Alan’s Blog

Spent the entire weekend playing Neverwinter Nights 2. When I say the entire weekend, I actually mean just over half, as there were some issues we encountered before we could start playing.

Ultimately, it was a blast. It’s not too far away from the original Neverwinter Nights in terms of gameplay and such. It feels like what would happen if Neverwinter Nights and Knights of the Old Republic 2 had children. I think it’s only out of love for the series that we didn’t just give up and wait for a few patches.

It’s got a ton of problems:

• Dragging an item onto another player opens the trade window with that item already on offer, however 3 times out of 5 it will add the item to the trade window but not show it.
• We had some weirdness with save games and remote characters progress sometimes not being saved if the remote character disconnected and reconnected.
• Timeouts whilst connecting to a LAN game. Defragging seemed to help this.
• The User Interface is not great. It seems they didn’t decide, “Lets take Neverwinters Interface and make it better or simply streamline it” but rather “Lets start again with our own interface and make it kind of look like Neverwinters”.
• Crashes. This mainly happened on one machine, and could be indicative of a problem with that machine.
• The pathfinding seems to be taken directly from Neverwinter. It’s still shit. In fact, it might even be worse.
• The Camera is terrible. It might be playable if you go into “Knights of the Old Republic driving camera” mode, but if you want to play it like Neverwinter Nights, then you’re screwed. It’s too fast/too slow/too jittery.
• The Map is crap. Utter crap. Why can’t I click on a point on the map and have my character try and run there (you know, if the pathfinding didn’t fuck it up too badly). Why can’t I leave markers, or do anything else apart from look at the map? WHERE THE HELL IS MY ON SCREEN COMPASS? How do you expect me to navigate? The best I came up with was using the visibility cone on the mini-map to kind of point in the general direction of a map point I wanted to get to, but with the camera setup, that’s pretty useless too. Why do the location markers on the mini-map not have tool tips?
• Loading times - ugh.  I ended up needing to run in a window due to some keyboard/focus problems I was having, which thankfully allowed me to check my email and browse the net and check email whilst it loaded.

And then there is just the things they changed and we’re not happy with, such as:

• Any Co-op players just seem to be along for the ride. All players seem to be considered the same ‘character’ in the story. While this is to be somewhat expected, Neverwinter at least had some different dialog based on whether you were the player that did some action or not. For instance “hey, thanks for getting the badly needed item, we really appreciate it!” for the person who just dropped off the item, and “hey, did you hear what they/<character name> did? They found us the badly needed item”. Nothing like that has happened so far. Basically, you’re “the dude” depending on whether you got to the event first, or you are the party leader (the default decision as to who is in the story). A nice touch was the other players being in the cutscenes, but wasn’t really enough without some clever script writing.
• The Henchmen interaction isn’t great. Suffers from the same issue above, so getting ‘friendly’ with your henchmen is impossible, as there are two people being considered the same person. In the original game, each player could take 1 henchman each, and that player would be the only one who could get information or history out of the henchman. If you tried talking to someone elses henchman, they would say “sorry, I work for someone else.”. In the new game, you don’t have that level of involvement, especially if you aren’t the party leader.
• Related to the above. Conversations are group conversations now, whoever triggered it is in control, everyone else is locked watching the conversation until it is over. In the original you could have multiple conversations going at once. You could both be doing different quests. While this makes sure all the players are keeping track of the dialog, it used to be up to the player.
• Again, a similar problem. Players trigger level changes for all players. This means you cannot be in different stores. It makes little sense my talking to a blacksmith when I’m a Wizard, however I’m forced to go there when our Paladin character goes to get new equipment. In the original game, arriving at a city usually meant “I have to go buy some stuff, we’ll meet up at the Inn” and off everyone went.
• There are some other issues, but these are the main ones.

Some other changes I dislike, but aren’t major issues. For instance, my actions on behalf of the group have no bearing on the alignment of other players. So we’re the same character, but independant in terms of actions? If I tell an NPC I’m going to gut him and end up killing him, what does that say about the Paladin who must always be a beacon of good yet just stood by whilst I butchered the innocent NPC? (or even worse, helped?). It makes sense in certain instances. For instance, stealing some weapons is an unlawful action, but if I don’t care, I should be able to. But there should at least be some ‘group’ alignment decisions. In the original, it was only group alignment, So I would need to be careful I didn’t screw up a Paladin’s alignment when we were grouped. However, he could leave the group and not be affected.

There are some fairly big issues in the game, hopefully some of them get fixed eventually. The story itself is being a little reserved so far, but if I recall, the first chapter usually is (I think we’re still in the first chapter). We’ve been able to work around most of the problems so far.

In terms of the original game, it’s just more of the same. They’ve fucked some things, and improved some things, so it works out about the same.

That’s enough for now, might post more about it later.