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."

Comments

Why....

[Penguin's Advocate]

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.