Neverwinter Nights 2 interface mod

Installing user interface mods is one of the first things I did for this game, but it was tricky to balance the different things I wanted. These mods work by replacing the XML files for each piece of the interface, and sometimes I liked the changes made by two different mods that affected the same UI panel. For instance, I play at a high resolution, so I want big panels that take advantage of the large screen size, and also large fonts so it'll be readable.

Usually, portraits are vertically rectangular, somewhere around a 1:2 aspect ratio, including painted portraits of real people from history and modern photographic equivalents. It's simply more aesthetic to have the head and the shoulders in the picture. The ones in NWN2 are square, which not only looks cramped, but since it shows only their heads, and the characters are made from the same 3D models and are all facing the same direction with the same expression, it's rather difficult to tell any of them apart, especially at the tiny size those portraits appear as in the dialogues.

I have a large collection of good looking portraits at a 1:2 aspect ratio (like Baldur's Gate and NWN1 used), and I wanted to use that aspect ratio for the portraits rather than the square ones. I found a good mod that added support for 256x400 pixel portraits, as in Neverwinter Nights 1, called Character Sheet NWN1 Portrait support, and that worked very nicely, though it was made for resolutions a bit lower than what I'm running.

I also wanted all my inventory slots showing as one big bag, instead of them being broken up into multiple bags that I have to flip through to find things. I know some people prefer to organise their items by putting them in different sections, but I prefer to have as much visible at once as possible. Again, I found a mod for that, though again, it was made for slightly smaller resolutions.

I would also prefer the inventory icons to be large, like in NWN1 (though perhaps not quite so large as that), so I can more easily distinguish items at this resolution. I haven't found a mod for that, and I may make one at some point.

I tried using a UI creator program from the Vault, but on starting it up, it claimed there was a newer version available and insisted that I download it, and refused to run this allegedly "out of date" version. I checked, and the version number on the web site was exactly the same. I redownloaded it anyway, but this freshly downloaded version made the exact same claim, and refused to run. This raised my suspicions about scams and malware, but whatever the reasons, the effect is that the program is non-functional.

Eventually, I got around to examining the XML files myself to see what I could do with them by hand. I downloaded and skimmed through Lance Botelle's NWN2 XML & GUI Coding For Beginners, mostly looking at his examples of what different formatting codes looked like. Then I examined the code of two of the mods I was using. One of them had some comments telling what the original values were and what the mod was trying to accomplish, which was useful.

My dialogue box mod

Before adding frame

In this case I was working on a mod for the conversation panel (what the game files call the "quick chat" panel). I prefer the dialogue to be presented in this manner, rather than the "cinematic" style that's the default in the toolset.

But I wanted the box to be much bigger, since I consider the dialogue to be an important part of the game. You can't do anything else while you're in a conversation, why not make it the main focus of the screen while you're in it? Putting it in a little box in the corner is no good, especially at this resolution, where the font is rather squintworthy.

While I was working on this, largely through trial-and-error, I found that I could just keep the game running, make my changes to the code, and then switch back to the game and start conversation again with a handy nearby NPC to immediately see how the changes looked. I was glad I didn't have to reload a save, or restart the game, which would have made progress painfully slow for this kind of trial-and-error work.

The code on which I based this had already changed the background image and font colours to a black-on-parchment style instead of the white-on-charcoal. I actually thought the original colour scheme was fine, but I do indeed find that black-on-parchment is easier on the eyes, so I just made tweaks to that -- I changed which of the parchment textures it used to better fit the larger box I coded, and changed the dark green of the response text to a deep burgundy colour to better go with the parchment colour.

I made the conversation portrait twice as large as it was, to put more focus on the subject of the conversation (though still only half the height I set for the character's dialogue), and with the portrait aspect ratio change I was able to just put it in a kind of "column" on the left, with both the NPC name and the dialogue in a second column to the right of it. One note about the altered aspect ratio, though...I couldn't find any parameters to adjust the camera placement for the default "rendered" portraits made out of snapshots of the character model, so it basically looks like a slightly off-centre closeup. The custom portraits at the intended aspect ratio look perfect, though.

Final version

The portrait frame didn't look good when stretched to the new dimensions, so I commented it out and left the portraits unframed for a while, until I found a more suitable replacement. Now it looks good, and I think it's a pretty good size for both the NPC's dialogue and the list of your responses. Now you can have up to 10 response options visible at once without the scrollbars appearing, if they're all of a typical length. How much empty space you see is, of course, dependent on the amount of dialogue written for any given part of the conversation.

After using and enjoying this new conversation panel size and style, I did find one reason the parchment background isn't the best of ideas. The OC has a couple of places where descriptive text is delivered in this panel using near-white text, which is nearly illegible against the light parchment background. Additionally, user-made modules sometimes use bright colours for special text as well. So, I think it'll have to go back to the white-on-charcoal, even though it's not as optimal for readability. I'll offer the first version I made as an option with that caveat.

Next, I expanded the portrait selection window to show much larger portraits, to make it easier to choose one. I tried to make it more than four columns, but I couldn't get the portraits to appear correctly in the additional columns, so I just left it at four.

Finally, I expanded the column of portraits for your party members to use the full height of the screen at 1920x1080. Even in the vanilla game, there are times when you can have 5 full companions and enough animal companions/familiars/summoned creatures to make you have to scroll through the portrait column to check your companions' health or status effects. Now there's less unnecessary scrolling at 1920x1080.

Some of the male and female portraits from the NWN1 art, in my expanded selection panel

Since my conversation panel mod depends on the portraits being in the NWN1 aspect ratio, and other code based on the work and examples of Ragnorak, Shin-Anubis, Thanatos2001, Fire&Ice, and WhatIsSol, I'll have to include that code in my distribution, as well as the other panels that would affect, though some time later I can design another version that keeps the square ones, even though I don't like them.

Although the mod is functional and ready, I need to figure out how to handle its packaging before I upload it.

Edit: It's online.

Neverwinter Nights 1

The last thing I expected to happen after playing Neverwinter Nights 2 was that I might also get into Neverwinter Nights 1 after my initial lackluster impression of it.

I had tried NWN1 briefly a few years ago, and I was not inspired to continue. I played the original campaign from the beginning up until escaping from the besieged Academy, and it was an incredibly boring experience (not at all like the delightful starting experience of its sequel), with a headstrong companion who I couldn't control and who kept engaging with far-off enemies when I needed a break. It had a radial menu (good for gamepad, pointless for PC) with monochromatic abstract icons that didn't even tell you what the options were until you moused over them. Icons are for buttons. Menus want text. And monochrome icons are another offense to UI design. The priority for UI design is function, ease of use, and clear differentiation between options, not a unification where everything looks like everything else.

The graphics, as I've mentioned before, were from that transitional period when publishers stopped accepting 2D-based games, and so every game had to be 3D, even though the hardware of the time required them to use a frighteningly low number of polygons and extremely low-rez texture maps to support a wide enough customer base, regardless of whether or not there were enough skilled artists out there who could make good-looking art under such restrictions. If there were, most games' budgets weren't being used to hire them.

All these things kept me from getting into it at the time. But I couldn't help noticing that it remains a very popular game, and has a very large number of free campaign/quest mods to download (around 6000?) -- far more than NWN2. I found many interesting-sounding and good-looking NWN1 mods by accident while searching for mods for NWN2.

Also, when I first tried the game, I was tending to play it with the camera pretty close to the action, and with the characters clearly in view, where all their flaws were most evident, but in my recent playing of NWN2, I'd been generally playing with the camera zoomed far out and above, in the kind of pseudo-isometric perspective to which I've grown accustomed in the Infinity Engine games, which I hadn't experienced until after my first brush with NWN1. So if I tried playing NWN1 with a zoomed-out camera like that, I reasoned it would make the blocky meshes and low-rez textures irrelevant.

So, when GOG had a sale recently that included Neverwinter Nights (diamond edition), I succumbed to the temptation and bought it, because it was a pretty good gamble that there would be enough enjoyable content to warrant the cost at that price. I ended up pleasantly surprised.

Mods

Happily, I also found numerous mods to improve various aspects. First I should state here (in case there's any confusion) that there are two different meanings for the word "mod" in the context of gaming that I use here (not counting a third meaning, which refers to forum moderators). The kind of mod I'm about to talk about here, which is short for "modification", which modifies or changes aspects of a game, and then there's the kind of mod that's short for "module", which comes from the old modular adventure packs (originally called "modules") that were sold for D&D, which were designed to be modularly added to fit into anyone's already-running gaming campaign. I'll be talking about both here, and I'll try to reserve my use of the shortened "mod" to only mean "modification", and try to remember to use the word "module" to refer to anything that adds new adventures or quests to the game.

Amethyst Dragon has several mods that improve the UI by colourising the icons (including scroll icons), as well as making many parts of the UI transparent. I need to figure out which files do what on that last one, though, so I can disable some bits of the transparency. I like the transparent quickbar and the no-background compass, but some of the UI shouldn't be transparent (such as text boxes).

There were also a few head packs that improved the character design, a shader mod that adds some better lighting effects, bloom, and better colour saturation, and an environment mod that improves some of the geometry and textures. However, managing all these mods and dealing with conflicts arising from everything going into a single "override" folder promised to quickly become a headache, so I looked for a mod manager like I used for Oblivion, Morrowind, Dragon Age, and even the Infinity Engine games via WeiDU. Surprisingly, I couldn't find any. There were a couple of override managers I found, but they seemed to work by making backups of entire different sets of the override folder, instead of keeping track of which files are associated with which mod and tracking conflicts and such.

I ended up repurposing the Morrowind Plugin Manager for use in NWN. I needed to have a dummy "morrowind.exe" file in my NWN folder to get it to set up its directory structure, but after that it worked without complaint. This allows me to install and uninstall any override mod without having to remember which files it installed. The only inconvenience is that I need to temporarily rename the override folder to "data files" any time I want to install or uninstall something, and then rename it back to "override", because that's where Morrowind Plugin Manager installs things, and I couldn't find any way to change that, or fool it with a shortcut to the override folder. This also means that I still have to install certain mods manually, if they include files that need to go somewhere other than in the override folder.

I also needed to "prepare" the mods I wanted to install, by having each mod in a single ZIP or RAR file, with any extra folders removed, and any readme files renamed to something unique to that mod so that they didn't get overwritten.

For some reason, mod pages on the Neverwinter Vault are often full of multiple revisions of each mod, in multiple parts (for patches or optional components, or other reasons), sometimes with the same files duplicated in multiple archive formats, and rarely any explanation as to which files are actually necessary to get it running. If the Vault doesn't allow revising file descriptions, I suppose I can understand it, but if they insist on keeping old versions on the page for the sake of maintaining download counts, there should be some kind of clear separation between the latest and the older ones.

After dealing with all that mess, though, it's a convenient install and uninstall. I could get around the folder renaming and override-only issue if I placed my entire NWN folder inside another folder called "data files", and then included the "override" folder in the directory structure in the RAR files, but I'm not going to go that far.

Content

The GOG bundle came with the original campaign (of course), the toolset, the expansions Shadows of Undrentide and Hordes of the Underdark (two names that can be easily confused for new players), as well as premium modules Kingmaker, Shadowguard, and Witch's Wake. (All of the screenshots in this post are from the Kingmaker module, with various improvement mods applied.) There were also some nice wallpaper images included. Most of them I'd seen on the web already, but these are in resolutions higher than I've seen elsewhere.

"Premium modules" appear to be what we would today call "DLC", and it also appears to have been an early experiment on Bioware's part, because several of them were made with sequels in mind, and had cliffhanger endings that were never resolved. More of these premium modules were in the works, but Bioware apparently changed its mind about publishing them, and canceled the rest of the projects for reasons unknown to me. Even stranger is that there are three premium modules that were published, but were not included in the pack and are no longer being sold anywhere.

I've heard it said that I should look at the NWN original campaign as if it were an afterthought; just a kind of large demo module for what they were really selling, which was the toolset for making your own modules, combined with the multiplayer component for conducting DM-led D&D sessions as you would in a pen and paper session, except with a group of people online in a shared 3D world.

I'm more interested in single-player modules, myself, since playing this kind of game in realtime without the ability to pause or take turns is not at all the kind of experience I enjoy (such as missing a turn because I was trying to find a scroll in my inventory to cast). But with that perspective on the OC in mind, I figured the premium single-player modules would be a good choice to try for a more enjoyable experience than the OC had been. I started with the one called Kingmaker.

Kingmaker

The word "kingmaker", which I think I first heard in the movie Being There, describes an individual with considerable influence who remains backstage while pulling strings in order to get a personally chosen and groomed candidate into a position of power, possibly with the intent of controlling things from the shadows.

I tend to think of Merlin of Arthurian legend this way. Though it might not be how it was intended, I imagine that when Merlin embedded a sword into a stone and declared that only the one who could pull the sword out of the stone would become king, he must have been in full control of whether that sword would budge at all, and for whom. The people would surely never accept a wizard for a king, but why not a man chosen through a feat of strength? It would probably have been easier to get popular support for the idea that way, since history is full of kings who became king through brute force. But he tricked them all by allowing the sword to be pulled out of the stone by the child Arthur, a boy that he could influence and shape to rule as he wanted him to, while he sat in the background as court wizard. That's the kind of "kingmaker" that appears in this premium module.

As a player, you find yourself raised from the dead by a shaft of light who tells you that he wants you to gather up some allies and win an election to become Lady or Lord of a local fortified town. Mr Shaft then manifests himself as a magic talking weapon to help guide you along this chosen path. You then have to choose only two of your former four companions to be resurrected alongside you, which is a choice made more difficult than simply choosing them based on their classes due to the fact that some of them are more eager to live than others. I ended up choosing Kaidala the nymph druid even though she had fully embraced her death, because there was a monster waiting for her spirit to be released so it could torture and devour her. Calibast was an easier choice, since he was very friendly, clearly wanted to live, and I needed a tank.

This module takes the abstraction of buildings to an extreme when it comes to the dungeons, or at least that's one possible interpretation of why almost all dungeons outside of town are represented by small shacks. It's possible that I'm meant to understand that all of these shacks are simply protective structures around staircases that lead underground, where the actual dungeons are located. But some of them don't lend themselves well to that explanation. For instance, a ranger's dwelling inside the trunk of a large tree turns out to be a standard-looking (and very large) house on the inside, like a TARDIS. [Note: the windows pictured here are not part of the original tileset.]

The companions generally behaved nicely with the basic management commands "attack nearest", "guard me", and "stand your ground." They had a good amount of interaction and personality, too, with some nice lighthearted dialogue, some joke conversations, and even a romance option, which was a pleasant surprise.

In fact, there was quite a bit of personality all over this module, from most of the NPCs. I especially liked the personality and voice of Alias, which prevented me from hating her for the issues surrounding her. One was that if I took her offer to escort me to a quest location, and had her stand by to escort me back when I was finished, it made it extremely difficult to move around the surrounding area, because the game kept automatically targeting her and making me run to her and initiate her "Are you ready to go back to the keep?" dialogue. I was able to override it by repeatedly clicking on the spot where I wanted to go, and I could have sent her back to the keep without me, but that would have aggravated one of the other issues.

The other issue is one of design. You can't complete all of the quests in the module without some very careful planning and workarounds, because there's a vote to be had, and you can only delay it 3 times, after which the election has to take place, and all other quests are closed off for good. Walking around town, which is necessary for some quests, leads you past certain spawn points where Alias appears to tell you about the vote. It's possible to avoid those spawn points except when you go to the area of the keep where the guild hall is located, because there's a spawn point there that you can't avoid when you try to leave. I hated having to game the system in that way, but I really didn't want to have to play through the module 2 or 3 times just to finish those quests.

There were numerous dungeons to crawl through, some of which had some puzzles or unique features. The manticore room was a notable instance. You have to lure a manticore into a gas chamber and lock it inside, to kill it without damaging its pelt. It was a bit difficult, though, because most of the times I ran in to get its attention, it stood stock still without pursuing me, and just shot darts at me, which tended to kill me in one strike. I can't tell what it was that I may have done differently that got it to chase me, but once it did, it all went smoothly.

Those were the only bugs I recall, and the rest of the module was great fun, and a very positive experience. I enjoyed dealing with all the traps in the dungeons (which can be recovered as well as simply disarmed, giving you a free trap!), and experiencing the variety of creatures and architecture. A couple of the dungeons had riddles and puzzles as well, with secret doors and environmental hazards to either disable or attempt to use against my enemies. There were some interesting, non-dungeon-oriented side quests as well, that could be solved through character skills like persuasion (there were many skill check opportunities throughout the module), and an interesting mystery in which you can get involved if you decide to purchase a haunted house. Some of the quest text didn't quite match up with the locations, such as referring to an unseen power of the ghost on a nonexistent second floor of the house, but that's a tiny niggle in an excellent questline, which is nice and lengthy, involves many NPCs, and can be solved in at least 3 or 4 significantly different ways.

This module proved to me that NWN1 can be just as much fun as NWN2. Next I'll have to talk about the Wyvern Crown of Cormyr.

A few more screenshots

Neverwinter Nights 2: You say goodbye, I say hello.

It was sometime last year, while I was looking for some good fantasy style artwork for character portraits, that I came across this "Aribeth's Farewell" picture (reproduced here), marking the final official Bioware patch for Neverwinter Nights 1. I had no idea who this character was, or anything about the plot or stories of the NWN campaigns, aside from them being set in Faerun.

I wish someone had tried to convince me to look into the second game of this series earlier. Despite its numerous flaws (which you can be sure I'll unflinchingly enumerate in detail over the course of my posts on the subject), it has in abundance what I've found to be missing in the games of this type that have come after it. The second game, developed by Obsidian, appears to have also already received its final patch at the time of this writing. So here again, is a game whose developers have said goodbye to it years ago, and here I am coming in just now to say hello for the first time.

"This is so exciting! Wow! Where to begin?"

--Neeshka, a character I think I'm going to like.

Now I can see that my comparison between Dragon Age: Origins and the Baldur's Gate games was missing this very relevant intermediary. A great amount of what I found to be missing in DA:O (compared to BG) is in fact in Neverwinter Nights 2.

So, coming from DA:O, which has 3 races and 3 classes to choose from, I was delighted with the character creator for NWN2, which sports 8 base races and 16 additional sub-races, with 28 classes to choose from, not counting specialisations within a class. I picked druid for my first character, partially because I've enjoyed playing a druid in WoW, and also because I liked the style of armour. Each of these classes has its own style of armour! And from what I can tell, it doesn't have to become obsolete once you find better armour, because the crafting system allows you to put up to 4 enchantments on it. So after selecting the druid class, I was further delighted when the character creator basically asked me, "okay, now what kind of druid?" with a selection of druid specialisation packages to choose from, or the ability to customise my own.

Sample head and hair combinations

The one place where character creation seems to be inferior to Dragon Age is in the appearance, since they use a selection of pre-made heads rather than facegen sliders, and the artistic design of the heads and hair is rather unappealing, though not as bad as some other games I've reviewed here. There are, however, a number of mods that provide better, more appealing heads and hair, including a conversion of the popular Ren and Idkrr hair sets, known from the Oblivion mods. NWN2 does have one notable bonus in the appearance category, though, and that's the height and girth sliders for your general body type, allowing you to be tall and skinny or short and stocky. It would be nice if more games included that option. Even when it's a simple scaling and not actually visibly changing your body fat/muscle tone ratio, it's a welcome additional bit of customisation.

There was a pretty long list of voices to choose from, as well, though the voice sets seem to be shared across all races. There were no really good dwarf male voices that I could tell, for instance, but there were several that suited my female sun elf. What I don't understand is why they made the voices randomly shift pitch up and down, both in the character creator and in the game. In other words, the vocal lines that you hear over and over in the game will sometimes be raised to near chipmunk-style pitch, and sometimes down to demon-style pitch ("Urr lerrtle wrrrghed derrrwn errt therr merrmerrnt!"), which, even when it's somewhere between those extremes when I hear it in the game, always sounds obviously artificial. Who thought this was a good idea, and what did they hope to accomplish? We've already picked the voice set, so why is the voice changing? Are they suddenly breathing helium or sulphur hexafluoride?

Graphics and art design

The graphics have some pluses and minuses. The major advantage is the sheer variety of items, textures, environments, placeables, architecture, etc. The world of Faerun is perhaps the most detailed and expansive fantasy world ever created, and the range of story types that can be set there is very wide, and this is reflected by the art assets. However, the art style used for these assets lacks personality, being in general rather bland and inorganic in both modeling and texturing. This critique extends to the characters and their animation, as well, which I find to be stiff and awkward in places. Dwarves are especially awkward, always having their heads tilted forward, with their chins in their chests.

The textures of the interior environments also appear to be very mild on the specular mapping, giving a dry, clay-like appearance to everything, and in some cases (like the crypt walls) the normal mapping seems a bit excessive or inexpertly applied. There are also glaringly obvious seams in some oft-repeated wall textures and extremely pixellated cobwebs that I can't believe got past quality assurance.

I'll be interested to see if any of the user-made campaign modules make improvements to the basic items and architecture.

Optimisation, bugfixes, and tweaking

The game may be poorly optimised and have some performance-reducing bugs, but over the past couple of days I found the necessary tweaks and workarounds to get it running smoothly and change the control scheme to something more comfortable and familiar (in fact, almost exactly like DA:O or WoW). Kornstalx's NWN2 Hotkeys v1.05a changes the camera control from the middle mouse button to the right one, and also allows me to simply hold left and right mouse buttons to move the character forward and rotate the camera at the same time in whatever direction I want to move, which is the comfortable DA:O and WoW control scheme.

I have the graphics settings almost all at maximum, at 1920x1080 resolution, with the only reductions being no point light shadows, no rendering of far distant shadows, and character shadow quality set to medium. I would actually rather have character shadows disabled completely, but I can't find any way to do that without also disabling the environmental shadows, which would degrade the visual quality of the environment greatly. The character shadows I'm talking about aren't the ones cast on the ground under the character, but the self-shadows, such as the ones cast on the character's face by the hair, which is unnecessary and generally looks bad.

Tweaks to the nwn2player.ini file reduce the ridiculous sensitivity of the camera control to normal levels, as in any other game of this kind. These are the settings I found to be comfortable:

[Character Mode Options]
Mouse_Turn_Min=0.050000
Mouse_Turn_Max=3.000000

I use character mode all the time, and don't really see much difference in any of the other cameras, aside from the fact that you can change settings for each of them individually. I can zoom in closely or zoom far out to a distant overhead or faux-isometric view in character mode, as well as either click to move or hold the mouse button to move, or even move with the keyboard.

The NWN2 Client Extension fixes a timing bug that was causing the background to move in a kind of choppy stutter when panning. Now it's all smooth sailing.

What it felt like Shepard was saying

Poorly timed for my entry into this game was the decision a few months ago by Bioware to take offline their pre-Social forums, which contained uncountable numbers of posts about NWN and NWN2. In my searches for solutions to the problems I mentioned above, I would almost always hit several links on Google that looked from the summaries like they had the exact answer I needed, only to be directed to Commander Shepard's ugly face on the front page of bioware.com. I cannot adequately express how much this repeated occurrence increasingly felt like an insult, and how much bad faith it engenders. It has been months since their incident, and they haven't put that knowledge base treasury back online in any form, preferring instead to use all those links as a redirect to an advertisement. The likelihood of me buying Mass Effect 3 is surely decreasing with each such instance.

Crashes are rare with this setup, and far fewer than the crashes I still sometimes get with Dragon Age.

There are still some issues with the movement. Characters, including the one I'm controlling, can easily get blocked and stuck by environmental props. If I run too near to, say, a barrel, I can hit the collision box and just start running in place until I unstick the character. When companions do this, I may not notice until I'm on the other side of the temple. Other games handle this sort of thing better, by transferring some of your forward motion to the sides, so instead of stopping you, you're deflected around the item.

Interface

The user interface is designed in XML, and can be changed without any special tools. Thus, there are many user-made interface changes to choose from. I've found ones that increase the window sizes to use more of the available screen space for larger resolutions, as well as a larger font for the same reason.

I've also installed a tweak to change the size and aspect ratio of the portraits for the PC and the party members, making them use the same portrait size as NWN1 (larger, and a better proportion for portraits) instead of a square one. The default portraits in NWN2 are simple snapshots of the rather unappealing 3D character models, just like in Dragon Age. They're all facing the same direction, with the same expression, and have nothing to make them uniquely identifiable or artistically represent aspects of their character. Obsidian apparently understood this as a flaw, since you can easily change the portraits by double-clicking on them in the character sheet screen and selecting a new file in Targa format. There are many custom made portraits online to choose from in the correct aspect ratio since I'm using the NWN1 portrait mod, although finding appropriate portraits for the OC characters in particular is just as difficult as it was for Planescape: Torment, or even more so since the few actual portrait replacements I've found were made in the same square aspect ratio.

But look at the difference! The 2D portrait has personality and mood, while the 3D one is just a bland screenshot of a doll-like 3D model.

Starting experience

I found it highly refreshing to play a game with a starting experience like this. After so many games starting me in a barren wasteland, junkyard, prison, or other unpleasant surrounding, here I began in a land of lovely green wetlands and meadows, during a harvest festival full of games, entertainment, small-town rivalries, and competitions. The townsfolk had vibrant personalities, and the whole setting of the harvest festival allowed me to learn the controls of the game in a relaxed, pleasant environment before getting thrust into battle.

During the initial introductory areas, two friends are provided as party members: a fighter and a wizard, with a couple of other party members added briefly for tutorial purposes. Once you leave for the wider world, the first two companions that seem to be available are a dwarf fighter named Khelgar and a cheerful tiefling thief named Neeshka, who I quoted above. I don't yet know how long it'll be before I find any more, but I'm glad I'm a spellcaster (as a druid), since otherwise that role would be lacking.

Comparisons to Dragon Age: Origins

I'm noticing quite a number of elements that Dragon Age could well have acquired from this game, such as the companion influence system, the 3-companion limit, and the area-of-effect circle marker that you place on the ground when casting an AoE spell. That last one is one of the things for which I praised Dragon Age, calling it an improvement over the blind AoE in Baldur's Gate. Characters who die during a battle also get right back up again after combat is over, as in DA:O, so I don't know what good these "raise dead" scrolls are, unless it's for combat rezzing.

Problems and letdowns

The AI is abominable in this game. That goes both for pathfinding and for following the orders I bloody well give my companions. They'll sometimes directly ignore an order I broadcast right in front of them, such as "follow me", despite me ordering it multiple times and moving in a direction, and instead they'll charge in the opposite direction right into the Cloudkill that was billowing in the hallway for the enemies I wanted to draw out. Not to mention unexpectedly charging forward to attack distant enemies while I'm having Neeshka disarm a trap. Running right onto the trap, naturally, before I can stop them, and when I thought I had them all on "stay". Even failing to obey my orders, the AI should be smart enough not to run into poison clouds that I cast or traps that I've detected. It's a real exercise in companion wrangling. I don't even want to get into the times in the heat of battle that I position myself to cast spells that cause damage in a straight line (like Lightning Bolt) so that they'll hit multiple enemies and none of my companions, and it's almost guaranteed that several of my companions will get right in front of me to receive the full blast when it goes off. I might have to try the "puppet mode" where they don't do anything without orders, even though that's not what I want -- what I want is for them to act intelligently.

Companions are constantly getting stuck on scenery. There's no excuse for the party members getting stuck on walls while running down a hall. When they're following a party leader, they run in a direct path toward the leader, and clearly aren't using the walkmesh for the level. Switching to controlling them directly, and clicking on the spot where I want them to go makes them correctly run around those same obstacles they get stuck on when they're following the leader. That's bloody ridiculous! How can this have gone unfixed for so long? The companion pathfinding is one area where Dragon Age: Origins is clearly superior to NWN2. Companions should always use a level's walkmesh, following or not.

A stranger bug that I often encounter is that sometimes I'll be running around and am abruptly teleported back to where I started from. This can happen at quite some distance, causing me to need to retread my steps. What the hell could cause that, and how can that have gotten past quality assurance?

On an aesthetic topic, the various temples are very disappointing compared to the Baldur's Gate games. Whereas in BG they were unique and interesting, Obsidian basically went the Oblivion route with the temples, making them all look like generic Christian churches with hard wooden pews and angelic choir music, with a token shrine to the particular god near the front. By contrast, the temple of Helm in BG2 was dripping with atmosphere appropriate to that stern, obey-the-law kind of god, with industrial sounds and an authoritative voice echoing through it reminding everyone of the laws they must follow, while the temple of Umberlee the water-queen was essentially a giant indoor pool with narrow catwalks crossing over it for the adherents to walk on.

Spelling mistakes and incorrect grammar are also noticeable. "Nevermind" instead of "never mind," using the word "discrete" when they should have used "discreet," "it's" when they meant "its," "pouring over books" instead of "poring over books," "who's blood" instead of "whose blood," and so on.

This may seem to be a pretty harsh review for a game that I like and recommend, but believe me, it deserves the criticism as much as it deserves the praise. There's a brilliant, shining game under the grime of its bugs, and I only wish I had a way to scrub that grime away. The game system is expansive and very flexible, and (companion AI issues aside) fun to play. Even the official campaign is a fun ride. I've already begun downloading user-made story/quest modules, though, which I expect to also enjoy. I'm beginning with highly-rated, spotlighted, and award-winning modules on the Neverwinter Vault, which I think will have to suffice in lieu of personal recommendations. I'll have to look for some module reviews somewhere, too.

Arx Fatalis

I finished one of my holiday gifts recently (well, finished enough -- more on that later). Arx Fatalis (Fatal Fortress or Fortress of Fate in Latin) is a game which was inspired by the Ultima Underworld series, and was the predecessor to Arkane Studios' more recent Dark Messiah of Might and Magic -- which is a better-looking, but severely stripped down spiritual successor (aren't they all?)

Arx Fatalis is a rather linear RPG-like game. You play as a single predefined character -- a voiced, male-only "chosen one" figure (with a choice of 4 possible faces) who was sent to save the world from an ancient evil (the story isn't one of its strong points). The RPG elements include the ability to put stat points into various attributes upon gaining new levels, optional side-quests, inventory management with buying and selling at vendors, crafting, character specialisations, and a good amount of freedom in your approach to solving various problems. Although you don't get any choices of dialogue during conversations, you do get to make various decisions through your actions, and there are usually multiple choice paths with different advantages.

There are numerous puzzle challenges throughout the game, which I consider one of the strengths of the game. These were almost all enjoyable and challenging, with just the right amount of clues to keep you from getting stuck, but difficult enough to make you think for a while.

Buggy as hell

Of all of my GOG games, this was the only one that gave me significant trouble in getting it to run properly. I was plagued by crashes, bugs, and graphical glitches that made the game unplayable, but eventually, through stubborn perseverance and experimentation with various settings and patches, I got it into a playable state. I wish I could report exactly what combination fixed all the problems, but I tried so many things I can't say for sure.

First, there was the rendering problem. This was noticeable immediately on starting the game, from the first cutscene to the game itself. The frames flickered and stuttered, and although camera freelook view and the movement of my character seemed unaffected, all animated textures stuttered as well, and jumping and crouching were jerky and strange as well. The last official patch from Arkane Studios itself, posted around the time they released the source code (around the holidays of 2010) has an option to "enable rendering fix" which for some reason didn't solve this problem for me at first, but it's working now, and I'm not sure which tweaks did it.

Then, there was the crashing problem. This happened mostly during the transitions from the interior of the king's castle to the city of Arx. Why, I don't know, but the fix was to lower the texture resolution to "low".

Finally, the running speed problem. This one was identified by user Nuky on the GOG forum as being related to the amount of time your computer has been running since startup. Apparently, the speed starts out fairly normal if you're playing the game after recently having reset your computer, but for those of us who keep their computers running for long periods of time without resets, the running speed increases until you shoot down the corridors like The Flash. Thanks to the source code for the game having been released, Nuky posted a fix for this problem, which solved it for me. His fix also improved the speed of the unnecessarily sliding menus (personally, I don't see why they kept that sliding in there when it performed so poorly) at the expense of the font's antialiasing.

In case it had anything to do with the overall fixes, here are my nVidia card settings that I tweaked during the troubleshooting process (items that are set to "application-controlled" are not listed here):

• Antialiasing - Gamma correction: Off
• Antialiasing - Transparency: Off
• CUDA - GPUs: All
• Maximim pre-rendered frames: 3
• Multi-display/mied-GPU acceleration: Multiple display performance mode
• Texture filtering - Negative LOD bias: Allow
• Texture filtering - Quality: Quality
• Texture filtering - Trilinear optimisation: On
• Threaded optimisation: Auto
• Triple-buffering: Off

After I got all this taken care of, it became a relatively smooth playing experience, with only occasional hiccups.

Overall impressions

This game includes hunger, but no need to sleep, despite the wide availability of beds, and the fact that you obtain your own bedroom early in the game. I thought I would find hunger an annoying feature, but it turns out it just made cooking more enjoyable. Cooking is one of the two crafting disciplines you can practise (three if you count enchanting), the other being alchemy. The difference is that there are no skill requirements for cooking. All you need are the tools, ingredients, and a fire. Most food doesn't even need the tools. Just set some raw fish or rat ribs by a fire, and in a few seconds you have cooked food that'll satisfy your hunger. The fact that rats are the only creatures that regularly drop meat (sentient creatures like goblins or trolls might happen to be carrying some food, but you'll never get goblin meat) makes the many rat encounters in the game slightly less annoying (I daresay at least 50% of the combat in this game is against rats).

But once you've gotten your hands on some flour, water, apples, wine, and a rolling pin, you can make yourself probably the best food in the game: gourmet apple pie. It satisfies your hunger for longer than almost anything else, and it takes up the minimum space in your inventory, unlike the similarly satisfying large ribs.

Alchemy isn't as fun. There are only a few potions you can make (health, mana, poison, antidote, and invisibility), and your object knowledge skill only affects whether you can make them. You need bottles, a mortar and pestle (to powder your herbs), and access to a still to brew the potions. Empty bottles are fillable with water or wine, and drinking or using those items will leave you an empty bottle to use in alchemy, but if you drink a potion, the bottle seems to disappear.

You can also carve wood into wooden stakes (useful for zombies), enchant your weapons with a few possible reagents (and poison them as well), craft and repair weapons at a blacksmith's place (or just repair them at any anvil), go fishing, and mine gems and precious metals from the walls with a pick. These are all less developed than the previous crafts, and money isn't really a problem in this game, either, so you could just skip the mining.

Unfortunately, the world is hardly populated at all. The "city" of Arx has perhaps 20 people living in it, which includes the king, his servants, and the guards. There are 3 merchants (one for gems and jewelry, one for weapons and armour, and one for misc supplies), plus another merchant down in the lower caverns. It makes the slaughter of all the people at the first human outpost you find seem like a terrible loss, since they pretty much cut the human population in half. Not that it seems to matter to the people in the nearby tavern, who never seem to notice or care that there's a body-strewn battleground next door, even though they'd have to pass by it to leave the tavern.

Nearby that same tavern is a small alcove containing the wreckage of a teleporter, which I presume was destroyed by the Ylsides during their offscreen attack on the human outpost. This is the first such teleporter you're likely to find in the game, and it is explained at some point during the main quest how you can use them. "Let me show you how we travel", one of the naga/lamia women told me at that point, and she took me to one of the intact teleporters near the market area of the city of Arx, and showed me a spell to cast to activate the device. Each device must be activated in person before you can teleport there, much like meeting the flight masters in WoW in person before you can fly to their flight points.

I'll be generous and assume that by "activating" them, you're doing some kind of magical attunement to your body so that you can travel through them, and not that they've just all been sitting dormant all this time. But there's one thing I noticed about the teleporters. First of all, once you activate a portal, it'll show up on one of the sides of the device for the rest of the game, and there are a limited number of sides. I had assumed throughout most of the game that one of them would always be broken, because of that wreckage down by the tavern, until I actually did come across one final teleporter. Once I activated it, the final panel of the teleporter opened, with no space left for the broken teleporter. Either this is some kind of oversight on the developers' part, or else we're meant to assume that the wreckage was not the result of the recent attack, but had actually been there for a long time, and one of the teleporters that I had already activated had been its replacement.

The look and feel

It's a somewhat strange ambience in Arx Fatalis, with its goofy, cartoonish goblins and trolls, with quests to get a birthday present for the lonely troll and to sneak into a goblin's room by secretly giving him diarrhea, while on the other end of the spectrum there are copious dismembered bodies, scattered heads, arms, and torsoes, torture rooms, hanged prisoners, and human sacrifice (a woman and a child, who it's possible to rescue), with more sacrifices being referred to in the past.

Aside from the violence, there's also the unexpected but not unwelcome possibility for sex in the game, though it's handled in a very strange and bizarre way. If you return the magic rings to Alia after destroying the meteor, she's so pleased that she invites you to stay with her for a while. After a black screen, there's a very strange after-bed sequence that could be interpreted as a nightmare.

There is no followup or comment to the monster-face "premonition" either in conversation or in the quest log. My thought is that it might have been from a dropped alternate resolution to that part of the story, depending on how you may have handled things before. There are a couple of scenes in other places that play out slightly differently depending on your actions, after all. This might have originally led to a fight with a monster Alia. If there was such a plan that had to be dropped, they may have decided the scene was too good to waste, and so they put it in as a kind of fake-out "dream sequence" just before the "real" conversation.

Compared to Ultima Underworld

As written in game histories, Arx Fatalis was planned to be a third game in the Ultima Underworld series, but Arkane Studios couldn't get the license for it, and thus they retooled it into a similar but original setting. Since I have not yet played UU, I base what I write here on my readings of developer interviews and of gameplay videos.

Since Arx was based directly on it, I won't go into the similarity in setting, or the "chosen one" back story, which was a staple of the Ultima story anyway, in the form of the Avatar. Visually, there's little to compare, since UU was 2.5D like Doom, with 2D sprites moving in a 3D space, and Arx is fully 3D.

But in terms of content, for instance, Arx includes somewhere between 6-9 types of enemy, not counting 1-time bosses or humans, which is a fraction of the creatures in UU, whether or not I use UU1 or UU2 as a representative sample. Arx initiates dialogue only when it wants to, in the form of non-interactive cutscenes, while UU has proper branching dialogue with NPCs, with multiple response options. My only complaint there is that UU uses faux Elizabethan English, as it seems all Ultima games do.

Hunger is in both games, but UU also requires sleep, which I suspect (from the presence of the aforementioned beds and bedroom) was originally planned for Arx as well, but never implemented.

In UU2, not only can you make your own notes on your map, but you can enter your own text in character dialogue in some places, which is perhaps useful in cases where you know the answer to something that your character hasn't actually discovered. This does break the RPG elements, but the game already does that by having you do realtime, manual combat (which Arx also does).

I can't tell how the two games compare in terms of the number of NPCs and locations from what I've seen, unfortunately.

I'm not sure how many of the good UU elements would not have been cut out if Arkane had been able to call it Ultima Underworld 3 instead of making it a "spiritual successor", but the more cynical side of me suspects those things would have been cut for time and money reasons anyway.

Compared to the Elder Scrolls

Both Arx Fatalis and Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind came out in 2002, and are graphically very similar, so if you're familiar with the more popular Morrowind, you know what to expect graphically -- Good environmental structure and texturing (for the time), and rather ugly character models. Arx beats Morrowind in terms of character animation, though.

Having seen what I've seen of Ultima Underworld, I'm leaning toward the conclusion that Morrowind and Arx were both aiming for the same things, and went about it in similar, but not identical, ways. The first two Elder Scrolls games look a lot like the Ultima Underworld games, the first of which was released 2 years before the first Elder Scrolls game. Of course, Daggerfall deserves a post all on its own, and I'll get to that eventually. But the point for now is that the first two Elder Scrolls games owe much of their look and gameplay to UU, and Morrowind represents their move to full-blown 3D after the Doom-like 2.5D of the first two. That's why it's valid to compare Morrowind and Arx Fatalis, as both of them are basically 3D reimaginings of Ultima Underworld.

Arx Fatalis did not have an intermediate step as the Elder Scrolls did, and jumped directly from Ultima Underworld to full 3D, and I find it interesting that they arrived at such a similar destination as did Morrowind. A natural convergent evolution, or did the two studios influence each other during the design process?

At any rate, the biggest difference between the two is that Arx abandoned the character dialogue options that Morrowind retained, and chopped the character appearance customisation down to 1 race, 1 sex, and 4 faces (down from 10 possible face choices in UU, with 5 for each sex), where Morrowind continued the trend it had established in its previous games where it had expanded the character customisation to several races, with numerous faces for each race and sex. The second most striking difference is the linearity and lack of replayability, due to a much smaller game world with so few side quests.

Compared to Dark Messiah

From reading the TTLG forum, in the Arx forum that I never visited (I was always there for the Thief series), I see that people were anxiously expecting an Arx Fatalis 2 for years after the first one, but eventually it was revealed that Arkane Studios was instead working on Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, which was released in 2006. I actually went and purchased that game while I was playing Arx, though I already knew from the forum posts and from the gameplay videos on Youtube that it was even more stripped down from Arx than Arx was from UU. From the gameplay videos, I could tell that it would be a pure FPS action game, and bought it with that in mind. It's a departure from the rest of the Might and Magic line, but I have no experience with those, and the fact that it is such a departure is what makes it worth comparing to Arx Fatalis.

It was, in fact, essentially an FPS compared to Arx, much like the difference between System Shock 2 and Bioshock. I was pleasantly surprised to see that there was actually still an inventory and several trees of stats and abilities we could invest points in, but those things are not enough to call Dark Messiah an RPG. It's at best an FPS with a few RPG elements, and it's even more linear than Arx Fatalis. You can't even select an appearance, but it hardly matters since you never see your character.

I did notice quite a few elements from Arx returned in Dark Messiah, though. I'm strongly tempted to believe that this game actually began its life as Arx Fatalis 2, but was repurposed at some point during development when they got rights to a well-known title. Right on the title screen, in fact, one of the game's necromancers is staring menacingly at you, and he bears a resemblance to the Ylsides from Arx. Also making a return appearance are certain kinds of food, certain props, and a functional forge. But once in your inventory, every type of food magically turns into identical "food rations". And since there's no hunger in this game, the only thing food does is restore a tiny amount of health. As a wizard/thief, it takes more than a full stack of food to restore my health bar completely, and I would expect a warrior would get far less benefit from it. In addition, there are arbitrary item-type limits. "You can carry no more than 20 mana potions" (or anything else) no matter how many inventory slots you have free.

Speaking of inventory, I had been finding myself running out of room and getting impatient for the night to end so I could go to the nearest shop and sell off some junk, only to find that there are no shops in Dark Messiah! At one point we went to a tavern, and I thought that was going to be a shop of some kind (and my demon companion said "I think they sell more than just food here,") but the barmaid just walked off into the kitchen and stayed there, not responding to my attempts to speak to her except to yell at me for coming into the kitchen and threatening to call the guards if I didn't leave. No one in that tavern, in fact, appeared to do anything. So don't bother picking up anything you can't actually use, unless you want to be sure to have something on hand to throw at enemies.

The game also commits the exact same kind of offense as Arx did -- namely, introducing a boss fight weighted heavily against magic users. Here, an orc boss challenges me to single combat with the rules specifically prohibiting the use of magic. I'm a wizard with no points in mêlée combat at all, and he can kill me in 1 hit. If I even switch to casting mode, his half-dozen bodyguards immediately attack as well. I found that out by accidentally hitting a key nearby the "kick" key which put me in casting mode. I spent maybe 15-20 minutes reloading over and over, quick-saving as soon as I'd scored a couple of hits and was still in decent health. I have no idea how long it'll take to wear his hit points down, but I'm very sick of it by now. I was also sick of replaying his long speech before he attacked, until I realised you can save during cutscenes.

Dark Messiah is actually a change from my most recent trend of starting with the latest game in a series (even a series as loose as a thread of "spiritual successors"), and working my way backward to the earlier games, which traded graphics for better and more complex content. It is very pretty, with some nice characters, and even includes rope arrows like in the Thief series, but it lacks in depth.

End of Arx Fatalis

This is what I was talking about when I said I had "finished enough." As it turns out, I couldn't finish the game, and I don't plan to. The final boss fight appears to be unwinnable for me, as a non-warrior type, with the final boss' apparently huge health reserve and a tractor beam that forces you into close combat. And since this fight ends the game, I don't feel the need to keep trying. I watched the ending on Youtube for closure.

I tried numerous strategies that I read about, but nothing worked for me. The boss either just stood there and did nothing (after his transformation) while I kept hitting him over and over until giving up, or he wiped the floor with me despite me constantly chugging health potions, or he stood there confused when I levitated or climbed a pillar, but again simply refused to die no matter how many times I hit him with the special sword or threw fireballs at him. I played a combination thief-mage, with high casting skill that could kill an Ylside with 2 fireballs and a lich with 3, but nothing worked against this boss.

Since casters are heavily crippled in this game due to the gesture-recognition system they used, where you have to draw 3 or 4 runes in the air with your finger to cast a spell, and can only pre-cast and store up to 3 of them, it essentially amounts to a 3-spell-per-fight limit, since fumbling around in the inventory for scrolls with no ability to pause while doing so, and trying to draw runes with a mouse (and have them be recognised) are too clumsy for me to want to keep beating my head against that wall.

Nevertheless, despite the buggy beginning, small world, linear story, lack of freedom, anticlimactic ending, and reduced content from its predecessors, I consider Arx to have been fun and enjoyable. Though small in scope, Arkane did take care to make each area visually different and interesting. If you spend as little time in the city of Arx as possible, and spend most of your time exploring the different levels, the illusion of a larger world may persist (though you may end up backtracking a good deal due to getting lost, which is easy to do). On the other hand, what it really makes me want to do is try out its predecessor Ultima Underworld, which I suspect I'll enjoy all the more for what was left out of this one.