It’s a question that’s been nagging at me for a while now. However, this thread led me to actually start a thread to ask.
I know NWN has gotten lots of awards. I know people have waxed orgasmic about it. But I played it and I really hated it.
I’ll start off by admitting that I only played the single player. Maybe that’s where I missed out. I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking.
I seem to recall that you could only pick up one sidekick at a time. Plus, I think I could (wizard) pop out a familiar when I felt like it. Kind of annoying that it could appear and disappear in a puff of smoke, but I wasn’t going to bitch too much.
Then it was time for my wizard and his sidekick orc fighter to open a chest. I knew it was trapped. Not only did I know, but my character knew, too. A spell or ability or Spot Check or something told him that the chest was trapped. Now, I’m not always the sharpest cookie in the drawer, but I do know that the Big Burly Fighter has a much better chance of surviving whatever nastiness the trap represented than my 12HP wizard.
But I couldn’t get OrcGrunt McMeatShield to open the chest. It’s not that he wasn’t strong enough. It’s just that he couldn’t do it. Because I couldn’t directly control him. And there wasn’t any way to say, “Oh valued companion. One of us can survive opening this thing and one of us can’t. How about you do it?”.
So the wizard opens the chest. And the wizard dies. And the player gets disgusted and uninstalls the game. The player then gives the discs to a friend of his who had wanted to play the game.
Come to think of it, NWN is actually one of the reasons I don’t buy computer games all that much any more.
I was thrilled with the game when it first came out, but I can hardly muster excitement over it at this point. Maybe the next installment will be better, but the interface can be very clumsy, and multiplayer is extremely frustrating. It never captures the thrill of the infinity engine games.
I played NWN for a long time when it first came out. It just never seemed to end… and although I would solve little quests, etc… (I seem to remember some crazy guy, and some plague city, etc…), it seemed like I wasn’t getting any closer to the final goal, and yet I was something like 15th level.
I finally just got bored with it and quit playing it, to eventually lose it in a hard drive crash a year later.
Give me a game like Wasteland or Fallout where the main game isn’t super, super long!
Looks like you’ve only played the original game without the expansions. Neverwinter Nights by itself is kinda mediocre, especially the insipid campaign, but when you take the expansions and the thousands of mods and extra goodies you can get off the internet (or make yourself, the game’s toolset is one of its best features)into account the game becomes incredibly versatile. In fact, the only meaningful thing missing from the p&p are ridable mounts.
I first stopped playing it after finishing the original’s campaign once. It was, as I said, too insipid and simple for a game made by the creators of the Baldur’s Gate series. But after giving it another shot with the first expansion, whose story was much more entertaining and original, I still haven’t stopped playing it even after all these years.
The custom content created by the community adds immensely to the game. You can get anything from better models for items, to extra prestige classes and player races. There are also hundreds of fun and origianl adventures created by builders using the toolset, including some pretty faithful recreations of popular p&p modules. Bioware still adds to the game by putting out patches that add new items and monsters and even creates shorter campaigns you can download off their site (you gotta pay for those though).
Also, the problem you had with you henchman not opening the chest is fixed by talking to him and telling him to help you open a chest. However, henchmen only help out with that if you attempt to unlock it yourself first.
If it’s locked the trap will only be set off after you unlock and open it or if you try to bash it, not if you or the henchie use the unlock skill.
If you are a wizard or sorcerer you can take on a pixie as your familiar and it will automaticaly attempt unlock and difuse traps, it dies easily though but is good at those skills.
I wouldn’t count on it. Atari is going down fast, and NWN2 is probably going to a casualty of their desperate need for cash, right away. I expect a bug-ridden, half-finished mess like Temple of Elemental Evil. Support for NWN has already been a casualty as of last month.
But as for why the original game was so popular, it was largely down to the unbelievable amount of online material available for the game, and the flexibility added by the various expansions. The third expansion, which added epic-level content, had one of the cooler stories I’ve played in a CRPG. Not Fallout or Planescape: Torment quality, but still a cut above the rest.
To echo the previous responses in the thread, I’m told by my friends that love it that it was the game’s expandability and multiplayer components that made it so good.
Personally, I just thought it was a half-assed diablo clone with a dialogue tree system tacked on. It didn’t help that it had a recurring bug on certain windows 2k systems (such as mine) that made it nearly unplayable that Bioware never really figured out how to fix. If I’d actually bought the copy I had instead of borrowing it from a really patient friend, I’d probably be more angry about that situation than I was.
Another method you could have used was to stand back and shoot at the chest from a distance with a range weapon. A wizard would take a while to destroy a chest that way (less time if you use a combat spell instead of a weapon), but shooting it once will get your henchman mad at it, and the half-orc could usually bash open a chest in one blow.
And, of course, wizards get knock spells eventually, so chests are never a problem after that. Or you could have taken the halfling thief henchman, who would have disarmed the trap automatically as soon as he’d seen it, then picked the lock once you’d tried to open it.
But really, the love comes from NWN being so moddable. I never built anything myself, but I’ve played at least 30 new modules downloaded from the net. There are hundreds available.
It also allows play with multiple players and a DungeonMaster. Another feature I never used, but lots of people loved it. There really aren’t any other computer games that can simulate the tabletop RPG in that way, so NWN was it for those that wanted a feature like that.
on preview: Bummer about NWN2. That might actually have torn me away from City of Heroes.
I actually played it through and played a bunch of mods, but remember surprisingly little about it. My biggest complaint was that you never really got a party the way you did in Baldur’s Gate, so you were always missing something.
On the whole, I liked BG better as it had more interesting characters and some humor thrown in now and then.
I loved NWN to death. I only played all the way through the main plot once, but I’ve gone through Shadows of Undrentide several times and Hordes of the Underdark dozens of times. I never got into multiplayer with it, and the main attraction for me was being able to see the character develop and grow through the levels (I hadn’t, by that time, had any chance to play 3rd edition D&D, so this was new to me). Also, that progress was way faster than it would have been if I was playing in a PnP game.
Alas, it would not shock me to my core of NWN2 turned out to be a single-player DDO game. Le sigh. I’ll still buy it, if it’ll run on my machine.
For me, NWN suffered from bad timing. It was probably the next RPG I picked up after the BGII expansion, and it left me flat. I was amazed at the graphics, but the gameplay and story weren’t a fraction as good.
If I had started it later, when the mods and expansions were available, I might have been won over. As it is, I never bothered with it again.
NWN on its own is probably a B+ or so. It’s pretty well done but not exceptionally so, and not really any better than the Baldur’s Gate games (which I’ve always thought were a bit overrated, but that’s a different conversation) or a number of others.
With the expansions, though (epic levels and prestige classes, two campaigns that were superior to the original, and a bunch of other things), and the sheer amount of stuff that the user community was able to do with the game, though, this became a game that you could play literally FOREVER. There’s just so much different stuff that you can do and play through, even not taking the multiplayer into account. Once you DO include the multiplayer, which is extremely well implemented and a ton of fun with even more of that user-created stuff, NWN moves solidly into the absolute top level of games that have been released in the last several years. Especially given the rather insipid non-MMO offerings that we’ve seen on the PC recently, particularly in the RPG genre.
(I do have to say, though - I HATE the way that the D&D system deals with caster-types. Hate hate hate it. For all that the nebulous concepts of “mana” and “energy” that everyone else uses are often mocked… they work WAY better as a gameplay mechanism than the whole spells-per-day system. Especially in NWN, where the effective result is “rest after every fight if needed”. As someone whose first inclination is always to play the biggest direct damage caster possible, this hurts a bit. Though I’ve had quite a bit of fun playing rogues, weapon masters, and any number of other classes in NWN.)
Also, I’m with the general consensus re: NWN2. Certainly hopeful, but not really expecting much at this point
As I understood it, the NWN2 was slated to be hammered out by the same bang-up team that did Knights of the Old Republic 2. whose chief thrill was provoking sweet, sweet memories of the original Knight of the Old Republic. I thought, well, maybe if they weren’t so rushed. But alas, it looks like that’s not going to happen.
Another complaint I have about Neverwinter Nights is that there’s nobody to pickpocket. I obsessively pickpocket in any game that allows it, but I can tell you with a good margin of certainty that nobody in the original single player campaign had anything in their pockets. Why have the skill then, assholes?
Honestly, even with good content, after a while I got turned off anytime I even thought about using that focacta interface.
NWN + expansions was superb imo. NWN online in any of the 100’s of realms that were setup was even better. No fees, and I got to DM on my friends site. Pretty much wound down now but gives you an idea of some of the things people were doing with the NWN engine.
The sheer amount of tools available to DM was staggering and great fun could be had making up quests on the fly. I hope NWN2 is a worthy successor but I fear…
The henchmen AI sucks, and the original campaign was not that fun, but some of the modules out there are unbelievable. Modules were the only reason I bought SoU, and the only reason I’m considering buying HotU.
I keep seeing NWN2 getting bashed… was there something released recently that I missed that destroyed everyone’s hopes for it? I loved playing the NWN expansions with my friends and was looking forward to NWN2.
For me and my group, the attraction of NWN was taking the D&D books and rules lawyering away from the table. That alone destoyed more game campaigns than I can remember.
I’m gathering a small but steadily growing regular playing base, and I use multiple Persisitent World campaigns on my server. I never got into the single-player mode; I always intended to take D&D to the computer when I was studying CompSci and playing too much D&D in college. This has been the answering of a dream for me.
If anyone successfully gathers a NWN group of Dopers, I’m in. I can’t get enough interest by myself to get started, but once we do I’m very experienced at the DM side of things.
Hijacking the thread slightly just to establish my geek cred for the week…
For anyone who has ever wondered where the frak the D&D spell system came from, it is a direct lift from Jack Vance’s Dying Earth series of stories. Even some of the spell names come directly from there. I always wondered why Vance never sued them like the Tolkein estate did.
(And I have no idea why Arneson and Gygax went with the Dying Earth system because you’re right; it’s not a very good game mechanism.)
