@Sharpe asked about NWN2 mods. I resurrected the NWN2 thread that had the most hits.
I have been playing NWN2 again for the last few months. I run a monthly “old school” CRPG night with some friends, and we choose to play NWN2 Storm of Zehir for the first campaign. We are 4 sessions in, and its working well.
The mods I choose focused on stability, compatibility and adherence to the 3.5 PNP rules. The mods we use are:
Some of these conflicted with one another. I merged them so they work with each other. I am happy to share the file (my zipped overrides folder) privately if anyone wants to use it.
I run a few more mods that fix a few specific things in SoZ, which only matter if you run that campaign.
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As a side note, I have a very stable server running NWN2 SoZ now. Its set for a party of 4 PCs. If you and a few friends want to grab it a few nights per month, let me know. I can set it with a custom save file that is specific to you, so you can track progress. It only crashed once on us over about 15 hours of play so its pretty reliable.
PM me if you are interested - you need to do all of the party organizing. I just host the server. :-)
And I was thinking, “Wow, another version of NWN?! I didn’t even know one was under production.” IIRC, the plot of NWN2 was bad, and the NPCs were quite forgettable. Maybe it is worth playing though again, although that had never occured to me after finishing it the first time.
It wasn’t terrible, certainly much better than the NWN1 original campaign, but it’s nothing I would go out of my way to play 10 years later when competing with a giant steam backlog. Mask of the Betrayer does compete.
I enjoyed NWN2’s main campaign and really liked the courtroom bit. Of course, I always played heavily modded. That said, I also agree Mask of the Betrayer turned it up a notch.
NWN1 had a terrible campaign that made The Keep on the Borderlands seem like an absolute epic adventure.
I had forgotten about the whole Keep thing in NWN2. That could have made a great foundation for a game unto itself. You start a game with a crappy ruined keep and you want to upgrade it. You also have a group of adventures who recover gold and artifacts (which you actually play the adventures, and they are not just some arbitrary unit). You level up your adventurers and you keep which provides better goods / services to the adventurers. Maybe you take it to a kingdom level too.
I also really enjoyed the 1st Act of NWN2. Then after the courtroom scene it never got as good in Acts 2 and 3. But I did enjoy the fact that I was playing as a bard, and it wasn’t just a class, I was actually playing and doing bard specific quests about staging a play at one point. That’s not something you normally see in a lot of games. It made me curious what they had in there for other specific classes.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t make it very far in Mask of the Betrayer. There’s an enemy you fight almost right off the bat, and he seemed to be immune to the spells and actions of my party. So I couldn’t figure that one out. I’d already spent hours creating a character I thought was so powerful, it would be like cheating my way through the game. And instead, I couldn’t even beat the first real enemy in the game. So I quit MotB.
Yeah, the NWN2 boxed campaign was an Obsidian product and really quite enjoyable. Just saying I wouldn’t go out of my way to play it 10 years later-- while I would do that for Mask of the Betrayer, because it’s truly exceptional.
I enjoyed the first campaign. MotB is definitely superior. The main campaign is going to take something around 40 hours and MotB is 20ish. If you want to play 60ish hours of NWN2 then do both, otherwise go with MotB.
Agree with Stusser - MotB is legit great even today, while the NWN2 campaign has probably been supplanted by similar campaigns in Pillars of Eternity and Dragon Age: Origins (and I’d recommend those 2 over the former).
That said, the NWN2 campaign is much more like those latter two games (or the BG series), while MotB has a lot of Planescape Torment in it – which is a great positive if you appreciated that game, but if you’re looking for a more straight-forward adventure, the NWN2 campaign is decent - it starts slowly with a crappy starting area, but it gets much better and then sort of peters out at the end.
Nah, when I mentioned it in the thread, MoTB at Qt3 acknowledged at the time that this was a really tough enemy. But it was about 5 years or so after release, so players didn’t really remember all that the enemy was immune to. I probably just picked a character that had poor choices compared to the types of damage that this guy was vulnerable to.
