Was it Good? - Neverwinter Nights

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It was absolutely fantastic. A full campaign plus all of the DM tools and the ability to run shared servers for people to join and play together!
I really wish they included similar real time DM tools to BG3.
- With Larian's previous game having great DM tools and them saying they would've loved to do DM tools for BG3, I think WotC telling them not to is a fair assumption to make.
  
  That woukd be consistent with worc anti virtual tabletop tirade last year.
- Always wanted to play it but never did, I fear as a new player it wouldn't have the same appeal to me given the age of the game and no nostalgia level. Am I wrong?
  
  The base campaign is kind of awful. It really just existed to demonstrate what you could do with the tool set. The expansions, Shadows of Undrentide and Hordes of the Underdark, are much better written with more interesting characters. None of the three campaigns hold up to modern game writing standards and all are pretty heavy on dungeon crawling. The deciding factor is probably going to be how much you like the D&D 3.0 rule set.
  Obsidian's sequel is based on D&D 3.5 and the core campaign has writing roughly on par with the first game's expansions, with the quirk that it's Obsidian doing high fantasy straight rather than their usual deconstructions. NWN2's Mask of the Betrayer expansion is easily the best written thing out of either NWN game and is genuinely pretty great. NWN2 has some pretty terrible optimization, though, and runs rough on even high end modern systems.
  
  The movement is wonky compared to modern games, and unless you are wanting to do real time DMing it isn't worth it in my opinion.

The DM tools were where it really shined; I’d love a modern game with that kind of support.
- Divinity Original Sin 2 apparently has them. Don't know how much you can do with them hut there's a stream out there with Matt Mercer using it to DM. But I haven't watched it yet because I want to play the game myself first.

I remember the DM tools and custom campaign multiplayer being fantastic, but I don't remember too much of the actual story. What I do remember is hating the restriction of a single follower, as the party banter is one of my favourite things in this type of games.
- Yeah, I got it mostly for the campaign, hoping for more Baldur's Gate. It was so disappointing.
  The story was uninspired, but most of all solo gameplay was so boring. One character, one NPC companion and you couldn't control them in any way, starting at low level, all of that made your strategic choices practically inexistent.
  And then the engine breaking everywhere causing it to rewind your action after 5 seconds because it suddenly remembered "hey, you were not supposed to be able to go there, we've put a bunch of knee-high crates to block that 5 meter wide empty hallway!"
  
  Yeah I had pretty much the same experience. BG2 was my favourite game at the time (it's still up there) so I was incredibly hyped, but it felt flat in comparison.
  At least I got enough bang for my buck with the multiplayer stuff.
- It was a very linear story, too.

Hell yeah, it's was magnificent, and the expansions were better than the OC!
What news of the Waterdhavian creatures?!

But the controls were horrendous

They were both good.
But I never run into anyone who even played the OG MUD on CompuServe. Just the Bioware one.
The expansions were even better and so was the fact it had a toolset and DM'ing elements for online play.
The fact BG3 does not is the only reason I'm not still playing it. Really wish it had a toolset so we could have custom campaigns and shit.

15 comments