Warning, long post! (i.e., This thread is now officially dead since it takes more than five seconds to read. Thank you and good night!)
NWN has taken quite a bit of getting used to, and all of it I freely admit comes from my wanting-it-to-be-Balder’s Gate 3 bias.
Over time, though, you start to accept the game as it was intended and it gets pretty addictive. So far, I’ve found the game challenging, regardless of whatever class I’ve played and have had fun trying to figure out which combination works best. “What kills creature x faster?” has always had an appeal for me. That’s why I don’t care so much whether the game uses the 2nd Edition rules or the new 3rd Edition; for me, the hook is figuring them out and still not break the game to where it’s too easy. And while the story so far doesn’t seem as epic or grand as the Baldur’s Gate series, I don’t think it’s from a lack of effort…it just seems that this engine doesn’t somehow convey the same impact. Probably an unfair BG bias again on my part, but I’m sufficiently intrigued enough for now. If anything, I suspect things are moving too slow for my tastes.
What is not working is the single player/multiplayer campaign convergence and how the game suffers for not excelling in either. Given that the game seems effort intensive, I was hoping to go back and forth between my sp campaign and dabble in some mp with my friends, using the same character. The manual even says there’s an “import” feature. Wrong. After the manual was written, Bioware evidently thought an import button wasn’t necessary since you could accomplish the same thing through different but not necessarily much more complicated means (as per a Bioware programmer). Wrong again. The “workaround” suggested by the programmer currently breaks your henchmen, and the steps involved are a major pain in the ass. I can only assume they’ll fix it, but I think this is one aspect they didn’t pay enough attention to. After all, such a practice was common with the BG series as long as you played your single player game in multiplayer mode and the coming of NWN was supposed to do away with that.
Another thing about multiplayer is that it’s much easier to hack your character with the included toolset and debug mode. Which means going on any server with localvault characters is just plain nuts. So unless you can find a favorite server out there that stores the characters for you, it gets out of hand. To be expected, sure, but such servers will often be full due to quality and popularity, so it won’t be convenient. And just how are these “portals” supposed to work? If your character is stored on one server and thus “legal,” will the scripting allow his/her stats and equipment, etc., to jump on over to the next one and thus equally legal and safe on the new server? I haven’t seen an example of this yet, but I remember this being a big bullet item on NWN’s feature set. It’s almost as if you’re asking The People to run a type of MMORPG environment for you. This smacks of being a little too Utopian for me given the kind of issues a dedicated MMORPG company like Verant or Mythic face.
Yeah yeah, the game has just been released and given time, much of this will hopefully be worked out. Don’t know why I’m disappointed at how much doesn’t work since it was obviously released to make a fiscal deadline (anyone know if Ubi’s fiscal year ended yesterday?). I guess I’m skeptical the game will ultimately function as seemlessly as I hoped.
This much is clear: NWN is a true DnD 3E game if played in an appropriate manner. If you can find other players you trust and have a competent DM, then it looks like it’s possible to have a computer gaming experience like no other. So why do I feel this would require everyone sitting around a table with laptops instead of surfing at home, trying to find a good NWN session through Gamespy?
