Putting the 'role' back in role-playing games since 2002.
Donate to Codex
Good Old Games
  • Welcome to rpgcodex.net, a site dedicated to discussing computer based role-playing games in a free and open fashion. We're less strict than other forums, but please refer to the rules.

    "This message is awaiting moderator approval": All new users must pass through our moderation queue before they will be able to post normally. Until your account has "passed" your posts will only be visible to yourself (and moderators) until they are approved. Give us a week to get around to approving / deleting / ignoring your mundane opinion on crap before hassling us about it. Once you have passed the moderation period (think of it as a test), you will be able to post normally, just like all the other retards.

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

Gargaune

Magister
Joined
Mar 12, 2020
Messages
3,136
FriendlyMerchant, I dunno man, that's just not my experience with it. Maybe I just played it at the right time back in the day and got used to is since, but NWN's GUI works quite comfortably for me, I've got no confusion with either the layout or the feedback. And I've only ever used WASD to move past finicky pathfinding. Understandably, it'd be a bit of a shocker coming from the IE and no argument about the OC being shit, but I don't remember the game being hard to manipulate even when I was new to it in my teens.

As for "why didn't they make an MMO", you gotta look at what exactly NWN was designed to be in its time - not simply a D&D-based videogame, but a PC platform for playing D&D, with co-op, DMs and module-building at the heart of it. And it did work despite criticism, PWs are living proof of how far customers took it. After pushback from the fan community which probably wanted more IE-style singleplayer experiences, BioWare did try to circle back to that demographic a bit with the expansions, but if you're asking for the "why" of it, that's it.
 

Fartov

Barely Literate
Joined
Jul 11, 2022
Messages
2
besides the OC the game is pretty great and what people have done with the toolset and reverse engineering (in the diamond era) is extraordinary. the worst thing about it really is (some of) the people that like it.
 

Lord_Potato

Arcane
Glory to Ukraine
Joined
Nov 24, 2017
Messages
9,835
Location
Free City of Warsaw
Neverwinter Nights might be shit (never finished the OC ourside of prologue) but A Dance with Rogues I module retroactively validated the game and made it a timeless classic.
 
Joined
Jan 14, 2018
Messages
50,754
Codex Year of the Donut
NWN may be trash, but it released with an excellent engine ahead of its time that spawned a lot of good games + good mods that was sadly killed because EA demanded it.
Good editor tools + designed around mod support is far more important to a lot of people(former bucket includes developers) than the flashiest, newest technologies.
 

Ravielsk

Magister
Joined
Feb 20, 2021
Messages
1,514
For full disclosure I am one of those people who considers cRPGs to be a shit genre in general. Mainly because it rooted in antiquated design philosophies that were mostly the result of devs poorly translating DnD rules onto the computer screen.

With that said my experience with nwn was mostly meh. I played the prologue and the first chapter of the main game module and basically dropped it afterwards because of how much it dragged. I cannot say it did not intrigue me on some level but it just dragged on far too much. I would spend maybe 2 hours playing but it genuinely felt like 5 hours because of how much nothing was slotted between every relevant bit. It been years since then but my main issue was that it felt like the devs wanted Diablo style dungeon crawling but then they slapped it onto a slow DnD combat system that is a lot of things but definitely not designed to have 5 guys and some flies around every corner.
 

Lhynn

Arcane
Joined
Aug 28, 2013
Messages
9,823
The best gameplay is reserved for levels past 12, the base game modules are awful, the best player made modules go from 1 to 12. This creates an annoying problem. Persistent worlds were pretty fun though.
 

d1r

Busin 0 Wizardry Alternative Neo fanatic
Patron
Joined
Nov 6, 2011
Messages
3,576
Location
Germany

Ayreos

Augur
Joined
Feb 20, 2015
Messages
109
Everyone seemed to love NWN back in the day and the servers were full for a long time, including awful roleplay servers nonetheless full of well-read middle-aged failed actors living their wildest dreams of celebrity. For kids, it was also a first experience with D&D mechanics, and many were encouraged to read, play pen&paper RPGs, or at least to discover the likes of BG and PE:T. (My local game store placed the BG1&2 bundle release right on the same shelf as NWN on release week.) So while it might not be the deepest or best written CRPG out there, it unmistakably represented incline for the genre as a whole and deserves respect
 

Beans00

Augur
Joined
Aug 27, 2008
Messages
931
I don't recall anyone ever mentioning nwn in school, I feel like I was one of the only kids who heard of it. Despite what people want to believe baldurs gate/bioware games weren't in the mainstream consciousness until mass effect, MAYBE kotor.

The weird kids were always the JRPG kids, 3 dorks sitting alone eating yogurt out of tubes talking about cloud final fantasy 7 fanfiction. I never admitted I played those games in public.(I didn't really like them just played them)

People who played WoW were made fun of and bullied, although I was in highschool just before wow hit its big peak and went mainstream(I graduated in 2009). Most of the bullying came from the south park episode. I never played wow because the idea of paying money to have a full time job you DONT get paid for never appealed to me.



The only time I got into a video game related fight was over fallout 3 when I beat up a friend who kept shit talking me about it(he knew I liked fallout 1-2 and he was an oblivion fanboy). Anyways it wasn't that serious of a fight so we were still friends after and i felt bad after wooping him I helped him pick up his math binder because his papers flew everywhere.
 

0sacred

poop retainer
Patron
Joined
Feb 12, 2021
Messages
1,411
Location
MFGA (Make Fantasy Great Again)
Codex Year of the Donut
I don't recall anyone ever mentioning nwn in school, I feel like I was one of the only kids who heard of it. Despite what people want to believe baldurs gate/bioware games weren't in the mainstream consciousness until mass effect, MAYBE kotor.

Baldur's Gate was played by a lot of people at my school at release, for most of whom it was their first CRPG. Despite liking the genre I hadn't heard of it and hopped on the bandwagon, but apparently a lot of hype was generated in big German gaming magazines.
 

Percolator Fish

Liturgist
Joined
Oct 5, 2003
Messages
171
Location
Front Lines of the COVID-23 Epidemic
I don't think any PC gaming in 90s could be considered "mainstream", correct me if I'm wrong. Could be different outside the US. Perhaps some megahits like Myst or Doom would've been known outside the nerdy but even then I kinda doubt it.

Baldur's Gate wasn't incline either. Quite the contrary.
 

Beans00

Augur
Joined
Aug 27, 2008
Messages
931
I don't think any PC gaming in 90s could be considered "mainstream", correct me if I'm wrong. Could be different outside the US. Perhaps some megahits like Myst or Doom would've been known outside the nerdy but even then I kinda doubt it.

Baldur's Gate wasn't incline either. Quite the contrary.

Diablo 1-2, starcraft, age of empires 1-2, half life, were 100% mainstream for pc games in the 90s. Kids at school knew about them and talked about them constantly(just the first few games that came to mind).
Doom and quake were probably in the same boat but I wasn't in school yet when those games were at their peak.


Growing up, in elementary and highschool I remember maybe 3-4 other kids who had played baldurs gate, slightly more who played fallout 1-2(maybe like 6-7).




Also on a side note, if anyone is interested in Volourn 's NWN origin story check this out
https://www.nma-fallout.com/threads/rpgs-for-the-stupid.159215/page-6#post-3198521

Poor guy was insulted so much for defending NWN he literally started typing in broken english on purpose and has done so for almost 20 years. Poor guy was outright harassed and bullied of NMA for liking nwn which is pretty fucked up if you think about it. NMA needs all the posters it can get.
 

Groover

Literate
Joined
Aug 6, 2023
Messages
44
The weakest link in the NWN experience is undoubtedly the slow, laggy, and relatively hands-off combat, and how it always degenerates into wasting time casting buffs before every tricky encounter. I had some fun in the RP persistent worlds for some time as it essentially amounted to digital improvised theatre.. but you'd always be hamstrung into coming up with ridiculous excuses to go kill something since most of the experience is dreadfully bare without combat and dungeon crawling. It's also, by far, the most efficient way to level your character, and there aren't all that many meaningful ways of interacting with the world besides deleting entities from it.

Coming up with stories in real time with other players was fun for some time, but it started to feel like drudgery pretty fast thanks to the staccato nature of typed conversations. We'd always congregate at the same places and stay there until someone inevitably proposed beating the shit out of some goblins or whatever else
 
Last edited:

Eisen

Learned
Joined
Apr 21, 2020
Messages
590
I tried the OC and felt bored, very clunk. But later i tried the EOB module and i liked.
Still clunk, but i like it
 
Joined
May 31, 2018
Messages
2,509
Location
The Present
NWN OC was very meh when it came out. I thought it OK, but it was when I ventured online that it became my main game for a few years. The content and community were exceptional. I revisited the OC earlier this year, and it was better than I remembered it. The graphics are as awful as ever though. If this game had a total make-over, it would be remembered more fondly.
 

TheCumGuzzler

Novice
Joined
Jun 2, 2023
Messages
72
I thought NWN was bad but Swordflight, Honor Among Thieves and Prophet changed my mind.
Can't deny some of the criticisms, the game being slow for no reason and horrible henchmen AI comes to mind I still love the community content :greatjob:
 

Volourn

Pretty Princess
Pretty Princess Glory to Ukraine
Joined
Mar 10, 2003
Messages
24,924
"Poor guy was insulted so much for defending NWN he literally started typing in broken english on purpose and has done so for almost 20 years. Poor guy was outright harassed and bullied of NMA for liking nwn which is pretty fucked up if you think about it. NMA needs all the posters it can get."

Are you retartet? I was never bullied. I certainly wasn't 'bullied off' anywhere.

I was banned because NMA was anti freedom of speech. ie. They are sjw nazis. :D

Their forums their rules. LMAO
 

JarlFrank

I like Thief THIS much
Patron
Joined
Jan 4, 2007
Messages
33,052
Location
KA.DINGIR.RA.KI
Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
I don't recall anyone ever mentioning nwn in school, I feel like I was one of the only kids who heard of it. Despite what people want to believe baldurs gate/bioware games weren't in the mainstream consciousness until mass effect, MAYBE kotor.

Baldur's Gate was played by a lot of people at my school at release, for most of whom it was their first CRPG. Despite liking the genre I hadn't heard of it and hopped on the bandwagon, but apparently a lot of hype was generated in big German gaming magazines.
I remember NWN being hyped in magazines and my friends talking about it a bit, but when it came out it pretty much fell flat, don't remember anyone praising it or talking about it years later, meanwhile we still talked about BG2, Morrowind, Diablo. NWN was mostly forgotten.
 

Shuruga

Educated
Joined
Jul 4, 2022
Messages
54
I have the same recollection as JarlFrank. The lackluster response to NWN contributed to me not playing NWN on or near release. When I finally got to it a few years ago I found the OC OK at best and the expansions reasonably good... but then I found the community content and found myself playing NWN more than any other RPG. I don't know how much of a hidden secret it is among old school RPG enthusiasts these days, but it certainly felt like I was discovering a hidden gem!
 

As an Amazon Associate, rpgcodex.net earns from qualifying purchases.
Back
Top Bottom