Except that NWN2 and KotOR2 were terrible, and significant downgrades from their parents. They not only featured bugs o-plenty, surreally ugly art and lousy voice acting (Darth Screetch wants a word with you), they were filled with cliche after cliche. Horrible "it's time for a fight, so we threw one in", endings that made you wonder what the entire point was, NPCs you tolerated purely out of necessity and continuous segues that went nowhere and yet were unavoidable. NWN2 frequently abandoned D&D rules, yet did so to no actual value. They just did it to do it, apparently. KotOR2 had no ending, and of course would thrust you into situations where the tedious NPC you've been avoiding is suddenly the only playable character, and now the underdeveloped loser is in an unskippable, usually unneeded encounter. It almost reached a point where to you looked forward to what would annoy you next.
I don't want RPGs that hold your little hand and explain the backstory 10 times, but throw me a bone here. In both games, the PC never felt important, never felt like anything but a tourist while other people go about their own personal lives that they never bother to explain. Mystery is one thing when you care; KotOR2 half the time felt like someone else's work stories. In KotOR, I felt important, I cared about what happened to those around me, I felt like my decisions mattered; KotOR2 was like a bunch of fight scenes tacked on to the most austere story they could find, and yet your character quickly became so overpowered the fights were only hard when you had to use one of the otherwise-pointless NPCs.
The best advice Fearghus needs is "stop doing what you're doing". A single-player RPG needs a story, it needs compelling characters, and it needs to make the player feel like what they do actually matters. Those are the things MMOs can't do well; those are the reasons to play a SP-RPG instead. Asking people to roleplay a tourist is a recipe for failure.
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.
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Except that NWN2 and KotOR2 were terrible, and significant downgrades from their parents. They not only featured bugs o-plenty, surreally ugly art and lousy voice acting (Darth Screetch wants a word with you), they were filled with cliche after cliche. Horrible "it's time for a fight, so we threw one in", endings that made you wonder what the entire point was, NPCs you tolerated purely out of necessity and continuous segues that went nowhere and yet were unavoidable. NWN2 frequently abandoned D&D rules, yet did so to no actual value. They just did it to do it, apparently. KotOR2 had no ending, and of course would thrust you into situations where the tedious NPC you've been avoiding is suddenly the only playable character, and now the underdeveloped loser is in an unskippable, usually unneeded encounter. It almost reached a point where to you looked forward to what would annoy you next. I don't want RPGs that hold your little hand and explain the backstory 10 times, but throw me a bone here. In both games, the PC never felt important, never felt like anything but a tourist while other people go about their own personal lives that they never bother to explain. Mystery is one thing when you care; KotOR2 half the time felt like someone else's work stories. In KotOR, I felt important, I cared about what happened to those around me, I felt like my decisions mattered; KotOR2 was like a bunch of fight scenes tacked on to the most austere story they could find, and yet your character quickly became so overpowered the fights were only hard when you had to use one of the otherwise-pointless NPCs. The best advice Fearghus needs is "stop doing what you're doing". A single-player RPG needs a story, it needs compelling characters, and it needs to make the player feel like what they do actually matters. Those are the things MMOs can't do well; those are the reasons to play a SP-RPG instead. Asking people to roleplay a tourist is a recipe for failure.
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.