I haven’t found out how to work the MP, sadly. But that’s probably due to me being stupid. Or something.
Anyone give me a tutorial on joining a game via the GameSpy Arcade? Please? 
It can be, but it’s not limited to that. You can start a game with the supplied modules (including the single-player game) or any user-created modules. It ships with a pretty full-featured toolset to create your own modules and create your own game. And it also ships with a “DM Client” so you could have one person acting as dungeon master during the session instead of having to rely only on scripted behavior.
It’s pretty much the same as Diablo II. You control one character. That character can hire a mercenary who’s AI controlled with high-level commands like “guard me,” “heal me,” etc. And if your character is a magic-user, he can summon an animal to act as a familiar. So a max of 3 characters in your “party”, one of which you control directly.
Thanks for the reply, SolGrundy
The bug is that sometimes you can’t get the creature in the prison like you are supposed to. They still haven’t pinned down the cause.
I bought Neverwinter Nights from Best Buy and the first thing I noticed was the price tag. Not the price but inventory code which I read as “neverwinning”. I haven’t installed the game because I’m still playing Dungeon Siege. My party has Kroduk, Gyorn, Ulora, Naidi, Lorun, Zed, and a mule. We should be meeting Merik soon but I doubt I’ll take in another mage.
[Hanging jaw. Drooling. Eyes watering]
Ohhhhh, goodness. I’ve been waiting for this game to come out. I knew it was going to be cool, but … [screeches in child-like amusement]
Ack!! I want it I want it I want it!!! If only our computer wasn’t effed up and I wasn’t broke!!!
Oooohhhh! The humanity!!!
“I love Neverwinter Nights . I don’t know what the hell is wrong with us, as Batjew, Monkey, Pork, and myself played it until three-thirty in the fucking morning, which was very poor planning on my part and I do apologize for it. In my defense, rabid dogs and wild-eyed mongrels had recently overrun the Blacklake district, and they sure as shit weren’t going to throw shurikens at themselves.”
– Tycho, from www.penny-arcade.com
What’s dialogue like in the game? What I liked about all the Black Isle games as opposed to Biowares was the dialogue trees. Are they as basic and cut/paste as the Baldur’s gate ones or are they as involved and personable as Black Isles?
Also, are the quests all combat centric or are there thieving ones and diplomatic ones as well?
These are questions I haven’t seen addressed in any reviews either :(.
(I really do like BG2 and this isn’t bashing it in any way, I just prefer the writing that’s in Torment and Icewind Dale).
Well, its mostly combat centered in the included module yes. But there are plenty of times when diplomatic skills come in handy. I’m playing a paladin with a very high charisma and persuade skill, and I can talk just about anyone into just about anything. I’ve gotten Aribeth to open up to me, I’ve convinced guards that I was a guest of the person I needed to kill, I’ve stopped fights, I’ve gotten people to tell me important facts they wouldn’t otherwise, its great! And if you really want a much less combat oriented game, you can just use the Aurora toolset to make your own, or use the DM function to take out a lot of the monsters and add in more NPCs on the fly as you play. The amount of flexibility this game gives you is amazing.
Oh man, I want it I want it I want it!
(Though I doubt it will run on my PC…however, I am getting a new one this fall! (and by then I might have the spare money to buy it.)
Of course, I am horrible at finishing games. I start, get so far, then stop. Very odd. I still have to finish Baldur’s Gate…then Baldur’s Gate 2.
Wait … games have endings? Wow. Here I thought modern games just didn’t end.
I’m so bad with finishing videogames … mostly because I’m just bad at them. Last thing I actually beat was, I think, Star Fox back in '96.
I think I might have beaten it on the medium level, but I doubt it.
I read that there’s a cap at level 20. What, exactly, do you do when you reach that cap? Restart with another character? Keep playing other modules? In other words, do you ever reach a point where you just say, “Well, nothing left to do here. Time for a new game.”
I’ve been playing it off and on since I got it. It’s pretty great (especially the purty, purty shadows).
The game ends when you end the quests, not when you reach level 20. It’s just that you don’t get more powerful past level 20.
In fact, the power-level of the game seems to be a problem. I just finished chapter 1, and the last bit of stuff I did in the chapter was really easy. The gamespot review mentions that if you do all the sidequests in the game, it stops being a challenge, because you’re a higher level than the game is expecting. And given the sort of obsessive gameplayer I am, I’ll probably do every side quest I can find.
Fortunately, you can up the difficulty level on the fly, either through the game control panel or through dismissing your henchman. I may end up doing that.
Daniel
aka Henri de la Glaciere, French Bard
Nanook of the North Shore wrote:
Top ten things you’ll never hear in a D&D game:
…
- Oh, my paladin would never do that!
El Hubbo bought it on Sunday.
Last night, I started up my half-orc barbarian biznatch with +5 strength modifier. She ain’t too smart, but she whoops ASS.
Now I gotta figure out a way to convince him to buy me a copy of the damn thing for my own PC…
I’ve been looking at the screenshots at gamespot and this one is the best one I’ve seen so far.
[url=“http://gamespot.com/gamespot/filters/products/screens/0,11105,188666,00.html?page=378”]Isn’t a good troll an oxymoron?"/url]
Neverwinter Vault appears to be a good source for modules.
I found an pretty bald-faced Tom Waits reference in NWN:
Black Rider Quill
Black Rider Quills take their name from a celebrated epic repeated in any bardic college worth its salt. The subject of the talk is dark, encouraging one to “dance around in your bones,” but it is referenced here solely to stimulate the muse. These blades were likely forged in tribute, and were probably not present for the events of the original story. It is not known if they were comissioned together or individually.
Base Damage: 1d6
Base Critical Threat: 18-20/x2
Base Damage Type: Piercing
Weapon Size: Medium
Feats Required: Martial, Rogue, or Elf
Base Item: Rapier
Weight: 3.0
Special Properties:
Enhancement Bonus: +1
Skill Bonus: Lore +4
Skill Bonus Perform +4
(In fact, 'Taint No Sin (dance around in your bones) was not original to The Black Rider, but was an old Tin Pan Alley song that was actually pretty cheery the way it was intended to be sung.)
I’ve had the game for a while now (actually my wife got it for her birthday) and I have been playing with the tools for making modules. It took me a bit to get used to them, but now I can make fairly decent little adventures. I’m working on a module where you are shipwrecked on an island. There is a 16x16 overland map of the island and three 8x8 dungeons (although one of them is really just a big room with some merchants in it). So far I am able to link maps, create scalable encounters tied to different parts of the map, place treasure, and make NPCs capable of holding simple conversations. I have been able to do this in just a couple of hours and although it’s not finished yet it’s playable.
I hosted a game as a DM on a small dungeon I created before my current module, a simple dungeon crawl to get used to the controls. The DM controls have a LOT of menu options but that’s necessary, and it seems logically laid out. I didn’t need help figuring out how to place encounters, individual monsters, and treasure on the fly, and it’s easy to take over NPCs and talk through them.
So far multiplayer has been a bit lacking - servers are either running one of the chapters from the SP game or some simple barely stocked custom map. I’m hoping this will improve and I’m sure it will, my custom module is better than anything I’ve seen yet.