The most fun part of the game was watching my monk doing all those attacks and great cleaves against a group of low level enemies.
Then I had to watch him slowly walk to the loot piles when I clicked on them in the janky Aurora engine. Oh God, noooo!!!
Oghier
3283
This is the reason for most of my GOG purchases. Virtually all of them are re-purchases, based on convenience and not having to mess with DRM.
My gaming backlog is getting scary-big. I may need to take some time off work! ;)
Yeah, I’d say two thirds of my GOG catalogue are games I already have that either don’t run on modern PC’s or are just a pain in the neck to manage (such as NWN, although I haven’t picked that one up at GOG just yet).
Chuck
3285
Yes, those codes were brutal. One long series of numbers per game = 3 long strings of numbers.
Also, Deekin the Kobold from the first expansion is my favorite NWN character, bar none. Worth playing for his story alone.
Mordrak
3286
The reason I played a monk is because in PnP they are awesome (or were) and at the time I figured since Bioware changed from a party based game to a hero with relatively weak companions at best, I should choose a class that didn’t need gear and could kick ass.
The problem with that though was without sifting through and making decisions about loot or the spell choices I normal enjoyed, it made the original campaign even more tedious. I hated it.
razarok
3287
NWN was the only game I ever had any measure of succes with regarding the toolset…
There was this ultra handy script generator (that was really complex to boot) that a community member had made that let even people without any knowledge of c++ make complex encounters…
Are you talking about NWN1? Because if so you can’t possibly be thinking about monks. They get a speed boost every few levels, by the time you’re in the high teens you’re basically going twice as fast as normal. Put boots of speed on him and I literally kept bumping into walls and other obstacles because I was going too fast to stop or turn in time. Moving around between loot piles is practically as fast as dimension door would have been.
It includes the Kingmaker retail release, which includes the Kingmaker, Shadowguard, and Witch’s Wake premium modules. Unfortunately those are the shortest premium modules, all requiring a brand new character, and iirc all intended to be the start of series that never happened. (I do recall a Witch’s Wake 2 being released as a free module at some point. I think.)
The singleplayer campaign in the original NWN1 release has: awful writing. Completely unimaginative plot. Cardboard characters. Zero meaningful choices or roleplaying options or alignment. And not just one but several sequences where the main plot says “here are these four (or three) objectives, go do them in whatever order you please”, which is admittedly a standard Bioware plot construct but is particularly glaring here. It’s bad.
Then Bioware tapped some other company, the name of which I forget, to do the expansion Shadows of Undrentide, which was much better on pretty much every count. And then Bioware did a second expansion, Hordes of the Underdark, which largely assumes your character comes from the Shadows of Undrentide campaign (which also starts you at level 1, like the OC), though has a couple of references to the OC characters, and is a really cool epic level adventure that almost, sometimes, gets reminiscent of Baldur’s Gate 2. Especially the Underdark section.
Unfortunately, -all- of the campaigns and fan modules are let down by the incredibly shitty design of the Aurora engine. The control scheme is pretty bad, the graphics are ugly and super repetitive because of the limited tilesets available, the implementation of D&D 3.0 is not just inaccurate but questionably so (why the hell would they give monks Concentration as a class skill - which it isn’t in the actual rules - when the only thing that Concentration does is help cast spells while taking damage and monks don’t get spells?), the game shoves you into D&D combat as a single character when D&D combat is 100% designed around groups of characters, you can’t control the one or (in Hordes and a few post-Hordes fan modules) two NPCs you are occasionally allowed… and so on and so forth. I really dislike it very much.
I think it’s arguably worth looking past the many, many shortcomings of the engine and playing the two expansion campaigns, most of the premium modules, and the many high quality fan modules, but yeesh.
NWN2, despite some issues, is much better from a design standpoint, and while the OC of that is not as good as the Mask of the Betrayer campaign or much of the best NWN1 content, it -is- far better than the OC of NWN1.
What Telefrog and everyone else said. Vanilla was bland but Diamond was awesome (Hordes of the UnderDark was a great, great experience).
Can one play Hordes of the UnderDark while skipping the original campaign?
Wait, I’m reading malkav11’s post, so I could skip the original uninspiring campaign and play Shadows of Undrentide from scratch?
The original NWN1 campaign not only can be skipped, but should be skipped.
Oghier
3294
Yes, and I highly recommend doing exactly that. The expansions really do make for good gaming :)
Good to know guys, thanks! Once I snag this I’ll do exactly that. :)
Yes, the original was bland but the expansions where good and some of the Fan Made Modules where amazing. I also did not mind the Graphics as the simplicity of the tiles made it possible for me to create a Gargantuan MP Campaign. Lilac Souls Script generator was also a godsend in this regard. I was the GM and I had a party of 4 players. We had a blast! Best times I ever had with any toolset. NwN 2 was a total letdown in this regard as the toolset, while more complex, took away the ability from a lot of people to actually create something useful all by themselves. It is really a shame. Sigh I spent Days with NWN2 without getting anything useful done. My first NwN Dungeon including monsters, a trader and some dialogue was done in 2 evenings.
Yes it is no eyecatcher but I gladly take bad graphics with the possibilities it gives me. Ah Nostalgia. Makes me want to fire up the toolset and Google for the script generator. I am still sad no one so far was able to duplicate that level of accessibility.
EDit2: I just checked and there is still new modules and stuff released for NWN1. I am baffled and giddy with excitement! Here goes my weekend.
Murph
3297
I think everyone got spoiled by Baldur’s Gate 2. The main campaign in NWN may not be anything to write home about, but it’s got its moments. But the part that cracks me up is where a few pages back people were heaping miles of praise upon Icewind Dale, while admitting that the story really isn’t that great – and from what I hear, not as good as the story from NWN. (I never played IWD myself.)
NWN does a lot of things right, chief among which is opening itself up to the mod community.
Myself, I’d say start the main campaign. If you get a couple of hours in and it’s not grabbing you, then jump straight to the expansions, because they are undoubtedly better, but I wouldn’t automatically discount the OC without giving it a shot. It’s on par with MOST RPGs in terms of story, just a little below average for Bioware.
Miramon
3298
The main campaign in original NWN was the second worst story I’ve seen in any game*. It was obvious who the secret hidden villain was in the introductory cut-scene. I was looking for a chance to kill him all through the early levels, but noooo, he’s a friend until the big reveal. By the way, the whole notion of a “reveal” is really bad, 99 times out of 100. If you are a game designer, and you think this might be a good idea, think again. Really. Just don’t do it. You can thank me later.
*Prize for worst still goes to Lionheart. Yay.
I’m as completionist as they come, but there are so many better games out there to play during those hours. The campaign is neither good nor bad: it’s simply a waste of time.
I actually enjoyed the OC when I first played it because it had good mcguffins for straight-up dungeon-crawl. The story was pretty weak, but I didn’t feel like they were hammering it to death. On replaying it, it’s definitely not as fun as when I first played it and I abandoned it midway through chapter 1.
SoU was really poorly-paced, in my opinion. It took forever to get going and it had some weird difficulty curves. I wanted to play Hordes, but Shadows just couldn’t keep my attention.
Icewind Dale’s hands down better than the NWN1 OC in every conceivable way except that it uses 2nd edition D&D rules (and the sequel fixes that).
