NWN Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition - Beamdog's final enhancement - now with new premium modules

[anvi]

Meh. Gimme NWN with Dragon Age's engine and a party and I'll pay.

Talk about, getting the worst of both worlds -- a shit campaign, mixed with an engine that won't run old NWN mods or let you do multi-player.

You've had 100 years to play multiplayer and custom campaigns. And you still can. The whole point of doing a remake should be to make it feel less clunky and gimpy and old. The Baldurs Gate EE was pretty much a waste of time seeing as you can already do it all with mods.

 

[anvi]

Meh. Gimme NWN with Dragon Age's engine and a party and I'll pay.

That sounds horrible.

How? DA's engine was sweet, immersive over the shoulder view or mouse wheel out to a high up tactical view. Modern resolutions, etc. That's one of the main things that stops me playing NWN again. That and the fact that it is single character which sucks.

 

[Lacrymas]

I don't think a remake of NWN will capture its uniqueness. People like to deride NWN for its graphics, but I love them, they are endlessly charming and never get old to look at. They create this very striking aesthetic that I've never seen anywhere else and will probably never see again. Remaking it will just turn it into generic modern 3D which looks very fake and plastic-y and I hate that style. The single character combat is another unique quirk it has, it's not bad, it's simply different.

 

[Lhynn]

How? DA's engine was sweet, immersive over the shoulder view or mouse wheel out to a high up tactical view. Modern resolutions, etc.

It was barely functional. On top of that it had limited moddability, especially compared to aurora. And Aurora is the almost only thing NWN has going for itself. Its a BIG thing, if you kill it, you kill the game.

That's one of the main things that stops me playing NWN again.

Gameplay was better in nwn than it is in DA:O

That and the fact that it is single character which sucks.

Single character is great. Make a good build, play a character driven module.

 

[racofer]

The only thing I recall right now that NWN could really use is better font scaling for high resolution displays.

 

[Musaab]

Who else is pumped for the Friday stream?

 

[ArchAngel]

Because what could possible get better? think about it the models are what they are and they are made by multiple piece glued togheter how can possible to be mide new character or creature models in a single model instead composed by pieces? the graphic will never get better it is nwn1 all over again with shaders.... But we have nwn2 that is actually better and allows even to develop more things modding and module talking.

If Beamdog took NWN2 SoZ and expanded upon that, improved graphics a bit and fixed some of the problems I could see myself wanting to buy and play that.

 

[ArchAngel]

Meh. Gimme NWN with Dragon Age's engine and a party and I'll pay.

Talk about, getting the worst of both worlds -- a shit campaign, mixed with an engine that won't run old NWN mods or let you do multi-player.

You've had 100 years to play multiplayer and custom campaigns. And you still can. The whole point of doing a remake should be to make it feel less clunky and gimpy and old. The Baldurs Gate EE was pretty much a waste of time seeing as you can already do it all with mods.

And because people complained so much that BGEE is just BG1+community mods slapped together in a package being sold under Beamdog name, Beamdog had a great idea how to avoid such complaints for their NWNEE. They now only made package with Beamdog name and let the community to install those mods themselves..

 

[imweasel]

Beamdog has to improve the graphic fidelty somehow. AT LEAST better lighting, better shadows, bloom, tesselation... Stuff like that.

 

[Jimmious]

Gameplay was better in nwn than it is in DA:O

Disagree, gameplay in NWN was one of the worst in RTWP area ever.
I agree that the engine is really cool and extremely moddable and that single char games can be really good (hello Fallout) but gameplay in NWN sucked balls. DA:O was much more FUN to play. Like easily controllable and stuff, not a clusterfuck

 

[Reinhardt]

DA:O

FUN

 

[Cael]

What is the problem with the DA:O UI? It seemed pretty intuitive when I played it. Even the configurable NPC combat behaviour is pretty easy to get the hang of, and seems to work pretty well. I tend to let them do their thing after I configured them while I basically just controlled my toon and supervised. Why the hate for it?

 

[Ausdoerrt]

If Beamdog took NWN2 SoZ and expanded upon that, improved graphics a bit and fixed some of the problems I could see myself wanting to buy and play that.

Only if they fix the f***ing memory leak issue.

 

[Jimmious]

DA:O

FUN

Care now, I'm talking about gameplay, not the game in total. As in how the game provided information and was controlled.

 

[Reinhardt]

So gameplay in DA:O was fun?

 

[Jimmious]

In comparison to NWN? Paradise

 

[Jimmious]

Ah come on, what citation is needed? In NWN it was annoying even to find a spell to cast with the shitty "radial" menu. Even movement felt weird.
I can't think I had any problems with controlling anything in DA:O. My complaints were only about content

 

[Lilura]

I can't think I had any problems with controlling anything in DA:O.

Just because you can't think, doesn't mean there are no issues. It's also possible to like DA:O and NWN for what each game offers; mind-blowing, I know.

 

[Dzupakazul]

So gameplay in DA:O was fun?

In a few places, yes:
1) It had the best, player-configurable AI scripting of any RTwP game to date, which means that if you weren't much of an IE-style micromanager (i.e. constant pause/unpause/pause/unpause to micro everything correctly), you could set up your scripts and keep the real time flow of the game authentic.
2) Likewise, the degree of automatization worked well to your own playstyle. Again, if you wanted to set up scripts, you could. If you weren't a fan of all the skills and rotations that, say, a Sword&Board Warrior had to manage to be effective (compared to many other RPGs, where the Warrior is a very basic "I hit things" class), you could just set up your Alistair or Shale or whomever to work. The characters wouldn't completely shit themselves if you weren't babysitting them constantly, but if you chose to maximize micromanagement, there was reward at the end.
3) The fact that everyone had skills to use and manage made for some fun challenge in Nightmare mode, and it added replayability to the game because you could explore different paths with your characters. Want to make a full control mage? Go for it. Wanna try out a 2handed warrior? Sure. It's a more meaningful choice in terms of playstyle, most of the time; a teeny tiny bit more involved than "picking the best weapon choice for DPS or utility" (though obviously some choices are more optimal).
4) It was fun to discover spell combos and mixes and use them. It added a little bit of fleshing out to the magic system and the world (there's mages who document certain interesting interactions that take place between spells, and you can use their findings or stumble upon your own findings by experimenting? It's pretty nice)
5) I generally liked party control in Baldur's Gate and consider the boss-fights and enemy adventuring parties to be the most fun in that game, so I generally liked DA:O combat, too - though it doesn't have nearly as much great encounter design and there's a fair bit too many trashmobs.
6) Plenty of consumables to use, and many of them are craftable or fashioned to be fairly mundane in use, which means party resources weren't restricted to wands and magical potions. It's a nice touch, and once again gives more options to Warriors in fights where the physical damage or tanking isn't useful.

Neverwinter Nights - a game which I really, really like - in comparison has had some issues in terms of control and counterintuitive mechanics. Want to make a summoner? Well, your summons, familiars and henchmen eat your XP, so it's usually a long-term disadvantage to employ them, or you have to play around with dismissing your summons and familiars before you make a killing blow. Hiring a full spellcaster companion was also a crapshoot - Half-Orc Steve Blum and Edgy Dwarf are best companions because they play well into what AI does best, which is being a meatshield; likewise, Cleric Linu or Bard Deekin/Sharwyn are mostly fairly simple martial heroes that have some utility spells on hand to round stuff out, so they are never an issue either. Tomi the halfling Rogue was also not bad for certain playstyles where you could be the meatshield yourself or set up flanks. But try playing with Sorcerer-emphasizing Xanos or Boddyknock Glinckle, and you will see them opening a big fight with casting Mage Armor or casting AoE on top of you, engulfing you in fire while licking the - incidentally - resistant enemies. It's the old "Burst Weapons + Ian" volatile alchemy mix all over again.

On the other hand, though, I never had an issue with controlling any Player Character, even spellcasters, in NWN, because the hotkeys are generally pretty good and I mostly used the radial menu for out-of-combat or niche stuff. NWN supports arena PvP, so if you can handle it in World of Warcraft or any other game, you can probably handle it in NWN. It helps that bonus hotkeys are accessible by holding Shift and/or Control. I don't, at all, think the Interface is bad or unwieldy.

 

[Jimmious]

I can't think I had any problems with controlling anything in DA:O.

Just because you can't think, doesn't mean there are no issues. It's also possible to like DA:O and NWN for what each game offers; mind-blowing, I know.

I meant I can't think of any problems ...but nice one.
Hey I'm not saying to NOT like NWN. It's the way it played that I hated, I respect other aspects of it and especially the mod community etc. I also larped in some persistent worlds occasionaly

 

[Lilura]

Here is my Dragon Age: Origins tactical setup. I recommend playing the game like that.

 

[Cael]

I particularly like the fact you can set them to do things that you are likely to do anyway.

You are not going to use a multi-target attack like Two-Handed Sweep (or the one where you spin around and whack everyone around you) unless you are surrounded by two or more targets or even three or more. Well, you can set Sten to do exactly that.
Half the stuff I set up tend to be things that would be tedious for me to do, like using passive spells and abilities without me having to manually cast it every time, or Alistair/the tank automatically using Taunt when the fight begins and keep taunting to tie down aggro.
If your mage gets mobbed, she can automatically cast Mindblast or whatever that short range area stun is and run away.

As I said, I rarely had to micro them once the tactics are set up. They just run themselves. It is a very strong positive for DA:O.

 

[Delterius]

The only thing I recall right now that NWN could really use is better font scaling for high resolution displays.

And combat that isn't terrible.

As mediocre as DA:O's ruleset was, the controls were functional enough for a 4 party members setup.

 

[ArchAngel]

I can't think I had any problems with controlling anything in DA:O.

Just because you can't think, doesn't mean there are no issues. It's also possible to like DA:O and NWN for what each game offers; mind-blowing, I know.

NWN only had to offer last expansion. And you still needed to play through that terrible engine and UI and those beyond ugly graphics. And it had MP and custom content maybe, but I never dabbled into that.
NWN wasn't even a faithful D&D game, IE games were more faithful to AD&D than NWN1 was to D&D 3.0.

 

[Lilura]

As mediocre as DA:O's ruleset was, the controls were functional enough for a 4 party members setup.

Pretty much, yeah. I've found when things get busy with slinks s3 RAVAge that I relied more heavily on Adv. tactical framework. RTwP pathing routine is shit as usual; units still get stuck on and take a while to move around each other.

NWN wasn't even a faithful D&D game,

It was faithful enough for what they set out to do. Go and play ToEE if you want faithful.

IE games were more faithful to AD&D than NWN1 was to D&D 3.0.

Expand, pls.