JarlFrank
I like Thief THIS much
[…] A Dance With Rogues […]
Well, that escalated quickly.
Oblivion with mods is actually more fun than NWN, […]
That’s the thing: if we go with mods then things aren’t equal anymore. Both games have serious flaws and both have been improved by their respective communities—even though they are both fundamentally flawed. I was evaluating both games on their own merits (the few there were, anyway).
You do make many good points, but I still wouldn’t call it the worst RPG ever. It is flawed but being based on D&D 3rd Edition eventually yielded some good things, and the tools seemed to have helped with that. After all, wouldn’t you agree that you derived some enjoyment out of it, even if it was from user-created content? I should say that “worst ever” would preclude that.
Well, if we count mods and the good user-made content, it actually contributes to NWN's badness: the way its implementation of mechanics makes everything slow, tedious and boring detracts from the goodness of the user modules. I like A Dance With Rogues so much because it focuses a lot on non-combat content, as combat in NWN is just shit and there isn't a single mod out there that manages to fix that. It's still extremely slow, you have minimal control over companions and they usually act like retards, and it's essentially Diablo with D&D rules except 10 times slower. There are plugins that speed up resting speed (thank god), but none that speed up the progress bar when unlocking doors or disarming traps, so thief activities are still tedious (because apparently this is hardcoded). You are pretty much forced to use Cheat Engine's speedhack to make the game waste less of your time with idiotic design decisions.
NWN mods are good despite the game they run on, not because of it. Apart from ADWR, I also enjoyed Swordflight, but had many situations where I almost ragequit during the more difficult dungeon crawl sections. Playing a fighter-rogue I'm pretty good at most things, including combat, but in some places encounters are quite tough and you get a crossbow-wielding thief girl as a companion, and a spellcaster. The thief girl would always stay within enemy threat ranges and fire her crossbow, constantly provoking AoOs and killing herself in the process. The caster would always blow his best spells out against mobs that I could've dealt with on my own, so he ends up not having enough left for the tough boss encounter. It's frustrating and the exact opposite of fun. And it could be extremely fun if only you had direct control of your party members.
NWN's gameplay is fundamentally flawed and a lot of these flaws are hardcoded so modders haven't been able to fix them. So even the greatest NWN mods are dragged down by how utterly fucking shit the game is. I could've enjoyed my favorite NWN modules even more if only the game's gameplay systems were better. Dragging down top notch user content by having utterly shit systems does qualify it for being one of the worst RPGs ever made, even more so than some Russian shovelware games that are plain bad but never had mods made for them (no good user content for them to drag down).