Neverwinter Nights 1: Wyvern Crown of Cormyr

This premium module was not included with the GOG package for Neverwinter Nights: Diamond Edition, and in fact was one of the ones that are no longer for sale, but Bioware seems to be making them available for download from a prominent stickied post on their forum, which downloads the installers from Bioware itself, so I seem to be in luck in that regard.

The basic premise of this module is that you, your sibling, and a friend are forced from your land by a terrible raid, and you travel to the town of Thunderstone in the Kingdom of Cormyr, your landlord's seat of power, where you can seek revenge, justice, or perhaps just a fresh start on life.

This one has a more serious tone than Kingmaker, but has strengths in other areas. The quest log has quite a bit of useful information that your character should know in the form of open quests, and certain dialogue gives the option to copy non-quest-related information into the quest log as well, acting as a kind of codex in that regard. XP seems to flow a bit more freely, in the form of rewards not only for quests, but for successful use of skills -- even persuasion. (Makes me glad I invested a good number of points into persuasion at the start of the game.) It also rewards you with XP for making decisions in conversations that the writers judged to be in harmony with your chosen character alignment. I don't know if any XP is taken away for playing against your alignment or not, but the module description does mention that some XP is taken away for any automatic resurrections.

The description of the module said it favoured martial players, so instead of my first choice of playing a magic user, I went with my second choice of a rogue. I decided to work toward the Shadow Dancer prestige class on this one, and I think I'll be able to pick that class on my first earned level-up. The game starts by granting you 4 or 5 levels, and I got all the skill points and feats to satisfy the Shadow Dancer requirements with the last of those freebie levels.

I started writing this post while I was playing it, but now I've finished the module, so I'm going to give a general overview of it, including its pluses and minuses.

Early part

There were a lot of crafting components lying around in this module. I had no recipe books, so I didn't know what they were for, and whether I should have been carrying them around or not. I also didn't know where it would be safe to store them, since each place I'd been to became inaccessible once I left, and most vendors wouldn't buy them. Thunderstone turned out to be the "home base" town, though, and ultimately I was given a bedroom with storage chests as a reward for progressing in the plot. I eventually dumped all the crafting components once I found someone who would buy them, since the only crafting seemed to be at the one smith in town who could only use very specific items.

Death in this module is handled very much like in NWN2. If your companions die, they come back to life once you've finished fighting (assuming you survive). If you die, as long as at least one of your companions is still alive, you can choose to "respawn", with the understanding that your companion(s) managed to drag you to safety after you "died". A "fall back" or "retreat" command would be very useful to have, or even a "heal yourself" in addition to the "heal me" that the game provides. There is a "flee" command in the voice chat menu, but it appears to be just for talking to other people in multiplayer, because AI companions ignore it completely.

On getting to the town of Thunderstone in Cormyr, it became evident that when they said that the module is aimed at "martial characters," they meant knights. This mod is heavy on the romanticised notion of a chivalric order. I personally don't care for knights, but my taste is strongly coloured by having read medieval French chivalric literature. Even though I shouldn't be dragging Earth history into a non-Earth fantasy world, the module authors made that difficult to avoid by including real-world technical terminology in their jousting matches. Thankfully, the jousting was only a brief hoop that needed to be jumped through to advance the plot, and get on to more of the engaging and interesting content.

There's a bug that manifested to me shortly after I met the satyrs in the forest. When speaking to my companions, an option appeared allowing me to level them up. I had thought that the companions would just automatically level up as I did, but since this option appeared, it looked like I'd have to do it manually. So I chose it, but the option didn't go away. I thought maybe the companions had enough experience points accumulated to level up several times, like perhaps they had never gained a level since the beginning, so I chose the option several times, until it became clear that it was just going to let me keep adding levels forever. When I checked their character sheets, and compared them to mine, it was completely unbalanced, with me being level 4, and my companions being level 17. I suppose this might be a debugging feature meant to make it easy to get through all the combat, but that would take away a lot of the fun for me, so I had to reload a previous save to undo the damage. The option went away after I leveled up once more myself, but it periodically returned throughout the rest of the game.

I also ran into a bug that crashed the game, when investigating the first barrow. Opening one of the doors spawned some enemies, but when it did I was frozen in place at the door, unable to move, while my companions fought. After the battle ended, the door closed, and the game crashed.

The module seems to encourage swapping out party members and experimenting with different classes. At first my only options were a fighter and a fighter/cleric (and myself). Later, a sorceress offered to join, but the party is considered "full" at only two companions in this module, so I kicked out the cleric. Later, a paladin offered to join, and shortly thereafter a noble's bored daughter offered her services as a rogue. I'm a rogue myself, so I decided on the paladin and the sorceress at this point.

The paladin has cast "turn undead" many times during my play, and it actually works when he does it. I never see any results when I try to cast it myself in NWN2 or the Infinity Engine games. When he casts it, several undead creatures run away with little flaming skulls surrounding them, which looks like what casting "fear" on someone would look like, (though it doesn't make much sense to show a skeleton running away from skulls). I wish I had more control over that aspect of his casting, though, because it mostly just made it more difficult to fight certain mobs as a rogue. As a caster it probably wouldn't have made any difference.

Later part

The module was much longer than I was expecting. I didn't expect it would take me two weeks to get through it. If I had followed just the main quest plotline, perhaps I could have gotten through it in half that time, but then I might not have been at a high enough level to finish it with so much fewer experience points. Of course, my purpose for playing this wasn't just to get through it, but to enjoy as much of the content as possible.

I was dubbed a knight, which is little surprise considering the theme of this module, but I have to say this module does a better job of it than the knighting ceremony in NWN2's OC. The one in Wyvern Crown has an actual animation of Sir Hawklin tapping the sword on my character's shoulders, and the one in NWN2 didn't.

I thought Polter's Fort was going to be the last area of the game, since the module would have been a good length at that point, and the fort was large and full of interesting gameplay (in truth, I was only about 75% finished after that place). Particularly enjoyable in this location was the ancient elven tomb that doubled as a lair for a clan of vampires! I had never fought vampires quite like these before, though they seemed more or less the same as the vampires in Baldur's Gate 2. These vampires regenerate quickly, meaning you have to hit them hard and often to kill them, but that's not the end of it. Upon reaching 0 hit points, these vampires change into a gaseous form and flee. Now, that happened in BG2 as well, but I never saw them again after they did that. In this case, the vampires returned shortly thereafter at full health!

That was when I remembered a clue given by a prisoner elsewhere in this fort, who spoke in rhyme about creatures who would "never go away" unless I "destroyed their beds". It was a bit difficult, but I managed to destroy the stone slabs while my companions kept most of the vampires occupied, but I did end up having to die and respawn a few times to do it. After destroying the slabs, the vampires stopped returning. There are other puzzle-type challenges of this sort throughout the module, and they're very welcome.

One thing I think a player should know up front when playing this module is that the special magic weapons that you can reforge over the course of your play should probably be reserved for later. It wasn't clear to me that having more broken weapons meant the weapon would have a stronger enchantment. I thought that the crafting component that you supply along with the broken pieces was the only source of enchantment, and that using more weapon pieces was only for making larger weapons (like a greataxe as opposed to a dagger). In actuality, using one broken weapon gives you a +1 reforged weapon, using two gives you a +2, and so on, and there are only 4 of these broken weapons to be found in the game.

Beware the air sharks

There was an underwater section of this game, which I certainly wasn't expecting. It contained mako sharks and some sahuagin (humanoid amphibian monsters that I first encountered in D&D Online). It functioned as a kind of "locked door", because I couldn't progress until I had found the "keys" as it were, which were in the form of diving helmets. One such helmet was right there in front of the area, but I had to find two more to give to my companions, otherwise they would quickly drown. At first, though, I thought its function was as a "gear check", to make sure I could survive an upcoming challenge by making me send my companions back to town to wait for me, and testing my ability to survive the area solo. Alas, I found it extremely difficult to beat the first two sharks, even one at a time, and when I saw the big group of sahuagin, I knew it would be hopeless, so I decided to come back later. This is also where I found that the sharks would pursue me back up to the surface, and fly through the air chasing me.

I found the second diving helmet later in a completely different area, and so I knew there would have to be a third eventually. When I got that, I was able to go back and clean the place up. I'm just pleasantly surprised that they had an underwater area. I don't know if the vanilla game had anything like that, but I'm going to assume it didn't.

The bad

I've been reading a lot about the difficulties and disappointments this mod team went through during the course of their development on this and other materials for NWN, and they have my sympathies, as do the other teams who were affected by the mishandling of the premium module program. This module is, on the whole, a very good one, but I must say that I do have some critiques of certain elements that impeded my enjoyment.

I'll start with a minor nitpick. There was one place, late in the game, where having an alcoholic beverage to offer an NPC would open up a dialogue option. Never having such a thing come up before, I unsurprisingly didn't have one. So, because I wanted to find out what he had to say, I had to ride back to Thunderstone to buy some. On leaving the area, I was given the option (as you usually are in this module) to travel back to town either with or without stopping to rest at inns, which costs a bit of money but makes you arrive rested and lessens the chance of random encounters. Just one thing about that -- I was told that I was stopping at inns. An inn is exactly where I needed to go, to buy a bloody drink, but my options didn't include anything logical, like the option to just buy one automatically in the dialogue and come back. I would have thought that the designers should understand that there's no in-game reason for a player to happen to have some alcohol on hand at this stage, and would make some kind of contingency for what the next logical step would be (that being going to get some).

This leads to the problem with the horses. So I got back to Thunderstone, rode to the nearest inn, hitched the horses, went inside, and bought 4 drinks: one of each type, just in case he had a preference, and just in case it wouldn't work unless my party and I also had drinks, to share with him a toast. Exit, unhitch horses (one at a time), mount each party member (one at a time, waiting for the animation to finish each time), return to location, resting at inns all along the way.

At this point I was coming to the conclusion that when you factor in the amount of time it takes to mount and dismount your party and deal with the hitching and unhitching, there is no speed advantage at all in using horses, and may even take longer to get places with that factored in. Pathfinding with these horses also seemed much more clumsy and difficult than walking on foot, regardless of whether I used click-to-move, click-and-hold-direction, or keyboard control, which made the narrow winding pathways on the seaside cliffs and in one of the denser forest parts into an infuriating exercise that had me expressing my frustration vocally. I actually grew to hate the horses, and the fact that there are several places in the game that require the use of horses to get through. I never want to play another NWN module that requires the use of horses again, if there are any. The one good thing about them, in my opinion, is that they provide extra packs in which to carry loot.

Horses aside, there were combat issues which may have been just problems with the engine, and nothing specific to this mod. I ran into many times during fights when Edgar would just stand around right next to me for several turns doing nothing, while I was getting hacked to death by a group of enemies, and would ignore my commands reminding him to "attack nearest" until suddenly several turns later he'd wake up and remember to do his job. Other times he would "forget" to follow me out of a room, leaving me fighting in mélêe alone (with Lacinda casting from behind, as per her job description). Lacinda largely didn't have any trouble following orders like Edgar did.

Then again, Edgar didn't seem to like Lacinda, because when I would tell Edgar I needed him to use his "lay on hands" ability to heal someone, the only options were to heal himself or heal me. He acted like there was no one else in the group. Previously, her name was in the list, and he had healed her successfully, but something seems to have happened. Possibly during one of the many times Lacinda died in battle because there is no "flee" or "fall back" command for the companions.

There were certain quests that lacked options that logically should have been there, given the characters that were available and what their roles were, and certain avenues were closed off to me because I didn't approach them in the way that the producers expected me to, but which would have made just as much sense as their expected paths.

The endgame was exceptionally tedious and irritating to get through, beginning from the point at which you must launch an assault on the Barrow of the Wyvern Crown (though as implemented here it's more of a defensive battle than an assault). You play as the general of a small army of troops, assembled to hold off oncoming hostile forces, directing the troop placement and distributing any extra equipment you might have on hand to better equip them, in advance of the fight to come. You get to determine when the battle begins, and then you can command the troops to either attack or fall back.

It was a novel gameplay mechanic, and I don't fault their execution of it. It's just that I'm playing a party-based RPG, and changing the gameplay style to large-scale combat against waves of enemies (a mechanic I particularly hate) with no opportunity to rest made that part of the game very unpleasant, and a chore to get through.

Then, we got to the barrow. The barrow was beautifully designed. I loved the look of it. More roleplaying choices were given here, which was nice, and then it was time for the penultimate task: fighting golems to get their hearts, which were the keys to raise the bridge to get the crown.

Fighting the golems was worse than the military assault, even though it was back to the style of gameplay I'd been enjoying the rest of the time. Even using the special golem-bashing mace I was given, and outfitting my two companions with the best crushing weapons I had, the fights were excruciatingly lengthy, due to near-constant "missing". The golem missed a lot as well, but not as often, and it hit us for a lot more damage. I didn't have any items with me that could increase our hit chance, and I don't think going back to town to pick up some potions or scrolls was an option at this point. I had to deal with party member and self death many times just to get through one golem, and it took at least half an hour.

I hoped the second golem would be easier than the first, but it was harder, because it was a ruby golem, which regenerated its health faster than my party could deal it! I made a good faith effort with this one, but ultimately enough was enough, and I cheated for the first time in this module, and killed it with the developer console. It's possible that a more min-maxed character with foreknowledge of what kind of weapons to bring to the final section might have had an easier time with this part.

The third (and last) golem was easier, and I defeated it normally (only somewhat faster than the first one).

The ultimate fight with the module's villain was significantly easier than the golems (justified in that he was presumably weakened from the earlier fight with the army), and I was treated to a little cutscene showing the aftermath, and some text revealing my score, which was based on how well I played my alignment.

Ending on a high note

The module is packed with high quality content, which might not be evident from my writing here, because I went into a lot more detail about the things that bothered me and the reasons for that.

What I read in the producer's background information indicated that most of the tilesets (or possibly all of them) were original to this module. I can't say, because I'm too new to this game to be able to distinguish what was original from what wasn't. I do know from a developer's comments that castles were featured so heavily in the module in order to showcase their new castle tilesets and resources.

The plot had some interesting twists and turns, and many opportunities to make decisions with consequences, and alternate ways of approaching situations (both toward the extremes of personality as well as multiple neutral options). There was honour and reputation to be won, and there were betrayals, grudges, and insults, and opportunities for several kinds of comeuppance. In one case, I remain unsure whether I had made the right decision in bringing one character in on treasonous charges based on a letter she had allegedly written, since she steadfastly maintained her innocence. The crown officer assured me that her trial would be fair, however, and that a powerful wizard would determine her guilt or innocence through divination. But there are other aspects of the circumstances that could make even that suspect. I think they did a good job with the ambiguity in that case, and I expect it would have been addressed if there had been a sequel.

I mentioned earlier that the module was abundantly supplied with side quests. These were varied and interesting, and were generally of the same high quality as the main quest. Unlike in Kingmaker, the side quests generally didn't involve dungeon crawls (though that wasn't a bad thing in Kingmaker), as those seemed to be reserved for the main quest. Instead, there was a lot of investigation and exploration. I wasn't able to get the ideal results out of all of them, but I accepted that and moved on. It's better, I think, than leaving a conversation node active for a player to try using a skill check over and over until succeeding. As long as it doesn't cut off a significant portion of gameplay on a bad skill check roll, I think it's preferable.

There were numerous mini-games that provided the opportunity to wager money. At one of the taverns you can play darts. At the tournament grounds you can play archery competitions, martial competitions, and magic competitions. Then of course there's the jousting (though that doesn't involve money), which the developers described as a kind of rock-paper-scissors game, where your input is restricted to where you want to aim your lance and how you want to position your defense.

The horses may have handled badly and took too long to mount/dismount, but they were better than the horses in Oblivion, mostly because you could fight without dismounting. And they looked good.

I liked how they made the town NPCs seem more alive by giving them random vocal barks. Some of them were the same barks you hear if you click on any random NPC, while others spoke their "yes" or "no" lines, and so on. There were also a good number of unique-looking and very appealingly-designed areas. Even though I went back to playing NWN2 after finishing this module, just going through these screenshots to decide which ones to include in this post reminds me that both games are full of worthwhile content to enjoy.

There's a lot to love in this module, and it's well worth playing. Its scope and quality put it on equal ground with full-length games.

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.