Slashdot Mirror
Neverwinter Nights 2 Expansion Announced
Next Generation is reporting Atari's announcement of an expansion for Neverwinter Nights 2 entitled Mask of the Betrayer. "Mask of the Betrayer will put players back into the Forgotten Realms (of Dungeons & Dragons fame) shortly after the events of the original Neverwinter Nights 2. The expansion will incorporate a new campaign, more feats and spells, races, weapons, monsters and enhanced modding tools, among other new features. Developer Obsidian Entertainment, the same studio behind the original Neverwinter Nights 2 and 2004's Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords, will be handling development of Mask of the Betrayer."
.. is an add on to Obsidian's Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2 that actually fills in all the missing stuff and stops it looking like a rush job. If it can be done for Fable, it can sure as hell be done for KOTOR 2.
I found the original NWN campaign fairly bog standard, but the expansions took it into a weirder direction. The same with the NWN2 storyline (another village under attack by some mysterious evil force? Come on!). I'm hoping they'll dare take it into a more interesting direction with the expansions this time around too.
Reading the outline too quickly, I found this bit of news quite shocking:
'The Sith Lords will be handling development of Mask of the Betrayer.'
... is the expansion to make the game playable by people with less-than-bleeding-edge video cards.
We paid to upgrade two of our computers, in order to improve the experience with NWN2, and found it was only marginally less jerky. What we saw was impressive, but we don't think that having to buy 2 $200 video cards in order to play 2 $50 games was a Good Idea.
Strike while the irony is hot! -- The Freethinker
I really hope this one has a more interesting ending than "some building collapsed on you."
Ok, I really quite liked NWN2, once I'd applied the 1.03 patch to fix the most vicious of the bugs and interface problems. The engine wasn't the greatest, but the writing and general feel of the game was excellent. So, a few things I'd like from an expansion:
- More customisability for non-PC party members. It kinda sucked just being stuck without any flexibility in their class-level choices and meant that you couldn't really experiment with different prestige classes in the main campaign unless you actually did multiple playthroughs.
- More tilesets. NWN2 suffered from the same problem as NWN1 here... it relied on the same few tilesets to make up the vast majority of its locations. I say to hell with the toolkit for once - give us some decent looking unique locations in the main campaign. This added a lot of atmosphere in BG2 and it needs to be done again.
- Better rounded party interactions. Don't get me wrong, I liked the fact that NWN2 brought back a lot of the kind of dialogue we remembered from BG2 and missed from NWN1, but it didn't go far enough. Most of the dialogue trees in the game seemed to be focussed on just a few of the characters. Other characters never really got developed much at all.
- More "political" sections to the plot. Combat's fun, but so's politicking your way through the cities.
- Continue to throw in the planar elements from the plot of the main campaign. I enjoyed these a lot. The Forgotten Realms setting on its own can get a little stale. Mixing in elements of the Planescape world in NWN2 added a lot to it, in my experience, and this could be expanded further.
- Give us a proper ending this time. Oh come on, were you even trying last time?
- Epic levels? I can take 'em or leave 'em. It would be nice if they were there, I guess, but don't go building an entire expansion around them.
. . . are they going to add support for epic levels? Once I got epic levels in NWN, there was no going back for me.
Admittedly this is a bit of self-promotion, but the first module of the Dark Waters campaign should be posted on the Vault tomorrow. It has lots of custom content, voice acting, scripting system, and hopefully a fun little storyline. For people impatient for the expansion, this might tide them over.
If they fix the pathing problems, I'll send every developer a chocolate kiss.
... a Linux port than an expansion.
:wq
I wouldn't touch this game with less than a 7900GT. I have one and there are things that I had to turn down to make the outdoor scenes workable. SLI isn't going to get you much here.
I haven't turned it on in months - between the horrific performance and the plethora of bugs (plus friends having the game crash in Act 2/Act 3), I figured I'd wait until it was stablized, then start playing.
So is it playable, or are they just trying to get more money from us for an unpatched game?
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
Obsidian has a well deserved reputation for taking good Bioware games and making crappy sequels that look and feel rushed. NWN is a great game, NWN2 on the other hand is crap. The story is crap, the engine is crap, and it's held together with crap. It's like what they did to KoTOR (ie KoTOR2), but on a grander scale. I was very excited about NWN2, I pre-ordered the collectors edition as soon as it was available for pre-order, I convinced my friends to get it, we got all setup to have a lan party on it's release...and it was a no-go. I, as well as every one of the people involved have awesome computers. They are specifically designed for gaming with all of the best parts available at any given time...and the engine ran like crap, and crashed often. It uses a ton more resources than Oblivion in order to not look 1/10th as good. We had to give up on our lan party because the game was simply unplayable on a few of the machines (and we're talking brand new dual core athlon FX's, dual 7950GX2's, 4GB ram, machines that should have no trouble running this game (and have no trouble running other games)). Despite this, I soldiered on and played through the entire game within a week, hoping against hope to find some redeeming quality...and there simply weren't any. Upon finishing the game, and experiencing the extremely lame ending, I fired up the editor...and crap. The editor is not as good as the original NWN editor. I had to find plugins just to get the same functionality I had in the original, and still it wasn't as good. I tried so hard to like this game, mostly because I loved the first one, but as with KoTOR, Obsidian severely dropped the ball. I'm surprised they're even bothering with an expansion... I'll probably end up getting it because I'm insane and still holding out hope for a good NWN sequel, but this time I will not make the mistake of recommending it to anyone else.
Frag 'em all...
Even though it looked cartoony?
People love cartoony in video games. And it was fast and simple. NWN2 is neither.
Instead we got the same - a graphical engine improvement over NWN, worse writing, more cliches, abysmal artwork (has there ever been a fantasy game with armor as ugly as NWN2?) and no actual functional improvement. Targeting was worse, pathing was worse, areas felt smaller, and the story - argh! Companions were either tedious or worthless (and the romance options just horrible - which are the least-interesting stock characters - yeah, let's use those two) and the story was just an excuse to go from one fight sequence to another and plenty of boss fights cheated within the D&D rules. Anyone remember the Bandit Camp? If you played NWN2, of course you did! Asinine. The entire game felt like a nakedly-arbitrary collections of fight-scenes, increasingly with the rules changed just to keep them from being boring. And then, at the end... nothing! Rather than frustrated that a good time was sabotaged by a lame ending, you realized the destination was as tedious as the journey - a total waste of time all around. And the toolset was so much harder to use that the one real strength of NWN - community content - was needlessly made so much harder and rarer. The game felt like it was made by people that tolerated the D7D rules only when they had to, only guessed at why NWN was successful at all, and thought that people still wanted to play with 15-year-old cliched boss battle rules that have never, until now, had anything to do with D&D. And now they are making a sequel, and will be shocked when so few people buy it, I suppose.
when i first saw this come out, i saw people with 8800's whining about framerate and choppiness... once i played it, i immediately decided that these claims were hogwash. am i to believe that everyone with a step below the cream of the crop hardware (and complaining about jerky game-play) is running above 1600x1200? have you people with issues made sure that there isn't a host of other crud running in the background and that all drivers are up-to-date? with a $200 gpu, your game should look excellent and play well. my housemate has a 3800+, 2gb ram and a 7800gt... he doesn't play anything at less than 1600x1200 and says his game runs excellently. in my opinion, this is one of the best times to be playing computer games; gpu's are at great prices for superb performance and cpu's keep going down in cost.
for reference, i have a c2d 6300 @ 2.33, 2gb ram and run xp pro
It's amazing how different you can experience a game... I loved it! I respect that it might not lived up to all your expectations, but some things you say I think are a bit unjustified:
, worse writing, more cliches
Than the paper thin NWN1 original compaign, which was more of a demo of what you could do with the toolset? Really?
no actual functional improvement
Now that is BS... How about having a real party again like in BG2, with up to....I think it was 6 (?) controllable characters in the party, rather than the single NWN1 henchman which you couldn't control and kept running into enemies and getting killed. Or the strategic minigame of rebuilding the keep and recruiting people to it...
Companions were either tedious or worthless (and the romance options just horrible - which are the least-interesting stock characters - yeah, let's use those two)
Do you know you have uncovered all the subquests and all the dialogue for them? I do agree that Casavir was pretty wooden though... Sand, Bishop or even Khelgar or the Warlock would have made more interesting male romances.
, and will be shocked when so few people buy it, I suppose.
We shall see. At NWVault, the people so say they will buy the expansion outnumber the ones who don't by around 10-1.
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
and no actual functional improvement
Someone never opened the toolset.