Looks like NWN2 has gone gold.
Personally I’m extremely excited about this one, hope it gets the same support the first did over the years.
Messed with the toolset as well. Was never an expert, but I can say it’s a lot more fun making outdoor areas now.
Excuse my stupid, but how does a game go gold before being released? Did that many people preorder?
Gold just means they’ve sent off the final retail version of it for replication/manufacturing.
Wow, you’ve never heard that before?
Casual gamers are so cute. :)
-Tom
Oooo, I wish this place had the little cheering guy smilie.
One of them testers should pull a jackmove and send me a goldmaster.
Wow, this one snuck up on me.
There are already two reviews in italian gaming magazines not talking about it too well.
Mostly complaning about the graphic style and the “constrictive” environment. After games like Oblivion they say it feels quite bad to play a game in tiny maps, with obligatory and frustrating paths like if going through a labyrinth and with long and frequent loading times.
The party AI (four guys in total) has problems in combat as everyone start running everywhere if you don’t take control of every character manually and the interaction with the environment is still low (you can set chairs on fire, but the NPCs don’t react to this).
They also say that in the SP campaign the interaction between the party is fun and well written and the alignment plays a major role with many intersections in the plot.
Honestly, Neverwinter Nights never did much for me, after playing the greatness of the Baldur’s Gate series, it also felt “constrictive”.
-Chris
Well, the Bioware style was always constrictive compared to Bethesda type games. (I know Bioware didn’t do NWN2 but maybe the devs are following in that tradition.) The BG’s, like all Infinity Engine games, are zone based and don’t have a truly wide open feel IMO. The best of them made up for it with good writing (particularly in NPC personalities) and sheer quantity of content. BG2’s triumph, for me, is that it won me over to thinking it the best single player RPG I have ever played – in spite of my preferring other styles of CRPG design.
NWN1 campaign never did anything for me… but Hordes of Underdark (and other odds and ends in the Diamond pack) are still on my backlog… I will be keeping an eye on this one too.
The idea of smaller, or constricted, or mazelike maps somehow seems to capture a D&D spirit for me… it reminds me of all those graph paper maps in old modules and homebrew campaigns. I can live with that, potentially.
We SO try. Actually, I had no clue and was wondering the same thing. FIDGAF = N00b
;)
Actually, a group of us already started working with the toolset and are planning a mod for NWN2. The original was fun to a point, but the lack of a “Party” took away from the D&D feel of the game. That’s the part that BG got right. From everything I’ve seen so far, they’ve addressed that issue and I beleive the party size is 4 now.
I’m looking forward to seeing if they’ve been able to capture what was cool in BG, IWD & NWN.
Yeah but, again, D&D just doesn’t translate well to a CRPG game. Dullness of combat and all the rest.
Why it is so hard to design a RPG ruleset tailored for computer games without doing another “Diablo”?
Or we have deep RPGs with terrible combat and gameplay, or we have fun but braindead hack and slash.
Any word if the control system was improved? Can you at least pause the game and issue orders to your characters now? I found the original NWN almost impossible to deal with. It relied to heavily on keyboard short cuts to respond fast enough to the combat.
My thoughts exactly. I really dislike the D&D/D20 system when used in CRPGs.
The review I have doesn’t say much about the controls. There’s the context menu, there’s a MMO-like bar in the lower left and another stance quick switch on the lower right.
They say the camera controls have a few problems and complained that when you identify a trap and go to disarm it, someone in your party sees a lizard at the end of the corridor and start screaming and charging it making the trap explode in your face.
Different strokes I guess…
I thought one of the few things that Temple of Elemental Evil got right was the combat.
Cute enough to invite over for a game of Guitar Hero? ;)
They say the camera controls have a few problems and complained that when you identify a trap and go to disarm it, someone in your party sees a lizard at the end of the corridor and start screaming and charging it making the trap explode in your face.
Well that sounds like they needed to tweak the NPC AI to not attack till you do or till they are attacked.
I am fairly sure I saw a gameplay video that was paused to issue orders to your party, but it’s fairly early here for me so I could just be insane.