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Hordes of the Underdark Goes Gold
MattW writes "Bioware announced that Hordes of the Underdark has gone gold. This is the second expansion pack for Neverwinter Nights, and the first to be developed in-house by Bioware. It's also the first CRPG to feature 3rd Edition epic levels. Looks like it will be fun. Some of the biggest requests from the custom content community are in, like custom talk-tables, that should allow for a much better level of customization for the game." I can't say enough good things about the Neverwinter Nights titles, but if this game is anything like the last couple, it's going to steal a lot of my time. I hope I manage to make it home for the holidays.
Well even though it took a l-o-n-g time for the Linux client to come out, it is a fun game. In fact it is the only game I play on a daily basis on my Linux system. Granted I have had moments of outrage to long delay's it is a great game, and I'm so happy to see the company still support the game and develop for it. This is a game that truly allows the end user and developers to continue the legacy as long as there is a demand. If they actually make a NWN II I hope they will concentrate on bring the Linux release up to par.
P.s. The gfx is pretty cool, not great but I don't play a game solely based on gfx, I need good playability and challenging tasks.
This SIG pulled due to lack of funding. (This damn war is costing too much!)
While I loved the idea of NWN, it didn't meet the expectations I had brewing for the four years of hype leading up to it. Surprised?
The endless customizations are awesome and it really is the closest thing to tabletop D&D. But it takes way too long to put together a quality module, on the order of hours of work:minutes of gameplay. The defenders will say "Yeah, but I, as the DM, can just roleplay the characters and other things I didn't have time to add." True, but you still can't match the open endedness of a PnP game, where all you need is your imagination.
Again, love the idea, but still waiting for something that truly replaces tabletop. This isn't it... yet.
Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.
There's a reason it seems that way. BG2 was expectation-shattering. I mean, BG1 was like: wow, this is a fun game, and nicely nonlinear.
BG2 was like: Wow, this is totally mind-numbingly amazing. It reproduced tons of fun kits, all the crazy spells like limited wish and contingency that we'd never seen in a game before, and the impossible hugeness of the game... you could play it 3 times and not find all the quests or read all the funny comments from the NPCs.
NWN, partially because of the huge success of BG2, had huge expectations attached. It definitely fell short, largely because the OC was just rather weak, partially because of a story that felt somehow mechanical, and partially because there were just too damn many chests... it literally slowed the game down.
Go back and play BG2 now though, and you'll realize without pause, its nearly impossible to control 1 character, let alone 6, and you'll find you REALLY want to rotate the screen around to see things from another angle... I find myself wanting to do that with ToEE all the time.
I would love to know how the sales compared to their expected sales... personally, I'd like to see them build on it. With a graphical update and a bunch of engine enhancements, NWN2 could be to NWN what BG2 was to BG. NWN already has a LOT of staying power: the City Of Doors and Dragonlance Adventures teams are producing projects far more impressive in scope than the OC, and containing more custom content than the first expansion pack. They've released custom modeling tools, creatures, and tilesets already. So there's actually a LOT of longevity left in the game -- because the biggest, best of the third-party projects are only going to start coming out now.