Has anyone tried this beta trash passed off as a complete product yet? Clunky interface and awful camera. I guess this is as much a warning as a thread to talk about the game. Don’t buy it until the main glaring bugs are fixed at which point it will probably only be like $19.99.
SHIT
Carry on.
Pretty graphics and an intriguing storyline mean jack shit if bugs, camera problems, and a clunky GUI prevent you from fully immersing yourself in the game.
What pisses me off even more is how the major gaming rags are downplaying said flaws and still awarding NWN2 8/10 or 90/100 or whatever. The interface problems are completely cast aside as if they don’t matter…
So I’m talkin’ to NWN 2, an’ it says to me, “Arac, I’m a pretty picture-usin’ version of an IRC D&D game. Only, the odds of you being able to play a Lizardfolks suck even more, since we’re not fucking making anything that is not core or a subrace thereof. Since the single player campaign is a piece of shit, you are essentially paying for a service wherein you get the D&D rules, strictly limited, and we use almost-cool graphics to imagine for you.”
What do DND rules and stats and tables do more or less than the current way RPGs work? I’m kinda confused about that.
How is NWN not single player?
I couldn’t stand Baldur’s Gate. I tried playing it a litle bit a long time ago. The only thing I rmember is “Batt keekeeng, far goo-dness!”. That was kinda cool though. I just didn’t see anything particularly special about BG I hadn’t seen before, except for it being boring.
D&D does “less” than a lot of other RPGs in that a whole bunch of its rules are hideously flawed and make no sense, and it has so many things that just fuck game balance like GWAR fucks everything in its path. It does “more” in how widely it, as a system, can be applied, modified, and used to fit almost any concept. Unlike your average CRPG, it has effectively boundless possibilties. NWN 2, essentially, takes a good number of the shitty rules and broken-ness from the “less” and absolutely nothing from the “more” of D&D, the way I see it. It’s a piece of garbage.
It does indeed have a single player mode. It would just, perhaps (by which I mean definitely) be better if it did not, so poorly plotted and executed the single player campaign is.
If Baldur’s Gate bored you, this will cause you real, physical pain.
Can you elaborate on each of those points? I don’t know enough about DND, BG and NWN to understand the meaning of everything you just said.
The weaknesses of D&D: D&D is based ona system called the d20 system, which bases almost everything on a twenty-sided die. If you equal or exceed the difficulty check of something with your roll (which you add bonuses to you based on your chacter in the usual RPG math fashion), you succeed, if you do not, you fail. Hohwever, 1 is auto-fail for many rolls, and 20 is auto-success. This means, theoretically, the most skillfull swordsman in the world has a 5% chance of missing a completely untrained, stupid, gigantic, unarmoured target. Additionally, there is a class that grants you immunity to the negative effects of any disease in the same supplemental book as a disease that grants a strength bonus every day, at the cost of other stats. But, oh, wait, nevermind, you don’t have to take that if you give your guy one level in cancer mage. In a year, your character would have a higher strength score than Thor does. There are a whole bunch of big holes like that in the rules, and then smaller ones (the Half-Dragon race, for instance, isn’t unfair on the same scale as the disease thing, but it’s pretty cheap, nonetheless). It’s got a lot of flaws in its rulesets that would benefit from someone not even playtesting them, but just thinking for more than three seconds before implementing in the book. There are a good number of things for which I cannot say I honestly believe that was done.
As for its unique features, take another RPG. Let’s just pick World of Warcraft, for example. You can play as an Orc, Troll, Undead, Tauren, Human, Night Elf, Gnome, or Dwarf. In the expansion pack, they’re adding a couple more, but otherwise, that’s it. You want to play as a Naga? Tough luck. Goblin? Same. In dungeons and dragons, you can play as just about any sentient race if your DM will allow it and you’re willing to do work in some cases. Many races that aren’t among the “core” races (the ones you can play as in NWN, pretty much) already have rules for playing them as characters. The ones that don’t are easy enough to figure out. As long as it’s not too powerful (there’s even a thing called ECL to guide you in equaling monster powers to character levels, but that gets really in depth in this explanation), and your DM thinks it fits and is willing to let it in, you can play it. Classes are similar, with the main classes available in one book, and other books having alternatives to them or further paths (called Prestige Classes) to narrow down your focus. Prestige Classes are a more ornate version of Talent paths in WoW, essentially. Instead of being a common Rogue, you focus your efforts to stealthy killing as an Assassin, or you gain some mystic power over shadows as a Shadowdancer. The possibilities are almost endless; there is a special prestige class for evil vampiric monks.
That’s what I really love about D&D, the fact that I can choose to play as a Lizardfolk if I want to, or that my power-mad wizard could dig up obscure magic paths (out of character, I look through bizarre supplements) to increase his own power to ridiculous levels.
In NWN2, many of the D&D ruleset problems, which are far too numerous to elaborate here and even get to sleep before school, probably, are still there, many racial imbalances (It’s not just elves and humans that often despise half-elves, it’s whoever made the rules for them at Wizards of the Coast, one joke goes, and it is not an udnerstatement), class imbalances (Clerics are unfairly good, wizards are just outright gamebreaking at high levels, and fighters are gimped beyond reasoning after level 10), and such. The most important, glaring negatives remain. The free-form roleplaying that makes those discrepancies and idiotic rules worthwhile is not; it’s narrowed down until you are no longer able to freely make a character of your imagination you’d like to play as much as you once were.
I agree with all you said, although I do tend to like the d20 system of 3rd edition. I have never played true pnp D&D, but I have played a whole lot of D&D games having MUDded for years and loving BG1/BG2/NWN. I don’t like to compare the two, pnp and video game, because the medium used forces some changes. The one thing that did bug me most about all those games except MUDding was the lack of creativity allowed like you said. I still have no clue why they did not allow you to easily edit and create new classes/races/feats in NWN.
NWN2 does a lot of what NWN did wrong and actually made worse some of the things NWN DID do right. The character animations are a joke and aren’t even in sync with the actual spell/skill. You will see some pathetic motion that looks more like a seizure and then a few seconds later magic missiles will appear out of his elbows. With the sound, I walk into a PRIVATE house and hear sound clips like I am in a crowded tavern. I think they literally have the same sound bytes for every indoor house. The mini-map gives barely any detail at all making finding your way a gigantic frusteration.
Personally I do like how they added some more D&D stuff for nwn2. I agree that it is not the most balanced thing. It is geared toward making the single player experience easier for all classes and to hell with pvp.
My problem with D&D is that it’s a suffocating, restrictive system meant for a type of game which encourages creativity and being able to do whatever you want.
Seriously. Wizard just is coming out with a million new base classes now that tickle some obscure gamer kink, because it’s really stupidly hard to properly customise a character to your liking using just feats and prestige classes.
I also loathe the spellcasting system with a passion but that’s neither here nor there.
I haven’t had any problems with NWN2 yet. Guess I’m lucky and not a prick
so you think the party ai/enemy ai/interface/camera/graphics/sound are all adequately designed and implemented? Game companies like Obsidian drool over gamers with low-expectations.
Indeed, they are to gaming what the people who don’t like punk but go to punk shows to pick us up because we’re easy are to the world of gaming.
I don’t have low expectations. I’m just not anal about little things that are quickly fixed or easily ignored. If you’re annoyed by the AI, learn to play the damn game more solo-effective. Possess your AI and send them into the fray, then switch back and stay back if you have to. It’s not hard to micromanage if you dislike the AI. The interface isn’t bad at all, I think. I have no technical problems at all. The game’s graphics run perfectly fine for me, and the sound doesn’t fuck up at all. The camera angles are a bit wonky with the ‘follow character’ setting, but a quick fix to that can be found on the official forum. There’s some option in one of the config files that needs to be set to one (Something about LockCameraAngle=1 or something). Honestly, it’s not like it’s so horrible that you can’t play it like it is while waiting for a patch to address the problems.
Well I’m glad the game works for you, but the consenus I get from the Internets is that is runs like total crap on most people’s machines.
But I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree. You clearly have no problem working around shoddy game design; I don’t. I’m so fed up with all these half-baked PC games making it to market. Battlefield2142, Sid Meier’s Railroads!, NWN2…all of them are bug-filled and run like shit. I mean how can you make a sequel that has a worse interface than the original!? I’m a huge proponent of voting with my dollars and refuse to support half-assedness in any product.
Because DnD nerds who take time to bitch about the fucking INTERFACE of a game are really going to let minor things get past their radars.
Try before you buy.
Last night I was playing some. I really am trying hard to like the game, but it is trying it’s hardest to convince me otherwise. I have tried messing with the party AI to find a setting that works, but can’t. I have the setting for “use items” set to OFF, but they STILL use their bloody potions to heal like 10hp.
I saw a corpse on the ground and went to open it. What sound clip do I hear? Maybe rustling of clothes or a morbid dead-bone crunch? NO, I get the default loot sound like I am opening and closing a chest! For a friggin’ corpse!
How can you get immersed in a game that constantly reminds you that you have to be the fixer and can’t even get sound files in the right places?
Yeah it’s not like an interface is important or anything. Good arguement there, Billy.
EDIT: I’m agreeing with Steve in what he says above, and his other posts. They’re not that big of problems in the game for the most part 
You guys are making it sound like the worst game you could think of playing, when its a decent game over all. Not the best. But it’s good.
I talked to you in the chat
Hypharse, you’re bitching about something that honestly shouldn’t ruin the goddamn game for you.