The official Qt3 Neverwinter Nights letdown thread

>The level limit of 20. You can hit that in a month of play, and then what do you do? It’s almost like you’d need some combination of perma-death and realm vs. realm combat to keep the interest up.

Unfortunately, 20 is it right now for 3rd Edition rules, although BioWare could create its own extrapolations for higher levels like it did for BG2TOB. Wizards has an “epic” level expansion in the works, but it makes radical changes that would be difficult to encompass within the NWN engine.

“1) Is it the net code or too many people trying to run servers on below spec machines and 56K modems? I had this happen allot.”

No idea. I only joined low ping games. Is there further information available I can view before I join a game?

“2) Why? It could be a similar setup to Diablo II for its attraction. People make many diffrent chars and try out diffrent classes and styles within the classes, using the 3E rules of skills and feats.”

Yeah, there will be some of that. I think the long-term attraction of Diablo 2 was the leveling and item collection. It’s not easy hitting the really high levels in D2.

Its was easier early on but so may people were getting there that Blizzard nerfed the exp you get allot to make leveling up at higher lvls ridiculous.

15 year necro, bitches!

It’s unclear what’s “enhanced” about it. The game looks abso-frickin-lutely identical to me. Textures are the same resolution, UI looks the same… no changes whatsoever. And the original NWN will run in 1080p no problem. I guess they scale the UI better to higher resolutions?

Baldur’s Gate and its posse were 2D games so they still look great, but NWN is a 3D game and thus looks like complete shit in 2017. You can’t just literally rerelease a fifteen year old 3D game with a couple tweaks and get anyone interested in rebuying it when again, the original runs just fine. Look at the screenshots. It’s laughably ugly.

Beamdog needs a new schtick.

I don’t want to hate on them since they’re a local developer and ex-Bioware but I don’t think they’re very good at modern games. I bought MDK + MDK 2 from them for their failed at launching a whole platform to compete with Steam and this doesn’t look much better.

Also their digital deluxe edition, which costs twice as much at $40, includes a bunch of original Bioware “premium modules” which have been available to download for free for the better part of a decade.

https://neverwintervault.org/project/nwn1/module/bioware-premium-modules

Sot he UI scales, there’s some cleanup on the visuals, and that’s really it. They say there are fan-requested improvements but don’t list any, and old save games work with it. I can see there being value in some of these for people who still play it for the mod scene, but not $40 worth.

The base NWN:EE is $20. They are cleaning up a lot of the backend and network code, and working with the largest community patch (CEP) and server stability (NWNX) groups. If they manage to revitalize the existing community by enabling steam network matching and the in-game Server browser, then that’s worth $20 on my book.

Here is the FAQ:

This thread remains aptly named!

Indeed! And how often do you get to make a legitimate 15 year necro? Quite a thrill.

Out on Steam now!

Hahah. Great name for this thread. Oh man, I was so disappointed. What a letdown, indeed.

Do you want to watch a 3 hour long retrospective on Neverwinter Nights?
The answer is “Hell, yes!” :)

Arise again!

I for one loved NWN and recently got the EE on sale. Yeah, the EE did not really do much for the game, however it fixed multiplayer and everything runs like it should. Looking around there are still people playing online and creating new content. So now I have access to all the official Bioware stuff, but also tons of community designed modules my friends and I can run together.

FYI: I picked this thread to bump because of stusser’s epic 15yr necro. Also because pretty much all the original issues in the thread are now resolved. Lag…not an issue on modern hardware. Level cap: fixed in the expansions. etc.

It’s amazing what passed for high end animation back then is now done by single individual developers now.

Funny, I just read the first few posts on this thread and couldn’t believe some folks were hot on the graphics. As I remember it, it had been in development for years so when it finally came out, it looked kind of dated and not impressive at all. Morrowind, which had come that same year (a month before), looked stunning in comparison. Dungeon Siege (also 2002) looked much better as well.

I got the EE on GOG recently and started a new game and I was not wrong about my assessment 18 years ago, even after just playing for 30 minutes: the main campaign is dull and tedious. I intended to give it another chance so I can get to the expansion packs (Shadow of Undrentide & Hordes of the Underdark), specifically HotU which I remember was pretty good, but I’ll likely skip the main campaign.

Neverwinter Nights 2 aged much better (as did Icewind Dale, Torment and Baldur’s Gate II).

You remember correctly, it was pretty ugly upon initial release.

I still remember playing it for the first time and being amazed that it was actually happening, as NWN had been in development for so long.

NWN1 main campaign really isn’t worth playing. SoU is fun, but HoTU is one of the best CRPGs ever made.

But people were upgrading their graphics cards to play it! My posts in this thread are all about what crappy deals the GeForce 4 MX cards were. :)

NWN was always horrendously ugly, and a particular let down next to the striking prerendered isometric maps in Bioware’s previous game (i.e. Baldur’s Gate 2). That said, I guess glaringly awful but easily manipulated 3D tilesets were more in line with the toolkit intention of NWN than painstaking renders.

And yes, the original release’s campaign is dreadful and should be skipped. It doesn’t matter to anything going forward anyway - even though Shadows of Undrentide was farmed out and Bioware made Hordes of the Underdark, HotU barely references the OC and is mostly a direct followup to SoU’s campaign.

If you are in the mood for picking up any NWN:EE DLC then I can recommend Darkness over Daggerford as another good, enjoyable campaign. Haven’t played the most recent DLC release, Tyrants of the Moonsea, so can’t comment on that one yet. However, it is developed by the same team (Ossian Studios) that did Darkness over Daggerford and Mysteries of Westgate (NWN2) rather than Beamdog, and I have heard some positive things about it.