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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."
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.
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.