Especially if you start cleaning up disk space while you are waiting and, in the process, delete the 87.2 MB file after it has been downloaded and half-way applied. I don’t want to tell on who did that, let’s just call them Cave M. . No, that’s too obvious, let’s call them C.Mike.
I found it through the Something Awful forums. Comparing the physical manual to the one online, though, I’m not 100% positive it was posted legally.
We just got into the game, haven’t even left the tutorial area, but we’re already having fun. We had a few glitches getting started, not least of which was accidentally ending up with a DVD-ROM and a CD-ROM version instead of 2 DVD-ROM versions. So we had to stop Lost about every 5-10 minutes to put the next disc in. Then my husband had to clear off an extra 7 GB from his hard drive after clearing off the first 7 in order to be able to patch the game.
I’m playing a strongheart halfling rogue 1/illusionist 1, working toward the arcane trickster prestige class. He’s playing a dwarven fighter, working toward the dwarven defender prestige class. In my single player game, I’m playing a sun elf conjurer.
So far, we’ve not found multiplayer to be a big hindrance. It still forces you to wait on the other person during important dialogue exchanges, but since we’re in the same room and can tell each other to wait, it’s not a huge problem for us. I like that we can both control the two NPCs in the party.
In that case, I’ll just wait until I have my copy of the game (hopefully today). Thanks, though.
Any answer to my question above (post #13) or are y’all gonna make me buy the game to find out?
I think Bully is my next game after I finish Valkyrie Profile 2, then NWN2 or Final Fantasy XII, I haven’t decided for sure yet.
I haven’t played enough to know, yet, Jayrot.
Those of you who’ve picked it up, how’s it running for you? My friend has an absolutely screamin’ machine, and it’s got such a low framerate that it’s unplayable. Apparently a lot of other people are having the same problem over on the official forums.
So far the game is working fine for me, framerate-wise, though I may have to restart a quest because I didn’t download the patch that fixed my issue with it 
The quests have improved, by the way, and so far my only true complaints are the long zoning time and the awkward camera.
Runs fine on my hp zd8000+ laptop, haven’t tried highest graphic settins tho, still looks sweet and am loving it.
I picked up my copy today, and played it for a bit. It runs well, but not totally smoothly on my machine; I have an nVidia GeForce 7800 GT video card, for the record.
So far, I’m really diggin’ this game. It feels a lot like, well, a sequel to Neverwinter Nights. It has better graphics, more character options, better controls (so far), and so forth. I approve.
I have the same machine. It seems a bit sluggish on my machine at 1440x900. Is that the resolution that you are using?
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Jayrot, I haven’t gotten very far, but there seem to be fewer transitions and the scenes are larger. As was mentioned, the load times are a bit slower.
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I like the new version a lot. The graphics are much better - both in quality and in styling. I always thought the original graphics were a little too cartoonish.
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The main module is a lot better. It is a bit more serious without the tongue-in-cheek stuff or the anachronisms. So far, it has been fairly linear – you only have a few quests and as you complete one there is a scene-cut. For normal modules, I prefer the open-ended style, but for the built-in modules with dialog and scene-cuts, this style works.
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The UI has some cool improvements. I didn’t like how the radial menu was blended with the backgroud because it was hard to read. They eliminated the blending and replaced the radial with a list. The list will take some getting used to. Other dialog boxes (like examine) are colored lighter so they are easier to read. There are 10 quick-menus that you can rotate through and they have 12 slots each. The quick-menu that is showing is mapped to 0-9, ‘-’, and ‘=’. At first I thought the inventory was much smaller, but it is actually bigger since they made every item use one square. This should eliminate a lot of shuffling and annoyance. The various dialogs are floating and can be hidden and moved.
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Keymaps can’t be changed in-game. And I couldn’t find the quick save (F12) until I looked in the back of the manual.
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NPCs and companions in your party work differently. You can basically select anyone in your party and take full control of them. I think, in the last one, you could do this for familiars, but never NPCs. Supposedly your interactions with NPCs will build influence with them. You can use to convince them to do what you want. I haven’t gotten far enough to see this.
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Crafting looks like it is better designed. The random rolls are eliminated and I believe it can only be done at a work-bench.
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Supposedly you can get a base of operations with a work-bench. You can leave NPCs there, etc. I haven’t gotten far enough to see this. I am not sure if this is the same as the last game (with a module starting point – usually an inn) or if it is something more persistent.
BTW, I think there was a 1.02 already yesterday.
So far, wow. Way better than the original. I mean, I played all the way through the original, and one of the add-ons (I bought both), but I just got really frustrated by the lack of control, the difficulty of operating the camera to see what was going on, the tediousness of taking advantage of any strategy.
The camera is still a bitch to deal with. I tend to stick to driving mode when I’m not in combat, but it makes me click where I want to go because apparently I can’t turn fewer than sixty degrees using the keyboard.
But the fact that I can now control my companions substantially improves both the playability and the fun of the game. I set up my AI so that they can choose attacks if I leave them alone, but they won’t blow spells or items. Then I can pause at any time and issue orders, like with the Infinity Engine games. Except, of course, that I don’t have the autopause options so I can redirect them as soon as they’ve killed an opponent. Still, companions are no longer random elements that you hope will soak up enough damage to be worth how they get in the way.
Now you don’t have to play a rogue if you want to scout. You can take control of your companion and set everyone else to stay way the hell back. I wish I could set them to stay put until I instruct them, but still it’s a lot better than NWN1 in which an NPC rogue would run ahead and disarm any trap detected even if that would trigger an enemy, and you couldn’t get the fighter not to run through the trap into the fray even while the rogue was trying to disarm it. I wonder who at Bioware decided that it would be fun to have no control over these knuckleheads until we bought a couple of extra supplements, and then we only had the power to set broad parameters. Did they find this a gas, they who designed the Baldur’s Gate engine? Who thought that was fun?
The radial menu is gone. It seemed like a neat idea at first, but it turned out that it was tedious and overcomplicated. Now if I need to cast a spell, I hit ‘F’ to bring up the current character’s spell menu. There are no emotes, and I wish I could hotkey AI commands, but the interface is vastly improved now.
Pickpocketing works! I invested in Pickpocketing all through the first NWN. I like picking pockets. I can spend hours running around town picking everyone’s pockets (reloading in case of catastrophe). I can tell you that nobody in the original NWN had anything in their pockets. Oh, but many barrels had healing potions in them. Fuck-heads! But now you can rob people blind. You get 20-30 gp per try. This will substantially increase the playable hours of the game for me. I have my bard pumped up with Sleight of Hand and singing the competence song. I am on the whiz! Hooray for this game not sucking.
I’m not having any trouble with my hardware running this game, possibly because I had beefed my system up at the beginning of summer to handle Oblivion.
Excellent point about using your NPC rogue as a scout. In NWN1 the rogue NPCs were just handy chest-unlockers and that was about it. It seemed rare that they found traps before I did. Most of the time it was easier to skip the rogue and just bash the chests and walk around the traps.
You should be able to make your NPCs stay-put; just command them to “Stand your ground”. It worked on NWN1 and I think it is still available on NWN2.
One other nice thing about the new graphics is that terrain supports elevation, so you can create hills and kettles. I started messing around with the toolset and the functionality seems very similar to the original – although the toolset itself appears to have been improved a lot.
Crap. I may have to upgrade, and I just got my computer remade. I didn’t think about changing the resolution. It…looked…nice. You know, from the first bit of walking around in the tutorial house.
Yeah, the box is sitting there…staring at me…daring me to play it.
If my computer can’t take it (which shouldn’t be true) I may have to throw a hissy fit.
FYI, for those who hate always having to control the movement/camera with the mouse. If you open up your nwnplayer.ini file (found in the My Documents\Neverwinter Nights 2\ folder) and set “CameraFollowAlways” to 1, the camera will swivel when you turn using the keyboard controls.
This made a HUGE difference for my play… I was really hating the movement controls.
Curses. I have to upgrade.
This makes me very sad in the pants.
I’ve got an AMD Sempron 3000+ processor at 1.8 GhZ. Is this enough to run this game, or is this the culprit?
Obviously, I can’t tell.
You could try using this site. I don’t know how accurate it is, but I found it recently and used it to check if NWN2 would work for me. It said it would, and was correct.
FRAPS reports that I’m getting some 20 frames, but it looks fairly smooth to me. This is at 1280xSomething (I needed more resolution so’s I could keep the map open while I was trying to move around. It doesn’t look jerky at all, but that seems like an awfully low framerate. Mind you, cinema is some 24 frames per, so it’s not that shabby.
Huh. My video card is the problem. Here I was thinking that I was all set for that for a while still. Rats. Now I’ve gotta figure out what to get.