NWN2 Goes Gold

Played for a couple of hours, got to the fort and picked up the tiefling chick with the incredibly annoying voice, which is where the game crashed. Actually it bluescreened my computer, a first for me. First impressions are that it plays like a pig, really slow, stuttery, just not optimized. The engine is total crap, imagine the exact opposite of guild wars and you’re in the ballpark. And it has the exact same music and sound effects as the first game. Not like Oblivion’s reimagining of the morrowind theme, or how ultimas always manage to get the stones theme in there somewhere, I mean it’s the exact same music and sound, bit by bit. Voice acting is flat out awful. Gameplay is, well, NWN with a controllable party. No real changes there. Too early for real impressions, but so far I’m not in an oblivion-ish daze of joy. Of course it’s a real CRPG, so I’m a happy man anyway, but it’s not a transcendent gaming experience by any means.

No sweet dialogue like all of PS:T or Kreia from KOTOR2 yet, either.

What normally enables convo choices are skils like Bluff, Diplomacy, Intimidate, which a high Int can contribute to indirectly by more skill points. Charisma has a more direct effect.

Awesome! So does Charisma actually affect the dialogue choices themselves, or does it determine how people react to those choices?

Neither, it just gives you bonuses to derived skills like intimidate, bluff, diplomacy, etc. So it indirectly helps all of them.

I’d have to crack it open in the toolset to really know, but it seems like it’s reaction. You generally get a healthy number of convo options, so it’s seems like an up front design rather than attrib based surprise choices.

It largely depends how the author of the module decides to do it. If NWN2 is like NWN1 (and it prolly is, in this regard) the author can have X skill level in a conversation skill (Diplomacy, Bluff, Intimidate… umm… there’re prolly others) be required to make a conversation option appear, while Y (a higher value) is needed to make choosing that option actually work. Or the author can make X & Y the same, so if you see the option, it will work.

And your Charisma modifier affects the score, so if you have a CHA of 18, all your conversation skills are 4 higher (the modifier for 18) than the number of skills you’ve dumped into them.

Since this is Obsidian, the SP campaign will prolly make abundant use of the conversation skills. Once you get into the user-created modules, it’s really hit-or-miss as to how helpful those skills are.

Edit: Beauty. On a separate page. Here’s the post I was responding to:

Awesome! So does Charisma actually affect the dialogue choices themselves, or does it determine how people react to those choices?

I’m also at the fort and the game is running fine for me. High graphics settings on a recommended specs machine, which really isn’t all that of a machine for this point in time IMHO (I built it two years ago for less than $1000). To be honest I consider my machine somewhat marginal for gaming, and that’s not just because I like FPS games as well.

Anyway, the camera thing is getting annoying. You find a setting you like and then the game rotates it for a cutscene and then follows at that angle unless you adjust it back or you get in a tight area and it auto zooms in so that the house or whatever isn’t in the way and you are forced to adjust it again so you aren’t looking at the bald spot on the back of your characters head (my fault for not doing a 360 look at my guy when I choose the hair style). It would be much better if the edge of screen rotation function rotated more quickly. In combat it seems like it takes forever to rotate around.

I tried some crafting, which is pretty neat. I specialized my Paladin in longsword but haven’t found one yet so he’s been hauling around a greatsword I looted. Now at the fort I had one of the NPC’s build me a longsword to check out how it all worked. What suprised me is that both my NPC’s have crafting skills, and the one that would seem obvious can only make weapons while the other one has lesser abilities in several skill areas. I guess they wanted to make sure you had crafting options even if you didn’t want to spend the skill points on your main.

I’m not seeing a great story so far, in fact the set-up reminds me too much of the beginning of the official SOU module. Speaking of the beginning, I thought it was a nice touch that in character creation you can type in some sort of brief background for your character to make them more personalized. Of course, they failed to mention that the main story disregards all of that with a pre-set background built in to the plot. I’m sure the background option is there for multiplayer online, but still.

Ok, put a few hours in-

There are some things that just drive me crazy about the game.

First of all, is party control. Why can’t I click on a party member then give orders? Clicking only “designates” them. You have 4 people in a party, and it wants you to press F1-F4 to select them. Not only that, but every time you select a party member, the viewport centers on them. This makes you have to scoot the damn mouse all over the screen to get all 4 of your guys to attack one monster.

There is a way around this, by selecting the “free camera”, but that makes it even more frustrating as you then have to scroll the camera manually around to keep up with your guys. If they just let you click on a party member, then click a target, it would be sooo much better. Anyone have any advice on this one?

Also, is there a hotkey to toggle “spotting” mode off and on? I’m always turning it off and on in the dungeons, and I really don’t like having to click the little button every time.

EDIT: To further elaborate, in BG2 it worked great. Click on a character, click on a target. You could also drag select the whole party and have them all attack one target. Or press “=” to autoselect the whole party. After playing FFXII, I almost want to put gambits on my characters… that system would work well with this game.

Performance is also pretty bad on my system. When looking down on the party at a slight angle at max zoom out, it runs OK. Leveling the camera to look along the ground just kills framerate. Overall, though, I find it playable… and the graphics sure are pretty.

Overall, I’m enjoying the single player much more than NWN1 (I hated the single player in that game). However, it’s by no means even close to BG2 so far. The dialog is also pretty average. Actually, above average, but no where near Planescape or BG2.

Just got my character set up (watching the Enron movie with my wife at the same time). Only one question so far: when I click my middle mouse button, it doesn’t move the camera, it switches me back to the Windows desktop. In other words, middle mouse seems to do the same thing as alt-tab. WTF? Is this some kind of mystery mouse setting? Middle mouse seems to do this in all my games (Company of Heroes, Oblivion, Doom 3)…

You should be able to reset this in the Mouse options in the controll pannel.

I had the same exact thing when I bought the latest version of Microsoft Internet Explorer laser mice a year ago. Couldn’t stand the damn thing. I went back to the older version I had, then converted to Logitec a few months ago.

God yes. But then the gambit list for a fairly simple game like FXII was huge. I could only imagine how complex it would be for something 3.5e D&D. Not that it would faze me, but I imagine lots of people would just have a heart attack.

Are you sure? I’m able to pause, click on a different character, click on who I want them to attack, and then unpause. I used it in the tutorial party fight, for example. Or am I not understanding something?

Were you clicking on their portrait, or in the 3D view on their model? If you click their portrait, it does the same thing that pressing their function key does… center the camera on them. Which makes you have to chase the thing you want to attack all over the screen when trying to click on the same monster for all party members.

Does anyone know how to fix damaged stats? Some zombies drained a bunch of my party’s stats, and I have no idea what to do about it.

Oof, it chugs a bit on my system, even at the lowest settings, and the lowest level of textures looks awful. All the more reason to finally upgrade, I guess.

Restore spell or scroll?

Not if you pause the game first. I’m clicking on the portrait. That’s how BG/BG2/IWD/IWD2 worked, IIRC.

I preordered from EB and they didn’t have any preorder extras in stock, so I don’t get the “merchant’s friend” bonus, which actually has some neat stuff. I’ve been trying to find it on the net somewhere, but no luck yet. Kinda pissed off about that.

edit: Nevermind. Pirates to the rescue as usual.

I’ve also received additional hidden dialogue choices from having a high enough Wisdom. Very early in the game though so not sure how common they are.

Lesser Restoration, Restoration or Greater Restoration. (spell lvl 2, 4, and 7)

I could click on the actual models or lasso them all rts style in BG2. I take it this is not an option here? sad panda