It seems only BTA, Tal, Bombur, Catbert and I are talking about this game...Well, Harbourboy's talking, but he doesn't have it.

Anyway, what's the buzz on the game?

Although I don't think it lives up to NWN's RP standards, and seems to be a dumbed down version of DnD - It is fun, there are a lot of visual changes: spells, effects, secenery, etc...and they look really great!

NWN wasn't perfect when it came out, but it got better with every patch - hopefully, they'll have the same dedication to the RP community for NWN2.

Don't think I am down on the game, I'm really not - I was just expecting a vast improvement over NWN. As it stands, it's like a playboy playmate - nice to look at, but lacking in substance.

Maybe my expectations were too high? Single player NWN was never my favorite either - I've had the best times playing NWN multiplayer in ALFA or other persistent worlds. They tended to be richer gaming and roleplaying experiences.

Anyway - those are my thoughts...What are yours?

Well, it's no secret I like the game a lot :D

Just the fact that you can have a traditional party that you can individually control makes the game so much better than the original IMO.

I've found the battles so far (and I'm not really that far) much more tactically challenging and interesting than the original. Those crazy docks thieves can take and give out a good beating, and those damned Ghasts with their stink and paralysis really gave me a hard time.

But that was really the one main thing that I didn't like about the original. At first you could only have one companion, and you had absolutely no control over them, including their equipment. At least in the expansions they improved on the companions a bit, but it was never very good since you had no direct control over them and AI is never great.

Oh, and the lack of a real party watered down the campaign in the original IMO since they had to make everything doable by any class.

Like I said - I didn't mean to imply I didn't like the game...I am having fun with it and the new tilesets are awesome!!

By the way - there's a spolier coming:
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Did two lizardmen burn down that woman's barn in your game? I'm wondering if I talked too long and made her put her guard down. Either way, that's easily been the funniest thing I've seen in the game!!!

Hehe! It happened to me too. I cracked up when I saw them happily run across the field with torches :D

That was one of those places that I wanted to be able to break the conversation and save the day. Anyway, it turns out to be critical to the plot, and there is no way to avoid it. That woman has a name by the way: Shandra Jerro.

And there are more funny things ahead. Turns out that NWN2 also has gnomes... ;)

Here's my take on NWN2. I think the story and the character interaction is drastically better than in NWN. It's still nowhere near the RPG that BG2 is but the banter is great. I played NWN2 multi and single player. I like single player better as the storyline is great and you and your party interact. As a RPG it is an improvement over NWN as you now have a PARTY that you control, which is more in line with traditional D&D, which is party based. I personally prefer party based games like the BG and IWD series, Torment, and Temple of Elemental Evil as I used to play PnP D&D. The graphics, ease of use, and character controls were better in NWN. I also don't like that you don't have portraits for your character like you do in NWN, BG series, and IWD series. This game seems to be a D&D version of KOTOR, which I'm not knocking, but I liked the character aspects from NWN better. That said, so far I am having a far greater time in the single player game of NWN2 than I ever did in NWN, largely due to the well developed NPC party members and the superior storyline. I think any RPG fan would enjoy this game.

I would say that the reason that hardly any one is talking about the game is that not everyone is rich enough to:
a) buy the game at full price on its initial release (many people only by second hand or discounted games)
b) buy the hyperspace capable computer required to play the game at any acceptable level of performance

Plus, the negative reviews posted by a several people here (like Catbert and Barmy Army) won't have helped increase the flood of people buying the game.

Hate to intrude, but I've another bit of speculation to add. Perhaps a reason why hardly anyone is talking about the game is because we're too busy PLAYING it :D

Give it a week or two when people such as I have finished the game, then expect some more chatter. Besides, if I've noticed one thing on the boards, its that many who defend the game once have to spend countless more times defending their positive opinion towards the game,' eh BTA? ;) , I think I'll wait for attitudes to cool down a bit and maybe for a few more patches before I comment overmuch. Anyway, back to my Druid\warpriest\neverwinter nine :cool:

Definitely ;) I almost stopped because I'd rather play the game than defend it, but then I saw quite a few people being swayed by the negative opinions and thought I should speak up since I liked it :)

Since nobody's talking about the game here, I've been hanging out at the BIO forums myself.
http://nwn2forums.bioware.com/forums/

It seems only BTA, Tal, Bombur, Catbert and I are talking about this game...Well, Harbourboy's talking, but he doesn't have it.I'm pretty sure I've chimed in with my opinion more than once.

Anyhow, NWN2 is a game that's just full of potential, but falls short in so many areas. Some of them are big issues, like machines that greatly exceed the miniums severely underperforming. Others are smaller issues, like defensive casting not turning on when you tell it to -- and thus your caster receiving a bunch of Attacks of Opportunity that he/she shouldn't have. Resting is silly. On core difficulty I can rest anywhere I want as often as I want, and no game time passes when I do so. So I could conceivably run into every battle with full hitpoints and unload every spell I have at my disposal (I think NWN 1 was similar in this regard). Companions can't die, so you can totally cheese your way through the game and exploit this. Early in the game companions are forced on you for some unknown reason. Apparently Obsidian thought their inter party banters were just too good to let players miss. And there is plenty more about the game that serves to aggravate.

That said, it's still a fun, entertaining game, and I think it will only improve with future patches. I encourage people to wait a few months for this one, make sure you have a fairly badar$e PC, and I think you'll have a good enough time playing through the game.

I give it a 6.5.

b) buy the hyperspace capable computer required to play the game at any acceptable level of performance I told you already in the other post: You don't need a super computer to play the game. Mine isn't, cost me about €900 and I can play the game with almost all feats on (just low on shadows) I'll post my pics when I get back from work.

Celesialraven is right, I spend my free time playing the game.

I bought the game when it came out two weeks ago and started playing it at once.

What were my expectations ?

I prefer to play SP with a party, loving the banter, romances and the tactical challenges.

Having played NWN and its modules a lot I didn't expect a BG3. But I was looking forward to something comparable or better than HotU.

What did I get so far, having now played as far as the end of act I ?

The OC story is ok for me. I usually play a good character and the story is tailored for this alignment.

The banter is good and occasionally very funny.
And the voice acting is very good most of the time.
Unfortunately, as I read on the forums, there are no romances to speak of.
And the dialogue options with your party memebers don't seem to change much during the progression of the game.

But the mission and combat design is not very imaginative. To often quality is replaced by quantity. And to fight one low level mob after the other is quite boring. Though playing on D&D hardcore level I haven't met any serious tactical challenge yet.
And it's not good for the logic of the story if you have to fight about 100 shadow thieves who are on a secret mission to capture a single person by stealth. And that is just one of many comparable examples.

The general management of you party members is better than in NWN (without the Henchman mod) but still lacking in comparison to BG2 or even Spell Force 2.
I don't like that party members are forced on you. This kills the feeling that you are developing your party yourself.
Furthermore it doesn't matter whether you take a NPC along on a mission. If she joins your party again later she has got the same number of XPs as the others. (Ok, that was the same in NWN.)

Or the automatic ressurection. It's convenient for sure. But I don't like it.

Nevertheless I can and will live with this things. For one campaign.

I have more problems with the mere technical aspects of the game:

The new graphics are good. But nothing special in comparison to other new games like Spellforce 2. Especially the animations are very poor occasionally.

Character creation was quite a disappointment. Not many options there. And most of them quite ugly. It's even a regression compared to NWN.

The UI is not good. NWN (and even IWD2) have much better interfaces.

The area map is insufficient. And there is no Fog of War !

And there are lot of bugs and unfinished elements.
The things which hamper me most are
- the bad camera and
- the abysmal AI of the NPCs.

I like to control my NPC's but I don't want to micromanage them all the time. But with this AI you have to, especially the spellcasters. (I didn't survive my first battle with Qara in my party because of friendly fire ;) )
And if you have to micromanage them you must be able to watch them all the time and find and access them very fast. But this is quite a challenge with this camera. And the UI.
It's impossible for me to play this game without using the pause function all the time.

Because of this I stopped playing the game for the moment - and therefore have time to post this message ;)
I hope to resume (or restart) the OC in one or two months when the major problems are fixed.

Resume:
NWN2 is an average game which was rushed. Or under severe budget restrictions.
If it is patched properly it even will be fun to play.
But it is not the game I hoped for.

The game is everything I had hoped for and even more. I would have bought it, regardless of reviews (Which only shows one person's view on it). I'm pleasantly surprised how much this reminds me of Baldur's Gate and I'm loving everything in it so far.

While the animations are mediocre at best, the rest of the engine with effects, shadows, models and landscapes surely makes up for it. I'm sure that this game will be the foundation for a lot of very beautiful and deep modules, like NWN was. I feel this is everything NWN was, with an added amount of BG and a few more whistles on top.

All in all, awesome.

Remember, the campaign is just a sneak peek to what is possible.

Yeah its barely in the play.com top-10. Some stupid football game is no.1 :rolls: I like the game and it does have a lot of potential.

The game only cost £25 in the UK so its hardly expensive.

I say give it a year, especialy if you dont have the minimum specs yet. Much like nwn1 this game is a bit rushed and while i find nwn2 story better then nwn1 (way better). this game has its true potential in playermade mods. And as pointed out, it needs a fair bit of patching.
if it gets the love of patching, i think all of you who cant yet run it or wont buy it yet, can look forward to a great game.

the reason i say this, is that when Nwn came out, i was much disapointed, because i ekspected a BG3 in many ways. the one henchman you could have in nwn OC and the lack of controls, put me off that game for a year. around the first expansion i picked up the game, patched it up and downloaded some modules i had got recommanded. And at that point i started loving nwn1.

What i looked forward to in nwn2 was the control over party members, the upped graphic ( i find nwn1 horrible to look at, allthough some modules do make part of it look great) and basically the potential in playermade mods, with this form of party control and graphic.

a lot of the critic i see falls on the OC. honestly, did any of you guys like nwn1 OC? because i found the adventure acadamy (WTF!) and the fact that you had no party what so ever, only a suicidal hencmhan of your choice way more disapointing. I have still not gone through nwn OC, because i get bored around chapter3. Secondly i found nwn1 OC pure hack'n'slash, where my lone warrior took down liches and the like, not becuase he was a great fighter but because he happened to be decked out in resistance gear. But even with a lousy OC, suicidel henchmen and so forth, players around the world managed to create some truely great modules, where i actually came to like the different henchmen (espacially in does mods, that modulated the controls over them)
The potential they show in NWN2 seems much greater, So i hope and believe that some truely epic modules will be created. and I for one, dont hate the OC in this game.

The OC in NWN was a demo of the engine, and that's about it. While I'll defend NWN to death (and own a couple copies of the game and both expansions), I still agree that the OC wasn't the most fun singleplayer experience. In multiplayer, it came aliver - even if you just replace your stupid henchman with a spielfreund.

The OC in NWN2 is all it's got, and even then it's 50% good at most. In my eyes the advantage of NWN's campaign was that it began on no premise, and you could start playing at any point and not miss anything. As MP hack-n-slash, it is sweet, just like a battleground for testing PvP character builds and the like.

And patches, patches, patches... Was KotOR2 ever patched to perfection (or at least playability)? No. Here we have the same developer, and to be honest, I wouldn't trust them with taking out my garbage, because they'll bring it back, and someone else's on top of it. I don't really see the point of patching this mediocre singleplayer contraption - unless they give me a 1.5gb core rebuild in a patch, it'll never gain half the features to put it above NWN.

I've been chiming in quite a bit I thought as well :p .

I completed the game sometime last week and was not overly dissappointed. The game is fun despite it's bugs, but the ending seems to have been voiced by a random programmer who was handed a script and immediately told to record :( .

As for speculation, besides patching bugs, fixing errors that let me talk to people that are in crossroad keep while I'm in Port Llast and the like, the only thing I'd really like is the BG2 type camera, where I can just grab my entire party and manipulate it at once. It makes things a billion times easier when the party isn't always trying to follow one guy, and when I'm able to see the entire party at the angel/position I choose.

As for the tactical challenges, I might just be too good at D&D rules and character creation for the game, 'cause at hardcore level, I find no battle challenging whatsoever. I charge in with my paladin or fighter or cleric and beat them all down with complete ease. Very few fights required me to use my party.

I've gone through all of NWN OC multiple times and I expect I'll do the same with NWN2. Never played Multiplayer 'cause I just found that there were no worthwhile mods or moderators.

Hm. Maybe I'm finding it more challenging because a Ranger doesn't have a great AC, but Kelghar was getting beat up by the dock thieves and Ghasts too. I think it's because there isn't treasure under every rock in this game, so everyone isn't outfitted with fancy gear yet. I remember all those DR belts in NWN1 :)

As for the tactical challenges, I might just be too good at D&D rules and character creation for the game, 'cause at hardcore level, I find no battle challenging whatsoever. I charge in with my paladin or fighter or cleric and beat them all down with complete ease. Very few fights required me to use my party.Well, sure it's easy if you don't use your party. Half the time they don't do anything useful, and the other half the time the actually do more damage to your side than the bad guys do. The party *is* the tactical challenge. ;)

I still think the negative comments outweigh the positive ones for me. The negative reviews point to very specific things that would definitely annoy me, whereas the positive ones just seem to relate to the fact that some people are more easy going and like a game despite its flaws. I will not be buying it any time soon, unless I hear people start to talk about how some patch or expansion has made it heaps better.

Harbourboy - You seem to like to play the original as a single-player game quite a bit. I can almost guarantee you'll like NWN2 better than the original as long as you have a computer that can run it well.

I can understand that you wouldn't want to upgrade your computer for this game (or any game really). But if you've got the necessary computer already, or are upgrading it anyway, I'm telling you you'd have fun with this game if you enjoyed the original as a single-player game.

Actually, I hate the original OC, but I like SoU and HotU. I like the gameplay in the expansions as well as the addition of prestige classes, reaching level 30, and the fixes introduced in all the patches.

I don't like the sound of:
- unkillable NPCs
- NPCs you are forced to take
- a dodgy inventory system
- camera angles that nobody seems to be able to work
- there being no possible way to be evil
- some of the performance issues

I meant the original game, not necessarily the OC.

The NPCs are killable, just not permanently. What exactly is the issue with that? You mentioned that you didn't want to kill off your companions...

As far as I know, you are forced to have companions in you party only until you reach Neverwinter. After that point, companions are merely accessible, you don't have to have any of them in your party.

What's dodgy about the inventory? Sure, everything takes only one slot. Is that really going to affect your enjoyment? Maybe; I don't know. But it barely registers on my annoyance scale.

Camera angles. I wish I understood the camera problem people are having. The default camera mode seems the same as in the original, except you are allowed more freedom in the angles you can set it to.

I believe you can be evil in the same way you can be evil in the official campaigns of the original. They weren't built around an evil plot either.

Performance issues. OK that can be a major show stopper, and I agree that you shouldn't buy a new computer just to play this game. But I wouldn't recommend you to do that for any game.

also...
- ridiculously idiotic AI
- underdeveloped party control alternative to AI
- no choice in NPC levels
- ctrl-c'd PrC features from NWN
- awkward animations

Neither last, nor the least

- gawd, I notice a ton of typos in the game text

Damn you people and your conflicting views! Maybe I will need to buy the game just to find out who is right and who is wrong!!

Borrow it from a friend instead.

I don't know anybody who has a computer anywhere remotely capable of playing the game, so no chance of borrowing it.

I'm going to build another computer Black Friday, when I can buy parts cheap. That comp should be able to run everything high graphics WITH shadows (right now I'm running it high grahpics with shadows on low and linear tracing). The game is good imo, it just needs a little work, I think it's worth waiting for a while though, there are already over 100MB's of patches to download.

I currently have a PC for sale, the specs are in one of the other threads and I'm asking for somewhere around $1,000.

Well, Harbourboy might be able to develop a personal affection for it because of the backstory. After all the protagonist is a "Harbor Man." ;)

the only thing I'd really like is the BG2 type camera, where I can just grab my entire party and manipulate it at once You can select the entire party at once (or only a couple of charaters) and move them like in BG? Then I don't really understand why people complain about controlling your party members.

a suicidal henchman of your choice :lol: that is pretty funny :) actually I did not find the NWN henchmen so bad, you just had to keep an eye on them, and make sure they do not run ahead of you and get clobbered. But with some buffs, the fighter-types (and Linu) were pretty resilient.

I am not buying the game right now because of the minor bugs, mostly. I hope these will be fixed in a couple of months. Otherwise, I sort of like what I hear, even when reading negative posts. Most of the people complain about things I do not care much about, like multiplayer issues, or not being able to roleplay a homicidal maniac :) And I like the idea of your party members being knocked unconscious; better than having them being dead and respawn at some temple. You still have to heal them after the battle, which I think is not cheap.

Actually, healing anyone after a battle is free and takes 5 seconds as long as there aren't enemys nearby. Healing someone during battle costs spells or potions; outside of battle all it takes is a rest.

You can select the entire party at once (or only a couple of charaters) and move them like in BG? Then I don't really understand why people complain about controlling your party members.You can't. That's kind of the point.

I'm really enjoying this game now, but Elanee is starting to annoy me - she shape changes at the drop of a hat, and I lose her spell abilities! Stoopid Doo-dads!

Turn off her use of special abilities in the AI, or right click on her when she's the active party member to select the command to change her back.

I've been using the right click - but I'll modify her behavior when I get home tonight!! By the way - is there a weapon/armor crafting table in Neverwinter? I've only found an alchemist's table so far.

Yes, in the Sunken Flagon Inn, there's a back room with all the tables you need.


Also, get the wild shape feat that allows spell casting while wild shaping. Forgot the name, but it's wonderful. I never liked Elanee 'til the very end where she could cast 9th level spells. Shape Change into an Iron Golem and power up with a level 8 version of righteous might and OH WOW FREIGHT TRAIN COMIN' THROUGH.

Thanks for the tip! She can change to an Iron Golem?!?!? That doesn't sound druidly to me.

I took my first level of Divine Champion last night to see how it is...So far, not much different from my pally...

Divine champion will boost your saves a lot and give you free useless feats (useless because they don't have enough feats in the game yet).

I was actually surprised how much stuff from the 2 expansions of NWN they didn't include. I wish they had included more PrCs, as well...

Ahhhh! Just found a recipe book for enchanting weapons up to +5! And the only spell needed is Light! I may just have to give Elanee the feat to enchant weapons and armor :)