I thought I'd start this so that anyone who buys it tomorrow (and after) can expound on their playing experience - so the rest of us can decide whether or not we want to shell out the dough and join the fun. :)

Detailed impressions/reviews greatly appreciated. Thanks a pantload in advance.

I'm goiing to be picking it up tomorrow hopefully so I'll be hanging around here for a while!!

I hope it can run on my computer though... :(

Didn't get a good review on gamespot, infact, even the first one had a better review, so I deffinetly won't be buying it.

Uh, not a good review? It got 8.6, which in their own classification is labelled as "great". And it's scored highly on all of the other reviews thus far as well (check our news).

Honestly, if NWN1 was being reviewed objectively back when it was released, it'd have got way, way less than 8.6 (let alone the 9+ that it got on average).

Still no sign of the mysterious NWN2 ("Yes, Mr. shop owner, it *is* a game.") in my picturesque area.

[EDIT: sorry, I got this thread confused with the "Who has it?" one.)

There was a review at 1UP rating it 5 out of 10 but they have pulled it and replaced with something more favourable to the game. You can still find the original review as a forum thread there.

The game has it's ups and downs. Obsidian did a great job of half-assing the role-playing/non-annoying part of it, but sure did implement a lot of stuff. Honestly I think NWN1 had more feats than NWN2 (organized better as far getting weapon focus and such goes) as well, but... as for the mechanics and all that - multiplayer will be much better, with further patches and maybe xpacs, the game has a lot of room for growth!!!

It's up to each player whether or not they want to play an RPG-esque action adventure game or not :) .

Pre-ordered, got it on the 2nd, plugged it in the drive and realized that it had an 87 megabyte patch on the day of release. Oh wow.

Now, to be honest, I didn't have the drive to follow the development of the game, saw a whole of four screenshots before I had my hands on it, so I didn't know what to expect, and in the end, I don't think any of my expectations were met.

The performance, in my book, is poor. I just bought an entirely new computer, with a nice and fast 3.6ghz Pentium D, a gigabyte of DDR2, and a PCIe GeForce 7600GT. I'm not the kind of person who plays games for the eye candy, so I wanted to get middle-of-the-road performance out of this with medium settings (Don't care much for shadows, dynamic lighting, bloom effects, and whatnot). I get a consistent 15fps with the settings minimized. Resolution - 1280x1024, this game is not made to be played on less due to low-resolution GUI panels that were drawn (in my opinion) by a person with no artistic talent whatsoever. I shelved this game when I read a lot of reports of people with dual SLI'd GF7900GTX get ~30 frames per second. I need 30 to play, but I'm not about to shell out another $700 to bring my machine up to the demands.

First impression? 3/10 at most. The game feels cheap. Voice sets are re-used from NWN, so is a lot of music and sound effects. Character creation made me wonder if I'm about to play a KOTOR mod. Spell, feat, and item icons look strictly amateur and convey precious little information. Radial menu is gone, but I knew that. Inventory looks like Baldur's Gate 1, and in 2006 this is not a compliment. There isn't a single thing about it that reminds me of NWN, and it has a very generic cookie-cutter style. Character animations are pitiful, both in motion and combat. This is my biggest gripe by far, I failed to get any sense of immersion because the characters look so blatantly artificial.

According to some, the storyline is better than NWN1, and this seems to be the only redeeming quality of the game in my eyes, which is a moot point seeing how it hurts my eyes to play it. The game's on a shelf until the patches bring it into 1.60s, at which point I will give it another try.

@omnigodly: Care to explain the weapon focus difference from NWN1? ;)

@Catbert: To me, some of the screens look like Rage of Mages or another well-meant but budget game. And some stuff looks like Might & Magic IX, which is a bad association. Some looks like Might & Magic 6 and that's a good association, but come on, just how old it is. We're talking about a friggin' new game with unearthly requirements. And it's not an insane first person shooter, it's an RPG.

And KotOR rules. It was fluent and all on my machine, even KotOR 2. I do think it was sufficient, graphics-wise. Could have the same in NWN2.

My Lord do I want this game. Sure, the last thing I need is another distraction from studying, but still.

And catbert, I love your infamously lurking behaviour. It's been quite a while since I've spoken to you last.

The way Weapon Focus is displayed is annoying. Rather than selecting Weapon Focus... followed by the weapon in another box, there are individual feats for each, which makes the list of feats at levelup very cluttered. The same applies for skill focus and improved critical, and probably for any others that used a separate box in NWN.

I think the graphics look great. I love that everything has ceilings now. The characters have more animations, and the toolset is awesome. The camera can be a pain; it zooms too sluggishly for my liking. The characters are deep, and the quests, much like KotOR2, have a lot more grey morality. The game does start slowly, though; it's only when you reach Neverwinter that it becomes great. There's also a lot of humour in it, and the fact that this is made by some of the people who made Torment becomes quite clear. Voicing isn't great, and there aren't enough heads and hairstyles. And huzzah, there's no more radial menu!

[End of incoherent stream of thoughts]

Aside from issues I have with some of the mechanics and rules, I'm not finding the story very compelling at this point. You start off with life-long friends and a father who is far from appealing, which shows some promise. But before you really get attached, you lose/dump/leave the lot of them. The only real motive established, other than self-preservation, is the death of someone whom you didn't get to know well enough (in gameplay terms) to be sold on avenging. All in all, the backstory seems merely to be a device to get the game rolling.

Beyond that, no real story has emerged. No epic adventure. No world to save. No personal quest of discovery. It's about as mysterious and interesting as a Scooby Doo episode. I'm not hooked. If it doesn't pick up soon, I'll probably shelve it and replay the BG series for the thousandth time. Even the OC of NWN1 would be preferable to this -- at least the NWN1 NPCs had stories to tell.

In NWN2, I'm about to dirt nap the stupid tiefling myself. She's worse that Anomen, and the game engine won't let me dump her. I'm almost ready to start a new game and blow a dozen hours of play just so I can avoid making the mistake of saving her.

The characters have more animationsI'd love to smoke what you're smoking, but it is probably illegal. The only game that has less animations than NWN2 is uh, chess, I guess.

A perfect example (and why I cannot bear to play this game and explore its grey morality and apprently a great campaign) is your character movement. There are three stages: stand, walk, run. You stand, you press shift and walk, or you run. Should you run, you acceletare from zero to full instantaneously. Should you move one step sideways, you will make a vapid dash for it, complete with the awkward run animation that reminds me of claymation more than any real motion capture.

Compare that to NWN - if you make a step, it's a step. You could tread lightly, run, walk casually, with a simple mouse control, and the animation speed and intensity adjusts accordingly. If you go from point a to point b, you visibly accelerate, run, slow down, stop, with an incredibly organic and fluid animation.

Battles? Well, they decided that a cleave isn't worth it's own attack animation. More animations? No way, Jose.

The movement animations are less important to me than the gameplay and environment. Doesn't make sense to set everything to medium/low graphics and then complain about the animations being medium/low quality.

Alavin hit the weapon focus thing right on the money. Same issue with Skill Focus. Seems like Obsidian just wanted to make it look like there were more feats since they failed miserably at applying anymore than NWN1 had. The tiefling is a tad annoying, but I got used to her by the time I hit the city. She also toned down a little bit. Otherwise I mute my sound during her animation and just read the text :) .

To be honest, I think Obsidian owes everyone a better game instead re-doing NWN1 - the story line just rings of "rip-off (NWN1)". Magical artifacts, woo... never seen that before in NWN1, SoU and HotU... I hope there's more to it after you get started in the city, or I'm going to quit playing the campaign and go straight to player-made mods.

I don't know.. Animations matter to me much more than 32-bit overdone and pointless spell effects. After all, when I imagine myself cast a transmutation spell, I don't think that a magic apparition that slightly resembles a central processing unit silicon plate pops up on top of me.

Maybe it's just me, I want my role-playing games to give me a sense of visual immersion, and everything on screen acting like a wind-up doll doesn't contribute much to it. NWN, with all its shortfalls, gave me just that, and when I played multiplayer, I could imagine the characters around me as real people. The NWN2 puppets do not do that to me. They just don't have anything to them that makes them feel alive, and there is no excuse for such a flaw in a game which was supposed to be all that.

I thought the graphichs looked too "cute". Kind of like wow or something. I haven`t played it too much though, but it doesn`t seem like it has improved anything from the original game. The guys who made Morrowind and Oblivion are decades ahead of the guys who made nwn in my opinion. In ever aspect of the game.

From what I can tell, the regular walk/run animations from NWN are still in the game, including walking and strafing. You may just have yours set to autorun. Frankly, I don't see how something that trivial can seriously impact a game experience.

The game is also running like crap on my rig, which is admittedly not super-high end, but even with all the settings turned to their lowest, it's still chugging hard.

When I said more animations, I meant specifically non-combat animations, since they're the ones that matter most to me. For example, after one quest, a large group of men starts cheering at the prospect of heading to the pub, and starts cheering; they use half a dozen different cheer animations. Since I intend to make extensive use of the toolset, this is important to me; I can make much more immersive cutscenes than was possible in NWN.

I agree about the animations, they look a bit silly...

When that fighter at the beginning of the game started running with this longsword I couldn't stop laughing. I was reminded of Monty Python. Or better yet, Robin Hood: Men in Tights.
Remember that scene where Robin Hood interupts the Duke's dinner. After a while a lot of guards run out, falling over like domino stones later that scene.
That fighter guy reminds me of those guards...

But, in all fairness, the game is cool, I'm enjoying myself immensly and I don't really care about graphics, as long as I can see the end of the story!

ithink this game has better npc's then morrowind/oblivion ever had. secondly the original campaign has a better story then nwn1(okay i have seen fps and c-movies with better stories)
thirdly the going back to full party control rocks.

and finaly, much like nwn1, this game rocks not do to the mainstory but do the possibility of playermade mods and online worlds.

From what I can tell, the regular walk/run animations from NWN are still in the game, including walking and strafing. You may just have yours set to autorun. Frankly, I don't see how something that trivial can seriously impact a game experience.Nnnnot really, on both counts. Animations are lacking, and while I can somewhat see the point of "Graphics are Unimportant", it's not how that game is advertised. It might have a great storyline and fleshed out NPCs, but it if was built on a premise of being a game with a great storyline and fleshed out NPCs AND utterly misconceived graphics and underdeveloped animations, I'd have never bought it, because that way it's not really worth the $2000 in hardware it takes to run properly (run, not drag on like a wounded pig).

People would pipe in and say "Hey, but NWN also didn't have ALL THAT right away on release", which in my book is a ridiculous defense, because PacMan hardly had anything but it doesn't mean we have to base new game features on its scarceness.

Great game so far, and I've only reached Forte Locke.

The graphics are much better than the first one. Trails in the wilderness look like trails, not 15 foot wide roads; on the whole things look more natural. I like the mini-map with the little light cone showing which way your camera is facing, and the tracking ability that shows blips for enemies on the mini-map. I like the lighting effects: As I ran through a dungeon, torchlight was reflecting off my Greatsword as I passed by the torches. Really cool IMO.

The tutorial is rather simple, but gets the job done to teach you how to use the interface etc.

As to the story, I like how it's going. I got tired of of a level-1 character suddenly thrown into the middle of powerful forces, yet luckily all he had to do was fight level-1 monsters. This story makes more sense to me: You're a nobody whose adventure starts when your village is invaded and you leave in order to protect it, with those who are looking for what you have hopefully misdirected.

The camera can be a pain; it zooms too sluggishly for my liking.If it isn't due to performance problems, there are options for changing the camera lag and scroll speeds.

Are there any cool new animations for speciall attacks (like the Duelist's Flourish)?

Got the chance to play it yesterday, although I didn't buy it. I echo the comments of catbert, it's dreadful, every aspect of it, I can't believe some of the reviews it recieved, that 5/10 review Chev mentioned sounds about right.

I agree with you BTA -- great game so far. I've just finished the tutorial -- which was very well done I think.

Character creation was a huge step up from NWN1 -- and while the graphics aren't on par with Oblivion (not much is), it's still quite a bit better than NWN1. I think the interface is seamless -- and thank god the radial menu is gone.

Cat -- I've got a dual core 3.7 Ghz, 1g RAM and a GeForce 6800XT and am experiencing no problems whatsoever (and didn't with Oblivion either). And the fact that there was a patch immediately upon shipment isn't that usual these days -- it's virtually impossible to ship bug-free, unless a company wants to live with a severely extended development period -- they don't and neither does the public.

One person's fifteen frames per second is another person's "no problems whatsoever". I need the least of 30 frames per second to play, and I'd risk saying that it's not the kind of performance most people get. While I finally got it to run at an acceptable speed, I still can't help but complain how ugly it is. GUI panels are painfully blurred and do not clear up until 1280-sized resolutions. Makes me wonder if developers "optimized" it for 1600. Yeah, it looks much worse than Oblivion, and requires twice the processing horsepower to play. Why? No idea, really.

I don't see how character creation is a huge step from NWN - it's almost exactly the same, but you get to see your doll through all the steps. The creation actually lost the ability to pick a starting outfit (didn't matter so much to me) or tattoos (I liked that one!). And we lost portraits, just to take away from the single-player experience.

I don't worry about the bugs, or even the game-breaking glitches - those will be tracked down and fixed with any number of patches necessary. But still, we're beta testing the game. I know that every developer does it, so I guess that's alright. There are many things they will not fix with a patch. Low quality animations, "shortcut" game mechanics that were brought over from NWN (like the lack of PrC spellbooks), the obscene interface (where are my voice commands? Nowhere).

It's my opinion that as a sequel to NWN, this doesn't deliver. As a "game in spirit of BG/BG2", it doesn't deliver as it's so artistically generic. As a no-name low budget product from a start-up developer - it's awesome, commendable, but that is not what NWN2 is supposed to be.

Hmm, there seem to be some very divergent opinions on the game here! I will be interested to see how this discussion pans out.

Ok, played it for about 30 mins or so. Had great fun creating my character, that's pretty nifty.

But, gripe number 1 (so far) - the camera movement speed is painfully slow. I've cranked it up to its max level, but it's still annoying me how slow it takes to move the camera around. The guy runs a little bit too slow as well, but I've not looked to fix that yet, so I'm hoping there's an option to speed up movement speed. I hope it's not an annoying slow game all round, I get the feeling it might be...

I feel exactly the same. At first I thought it was my system not being heavy enough, but no, it's that camera...I'll get used to it to a certain extent, but it's really very terrible. :s

The camera speed is linked to your framerate. Once you get into the 25+, the camera starts to feel very similar to NWN, if not exactly like it.

Well I've been playing for about 2 hours now without really realizing it. That's a good sign I suppose!

Decent game so far. The dialogue is a lot better than the first one.

Once you get into the 25+, the camera starts to feel very similar to NWN, if not exactly like it. Sorry for the stupid question, but how do you get there? I've been playing a bit more and it's just too slow to be playable in a pleasant way.

A perfectly valid question, which unfortunately has one answer: a fast CPU, a fast batch of memory, a very fast videocard. The game is hungry for videocard horsepower, but once you take it to the top (with a top of the line chip of the current generation), it becomes pleasantly playable, and the camera lag goes to none.

Now we can get to the real question that can only be answered now that real people are playing it for real: what exact graphics card to do you really need in order to play the game at an enjoyable level of perfomance?

A very very very good one, I can tell you that.

I meet the minimum requirements, and even with a 3.2 GHz CPU, the game is simply too slow.

Turning off all the nifty effects doesn't do that much good.

But thanks for your reply, Catbert. ;)

Bugger, 50 euro down the drain, I feel quite ripped off.

[ November 07, 2006, 01:31: Message edited by: Uytuun ]

Before the game becomes playable, it's going to cost half its current price, I think. It just sucks, the requirements, from what I've seen while doing the news - there just doesn't seem to be any justification. Just hope they're ever going to optimise it. From what I've heard, it just eats up whatever power you have (e.g. taking 970 megs out of a gig of ram).

Funnily enough, either I have just got used to the camera speed or it's fixed itself. I can play with it no problem now, and I've pretty much gotten used to how it all works.

Bu I tell you what, the award for the most annoying voice in a game ever goes to.... Neeshka! It cuts through me like a knife...

I still don't have the patch, but I tweaked the performance and its actually quite good. The Warlock is a cool class, but I think he will get boring after a while as he is not as diverse as a Cleric or Mage would be.

If you just run the update thing then it'll patch it up automatically mate. It takes like 5 mins, well worth doing.

Well, I'm playing the game on a distinctly mid range 1 gig RAM/3ghz p4/geforce 6800 pc and as far as Im concerned it runs fine. I have the texture details on high and the shadows turned off. True its not fast, but everything runs smoothly where it needs to and the game is entirely playable. Perhaps I have lower standards than some of you folks, but as long as the game is playable I'm generally happy. Not too keen on the inclusion of ceilings/rafters and the like, though. They get in the way.

The party control isnt great, I'll agree. I like to play quite tactically, micromanaging each party member individually (and you certainly need to at certain points) but I also like my npcs to be endowed with sufficient common sense to defend themselves when attacked. I have found that not using puppet mode but turning most of the AI settings down or off completely helps. Its still not perfect, but it'll do for now.

Excellent game so far, nonetheless.

5 minutes? It took me 54.

From what I've heard, it just eats up whatever power you have (e.g. taking 970 megs out of a gig of ram).It doesn't eat everything it can, but I'm not surprised if it takes most of 1 GB. My computer has 2GB of RAM and before running the game I'm using about 30% and while running the game I'm using about 66%.

It doesn't seem to use all my system resources. I mean, I can window key out the game and do other stuff on my computer without loads of lag. I can't do that with many other games to be honest.

So what graphics card do you need to not get annoyed by the game?

I've only got a 6600 and it works fine. Don't listen to half what you hear. My set up is average at best and it runs the game fine.

@Harbs: GeForce 6600GT, 6800 or 7600 up should be good enough. I think 6200 barely stands chance, as does anything 7K below 7600. GeForce 5900-5950 (normal, XT or Ultra) is going to be powerful well enough but might be aged. Same with 5600/5700 Ultra (although they are ooold and weaker). As for Radeons... I guess 9600XT, 9800pro and that kind of stuff should hold its ground, but I don't know much about the newer models and it often happens that new cards have better technology and drivers and all, but are slower and less efficient (e.g. my GF 5900XT is more powerful than anything below 6600GT, with the possible exception of the best of GF4 Titanium and, according to some stats, it's still more powerful than GF 7300).

But it also matters what kind of computer you have in general. You may have a GF5700 on a 3 GHz PIV proc like Uytuun and you may have a GF5900XT on a Celeron 2.4 GHz like I do, and gives me a headache when I attempt to compare the effective potential. At any rate, NWN2 is a high-end venture.

@Barmy: What proc and how much RAM do you have there?

[ November 07, 2006, 21:18: Message edited by: chevalier ]

I've only got a 6600 and it works fine. Don't listen to half what you hear. My set up is average at best and it runs the game fine.What's your framerate at that? (~ to call console, type "showfps", watch the fps number in action)

Anything 16FPS+ is beyond what the eye can deciefer when you're playing a CRPG. That really shouldn't matter unless you're playing an FPS where the frames changing actually make a difference on targetting. (as in you can point an click on the guys feet, legs, chest or head and you still perform the same action).

Of course the counter to that is without a good framerate characters might end up jumping around from spot to spot, but like I said, if at 16 FPS you can tell it's a slow refresh you have a really really good eye.

Also, I'm finding part of my performance issues do in fact seem to be all the background programs I'm running. I shut down Xfire, MSN, AIM, Steam and Winamp and everything ran smoothly at low graphics, gonna try it with a few of those cloesd at medium. I only have 1Gig of ram. I'm planning on building a new computer (hopefully I'll build a new one every year and sell the older one for just under cost to build), so I don't want to upgrade this one.

I suggest defrag, making sure you have enough free space on HDD, shutting down anything you don't need, informing yourself about what settings tax your system the most (and cards differ here, e.g. mine loves lights, utterly rules at billboarding but sucks at particles badly), what other settings you don't really mind in your subjective perception (e.g. you have a better-than-real-water obsession or you don't give a damn about what water looks like so long as you can see it's water).

omni, must disagree with you on that point, sir;

There's a reason films are played to the audience at 24 frames per second. Had you seen a movie in a cinema that's 8 fps slower than the standard, you'd have walked out due to headache. Sixteen might be a bearable value given blur and low quality of the image (that's how video compressors work - they blur frames together to allow for a lower framerate, and thus less physical size of the data), but for a sharp, clear image that frame rate is well within the perception threshold. That's the kind of image computer games are. Not to mention that your control precision falls dramatically with low framerates...

Chev - 2800 sempron (underclocked as I have a crappy cooling fan and the computer kept crashing) with 1gb ram.

I've got a 7800 card and the game runs wonderfully in indoor areas with graphics pretty much cranked. Outdoors it's a different story: very low FPS to the point of being almost unplayable. Turning shadows and reflective water off helps a lot but it's still pretty bad. I also get a huge improvement if I turn textures down but then the game looks worse than NWN1.

This game does NOT have anti-aliasing. Huh?? NWN1 had it, for Pete's sake!

IMO the game's fundamental problems are the same as KOTOR2's (no surprise since Obsidian made that too):

it's incredibly linear; you get very few real choices in the direction of the plot -- sure there's lots of dialog choices but they're essentially just placebos. Ultimately, it doesn't really much matter what you say you'll get the same end result;

nearly half the game is just you sitting and watching cut scene after cut scene. I want to play an RPG, not watch a movie.

There's too many henchmen and you get stuck taking them all. Playing a paladin? Too bad, you must take the chaotic evil Ranger on a certain mission and he hangs around your base forever after that. The whole influence system isn't great because in order to get enough influence with an NPC you have to use them often and with so many henchmen that's just impossible. You lose track of who has what equipment; who has what special ability, etc. Everything gets watered down. Half as many henchmen with more depth would have been much better.

If you played KOTOR2 then this should all sound quite familiar...

Has anyone tried setting hardware acceleration off in dxdiag? That helps alot in some other games.

Anti-aliasing will supposedly become an option with one of the future patches.

There's no denying K.O.T.O.R 1 & 2 were awesome, but this is DnD! The game is enjoyable and all, but there's no real challenge. For instance permanent Death has been replaced with K.O.T.O.R.'s unconcious state. THat blows, dying makes games a lot more challenging and shouldn't be removed, it adds to the experience and the sense of achievment when you beat a tough enemy. And now everyone levels at the smae time, meaning you no longer have to protect sorcerer's etc. while they're at a lower level because they'll level at exactly the same time as you... even if they're unconcious- this didn't even happen in K.O.T.O.R! anyway, my advice is wait a while, this ain't worth full price. But i'd buy it anyway because all i need is to see the DnD logo.

What? You can't die? How ridiculous!

I'm getting a bit fed up of this game now to be honest. I wish I hadn't spent £30 on it now. Ah well, can't be helped. It needs some serious work on the patch and mod side before it fulfills its potential. A few good sides, too many bad.

Barmy - you were raving about it a couple of days ago!

The thinking behind going "unconscious" rather than dying is that the result will generally be the same. If someone in your party dies, what do you do? Either you reload, or you raise them from the dead.

Harbs - Yeah, I know. It seemed alright to begin with and I was really looking forward to reaching Neverwinter and walking around the big city for a long time, picking up sub-quests and finding joinable NPC's and experimenting. It's not exactly lived up to my expectations to be honest. Neverwinter the city is just boring, simply because I can't do what I want to do and keep being forced to do stuff. Maybe if I started with an evil Warlock or something, I might be able to spice the game up a bit...

I'm also VERY fed up of Neeshka's voice actor, who sounds like a 10 year old they pumped with 20 cans of Cola before recording. The game started out promising and fun, but the annoyances have built and built... hopefully they'll be a few patches out pretty soon and hopefully some kind modders will work on some fixes of their own.

BTA seems to be the only person left who is still defending this game. Can BTA save the public opinion from being uniform disappointment? Or are we going to consign NWN2 to the 'Pools of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor' bin?

It's an okay game, barring all the fixable glitches. But just okay. Neverwinter Nights is a pretty loaded name to bear, that immediately puts the product in the spotlight for a huge number of dedicated fans of NWN who have been playing the original for years, know of all the advantages and shortcomings of the game, and inevitably hope that the sequel will keep the good things and address the bad things. None of those expectations happened.

For a lot of players, this will be an okay game, but for a hardcore NWN fan, it has the feel of a straight to video sequel.

This is ridiculous...I now have to look at a game looking like this (http://groups.msn.com/SorcerersPlaceMemberPhotos/uytuun.msnw?action=ShowPhoto&PhotoID=1594) . And it doesn't even run smoothly indoors.

I haven't played a lot of it yet, so I really shouldn't say it, but this...thing...reminds me a lot of Diablo II for some reason. Or Dungeon Siege. It feels extremely amateuristic. And I don't know about you guys, but the measly little rag of a manual we got here is just despicable.

It's a good thing I bought that Baldur's Gate Saga after all, it seems.

[ November 08, 2006, 23:31: Message edited by: Uytuun ]

My NWN1 looks better. And I have a worse computer than you.

I got it today and will be loading it soon...But I have to agree with Chev based on Uytuun's screenshot: NWN1 looks better. I've been playing Wyvern Crown of Cormyr for the last 2 days and it is fantastic!

Depth and realism is awesome. I hope NWN2 wows me when I start it up!

Surely that's not what the game looks like... that looks cheesier than NWN did!

There's no denying K.O.T.O.R 1 & 2 Oh yes there is! KOTOR1 I liked but KOTOR2 suffered from many of the same problems NWN2 suffers from, and both games are from Obsidian.

The thing is, there were lots of complaints about KOTOR2: the influence system, too many henchmen, too linear, too many damn cut-scenes, a horribly unsatisfying ending. It seems Obsidian just ignored all these critiques and made the same game set in the Forgotten Realms.

Before it's release I was one of the (few) people who were leery about what NWN2 would be like based on Obsidian's track-record, i.e. KOTOR2. I was pretty fed up with all the folks who said "it's going to be awesome! These are the same guys who made Baldur's Gate, Fallout, PS:Torment!" Sure okay, but did you play KOTOR2?

After 2 hours of playing, I still can't finish the stupid competitions. For some reason none of the bows or ammo work in the archery test. The graphics are worse than NWN - I'm not surprised Atari is going under.

NWN was a great game! The additions in WCoC makes it better than NWN2 by a long shot. This game has less feats, the cut scenes are annoying and the voice talent is boring...Except for the leftovers from NWN.

Aren't sequel games supposed to add to the experience of the first? I've barely scratched the surface and I am bored to tears. This doesn't feel like DnD - it's like a bad version of the SIMs.

You know those annoyances building up I spoke about? Well, they've boiled over now and I'm pretty pissed off that I wasted £30 of my hard earned Pound Sterling.

I can't take it back, but I'll be selling this on eBay ASAP. I'll probably also replay NWN for the fun of it, just to remind myself that the original, however poor, wasn't as bad as this. I'll probably give the mods and additions a go as well.

Surely that's not what the game looks like... that looks cheesier than NWN did! Of course, if you have the newest of the new expensive out of the moon system, you can make it look good.

But the least you can expect when you meet the minimum requirements is that there is no lag when you play with everything toned down and in 800x600, but no...it was again laggy like hell indoors.

Of course, if you have the newest of the new expensive out of the moon system, you can make it look good.Catbert does and he gets 16 fps and the game still looks such that I like my NWN1 better (with top settings in 1024*768 on my old budget Celeron 2.4 and GF5900XT). Heck, the way it looks on your screenshots, I really wonder how come you can still have it laggy. BG1 probably looked better and compare requirements (you can even double or triple them if you like, the point still stands). With all the fancy stuff turned off or minimum, and in 800*600, it's just not excusable for the game to run like it does for you.

@Barmy: Daggerford, anyone? ;)

@Sir Fink:

These are the same guys who made Baldur's Gate, Fallout, PS:Torment!" Sure okay, but did you play KOTOR2?They didn't make BG. They only produced it, some of them. PST they got a good engine for. Same with the IWD series. And I'm not sure they actually did make the Fallout engine and all on their own or if they weren't producers again.

And lack of anti-aliasing... come on. Dear. I remember it from games in 2000...

^ Mm, after a bit of optimisation, I get a nice consistent 30. But then again, I'm simply unwilling to play at less than 1280 and less than full graphic detail in all but shadows (which aren't all that anyways) and most dynamic lights. Having it run at the settings I want it to run gives 15fps. In my book that's unplayable.

Also, anti-aliasing is in, there's an ini hack to turn it on, but then first and foremost it makes the game run slower.

Oh, and if you look at the credits in Fallout2, you'll find a few folks from the Obsidian team in there. There was a time when they had it. :p

I've barely scratched the surface and I am bored to tears.Well, the tutorial is pretty boring, but that's because they're just trying to show you how to use the interfaces. Once you're done with the tutorial, there's a bit of fun right off when your village gets invaded.

But, it looks like I'm in the minority in liking the game a lot, but then again, I liked KoTOR 2 quite a bit even though there were obvious gaps in the story outside the main quest.

I like the cutscenes, the voice acting seems fine to me, and I love the graphics and lighting.

I can agree that they haven't provided much in the exploration department, which I thought I recalled them saying they were going to do, but that doesn't bother me as much as it seems to others.

I haven't had time to play since the past weekend when I reached Neverwinter and the inn, but I'm still looking forward to it this weekend! :)

I've decided to let my LG devout Aasimar paladin2/cleric5 (who was on his way to becoming a warpriest) take a rest. I've started over with a CG bully human warlock, and so far am enjoying myself a lot. The warlock will get along with Neeshka and Kelgar a lot better, and I feel like party balance is working out better. My warlock primarily stays back and does his eldritch blast, while Kelgar tanks and Neeshka moves in for sneak attacks. The druid companion should fit in pretty nicely with this group as well.

The other thing that is making this more enjoyable is that I've resolved to accept mediocre graphics settings (I'll lkely be getting a new video card before the end of the year, however). I've turned off water effects, lowered resolution to 1024x768, disabled anisotropic settings (sp?) on my card and in the game and disabled V-Sync on my card. Game doesn't look much better than NWN 1 at the moment, but I'm getting much better FPS and I've never really been a graphics whore anyway. I can still play BG2 and be happy as a clam with the graphics.

There's definitely some enjoyment to be had. Give it a couple more patches and I think there will be a lot of additional polishing and improving to look forward to as well.

This game just sounds like a nightmare.

Well, it's not. ;)

Plenty of smart and sensible people here are adamant that the game IS a shocker.

I'd say "nightmare" or "shocker" is an extreme exaggeration. It's a good game and fun to play; it seems it hasn't met up with preconceived expectations for the majority in this thread.

Yea, it's not.

All in all, if you want some BG2-style gameplay with a somewhat more simplistic plot, then this is a go, and you'll enjoy it. If you wanted a sequel to NWN with its awesome immersive multiplayer potential, then the game is dreadful.

It's as buggy as anything, but all the serious stuff should be fixed (hope I'm not insane to expect it). I personally haven't encountered any gamebreakers, but many people haven't been so lucky.

Why is the multiplayer potential so poor?

i fail to see how multiplayer potential is ruined.

but luckely that newer was what i was looking for in nwn2. i was looking for a game much like nwn where great singleplayer modules could be made, but where i had more control over the party and where the graphic was less block like and where all areas didn't look the same.
I got what i wanted mainly.

On multiplayer. The way I see it, the OC is unmultiplayable because of the compulsory NPCs, dialog pause, and forced party area transition.

The dialog pause, according to the devs is a scripted feature for the campaign. That means that Obsidian specifically designed the OC without MP consideration. Well, that's a big turnoff for me, I spent many many hours playing the NWN OC with friends in multiplayer, and a lot of fond memories associated with that.

Forced area transition seems to be just a feature of the game. When you move from area to area, your party moves with you, no matter what they're doing. Walk into a house while exploring an area? Everyone in your party follows, no matter what they were doing at the moment. Newsflash, Obsidian, folks in multiplayer form parties, and they still want some independence at it.

Now, persistent worlds in this game are next to impossible. Moving away from the tileset areas makes modules grow, bloat, take up huge chunks of disk space and system memory. We need to download maps without any custom content outside of the game if we want to play them, and server hosters face the size limitation for their modules. 2 gigabytes of system memory taken up, and the capacity of the 32-bit memory addressing in Windows is exceeded. From the feedback of the people who tried, 2gb is far from an unrealistic number for large and well-scripted modules.

My personal pet peeve is that this game is non-immersive. Characters are plastic, animations are minimal, apprearance variety is non-existent as most of the faces are butt ugly and hairstyles similar and also poorly done. It doesn't pick on me so much in singleplayer (oh what the hell, it does), but in multiplayer I will not enjoy my and everyone else's character having the personality and vitality of a GI Joe doll. Voice command keys don't exist, emotes are minimal - just to add to the pile.

I guess a lot of people don't care about persistent worlds or active multiplayer in general, but that's what NWN was to me. The OC, both in NWN and NWN2 is, well, just a module. In NWN2, it's more interesting. But if you take the factor of the OC out, then NWN2 is a pretty broken and not very functional development platform.

This game just sounds like a nightmare.Apparently my attempt at adding a few positive comments to let folks know it's not all bad was... less than successful. :D

[ November 09, 2006, 20:42: Message edited by: Marceror ]

I have a Pentium 4 2.66 Ghz processor, 1.5 G RAM and a radeon 9800 graphics card. It seems my processor and and RAM are good, but I need a newer graphics card.

What should I upgrade to? I don't want to buy a new pc - other than games, what I have is fine for my needs. I've looked at the radeon x1950, but I'm also hearing about a PhysX card too? Any suggestions?

how does voice commands affect multiplayer? so far the only vital flaw i can see in multiplayer is forced party transgression, which hopefully at a point soon can be turned off.
ill admit i havetn played it online yet, but as far as i can undestand on one of my friends, who is going through it with another friend, its quite enjoyeble.

As to character looks, i find them way better then the bulky stile of nwn, but this is truely a matter of taste :)

Sorry but NWN 1 wasn't made for persistent worlds (bioware said that several times on the nwn forum), and while persistent worlds was a small succes, sorry but it was around 1% of the nwn1 players that took part in 1 or more regulary, it wasn't what the game was designed for. so why expect nwn2 to be?

anything above radeon 9500 with the minimum 128mb ram, should be able to rn the game

^ You can pull statistics and percentages out of your ass all you want, but NWN was a (great) multiplayer game. If you don't understand how the features I mentioned affect er.. destroy multiplayer, then I guess you're one of the lucky people who aren't affected by the issue. Voice commands are the smallest part of it, by far.

No surprise, really. The engine wasn't designed for MP at all, and if Obsidian failed to implement even the basic modifications for party control into it (what does it take to make your character selectable by clicking on it? Every game in the genre has that), I shudder to think just how they coded the MP capability into the engine from the ground up. But then, licensed core, proprietary animation model, recycled sounds and music... They must have been doing something for two years? :rolleyes:


Bel, x1900 should do you fine. Your Radeon most likely sits in the AGP port, so make sure to ask for an AGP card - most cards of the current generation would be offered primarily for PCI Express, but they should have AGP alternatives hidden on the same shelf.

It runs...Just slowly and blurry.

Slowly and blurry. Nice. If I want that, I could just play NWN drunk.

Forget PhysX. Almost nothing is designed to use it.

OKay - I finally got to do some fighting. The game is growing on me. My system seems a little under powered, so I think I'm going to pick up a new graphics card and a little more RAM and see how it goes.

You are right BTA, it's getting better. I just need to get used to it.

I was able to play a little more last night (just an hour or so), and I have to say the game is lots of fun.

I'm not seeing the extreme linearity some are complaining about. Almost as soon as I left the inn in Neverwinter, I had four things to choose from including a choice between what seemed like an evil and good path to getting into Blacklake.

Barmy's right that there isn't a door to open in every house and the alleys aren't littered with chests to open like in NWN1, but as I recall that was one thing people complained about in NWN1, and there are still plenty of places to go.

It really reminds me of BG2 in that you are restricted in where you can go based on the locations that show up on your world map that you have learned about from talking to people.

Wow - boy am I glad I started this thread. I was going to buy it yesterday, but now I'm definitely going to hold off until I get a new graphics card.

Thanks everybody for being so detailed, especially catbert. Would that I could start a thread like this for every game I buy and get such excellent feedback. :)

Good call, DR. I added a new graphics card (went from Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB to Radeon x1600 512MB) and more RAM (1.5 GB to 3.0 GB) over the weekend, and the game looks a WHOLE lot better. I still can't use shadows, it's slows the game too much...But otherwise, I'm enjoying the game.

If only I could figure out crafting recipes...

Crafting of what Bel? Weapons and armor are straightforward.

I've found a bunch of books of recipes for other stuff, but I don't have anybody to try them yet.

mostly weapons and armor...LOL! Also, how do you make magic weapons and armor?

Normal weapons and armor: Look at the mold and it tells you what you need. Metal ingots and a mold for melee weapons (two ingots of the same type for large, one for small). Wood planks and a mold for bows. Leather hide and mold for leather armor. Etc.

Apparently you can enchant any weapon or armor, but I haven't tried it yet (nobody to do it yet, unless that Sorcerer I just picked up but haven't used can do it).

EDIT: Oh yeah, you also need a workbench to put the stuff in and a hammer to forge them. You will get all that stuff in Fort Locke.

I have to READ the molds?!?!? :rolleyes:

Sheesh! LOL! :p :D