More Neverwinter Nights 2 modding

One should not take my lack of updates here as a sign that I'm not gaming.  The truth is, I play other types of games as well as RPGs, and I'm not sure that they'd fit well on this blog.  After finishing the module that occupied much of my time over the past couple of years, I expanded back out into a wider variety of game types, and played many other games to completion, though I did also find the time last year to add a Halloween expansion to my campaign.  At any rate, the itch to play and mod Neverwinter Nights 2 has returned.

I've played many modules recently too, of course, and I've even written reviews of them, but I'm not comfortable with posting those reviews.  As a reader may note from my previous reviews (including of NWN2 modules), I can be a harsh critic, and I have rather high standards.  Those standards have only risen higher since those last reviews, since I've not only played a good number of exemplary modules, but I've also seen for myself exactly what can be done in the toolset.  I want my criticism to be constructive, but it's hard to disguise the frustration I sometimes feel at certain common mistakes that cause problems in modules, especially when they're reported to the author and are never fixed.  So as yet I've remained silent.

I've started on another expansion to my campaign, but it's very preliminary work so far.  I've made some new custom content.  One is a recreation of the green devil head, the iconic trap in the classic Gary Gygax module Tomb of Horrors.  This has no real use outside of that module, and I'd hate to see such an iconic trap being used for generic decoration, so the only point to creating this was to test out a sculpting method in Gmax, which was cutting shapes out of a plane and moving vertices around.  It worked very nicely, so I can see myself making more interesting objects now.

Another is a new shiny tintable floor, which was inspired by a description of the evil cleric's room in the classic pen & paper module The Keep on the Borderlands.  Most NWN2 assets suffer from poor texturing.  Low resolution diffuse maps, overwrought normal maps, and very little specularity.  My content is intended to make up for that.

Another is a set of tile floors based on the dungeon floor tiles in the official Wizards of the Coast map tile packs.  These are also shiny and tintable in several ways (you can tint them in ways that make them appear less shiny, and can optionally tint them in a checkerboard pattern).  The scale is not the same as the original official map tiles, however.  The original dungeon tiles were a single tile to represent 10 feet, aligning it with one of the standard measurements (the other is 5 feet).  However, since NWN2 tiles are 9 m to a side, I decided to have 12 tile squares per 9 m, which makes each square approximately 2.5 feet.  This means that a set of 4 tiles creates a 5 ft x 5 ft square, or 8 of them makes 10 ft x 10 ft.  This makes it easy to map out interiors based on the old D&D maps.

Although I have some ideas in mind for my expansion already, I've decided to go through some old Dungeon magazines for inspiration and details, especially for special encounters, traps, treasures, etc.  Each room is a set-piece in many of these older adventures, each containing something new to see or do.  This sort of design goal fits in well with one of my other design goals, that of spectacle and discovery.  Then again, there are also some adventures that contain plain empty rooms.  I'm not particularly concerned with this kind of realism.  I want the rooms to have things in them that are interesting for players to do in a game, whether or not it's more realistic to have empty, looted rooms in a place that's supposedly occupied, or to have traps and puzzles in each room, or just to have rooms piled high with junk or objects too large for an adventurer to move.  Likewise, in a world where everburning torches are a common enough item, there's no real need to play the "realism" card in terms of lighting.

Anyway, here's to more fun times ahead.

Neverwinter Nights 2 module update

Although I've been rather quiet on this blog, I've been steadily posting updates on my progress on my adventure module for Neverwinter Nights 2 on the forums of the Neverwinter Nexus and the Bioware Social Network, where by now I've posted somewhere around 150 updates about it.  I don't think I said much about it here, actually, although I've posted several videos from it on my Youtube channel.

The summary of it is that it's approaching completion, and it's large.

After this module's completion, I can get back to more frequent updates here -- which is certainly not to say there won't be anything here until then.

What I've learned

I've learned an unbelieveable amount about modding and making games from this experience, far beyond my previous modding in other games.  My module for Dragon Age: Origins was a dipping of my toe, and this has turned out to be swimming in a vast ocean.

I've become comfortable with fairly complicated programming/scripting, which turned out to be not only a basic necessity, but a creative opening of the doors that allow me to make any kind of quest I can imagine.  I've also learned the value of writing detailed comments in my scripts, to document what I'm doing and why, and how it affects other scripts, or is affected by them, and where I'm storing variables and other information.

I've recently expanded my asset-creation knowledge from my existing forte of texturing, to learning how to make custom models, and creating new UV/UVW maps for them, using Gmax (a sort of "lite" version of 3DS Max, if I understand correctly).  I've created a number of new placeables for this project, first by simply retexturing existing models and by texturing the models supplied by others, and later by making the meshes in Gmax.

I also learned how to use other tools to import custom music and sound effects, and performed mass extraction and conversion of the game's sound assets so that I can more conveniently browse through them and pick appropriate sounds for my module's situations.  The built in "sound objects" that can be placed in the game are convenient for many purposes, but they don't include anywhere near the entirety of the assets available in the game files.

Before that, of course, I had also learned about how to made the graphic user interface elements in XML, and I used my graphic design experience to make them look nice at HD resolution.

I'll have to make a post to showcase the new placeables at some point, and ultimately I'll be releasing them as a pack separately from the module that I made them for.  I'd like to showcase the scripting systems, too, but code doesn't lend itself well to showcasing in that manner, despite being very interesting in other ways.

Lighting in this engine is another thing I've been learning about.  I can see that there were some mistakes in how the original campaigns were lit, and unfortunately those mistakes are what prompted me (and no doubt many others) to disable point light shadows.  And the poor engine optimisation caused many others to eschew even medium-level shadows.  A great shame, since with full shadows enabled, and a module with properly adjusted lights, the lighting can be very beautiful in this game.

I don't use these cinematic cutscenes, preferring the text box for its much longer capacity for each line (and perhaps more importantly, how it gives the user the ability to absolutely control the pace of the dialogue), but if I were to use the cinematic cutscenes, I would certainly use a classic studio 3-point lighting setup, and specifically chosen camera angles (rather than the default random angles) to create an appealing and dramatic scene.  Lighting is often not given the attention it should be, though it plays a very important role.  Some conversations I've experienced in some modules have taken place entirely in the dark, and not for any artistic reason that I could tell!

Likewise, I have come to believe that the washed-out look that I'd noted in some areas and objects in my original playthrough of the original NWN2 campaign is due to the fact that those assets were intentionally designed with a low colour saturation so that they could be tinted as needed.  And some level artists apparently didn't tint them.

One of the first things I learned was how to handle the game's two-dimensional array files (2DA).  Understanding those is really the first step in using almost any custom content.  I can clearly recall how foreign and mystifying they were when I first attempted to use one, which was the restsys_wm_tables.2da file used to select random wandering monster encounters for the resting system that was added in Mask of the Betrayer.

For that matter, learning to create a campaign and to import systems added by the expansions was a very valuable experience.  Creating a campaign was thankfully simple enough, since there is a very good tutorial for it by Kaldor Silverwand.  Importing the other systems, on the other hand, involved a lot of reading through scripts and examining settings in the official campaigns.

And of course, several mishaps underscored the importance of backing up your work often.  Fortunately, my backups have been frequent enough as to prevent the loss of more than a day's work.  If you're reading this, and you haven't backed up your current work in more than a day, take a break from reading and do it now, just in case.

Ways of learning more

Since there are no intermediate-to-advanced tutorials for creating modules that I could find, I think there's nothing better that you can do than to open up the default scripts and read them.  Especially the include files, and the scripts for special events and encounters in the campaigns.  Many of them have decent documentation that teaches you a great deal, and since these scripts were written over a period of years, and also by different people, there are a lot of different approaches shown in them.  In the few months I've been working on this, I myself have used multiple approaches for the same tasks, based on different factors, such as directness, extensibility, reusability, elegance, brevity, ease for other people to understand it, and others, so it's no surprise to see so many methods on display in the core scripts, especially those left over from NWN1.

In addition to just reading the scripts, it's extremely helpful to just play through the official campaigns, and take note of when the game has you performing a particular task that's similar to something you want to have in your module as well.  You can open up that file and see how they did it, and then use that knowledge to make your own version.

Anyway, I've really been enjoying this process of learning and discovery (aside from a few annoying things like working with the walkmesh).  So back to work for me!

Step by step landscape

Here's a little post showing me sculpting a landscape in the Neverwinter Nights 2 toolset for my upcoming module, just for anyone curious about the process.

Here's how it started. I took the flat plane, filled it with a sand texture (for the ocean floor), and sank most of it so that it left only a little island in the middle, and a mainland on one side. I put a tower and an NPC on it for scale reference. Then I added a water plane, laid down a little blue tint for later, and started smoothing the island. I caught some of this on video, due to an unintentional Fraps activation, so here it is:

I continued adjusting the height and basic shape of the island until it was approximately roughed out to the right size and shape. Next, I started going over it again with a smaller brush for finer control.

Here, I started picking textures for the island and laying them on. Once I had the basic areas sketched on, I used the texture swapper to try different combinations of rock, dirt, and grass, until I found a combination that looked pretty good together.

After that, I added rocks, grass, trees, and bushes, as well as a dock and some rowboats. I adjusted the water and atmospherics too. Here's a brief video showing the island at this stage:

Then I threw on some textures for the mainland. Since this is off in the distance and shrouded in fog, it's not important to have fine detail, so I used camouflage-style large blobs of colour.

And here's a screenshot of the mainland from the lighthouse island.

New NWN2 module underway

I've officially begun work on the module I've been planning. I'm calling it The Black Scourge of Candle Cove, and I'm discussing my progress on it in threads on the NW Nexus and the Bioware Social Network.

Neverwinter Nights 2, part 6 (ending)

Aside from some new upgrades being available to build at the keep, and some new keep-related resources to collect, the order of the day in Act 3 is to gather some potential allies for the upcoming fight against the King of Shadows (I agree with the Luskan ambassador in regard to the silliness of the name). Basically, that means that Crossroad Keep has become a new quest hub, with the world map now being restricted to locations that relate directly to this purpose. All except for the town of Ember, which has no one new to recruit. I went down the well to see if I could gain the friendly goblins as allies, but there was no new dialogue with them. There were also some characters available to recruit to work at Crossroad Keep, which don't seem to be directly related to the upcoming battle, like a dancer for the tavern and a couple of extra merchants.

The other locations (with one notable exception) were pretty small and self-contained, not like the similar ally-gaining quests in Dragon Age: origins, which had very large diversions for each one. In at least one case (Highcliff), it seemed like they might have planned them to be larger originally, because they involved some boss-level fights with groups, phases, and adds, but these were all located right there, without having to crawl through a dungeon to reach them.

The simplest of these was also the hardest. I had to fight a character named Light of Heavens in a one-on-one duel. Again, me as an unarmoured spellcaster, and her as an armoured sword-swinger with knockdowns, high hit points, and lots of spell resistance. Once again, with this fight, the devs show their disregard for clothies by requiring it to be a solo effort. This was a slightly laggy location, with dozens of citizens spawning from houses and evacuating the city, but not enough to interfere with the gameplay. It took several tries, but I finally beat her with the use of about 10 summoned creatures (in a series, since I could only have one at a time), 2 or 3 blast globes, just about all my spells, and lots of running around the marketplace in a big circle to gain enough distance to cast spells at her, since my speed was just slightly higher than hers. The process was basically starting with a summon, running away until it got her attention, then casting spells at her until she killed it (which didn't take long), then running away far enough to summon another creature before she reached me, then running some more until it got her attention, and so on.

The one in Highcliff where I had to fight a lizardman shaman king was a much better fight, and much more fun, but it was, again, right there in town.

The druid circle one involved two of the companions, Elanee and Bishop, which gave it more character, but I don't see why it needed Bishop there at all. He was a forced companion when I went to that area, but didn't seem to do or say anything that made his presence mandatory. This was a minor annoyance since I had stripped him of all his gear when I left him behind at the first opportunity, and when he showed up I didn't have any armour on hand that he could wear. I never gave back his dagger, either, because I have Neeshka using it. The only reason I can speculate that Bishop might have been required, since he didn't contribute any unique action, and his commentary was inconsequential, is that perhaps his having witnessed the events there might play a part in a later development. There was some conversation back at the Keep from an earlier plot development when Bishop made some comment about what "we" went through, even though he hadn't been in the party at that time. I don't trust this chaotic evil ranger, and I don't like the fact that he's making his home in my keep, away from the watchful eye of Duncan back at the Sunken Flagon.

The Alliance with the Wendersnaven bit finally addressed the bard issue I had mentioned earlier. Finally, I got a bard instrument (the only one in the game?) that actually boosted bard skills rather than yet another equippable item that does nothing but cast some low-level spells when activated. Finally, a gameplay reason for my bard to carry an instrument!

There was an encounter with the ghost of a dragon in a location revealed to me by Ammon Jerro, which was plot-related, but separate from the "recruitment" theme of the rest of them. The dragon had information about how to reforge the silver shards into the sword we needed to kill the King of Shadows (why it would work this time, when it didn't work the first time, is unclear.) Apparently, Ammon had spoken to this ghost several decades ago when he was researching where to find a weapon to fight the King of Shadows in the first place.

The dragon's ghost was chained to this area due to a giant floating crystal dragon heart being physically chained up in this location, guarded by a couple of smaller dragons. By the ghost's request, I fought those guardians and destroyed the heart to release the spirit. This led me to yet another return to West Harbour, and at least this time one of the companions expressed a little emotion over what happened there. Grobnar did, too.

The best quest in Act 3

The recruiting of the Ironfist clan was the most developed of this section. It's almost out of place compared to the other ones, but you won't hear me advocate scaling it back to match the others. This one had much more companion involvement, and its task actually took place in multiple locations, and brought back events from way back in the storyline, involving an artifact-level pair of gauntlets that we had found at that time, the Gloves of Ironfist.

But talking with other voiced members of Khelgar's clan made me notice that Khelgar's the only one of his clan with that "Scottish" accent! I seriously can't understand how production companies keep doing this sort of thing. It's like Deanna Troi being the only Betazoid with her accent (her mother doesn't have it, and her father was apparently American), or Ambassador Delenn being the only Minbari with hers, or Londo Mollari being the only Centauri with his. Khelgar might have been a required companion for this section (if not, he should have been), but I can't tell because he was already in my party, reclaiming his role as the party tank after the death of Shandra.

To gain the support of the dwarves, we had to prove to the clan that Khelgar was a member in good standing, and not an outsider who had deserted them. To do this, we had to recover the second of the clan's patriarch's artifacts: The Belt of Ironfist. With that and the matching gloves, Khelgar would have the augmented strength necessary to lift the Hammer of Ironfist, once wielded by King Loudram, in a kind of sword-in-the-stone test of worthiness.

The belt was in the possession of some fire giants, so it was off to Mount Galardrym to find them.

Mount Galardrym was the biggest outdoor area I've seen in the game, if I'm not mistaken, and it was the absolutely best designed area. The long, winding paths leading up the mountain, overlooking lava pits, were clearly crafted with love and care. There were numerous watchtowers with trapped approaches, guarded by groups of fire giants and hell hounds who were fun to fight (though perhaps too easy for giants). There were several points of interest and several separate destinations to reach. One spot offered a scouting overlook to any surviving giants that our party may have missed by taking alternate paths, and offered an opportunity to push some large rocks down onto their heads as a surprise attack.

But the highlights of this area, aside from its aesthetics, were the two boss battles, one at the end of each path. One led to a big red dragon, and the other to the powerful fire giant king with his retinue of more giants and hell hounds than I had battled on the way up. Each of these bosses wanted the other one dead, as it happened, but I was not inclined to make any deals with either of them, so I fought each of them in turn. First the dragon, and then the giants.

The dragon fight was very challenging, and a lot of fun. My party was wiped on the first try. On the second try, I memorised a whole different set of spells in preparation, buffed nearly the whole party for immunity to fire damage (as many as I could with the spell slots available), and made sure all my offensive spells had significant damage even if save rolls were made. It was a brilliant light show! I've never had such an enjoyable dragon battle in any game before!

At the end of it, adding to the satisfaction of defeating a worthy opponent, the dragon's treasure hoard waited as a tantalising bonus. A huge pile of gold, and trapped chests filled with high-end gems, scrolls, and enchanted gear. This blew away the most recent other dragon battle I experienced, which was in Dragon Age: Origins (the dragon in the Brecilian Forest ruin, not the Archdemon). The fight there was less fun, and the hoard was much smaller. Here, I actually got to send my staff to haul the piles of gold back to my treasury! My standards had been lowered so far from previous games, I really wasn't expecting to be able to do that.

After I'd finished savouring my victory, I went around the mountain to the other side to face the fire giant king, which was another pretty good fight, but an anticlimax in comparison.

After gaining the Ironfist alliance, there were a few outdoor battles with the King of Shadows' forces, including a rather funny bit where we found part of his vampire army sleeping in their coffins during the day. Breaking the coffins open resulted in a crowd of vampires running around shrieking in the burning sun!

Ammon Jerro's remorse

I came to like the character of Ammon Jerro over the course of the game, despite the ruthlessness of his actions -- especially where it was completely gratuitous. Now, some of his murders were for revenge, though I don't recall if he explained what exactly their offenses had been against him. Other murders, however, were wanton and unnecessary, like the employees at the Moonstone Mask. While it turned out that he was motivated by the goal of recovering the shards to fight the King of Shadows and prevent a larger number of deaths, and considered some innocent casualties along the way to be acceptable losses, in some of these cases he could have just gotten what he came for and gotten out, without killing the people who were not fighters, and who were incapable of actually preventing him from getting the shards.

Spoiler: Click to display/hide

This hidden spoiler block contains spoilers about the death of a particular character

Still, he eventually came to regret what he had done, even though it wasn't until he had unknowingly murdered his own granddaughter.

Throughout the rest of the game, his regret came up again and again.  At first, he was unapologetic even in his regret, maintaining that he did what was necessary, and that he was already going to receive an unimaginable punishment.  Finally, though, in a long conversation that involved an influence check to see how well I had gotten to know Shandra, I was treated to a moving scene of Ammon Jerro falling to his knees and expressing his contrition in the ruins of Shandra's farm.

Solution to a major plot bug

There was a game-breaking bug in the battle at Crossroad Keep, after the siege tower battle, when Black Garius showed up and was giving his speech about how he was about to crush us by summoning an avatar of the King of Shadows, but it was actually pretty funny when it happened. In the middle of his speech, he apparently wandered a little too close to one of the soldiers, who sucker-punched him. This cut off his speech and he started fighting the soldiers, and never got around to summoning the avatar. Unfortunately, he was also plot-immortal at this time, so the game couldn't continue.

The solution is to open up the console and type:

rs 3541_death_nwalker

This loads up the cutscene that should play after you kill the King of Shadows' avatar, and the plot can continue from there. You will miss out on actually getting to participate in that fight, however.

I was also proven right not to have trusted Bishop in this section, since he was the one who just unlocked the gate to let the enemy in after the siege battle.

The ending

The ending was quite the mixed bag, but I'm inclined to forgive the visible signs of the time/money running out. There were subtle signs before, throughout the campaign, such as the design of Highcliff (the "tavern" bit I mentioned in a previous post), some conversations with companions that never went anywhere, and the large difference in scale between the various alliance-gathering missions, but the first really obvious sign I noticed was when I was looking to see what there was to do in the merchant district in Neverwinter during the evacuation. There was a dead man near an outhouse named "Privy Man", who had a mysterious journal on him that described some fearsome beast under the outhouse. I looked around, but found nothing else to do with him, and when I looked for answers online, I learned that it was the remnant of some cut content -- the Archmage Startear would have sent you on a quest to kill a lich who lived under that outhouse.

Nevertheless, whatever else they cut, Obsidian at least made sure to deal with all of the named adversaries introduced throughout the campaign.

Things really started showing the time/budget strain when what I thought was going to be another major battle turned out to be me watching a slide show of retouched screenshots, with voice acting, of Lord Nasher leading his troops to battle, and then a major event in the battle, and its outcome. Surely this was originally at least meant to be a cinematic, if not something in which the player was meant to participate!

Then there was the ending scene itself, which came after the final dungeon. After defeating the King of Shadows (it shouldn't be a spoiler to know that such a thing is possible), I was treated to another very unsatisfying slideshow of retouched screenshots describing the immediate aftermath of the battle (more on that in a second), narrated by a clearly non-professional voice actor (who someone on Youtube described as "Norman, from Accounts"), which then went on to describe what happened with various people and places in the next few years.

What happened directly after beating the boss, I was told by the narrator, was that my whole party was wiped out by the collapsing lair, because the King of Shadows was a "load-bearing boss". In other words: Rocks fall, everyone dies. I was incredulous. I couldn't believe that's how they ended it. And that was the good ending!

I spent the next few hours reading other people's reviews of that ending, as well as watching the "evil" ending on Youtube. Interestingly, while looking around on Youtube, I found that dialogue of my companions had actually been recorded to act out what I was only told had happened, and Youtube user RandonB put them together and posted the dialogue. I think that version of the ending would have been much better than the poorly narrated version, even if they had done it with the slide show method they had previously used for Lord Nasher's battle. It would have certainly been more poignant, as opposed to the whole "Then, offscreen, this happened. But never mind that -- here's what happened elsewhere over the next few years." Doing it the way they did, it actually reminded me a bit of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows (the final book in the series) in how the epilogue chose to answer questions that no one had even been asking, while keeping mute on issues of actual interest and relevance.

But aside from the actual ending, I enjoyed the climax very much. First was the showdown with Black Garius, and his attempts to seduce the members of my party to join his side, one by one. I actually went through this scene twice, because I wiped on the first attempt. The first time, he succeeded with Sand and Bishop (though Bishop had defected to his side earlier than in this scene), but the second time, he succeeded only with Sand. Although my influence with Bishop was predictably very low or nonexistent, considering I never included him in the party and didn't like him, and I hadn't said anything to try to convince him not to fight us, for some reason he decided to abandon both sides the second time through.

Neeshka was able to resist Garius' demon-binding on her through the power of friendship, since I liked her a lot and had a very high influence with her. I had high influence with everyone, really, except for Sand, who I neglected as much as Bishop, and much for the same reasons. So, with Khelgar, Neeshka, Grobnar, the Construct, Elanee, Qara, Casavir, Ammon Jerro, and Zhjaeve, we beat the stuffing out of Black Garius, at last, in a long battle with barriers, multiple add spawns, and several full heals on Garius' part. The rod of resurrection I was given earlier saw numerous uses during this fight. This battle also incidentally showed that it's possible to have a party of 10 fully-controllable characters, and that the previous party number limit had not been hard-coded.

After that mini-boss, it was time to face the King of Shadows himself, after a rest to heal and refresh our spells. It was nice of him to delay his passing through the portal until my party had rested from the Garius fight. This was a major fight, and with 10 party members, it resembled a raid boss. There were several phases to the fight, involving several strategies and objectives, and this made it particularly fun. It turned out that the Silver Sword of Gith was actually necessary after all to beat the KoS, but only because it was the only weapon that could damage the portal to the shadow weave, which is apparently the direct link KoS was relying on to stay alive (even though he had managed to forge a link to it out of nothing in years past, when he was dying, so it shouldn't have been any big deal for him to just make another one). Really, this whole climax was fantastic, right up until the slide show ending.

Obsidian bit off more than they could chew, but I prefer it that way. It was already a huge campaign with a massive amount of content, and I for one am glad that they aimed high, even if they ultimately had to abandon some of their plans.

And now that I've finally gotten the last part of this review posted, I can get started on my module.

Quest indicator mod additions

I think this system is as developed as it needs to be to use it in my NWN2 adventure module, but there is one thing that only recently occurred to me to try that might make it that much more convenient to use. It's pretty convenient already, though, since I've gone through and made it all generalised to the point where you don't have to touch the scripts once you attach them to the appropriate location on your NPCs or objects.

Instead, you assign local variables to your placed instances, and modify them through conversations or by firing scripts on conditional actions, such as "On Enter", "On Inventory Disturbed", "On Death", etc. In other words, anything that triggers a journal update will just need to have this script fired too. Everything else is handled through local variables.

This way, you can also have one questgiver begin the quest, and a second questgiver finish it, which is very important for certain kinds of quests (like breadcrumb quests). Anyway, I've been documenting how to use it in detail.

The video also shows my modification of the dialogue panel from my HD UI mod.

I'm close to getting ready to start on the adventure module itself. I just want to play the game a little bit more first, but I'm really getting anxious to start.

Neverwinter Nights 2, part 5

My apprehension at keeping all of my blog posts in a single file was justified. One surprise error while saving caused the loss of a month's worth of blog writing, about half of which had not yet been posted. I'll need to find a more stable solution, but in the meantime I'm making more frequent backup saves. This is what I've reconstructed of the second-to-last post about the NWN2 original campaign.

Crossroad Keep

The game is much longer than I was expecting. After battling what seemed to be a major enemy at the ruins of Crossroad Keep, I found that as a reward for my service I had been given the keep and its lands as a fixer-upper project. So now, apparently, I'm a landed noble, with a personal army, administrators, and my own peasant farmers to work the land, if I understand correctly. It'll be a giant gold sink, considering all the repair work that needs to be done, so it's a good thing I haven't spent much on the higher-level gear I've been seeing at some merchants.

This keep is much better laid out than the stronghold I was given in Baldur's Gate 2. Even though it's very large, there are characters stationed at all the important spots who I can talk to and be teleported to any other area. Additionally, there's a lot more to do there, such as making decisions on local policy, forging alliances, and sending other characters out on quests instead of doing quests for other characters.

The basement has a storage shelf and all three crafting stations, so perhaps this is what I should use as storage, instead of keeping it all on Casavir.

The improvements to be made at the keep are split into two areas -- manpower and repair/expansion. After talking to each of the heads of those departments, I decided to start by expanding and fixing up the roads that pass by the keep, to attract more merchant caravans, and I also told the chief of staff to recruit more soldiers, so I can later train them and set them out to patrol those roads, which is another necessary step to attract more merchants.

Guyven of the Road was there, too, and he talked about maps and finding nooks and crannies, but he didn't have any details, so I assume that's for later development.

While I was in the area, I went back to West Harbour to drop off a tithe box I'd been asked to deliver there, and see what may have developed on the homefront in the meantime. Nothing had, apparently. People were still walking around injured, houses were still wrecked from when I left, and I could still hear sound effects of fighting and screaming, and house fires in some spots. I did manage to finally get this "Wizard's Arsenal" quest out of my log book, though. It was a quest from the beginning of the game, which I had successfully completed at the time, but which was inexplicably re-added to my quest journal shortly thereafter. It had been stuck in my journal ever since then, even though I had entered that house several times trying to trigger something to get rid of it. Entering the house again at this later time made it disappear again.

Also in West Harbour, I found that I could bring one of the local farmers to Crossroad Keep to get the farms productive again. I think this keep might be an opportunity to help out that miner I met back in Port Llast, as well, who was looking for work. In any case, it seems that the keep adds a significant management minigame to the overall game, and it's a welcome improvement over other games' strongholds.

Incidentally, Crossroad Keep uses one of the tilesets with the worst kind of overdone normal maps (see picture). The stonework in the interiors looks like it's been exposed to about 2000 years of harsh weather, or else the stonecutter's guild was working with extremely crude chisels. Seriously, some of the normal maps in this game look like they were trying way too hard to point out the realtime shadows of the engine by making everything rough and pitted to absurd extremes.

Ruins of Arvahn

We were directed toward these ruins as part of the main quest. Approaching them caused that "Wizard's Arsenal" quest to pop up in my log book again! I was just walking along, and suddenly "Ding! *scribble*" my journal was stuck again with the quest from the beginning of the game to scrounge for starter weapons back in my hometown.

This was a pretty lengthy area, where I had to find and activate 5 statues, though the design of the place was rather uninspired. The first statue was right in front of the first fork in the road, three more were in dungeons in this zone, and the last one had to be reached through a portal that only opened once the first four were activated.

This area contained several tribes or factions that could be befriended or eliminated. I chose to befriend the first tribe of orcs, who seemed reasonable enough, refused an offer of alliance with a small band of infiltrators inside a dungeon because they were arrogant and threatening, and fought the ogre mage inside, because he was also rather arrogant and attacked me even when I merely declined to kill the orc leader for him.

The dungeons were pretty fun, with their own themes and objectives, and story exposition. One of them, Riverguard Keep, involved a kind of collection quest to gather items to open a door that led to one of the statues.

The gem mines involved a little puzzle in herding certain ghosts past obstacles into a central room, where they could perform a ceremony that would summon another one of the statues. This was also the site of a pretty funny bug, in which I was in conversation with one of the ghosts, and during the conversation, someone detected a nearby trap. I was surprised to see Neeshka automatically walk over to it and disarm it while we were still talking, and in the process, she apparently caught the attention of some enemies. So while my character was still stuck talking to this ghost, I was hearing the sounds of battle from offscreen, and seeing what little glimpses I could see of it when the fighting overlapped the cutscene camera angle.

The Temple of Seasons presented a series of season-themed challenges, each in an appropriately decorated room, and once all of the challenges were beaten, the door to one of the statues was opened. That one was the quickest run of the lot.

After passing through the final portal, I was redirected to (and I'll hide this in a spoiler tag) West Harbour, my hometown.

Spoiler: Click to display/hide

Here I found the smoking ruins of West Harbour, which had been attacked again in my absence.  A cutscene showed who did it, though, so it was no mystery.  It was the warlock that had also attacked the Moonstone Mask -- that time as well as this time, he was going after silver shards.  There's a strange disconnect here, because this warlock is the same man -- Ammon Jerro -- shown on the cover of the game and in the intro cinematic, fighting the King of Shadows.  He was wielding a sword in that cinematic, as well, which was shattered, so could that be the silver sword whose shards we're both trying to gather?

My only problem with this return home is that there is no reaction whatsoever to the fact that my character's hometown has been destroyed, along with all of its inhabitants.  Even the descriptions of the dead bodies of my former friends and acquaintances are written in a more-or-less emotionless style.  There's no music, no acknowledgement from my companions, and not even any opportunity (as far as I can recall) for me to state how my character might feel about it, whether I, as a good character, am devastated by the loss, or as an evil character I might be glad that they're all dead.  Look at those dialogue options, for my very first look at the destruction!  I suppose I can at least pretend that the first option is delivered in a devastated, breathless tone.

This hidden spoiler block contains an event spoiler

In regard to that, surely the designers must have had some kind of plans for an emotional connection for this scene. Why else would they have sent me here? There's nothing for me to do here. The portal was supposed to send me to the nearby Merdelain, to that one building that couldn't be unlocked when I passed through that location earlier in the game.

Anyway, I passed through that place and came to the last of the statues, in that building. Alas (or happily, considering it means more gameplay), there is another complication, and the statue is destroyed. But the foe within tells me that someone else had just been here and had received the statue's blessing, so now I just have to find that person. I figured it would be Bevil, my childhood friend, who was mentioned as having been heading into Merdelain when I had previously been in West Harbour.

Haven

Next stop was Ammon Jerro's Haven. Ammon Jerro was Shandra's grandfather, who she remembers as a kindly wizard. This was confusing to me, since I already knew that the mystery warlock is in fact Ammon Jerro, though it might not have been mentioned in the game yet. Anyway, the door to the Haven was magically barred against everyone except relatives of Ammon Jerro, so of course Shandra was there to open the door for us.

But Shandra's ancestry wasn't everything we needed. We also had to pass a few trials before we could get in, and that involved going around the area outside the Haven to gather items and kill mobs. The area's design showed some notable improvements over many of the previous areas. There were points of interest at different levels of elevation, a refreshing change of texturing that made even this dry desert area look good, and the mob placement was nicely distributed as well. The encounters were rather simple, though, and it left me wishing there had been a little more to do in this area.

Once we got inside, we were treated to a series of encounters with some bound demons who were willing to negotiate with us if we'd agree to help them out with their workplace bickering, getting their petty revenges and such. Shandra had been separated from us, and it seemed fairly comical at the time that she kept teleporting around trying to find us, always leaving a place just before we got there.

It was pretty straightforward getting through this place, though I had to watch helplessly as Shandra did some unnecessary things with no way to intervene, and it all culminated in a boss fight with Ammon Jerro himself, and ultimately the worst, least-engaging death scene yet.

Afterward, I was given an opportunity to rest and swap any party members if needed at the tavern on the property of Crossroad Keep, before a suddenly rude Sir Nevalle showed up to insist I go to Castle Never right then, with a little threat that I shouldn't get too comfortable here at Crossroad Keep, because it could be taken away from me at any time. Bizarre behaviour, considering the reason for summoning me turned out to be that Lord Nasher wanted to grant me full knighthood. This marked the end of Act 2.

Act 3 interlude

Act 3 started with the most frustrating and irritating thing I can imagine. Yet again, a developer gets the asinine idea that it would be a wonderful gameplay mechanic to suddenly strip away all my companions and drop me into a horde of elite vampires and wraiths after a bloody long cutscene with many unskippable parts! Arrrrghhh! I'm a squishy caster, not a tank! Why do so many bloody games do this? Developers: I hate this, and I don't respect this kind of design decision! I'm playing NWN2 for its party-based gameplay. If I wanted to be playing a solo hack & slash, I'd be playing an Elder Scrolls game.

After numerous reloads, even after setting the difficulty to the easiest level just to get through this moronic meatgrinder section (which I've never had to do in this game yet), only to find more shadow priests, shadows, and elite vampires waiting for me when I went "down the hall" to look for a secret door Sir Nevalle told me to find. That's when I resolved to get through it by any means necessary, so I could get back to an enjoyable part of the game.

I have to guess that the "party roster" option from the player menu at the bottom left of the screen must have been added by one of the expansions, because I was able to use it here to re-add my companions to my party, even though the setup here expects me to be playing it solo. I used that to get past the monsters, and then stuck through the rest of it solo (just in case it might have interfered with game scripts if I had a party), and eventually I was returned to Crossroad Keep with a new set of quests ahead of me, and all my companions gathered around to greet me. What a relief!

I think one more post should finish the OC, but like I said, this game is really long. I've skipped over a lot of things, and barely touched on others. I'm impressed.

Dead Nasher, or just a knockdown?