever. PERIOD.
 

FriendlyMerchant

Guest
The controls in general just feel clunky.

Terrible console controller inspired camera with movement keys for your character almost like they were tried to go for console games and used this to experiment with the engine.
The lack of henchmen controls is inexcusable (especially with the EE now), but other than that, NWN's interfaces are among the more solid in the business. A clean, snappy GUI with a consistent layout, plenty of accelerators and quick access slots, one of the best radial menus out there (the other being ToEE).
It's too bad opening a menu has nothing to do with the general gameplay outside of inventory management. That's what really drives it down. And I'm referring to control over my character as well. It's pretty clunky.

Lets be honest about radial menus as well, they're not very good and this game's menu wasn't very good either; especially since it gives you a lot of options regardless of the context and most of those options aren't relevant to a target (even though it was contextually sensative). It's also not immediately obvious whether you want right click the target, your character, or anywhere for a particular ability. The option to use it may show up regardless yet not work in one case yet works in the other. Yet you don't know until the ability gets qued. Even then, there's the chance that you just figure you misclicked and didn't add it to the que and then you try again without realizing that the mess of a menu is context sensitive for that ability and there's no way for you to know. There's actually nothing manual about this yet it works this way.

And the camera is fit for purpose with the original NWN's gameplay in mind.
The design of a single character D&D game is pretty shit. You have both mouse controls and WASD at the same time with a weird scheme fro the WASD to move the character and instead of the usual a,d for strafe and q,e for rotating, it's backwords by default. Controlling the character through this feels really clunky, especially using WASD. And if you want any precise movement, you have to use WASD anyways since the character often goes too far using mouse controls and the engine.

Weird cool-down based rest system that's designed to be abused between encounters. It was better was NWN2 had a more traditional and meaningful rest system in MotB (with stakes in the module) and carried it over to SoZ.
It was designed for co-op multiplayer. That's why it sucked in its original incarnation, same as the henchmen, really.
And they made a bad decision there. If they wanted to make an MMO then why not make one? Instead they made an engine and released it as a single player game with the option to play multiplayer. Terrible engine for single player. But if it feels bad there, it feels bad in multiplayer too.
But you didn't have to wait until NWN2's MotB for a rest upgrade, HotU swung back to a fade-to-black and random encounter tables. Later, DoD also brought back fatigue mechanics.
I stopped playing in the terrible OC, then tried Swordflight and stopped because of the control system. I'm not going to try those modules because of a rest system. Whatever else is in them isn't going to override my disgust with NWN's controls.

There were some shy steps to make henchmen more singleplayer-friendly too (inventory access since SoU, multiple henchmen since HotU), but they sadly never went far enough. BioWare should've at least rolled out a scripted solution like Balkoth's Minion Control across the board and, with the benefit of hindsight, Beamdog should've leveraged the DM Possession mechanic for an engine-level KotOR-style implementation in the EE. They were talking about it at one point, but it just languished in a #TODO list until it died of old age.

Ah, well.
I really don't care about what Bioware wanted to do. They started with a lot of bad ideas and it resulted in a game that feels terrible to play. KOTOR feels terrible to play to me as well. But that's besides the point.
 
Joined
Feb 20, 2018
Messages
999
I have a lot of fun memories of various PvP and RP focused persistant worlds back in the day. At the time, pretty much no one significant was making proper RPGs. You had Bioware who started making dumbed down rubbish directly after Nwn. Maybe Troika at the very turn of the millenium but they were gone by 2005. And here you had this game that opened a way for a lot of inovation within the RPG scene through it's fan made campaigns. It was exciting seeing stuff like Swordflight, Aielund and so on develop and try new things that weren't seen in RPGs before.Talented devs took advantage of the Aurora toolset and created magic. Especially with persistant worlds. Many of them competed with each other for new and exciting feature. One server might have gladiator matches where real players fought each other and there were mechanics for ticketing and betting on the match. Another might have dynamic NPCs controlled by a GM who reacted to everything you did. It was a fun time experienced by only a handful of people. As seen by the amount of people who dismiss NwN as a mediocre singleplayer game based on 1 of it's 3 official campaigns. Everyone and their mum was making "action-RPGs" that weren't very good at action or rpg. So having anything that actually tried to be an RPG and would provide more RPG experiences was grand. And I won't hear otherwise. You contrarian shits.
 
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