Mark, my enjoyment of the game mirrors yours. I really like the single player game, and my limited multiplayer has been just haphazard silliness. I figure in the future, after I’m done with or sick of the single player game, I’ll download new single player games, or join a semi-regular group/guild to play multiplayer. And, I hope to DM a lot.
‘I can hear the reasoned yet gratingly verbose tones of the Brian Rucker Brigade: oh dear, this sort of wanton combat does not satisfy my need to explore the many complex interactions of a fictional world riven by factional strife in a dynamic setting using multivariable calculus!’
God, I love this line. Can I get it on a shirt?
‘Two nights and I’ve tried about a dozen different public games and all of them sucked.’
Well, of course public games are going to suck.
‘BTW, I read a message about a new NWN online campaign starting that’s “roleplaying” and one of the things the DM is insisting on is that characters walk instead of running because that promotes more roleplaying.’
I’m speechless.
Ho ho! You are quite the Sophist, Sones. I did not say this. Please provide the textual evidence. I hope your modules provide your players with further examples of Sophistry.
For the record, the statement that the game models PnP “just fine” but that it is “boring” is an oxymoron for people who like pen-and-paper role-playing. Like me.
Your switch to a 9-5 job has paid off handsomely!
Just to briefly weigh in:
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I’m reviewing NWN and have easily spent 70+ hours with it so far, single-player, multi-player, and with the tool set. You can mark me down as a bona fide NWN fanboi.
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I’d like to state, for the record, that we here at Qt3 broke the news about Bub breaking the news about Neverwinter Nights. Until it was revealed on our message boards, no one knew anything about this. Asher and I are the Woodward and Bernstein of the gaming industry. And in case you’re wondering, he’s the one played by Dustin Hoffman and I’m the one played by Robert Redford. Thank you and good night.
-Tom
Heh, sort of, but nothing so grandiose. I got the scoop about a day before the press conference Mark and I attended. I wrote most of the story then. I kept it secret but told my editor, Bill McClendon at Gamecenter (he can confirm this) that I would have a big story for him early that Thursday. I went to the press conference (with Mark and 300 other Gen Con people - 3E rules and the D&D Movie were announced there too) and got a few more details. I added them, wrote it up and sent it in just before I went to lunch with Mark and Krys Card (who wasn’t the source). The story went up at noon CST that day, about 2 hours or so before Interplay could release the press document which meant GC had the story hours before anyone else could post it. Mark could have beaten me to the story, sure, but he didn’t get the tip I did and I think he was reporting for CGW.
I could have deceived my source at Interplay (who isn’t at Interplay any longer) and actually broken the story like some sort of amateur Woodward and Bernstein but I said I wouldn’t, so I didn’t, and my source has proven useful since then.
Anyway, CNet congratulated me on breaking the story. I got an email from the top (a guy named Brown, not Ken Brown of CGW) saying so and a lot more work from them until they shuffled off this Internet coil.
But I don’t think that means I’ve scored my Investigative Journalism Merit Badge just yet.
EDIT: Changed Noon PST to Noon CST above.
So what specifically put you off in the multiplayer?
In any event, I’m not sure I like the idea of having only multiplayer games that cater to the “jump in and go” crowd, games that are shallow enough to be enjoyable even when you play with an ever-changing stream of perfect strangers. And not to put too fine a point on it, but we already have those. Lots of them. Is it such a crime that we don’t have one more?
Not that we couldn’t. There is no reason why NWN can’t offer that, too. You could recreate Diablo, nearly to the letter, in this engine. But I’m glad it offers another alternative, too.
“I really don’t know what I’d say in a review about the multiplayer at this point. If the multiplayer’s only good if you only play with people you know, that’s not exactly a strength.”
Why isn’t it? It sounds like a strength to me. And I think it’s why BioWare worked so hard to make sure they had a big single player game. This weakness you’re talking about is inherant to a game like this, I think. Actually D&D has the same “weakness” really, doesn’t it? Anyway, this is why I want to go through a Tom Ohle dungeon mastered experience. Find out what it’s like for an experienced DM before I judge the game based on strangers new to the game.
I’m not sure that “sophistry” is the word you are looking for. But okay, here’s what you said in your first post:
After playing it for three hours, I can see what would have worked best: a series of scripted, set-piece combats against ever-tougher monsters where a balanced party is needed for success. Engage! Defend! Cast a spell! Cast a counterspell! Oh, a sneak attack by master rogue! All action-oriented endeavors. The computer is about action. The sit-down, talk-it-out, DM-led think-tank approach to medieval problem-solving only works face-to-face, because once you remove all that multi-person interaction, you realize how little there actually is to DO. Unless you are fighting nearly all the time. This is not a theory, citizens. It is now proven fact. Bioware has brought pen-and-paper multiplay to the PC, and it blows ass.
Using my Sophistric Powers, I jumped to the conclusion that you felt that BioWare had modeled PnP role-playing but that it just wasn’t fun (for you) on a computer when, well, when you said exactly that.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but the point of the above paragraph is that you feel they shouldn’t have tried to make a PnP experience, that they would have been better off doing something tailored more specifically for the computer? I feel compelled to ask, because you’ve accused me of misrepresenting you twice now merely because I responded to things that you have stated in (seemingly) clear terms.
Yes!!! Chick’s in! Now, just wumpus to go. Come on big W, fly baby fly!
Also, I may not have broken any stories (I was apparently busy at my 9-5 job??), but I can lay claim to the first 100+ post thread on the new and maybe improved (I miss my old blue screen with all the daily posts) Qt3 board. See the NWN Letdown thread.
The game is so worth 50 bucks IMO. However, I generally wait to see where Wumpus and Chick come down on a game. Whenever they agree that a game is good, then its a great game.
Jesus. I hope you like buying two to three games a year, then.
My dearest Benjamin, it is said that if hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue, then sophistry is the tribute lies pay to the truth!
Nowhere in anything you quoted did I say that NWN did PnP “just fine.” It tried to include many of the elements of PnP, but the particular combination of game elements they ended up with (see my problems with following text, messaging others, etc.) just produced a mess. What they tried to implement didn’t work AND the way it was implemented didn’t work either.
Aren’t you the guy who traded his old accounting job for an internal accounting job with fewer work hours? If so that is more time to play NWN!!
“I got the scoop about a day before the press conference Mark and I attended.”
I was there for CGW and since they were doing an exclusive story on NWN, I knew about it weeks before it was announced. We were NDA’d of course.
I think Desslock knew about it before the magazines even.
Even if everything “Legolas” (original!) complained about was true, um… I don’t care. I played through the extremely long, well-paced, interesting, and satisfying single-player game. It was better than Baldur’s Gate. I didn’t miss having a party, because managing one guy cut out a whole hell of a lot of tedium. (I did kinda miss Minsc and Boo)
The BG games had god-awful multiplayer. Worse than NWN by a mile. It’s not like those were bad games.
“So what specifically put you off in the multiplayer?”
So far all the games I’ve joined have either been cases of mass confusion or chaos. Some are DMless and we run around and try to figure out what to do. In one I was killed and respawned in a jail and no one knew how to let me out. In another we went through a zone and a huge pack of monsters was waiting for us immediately on the other side. We couldn’t even move forward. In another a pack of 8 of us fought a boss for literally 5-10 minutes. I felt like I was witnessing one of those giant fleet battles in MOO2 where the AI takes an eternity to move its ships.
It’s also hard to join a game in progress and find the other players. Even if it’s at the game’s beginning, everyone’s running around looking for potions and stuff, and some players get bored and wander off to look for something to fight.
I also wonder if the dynamic challenge code works right? Some games are advertised for levels 1-20, so you can have a wide range of characters. As a level 7 character, I can usually do nothing to the monsters. Maybe it’s because other players are level 15 or something? I suspect that for public games, soon you will need to be at the level cap to be effective.
In the couple of games I joined with DMs, they would spawn in monster after monster until we were dead. One even spawned in three dragons for some reason.
I’m a bit discouraged from even looking for multiplayer games at this point. Not a single one has been fun.
If you can only have fun playing with friends – and I’m not saying that’s the case, but it may be – then your viable multiplayer options are quite limited.
Now, if you want to say that’s a strong point, we’ll just have to disagree.
Tom, have you played public multiplayer games or just messed with it on your LAN, where presumably you can talk to one another? If you’ve done both, I’m curious to know how playing with strangers and using text chat worked out for you?
Is this a problem with the game or with the players? Without strong mods around, idiots will take over any public online game. There are only a couple of public servers I will play Day of Defeat or (used to play) CS on. I figure with a more complex game like NWN those problems will only be magnified, and so far that is the case. I’ve found a couple of public games that were fun, but they are needles in the haystack. Of course, this was a problem with PnP D&D also. Playing with my friends was fun, and playing with some random pack of weirdos at a game convention was not unless there was a good DM present.
This sounds mostly like bad module designing. Not to say that makes for an invalid point, because your reasoning certainly stands – I’d be bummed, too, if I were you – but it sounds like you got sucky modules. My time in multiplayer has been limited since retail, but in the beta all we had was multiplayer, and I played through the first chapter multiple times with a lot of different people, and I haven’t a single bad report.
Bad players, bad mod design – at the end of the day it doesn’t matter because I can’t find a good public game to play in. If I was writing a review, I’d definitely point out that. The reader could draw his own conclusions as to the cause, but the end result is that so far public games have been sucky.
Just to contrast this with Diablo II, there were plenty of bad games, but it was also easy to find good ones. It probably helped that there was no editor.
The multiplayer’s been a bit laggy for me too. Nothing too horrible, but I’ve warped a number of times and my character will pause a lot. There don’t seem to be any kind of predictive algorithms at work like the MMOGs use to disguise lag.
Tom, have you played public multiplayer games or just messed with it on your LAN, where presumably you can talk to one another? If you’ve done both, I’m curious to know how playing with strangers and using text chat worked out for you?
Both. Playing on a LAN is, of course, a superior experience, even with a crappy mod (the single player campaign isn’t too awful for MP, but it’s not ideal). At this point, playing online mainly works if you approach it as a Diablo-esque experience: combat, level up, buy stuff.
The problem is that first person shooters, real time strategy games, and Diablo have conditioned us to think multiplayer means ‘log on, jump in, enoy’. That’s definitely not the case with NWN, and some of Legolas’ points are certainly well taken. But NWN will require a bit more time for a) communities and b) well-done modules to come together. I have no doubt both of these things will happen.
As for communicating, the V menu works pretty well but typing isn’t too odious. Combat moves a little too quickly for me, though, and I want to pause even during MP games, which shouldn’t be a problem with a good group. My biggest MP problem was targeting spells without pausing and without accidentally hitting good guys (tip: move the camera to a direct overhead view).
-Tom