I'm not usually one to plug games, but after playing nonstop from the afternoon to late night yesterday, I have to say that MotB is, as the title suggests, absolutely amazing. In many ways, it is reminiscient of the greatest RPG of all time: PS:T. I mean, even the opening's similiar. You wake up, injured, at some place, and some helper appears to guide you out of the place. Sound familiar?

Before we begin, the only thing I don't like is how high-levelled everything is. I mean, yeah, okay, epic blah blah, expected to finish NWN2 OC blah blah, but I'd much rather play this through with a low-levelled character. At high levels, everything just becomes hard to control and unnecessarily difficult. You can easily tone the scales down and have the story/challenges basically the same. Besides, the NWN2 OC doesn't really have to do with this anyway. I guess it's for the public audience. But anyways, onto the good stuff:

The detail in writing is great, and, again, reminds me of PS:T. The fact you could interact with everything (and get XP from it) reminds me of PS:T. Being able to look at pictures with several pages of description reminds me of PS:T. Being at a wacky location far from home with a crazy surreal setting reminds me of PS:T, and is certainly a refreshing change of place from the bread-and-butter D&D buffonery in the original NWN2 campaign - or even most IE games (okay, IWD and Athkatla were pretty cool). I mean, we've all been to the Underdark before in NWN2, BG2 and IWD2, but Rashemi? I daresay the only contact with Rashemi most of us have had was from Minsc and Dynaheir.

Speaking of NPCs, the joinable characters here are also great. I mean, tiefling rogues, dwarven fighters, elven druids - who'd have thought of that? Give me SPOILERS AHEAD MATEYS DON'T LOOK sexy polite Edwina, Cespenar, sarcastic hagspawn, Fall-From-Grace v2 and bear gods any day. OKAY DONE. The conversation you can have with them are great, and the fact you can power them up makes it much greater.

The voice actors are also vastly supreior. Neeshka made me want to punch her and Elanee was annoying...though Sand was alright. Yes, I haven't even got that far through the NWN2 OC and I'm already bored with it. Kaelyn the Dove's voice, in particular, is pretty nice, and I haven't heard anything quite like it in games. I'm also 99% sure that Kaji's voice actor = Cespenar. Can anyone confirm or deny?

Finally, thematically, the concepts here are great. Spirits? Wacky. Masks? Awesome. Shadow Mulsantir? Amazing (the portals thing again reminds me of PS:T). Spirit eaters? Give me that over githyanki swords anytime! Hell, I didn't even finish the NWN2 OC, but the fact that we've seeking "silver shards" and having githyanki chasing after me is a pretty big giveaway. Did they forget they already used it once in BG2? :p

Pretty much everything about this game is great. Humour, wackiness, good storylines, great characters, interaction, music...everything. This is Obsidian at their best. I hope more expansions in the same vein follow. Huzzah for Obsidian! Huzzah for PS:T! Yay!

(If anyone is interested, the spirit/god theme reminds me hugely of Princess Mononoke, a Japanese anime epic by Hayao Mizayaki (the Spirited Away guy), well worth a watch. In fact, please watch it. It's great.)

PS: I'm in act two now, and one dialogue option with Nadaj asks about a red-headed mage. Who does this refer to? Someone in the NWN2 campaign? Can anyone inform me?

I just installed MotB, after having it collect dust on the shelf for a few months. Hopefully it will be as good as you say :-).

However, after having played The Witcher, going back to D&D feels like eating cinnamon, especially when you have to start a high level game... So far I have not even managed to come up with a decent starting character. It will probably take a full day, trying different concepts, only to notice that you dislike what you finally came up with and have to start over all again.

I'm playing a sorcerer, and I find spells a little hard to manage, especially when there's so many to choose from. He has the PrC Eldritch Knight, which just means he can hit slightly harder than the average wizard. Not that great, really. Kind of wish I had gone completely sorcerer.

Advice: Cleave is utterly useless.

eldritch knight is more useful if you play a wizard, since you can have a wide variety of spells prepared, whereas sorcerer should take arcane scholar instead, it gives you more powerful metamagics

Good suggestion.

The dialog with Nadaj when you are informed of the burned trees, goes something like this:

"You didn't happen to see a red-haired sorceress with an anger management problem around?

It refers to Qara, one of the companions in NWN2 OC.

Well, I didn't find it absolutely amazing. Sorry.

A few of my complaints (minor spoilers): the whole spirit eater special powers thing, similar to the crappy special powers you got in the OC, was too video-gamey for me. I mean similar to something you'd find in a Japanese console RPG ("Power up! Combat formation! Form of: flaming tiger!").

The spirit hunger thing was just annoying. Replace "spirit" with "food." Okay. You've got to eat, y'know, food or your stats begin to drop and, eventually, you die. Realistic? Yes. Fun? No. Not for me anyway.

To make matters worse there are numerous puzzles and large, twisty mazes you have to traverse in the game. Walk 100 feet this way, pull a level. Now walk 100 feet the other way and fetch a pickle. Now take that pickle back to the first lever and give it to the old man... etc. All the while of course you're starving to death.

I admit I cheated and turned off the spirit hunger via a console cheat code. That allowed me to relax and take my time wandering through the world, reading the lengthy item descriptions, setting up my spellbook and just plain enjoying the game without fear of starving.

I am playing it right now, and it is faaaar from amazing. The NPC`s are very good though. They lift the game quite abit. Reminds me of kotor, kind of. But the menu-system and the controlls are very sucky. And there is an AMAZING amount of bugs in it. Companions gets stuck in dungeons all the time. And sometimes, they just won`t follow at all. they just stand there at the point of entry. This happened in the original campaign too, ruined my game. Happened after I met that paladin near Owls Wells. Helmets don\t show either. Is this fixed in the patch by the way? I bought a cool helmet for the dwarf, and it sucks that I can`t see how he looks in it. If games like these are what people consider amazing, then its the end of good games for sure. No offence.

personally i didn't find the characters particularly interesting or dialogue particularly deep. on the contrary, linear, predictable dialogue didn't make much of a roleplaying experience.

and then there is a lot of loopholes, for example safiya treats you just the same if you are a red wizard or not etc. the only honorable exception is the spirit shaman, whose dialogue left me puzzled on a few occasions, i wasn't entirely sure how to go about it.

Companions gets stuck in dungeons all the time. And sometimes, they just won`t follow at all.
the best way to prevent your characters from getting stuck, is to set ai to off and hotkey a "select all party memebers" button in the menu, and whenever they stop responding, just push the key and they should start following again.

bought a cool helmet for the dwarf, and it sucks that I can`t see how he looks in it. helmets were never supposed to be in, the reason is that the npc's use customizeable heads with non-generic sizes which would apparently cause clipping issues, and the designers were too lazy to make customized versions for each npc.

I'm with Deathmage; I thought NWN2:MotB was pret' amazing, too.

...EXCEPT for the endgame. I can't exactly say much without spoiling it for you, Deathmage, but I was quite annoyed that the most epic plane-smashing part of the main quest turned out to be...well, those who have played it through know what I mean. It was the sheer ambitiousness that kept me going through the game -- well, that and trying to impress our winged NPC -- and then it just kinda...well, you'll see.

Planescape: Torment still has this one beat, story-wise, but for a long while into the game, MotB gives it strong competition.

(And maybe I didn't mind the spirit-munching as much because I didn't play spellcasting classes; my LG Ranger fasted and LE Monk feasted, and in both cases the spirit-eating mechanic made the experience tougher but not less fun.)

I do not know if I will finish MotB, found it to be so-so it is the general game engine and I guess the fact that the game demands such high resources without delivering that sucks much of the fun out of the game for me. That and the fact that my character has seen no improvement powerwise since the end of the OC, playing a caster sucks, no feats, no new spells, barely any more spells and I doubt the fact that your spells get a slightly higher DC matter when all foes have saves in the 40s. I am about to wander around in the hag dreams but after yet another crash I got hooked on Oblivion (a vastly superior game which runs reasonably smooth on my machine and looking way better than NWN2 despite NWN2 barely starting on my rig and giving me a choppy laggy game experience) again after only going to check out the graphics on my new screen. NWN2 and MotB is a game that could have been so much better if they had actually finished development and not released such an unpolished product.

I admit I cheated and turned off the spirit hunger via a console cheat code. That allowed me to relax and take my time wandering through the world, reading the lengthy item descriptions, setting up my spellbook and just plain enjoying the game without fear of starving.

I'd say you pretty much ruined the game for yourself. I thought the spirit energy concept was the best thing about the game. Especially, since this game isn't very hard at all and the fact that the plot revolves around it. The only thing I ever found remotely challenging, from a gameplay perspective, was keeping the spirit energy high. Not only did it add challenge it added a tenseness and urgency of your quest that without it, would have made it just another semi-decent RPG.

(OH, and pause the game when you want to read something. Your spirit energy won't decline;))

I played a bit with the spirit hunger "on" and got the general idea. You summon a couple elementals and use your once-a-day suppress ability, rinse and repeat. Awesome.

Been playing MotB like crazy and I must agree. I was shocked to see how very, very intriguing this game is. It just... drives you forward. After playing the original NWN2, I could have never thought it would be like this. When I played, I, too, started to see Torment in it. The athmosphere, the dialogue, the manifold, intricate plot, everything. It's just great.

Truly, this has been one of the games I have genuinely, completely enjoyed.

the spirit meter was a mistake. So was the last fight.

so, hm, can you elaborate? how is the last fight a mistake?