Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer

Neverwinter Nights 2: The Curse of a Sequel

The West Harbor Harvest Fair, aka tutorial

The avidly awaited sequel, Neverwinter Nights 2, was finally released by Obsidian Entertainment in October & November of 2006, after several delays that pushed its release date back twice after its announced schedule. Those of us lucky enough to have enough horsepower under the hood (I bought a new computer) were thrust into a new and beautifully rendered world of Dungeon & Dragons fantasy adventuring.

Players got to create a new level 1 character to be the star of the new campaign, and exited their home into the midst of the happy springtime village fair. Aided by two companions and a series of pop-up text boxes, players got to learn the basics of controlling their character and navigating through the virtual world. Clever scripting meant that your character could compete in and win the village melee, archery, thieving and magic competitions and thereby become familiarized with using the interface elements for each of those tasks. By the time your character is done you've been able to level up to level 3 and are now hopefully ready to face a much crueller world outside the village.

The village fair was a lovely prelude to a dark tale of endless journeying and incessant combat seemingly aimed at re-forging a broken sword, and slaying an ancient evil that is returning to the world. Unhappily, the cruel world doesn't wait for you leave your idyllic village and instead pays you a preemptive visit to get your adventuring career off to a violent and bloody start.

Grinding to a halt

I found the campaign itself rather long and repetitive, with a very linear structure, which seemed to be aimed at a young RPG naïve audience. It quite literally offered no storyline or experience that hadn't been done many times before. It offered up the typical scenario:

• There is an ancient and all powerful entity that has awakened
• He is going to kill all living things
• All the bad guys want a piece of that action
• All the good guys want him stopped

More importantly to your play experience, though, was the central fact that almost every NPC in the game would tell you: "Only you can bring me this item", "Only you can look for the answer to this question", "Only you can save me/us/my children", and "Only you can save the village/town/city/castle/world". Apparently only you can do all this because no one else is willing to actually walk anywhere, probably due to the long loading time for map transitions. Strangely, given that only you can save the entire planet from dying, the people are not even willing to give you the best item sold in their town, you know, so that you will win when you try to save them. They are willing to sell you these items, provided of course you go out and find some cash somewhere first. Yeah that all makes sense to only me!

So the campaign game involved you travelling back and forth across the world map to do the many missions you expect of a CPRG so that eventually you will level up and be powerful enough to face some seriously nasty action. The main downside in this version of the franchise was the long load time for outdoor areas and the necessity to revisit and therefore reload the biggest areas, over and over. After playing through the original campaign I commented to one of my NWN buddies, who is about the same age as me, that I thought NWN2 was paced for a 10 year old. My friend informed me that not only did he agree, but that his 10 year old loved the game. In fact Obsidian appears to have produced a pretty good kid's game - pity it was so expensive and carried a label that read "Recommended for mature audiences" here in Australia.

NWN2: Kick them while they're down! (you get +4 to hit)

Egad! Demons

The game itself came with a single player campaign and not much else. Obsidian had built an entirely new graphics engine, which looked fabulous in game, stunning even. They had then attached the new graphics engine to the old game engine of NWN, and updated the game files to reflect the newer D&D edition 3.5 rule set. The new rules included new spells, feats, classes and player races. There was also an entirely new, but badly bugged Toolset for building modules. Community members were amazed to discover that the campaign had been developed with a partial coded and bugged toolset, and the released version of the toolset was better than the game developers had used to make the campaign.

After the release there was an immediate patch to add a non-functioning DM Client, in an attempt to placate the howling masses, and to start the bug fixing process. The DM Client simply didn't work at all: a DM changing area would crash the game server. The game was also only for PC. There were also many game-breaking bugs in the campaign for a lot of players. The disappointment from the community was deafening. Obsidian did it best to answer the many complaints while Atari ignored the howls of protest and counted revenue.

Also of note was the lack of in-game content. Many people were used to the content that came with 7 years of NWN's development, and NWN2 had so few creatures and graphical resources by comparison that people were worried about the limits it would cause them in their grand designs. Worse than this, was the fact that although game stated it was multiplayer capable, it wasn't. Unless you mean that "the game can be loaded in multiplayer mode but will always end in a crash". Multiplayer, like the DM Client, was unusable in practical terms. It seemed Obsidian had removed or disabled all the working multiplayer code in the game engine that had been developed over 7 years of NWN and that had worked really well.

Worst of all for multiplayer fans was the fact that the new graphics system had caused game module sizes to balloon in size 10 fold. A NWN game module with 300 areas was a 350 MB file. A NWN2 game module with only 15 areas was 3 GB. Big worlds were simply not possible without making many separate game modules that link together, a practical problem if you want to run a persistent style world with huge numbers of areas (500+) as had been done in NWN, rather than host a single party campaign game.

In fairness I should point out that there were some bits that were quite well done and a lot of players seemed to appreciate. The whole new crafting system was a great addition and I think added a nice side element to the game for obsessive micro-managers like myself. The hunt for certain types of loot became a vital impetus to urge me to complete the quests I really wasn't that enthusiastic about.

Good or evil, it's up to you

Fort Locke, one of the beautifully rendered areas in NWN2

The developers managed to put in parallel storylines for the good-two-shoes and arch-villain types. Once you get to the city of Neverwinter (yes, it's in the new campaign again, but it's shrunk!) you can pursue the saving of the world by being a good and lawful citizen that does the City Watch and Noble's jobs for them, or you can pursue the saving of the world by being a villainous robber and assassin that does away with the City Watch and Noble citizens. Although the options are very stereotyped mutually exclusive choices, they are choices you get to make. So you might like to play the game through more than once, so you can find out exactly why a villainous thug would decide to save the world.

In a later part of the game your player is charged with the command of a castle. This seemed to impress a large number of players, and it was an interesting way of developing the story. It didn't really add much in terms of actual game-play but you know it was YOUR castle, so in theory you could execute all those lazy workers and peasants loitering about if you wanted to. Yeah, in theory, because in practice they're invulnerable, which I suppose is a good thing if you were worried about health-care premiums for all your minions.

To balance out the few nice additions to the campaign the developers decided to really annoy players with their choice of an ending. Let me spoil it for you: after you have spent a week playing, dragging your sorry ass up from level 1 to level 20, you will reload the game until you WIN, and then a whole mountain will crash down killing you and the entire party, in a scene depicted with crappy looking still pictures. The game does not export your character automatically before ending. This makes it hard to import your character into future expansions games that require a starting character to be a level 20 squashed corpse. Bitter? Me? Yes. Why do you ask?

Lost Initiative

Despite a few nice additions to the game and much improved visuals, the original campaign in Neverwinter Nights 2 and the state of the game itself was, at best, a disappointment at release. In short, some people were well and truly hacked off. Some people went back to NWN, while others simply stopped playing, and many just waited in the forums hoped for the day that their dreams would come true. I was less than impressed for the value I got for my AUD 100 (US $90).

All is not completely lost however, as Obsidian Entertainment aren't abandoning this project: they started immediately patching after release, for one, and by the third patch, most of the single player game issues and bugs had been solved. Now after seven patches the almost universally hated camera system has been redone, the DM Client is working and seems to only have one major problem left, and multiplayer mode actually works providing stable games and, more importantly, RPG enjoyment. There is even a server application, which is probably the best way to play in multiplayer mode. In addition to this, there's the expansion (which you can't have missed...) and an extra Adventure pack in the pipeline.