Neverwinter nights 2 expansion.

S

Starwars

Mildly Dipped
So the expansion (Mask of the Betrayer) is about to be released. I know NWN2 wasn't exactly the hottest game ever, but I think Obsidian has done a great job supporting it, and quite frankly the expansion is one of very few games I'm currently looking forward to.

One of the community members got a chance to Q&A it, and wrote up a "review" of it. He wasn't able to spill the beans on any details, but he posted his impressions (and he seems quite honest and hypefree as well!) of it at the Obsidian boards.
http://forums.obsidianent.com/index.php?showtopic=47858

And here is a preview that was put up on the NWVault.
http://nwvault.ign.com/View.php?view=NWN2Articles.Detail&id=242

Nice of Obsidian to invite a bunch of the community people to the showing. They even let one of the bigger NWN2 mod teams show off their very promising Planescape mod called Purgatorio which is set for release a couple of months after the expansion. Might be of interest to people here as they have claimed Fallout as one of their biggest inspiration in terms different paths and so on. It certainly looks like a great game on its own though.
You can check out their stuff here.
http://www.planescapetrilogy.com/
 
Well I have a mixed feelings about this game, its graphics requirements are way to high to warrant it and on top of that some models are down right ugly. Story is so so, remains to be seen how the expansion turns out. Oh yeah buggy, sigh I do hope they test it out before they release it so that game stopper bugs wouldn't be in.
 
Well, with all the patches installed I haven't had much problems with bugs (though some of the D&D mechanics aren't working properly).

I agree with the performance issue. This is being improved in the 1.07 patch though. I'm running the beta at the moment, and I've gotten really quite big performance increases which is nice (though a bit late).

I think Obsidian realized that they "overshot the mark" with NWN2 (it would be much better if it had been compressed and cut down a bit if you ask me). From what I understand, the expansion has been pretty much finished since the start of the summer, and from then on they've pretty much been spending only bugfixing and polishing.

I really hope Obsidian gets it right this time. I enjoyed KOTOR2 and to a certain extent NWN2 (I think it's boatloads better than NWN1), but both games have felt unfinished, unpolished, and have had some questionable design decisions. I have faith in Obsidian though, there are some great people there.
 
I like both NWN, but I prefer NWN1 because MP is better (biggest modules, Linux support and tons of modules and dedicated servers), and it seems that this expansion is worth to buy it. There is not much RPG which allows to play in cooperative.
 
I got this game yesterday. Maybe the first time in gaming history that a game is released in the EU first, and US second? :P

Anyways, from what I see so far, it's an improvement over NWN2 in every aspect I can think of. One of the most pleasant things is that the difficulty has been turned up quite a lot, and some fights are actually quite fun now, and I've gotten my ass kicked a few times now.
I'm not a fan of realtime w pause, but this is much closer to how it should be done than in NWN2 and the KOTOR games. It reminds me of Baldurs Gate in some places.

Story also seems to be taking a turn for the better, much more personal and dark rather than the "you're the chosen one, now go kill the evil lord" of the NWN2 OC. It's not on a Planescape: Torment level (but then again, what is?), but I'm definetely enjoying it at the moment. Actually, there are a few similiarities to Torment here and there.

Companions are interesting, and I actually like the ones I've seen so far. They're not annoying like quite a few of them were in NWN2. The Influence system seen in KOTOR2 and NWN2 has been improved a lot, and is now approaching something which I consider enjoyable. If you gain influence with your companions, you'll gain feats that boost your stats (if you accept them). It's an abstract system. For example, one of your companions offers to teach you in the arcane arts, but you never actually see any teaching. But you get a +2 to INT and something else if you accept. A bit weird, but much, much better than... well, nothing.

I'm quite enjoying it so far, might be the best RPG for me personally in a few years (though that's not saying much).
 
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