Why is multiplayer broken for this game series? Let me illustrate…
My wife and I played through the whole BG saga and really enjoyed it. Its my wife’s favourite game. So we were looking forward to NWN. When it came out the multiplayer for the game was shoddy at best. By the time it was fixed we had shelved the game.
Of course silly me I still bought the next two expansions, but due to having a baby we didn’t play the second one at all. HotU I tried playing multiplayer last night with my cousin - broken. e.g. of issues, all seem to be scripting problems;
The beginning dream sequence had my cousins character in it and he could run around but he was stuck in the dream room. We had to wait until my character appeared back in the inn and he rejoined the game and all was well.
The first time my character rested he was teleported back to the dream room (the one with the drow). Nothing happened, I couldn’t interact with any of them. I am not sure if something was suppose to happen or not. Anyway I ended having to use the teleport stone to get out.
Then we head down to the basement of the inn where the portal to undermountain is. My cousins character was able to go through the portal, but my character was trapped in a dialogue loop with the inn owner. I couldn’t go down the well as the option never appeared.
3 major scripting errors within 20 minutes of play. huh? Shelved. I wont be buying anymore NWN products as each one has been disappointing as a game.
I use to rate Bioware up there with Blizzard. Blizzards alone at the top again in my opinion.
Having ranted away like that, has anyone else experienced these sort of issues with multiplayer?
P.S. Any reason the Drow have purple/bluish tinted skin? That bothered me for some reason. I know jet black skin is possible in the toolset and it looks good.
Hordes of the Underdark is specifically described as a single-player campaign. People in the Bioware boards are making workarounds to get it to run multiplayer, but it was never intended to be played multiplayer.
“Mod”? I wish, then it might be understandable, forgivable even.
HOTU is a supposedly bug-tested official expansion pack that they charge damn near the cost of a new game for. If what you say about the bugs is true then it is, quite frankly, inexcusable of them.
Kalle, I agree 100%. I bought two copies for multiplayer, so double ripped off.
Lum, that’s how it was marketed and that’s why I bought it. I still think its odd that a multiplayer centric game has a “professionally” released expansion that is only for single player…
Anyway, Bioware has pushed too many of my buttons lately and their off my A-list!;)
I certainly wouldn’t call it multiplayer-centric, since all official campaigns are intended to be run single player, though some of them can be run multiplayer, and the majority of user-created mods being single player as well. Multiplayer is possible and can be quite fun, but the editor was the thing that was majorly hyped, with the “DM your game live!” thing taking a backseat to it. In my opinion.
I think Mr. Ohle of BioWare posted the results of a poll here earlier, one in which something like 90+% of voters chose singleplayer as their primary reason for playing BioWare RPGs.
HotU has always been previewed as a strictly SP experience, and I consider NWN to be a SP game first and foremost, but having a strong multiplayer component.
This is a solution, albeit, not a plug and play solution. You’d have to a very rudimentary understanding of the NWN Editor to use this, but I thought I’d put it out there either way:
Does it really matter what 90% of people use it for? What matters is if it is sold as a multiplayer experience, then it should not be broken out of the box so early. Its obvious it wasnt tested.
So I wonder what kind of multiplayer they are talking about when it breaks 3 times within 20 minutes of play.
I must be in the minority. I enjoy playing games from start to finish in story mode (ala BG or Diablo 1 and 2) over single player and will buy those games (multiple copies) in preference to single player.
But that’s neither here not there, I just feel a little cheated that NWN et. al. has marginal multiplayer capabilities. Its like they went backwards.
It’s at least ambiguous. The box for HotU says “twenty-hour single player campaign,” and the only mention of multiplayer is in the boilerplate system requirements panel on the side of the box. I agree though that they probably should have had a disclaimer saying “does not support multiplayer play of the HotU campaign” or something to that effect.
Great, thanks for that. But I have lost all interest in playing it. Ive been a computer game player for most of my life and my tolerance for games that have such large gameplay holes in them is zero. There are plenty of working games out there I can spend my time on. Shelved it.
Like a friend said to me, FF X-2 is pretty lame but atleast it works.
