If you liked Kotor1/2 but not NWN...

[Xilren's Twin]

Just wondering if you would share your reasons.  Since they are based on the same engine (kotor being modified or course), what is it about the Kotor titles that you liked that wasnt in NWN?

Was it the party control? The plot and setting? The cutscences? The character system?  The crafting?  The sound effcects? The lightsabers?

Or is it something different in expectations: i.e. you expected a great SP game from Kotor but great multiplayer and creation tools out of nwn?

Being one of the few that seemed to enjoy NWN even single player (if the module was good), I was curious to see if what people though made Kotor such a good game and NWN not so much.  I have my own opinions of course but wanted to see what others thought.

Xilren

[Righ]

That would be the story and the balance of the encounters then. NWN came with a basic module that was basically shite. They expected that some enterprising folks would write better modules. Unfortunately players had to wade through 3000 contributed modules, most of which were designed to cheat, povide unsatisfying PvP or had unbalanced encounters (too easy or too hard). The first module I created started you as a level one character, and forced you to face a red dragon. That was in fact par for the course.

Edit: And the bugs. They were fun too.

[Rasix]

Why I didn't originally like NWN:

1. The first module that came with NWN was horrible.  
2. No control over henchmen.
3. Original and first expansion (am I remembering this right) only had one henchman slot.
4. NWN, technically, is a bug ridden piece of yard trash.  I have never played a game that was harder to get working on my machine.

I played NWN when it was first released, and then again when all of the expansions were out.  While NWN drove me up a wall trying to get it to work with my system (part of it was a stick of ram that went bad), playing the 2 expansions was a much more interesting endeavor than the original game.  

The 1 henchman deal is just too restrictive.  It really doesn't allow for interesting party interaction and makes you over rely on dual or multi-classed henchman.  Having 3 is enough though, you can get your prerequisite healer, and another class to suit your mood.  This also makes it easier to play a pure caster.  

I think NWN is a fine single player game when you've got 2 henchmen and the module is well done.  It still pales to KOTOR 1/2, even on it's finest day due to the amount of polish those games have.  Artistically, NWN can't stand up and it's bugginess is just something that was hard to forgive.

[HaemishM]

Having just finished KOTOR1 last night, I think a lot of it had to do with the story and setting. The engine was used well enough, and I think actually worked better on the simplified console controller than NWN did wth the mouse. The cutscenes helped, but they were part of the story. I think a lot of my disappointment with NWN was the module creation tools, as well as the fast-paced real-time combat. That didn't work well in multiplayer, to me; it seemed too little like a D&D game, and more like a clickety-click action game. Turn-based would have worked SO much better for the D&D setting, even multiplayer. If there was a concern over the massive pausing, there are ways around that in multiplayer. Give each character an action timer, with the timer benig adjustable by the DM. Or work combat like the game Combat Mission, where every round of combat is paused, and players have a certain time frame to queue up their moves (again, with the time adjustable by the DM). Once all moves are selected, the turn plays out simultaneously, or with each player going as their initiative roll dictated.

In the end, it just didn't feel like D&D.

The construction set was also buggy. I spent the first few months trying to make a module without having the goddamn thing corrupt my module. The scripting, while simple, wasn't simple enough for me; that may be an impossible thing, but more GUI's and wizards for AI behavior would help. The construction set really needed a few more months of cooking time. I think it would have been better to release a good construction set, then release a campaign module for it, or vice versa. Merging the two weakened both.

And finally, the pain in the ass that was trying to add custom content hurt it as well. Hak paks were a good idea, they just didn't take it far enough.

[WayAbvPar]

NWN was a travesty if you were a PnP fan. The combat was far too fast-paced- it was much more like Diablo than it was D&D. I didn't have the preconceived ideas about KOTOR combat, so it wasn't nearly as galling.

I would like to see NWN with the ToEE combat system. The tactical options available in the d20 system just don't translate well in a real time setting.

Also- I didn't have the spare time to learn C++ scripting (or whatever the fuck it was) so the NWN editor was useless to me. Give me a GUI for quick and dirty editing, and let the the scripters do more of the esoteric things if they have the time.

Edit- heh- Haemish said much the same thing. I guess that is what I get for leaving the reply window open so long (I had actual work to do...the horror!).

[trias_e]

I found KoToR vastly superior, and 60% of why would be party based combat, 40% better polish, setting, and story.

I want to control a party.  To tell you the truth combat-wise I liked Temple of Elemental Evil better than both of those games, however, the rest of the game sucked ass which brings it down quite a bit.

[geldonyetich]

So basically, NWN shipped as a construction set, not a game.   The initial campaign was little more than something you can tear apart in order to develop better scenarios of your own.   Hordes of the Underdark and Shadows of Undrentide were actually fairly enjoyable.   I played through SoU multiple times… one of these days I should really take the time to play HotU, but I hear it’s good.

KOTOR had one thing going for it that many memorably good games have going for them: it knew when the quit.    You can't play the game beyond a good well developed plot supported by new content, and that's essentially what KOTOR had going for it.   The in-depth characters, the environments, even the individual items you found all supported the plot in KOTOR.

If KOTOR’s gameplay tried to get along without the plot, what do you think would happen?  This is essentially what you’d run into with many NWN scenarios out there that try to give players freedom of movement in an unlimited open ended scenario.   This is what happens in every MMORPG out there.  

Given that you are no longer deeply enmeshed in aplot, you realize the only influence you really have over the story is min/maxing your equipment.   You don’t want to bother reloading saved games every time you fail a vital saving throw because you no longer care to see what happens.   It doesn’t matter how extravagant your Jedi can twirl his lightsabre, there’s no longer a compelling reason to play.   The book no longer interests you, so you put it down.  Boom: Ditch the story and KOTOR is now NWN with a poor scenario.

This builds a strong case that RPGs, CRPGs included, need to be about telling a story.  If your story isn't worth playing, the gameplay isn't either.   Neverwinter Nights provides an excellent mechanic for telling story - essentially the same that KOTOR uses, even more sophisticated in places - but the talent that's actually capable of putting together this compelling story is few and far between.

So yes, it was the plot and the setting, not the game mechanic (which was the standard AD&D 3rd Edition: Jedi version you can pick up from any book store), and not the pretty (which contributed to the game’s success, but shiny always, always wears off).

Now go out there and write some good NWN plots, dammit.

[Rodent]

For me it was the story and the NPC's that made Kotor the better game. As far as setting go, well theese days the Star wars setting and the forgotten realm setting are about on par for me ( mainly due to the new star wars movies ). So that didn't play a very large role.

What has also been mentioned before is the control scheme. NWN had a horrible one, and I felt it constantly held me back from creating characters I wanted to play ( even with the pausebutton I could never get spells off in time or directed the way I wanted ).

[Sky]

That didn't work well in multiplayer, to me; it seemed too little like a D&D game, and more like a clickety-click action game.

That was it for me.

This whole trend to clickyclick spaz action outside of action genres sucks.

Works for shooters. That's it. And shooters should be on the way out with deeper gameplay replacing the simplicity of just shooting to victory. Or one would think.

[schild]

Neverwinter Nights was depressing. So depressing in fact that I don't know how the game garnered the noteriety it did. The story's on all the official modules were terrible. The control scheme can only be described as hazardous.

KoToR? Worst complaint I have is that everyone looked like they had a carrot shoved up their ass. The running animation was just terrible.

A good story can make the most abyssmal engine worth suffering through. NWN didn't have it. IMO, Bioware is nothing without Black Isle. That said - Jade Empire may change that opinion.

[Fabricated]

In my opinion NWN's construction set and engine just were NOT powerful enough to make it feel like DnD.

Unless you were interested in writing 5000 pages of scripts roleplaying was mostly limited to NPC interaction where you could replace your dialog options with "Say this to be evil", "Say this to be Good", and "Say this to be neutral".

There wasn't an option to include a lot of abilities in DnD that NWN doesn't use (Jump and Climb for example), limiting environment interaction. That, and decreasing the amount of abilities a player has to spread his points across increases min-maxing.

And the lack of a Quake 3/Half Life style map editor for creating truly custom maps means that you're forced to make your maps unique by cluttering them with 500 random placables and poorly made tilesets from NWVault, or go through the headache of creating your own.

There are some pretty awesome modules though, most notably Elegia Eternum, Excrucio Eternum (best skill check for "pick pocket" ever), In the Company of Thieves, Honour Amoung Thieves, and so on.

[Bunk]

Everyone has said plenty, so I'll be brief.

- I liked Hordes of the Underdark, the other offical modules blew.  
- NWN lacked in the NPC dept compared to KotoR. Knights really used the npcs to push the story and gave them all really distinct personalities. NWN basically gave you a comedy sidekick and an angsty paladin with boobs. I didn't care in the least about any of the other npcs in NWN.
- The graphics in NWN are just too dated - I admit, I'm a graphics whore.

Suprisingly though, I actually replayed HotU more than I did Knights.

[Jayce]

It's been said before, but KOTOR1 (I haven't played 2 but I have no reason to doubt) is much better than EP1 or 2.  It is on par with EP4-6 and probably better than ROTJ.

So yeah, for me it's all story.  Star Wars is a great milieu when done right, and having it set so many years before the movies really gives a feeling of continuity that EP1 and 2 failed to evoke.  In that way, oddly enough, they really extended the franchise in my mind more than EP1, 2 and SWG put together.

While NWN was obviously a half-ass story made to showcase the capabilites of an engine to a mod community that was expected to carry the burden of real content.

[Kail]

Um, might contain spoilers for the first KoTOR or NWN if you haven't beaten them yet, but anyway...

I kind of liked some things in NWN better.  The ability to actually roll up whatever character you wanted and not have to worry about him turning out to be someone else halfway through (haven't played KoTOR 2 yet, but I assume this happens in there, too, based on what I'm hearing about the inro).

Multiplayer was also nice in NWN, and was really, in my opinion, the only thing that made the game interesting to play.  I played it with people who I play the d20 game with, so it was actually kind of fun.

However, there were a lot of things I couldn't stand about the game.  First of all, the single player mode completely sucked, especially in the original module.  While it's great that the game was very modifiable, it's a really bad idea to expect the mod community to take a crappy game and turn it into a work of art.  It doesn't happen often.  If the pack-in game sucks, a team of three middle school students working from their parent's basements are not going to be able to turn it around.  

While there may have been really high quality mods out there, I never saw any.  Most of the ones I saw placed serious limits on the characters who could begin the campaign.  These ranged from only allowing characters in a certain level range to start, to forcing the player to play a specific character generated by the mod author (yes, I'm sure a female Drizz't rip off sounded like a great idea, but the number of people out there who can write convincing character dialogue is a lot lower than the people who believe they can).  They generally have extremely varied rules about how to travel from place to place, or where players can rest, or how the game is balanced, so that you can't really get a feel for the game before you're five minutes away from completing it (assuming it's one of the mods that takes more than five minutes).  They had crappy stories, crappy gameplay, poor balance, generally more than a few glitches, and generally fared even worse than the original game.

On a more trivial note, the character creation process was pretty bad.  There weren't that many hair or body styles, color selection was strange (I can play a pale blue human, but not a bright green orc?), and the character portraits, the only remotely detailed picture of your character, were abysmal.  Not only were they totally irrelevant to the way your character model actually looked, they almost always sported hairstyles and clothing that did not exist in the game.  There seemed to be a definite lack of "normal" type characters, too, like "Generic Human Fighter" or "Generic Gnome Cleric."  There were several orc portraits in armor carrying axes, but nothing that looked remotely like they would fit a mage or cleric.  If you want to play as a one-toothed beggar, or an elf in bondage gear, though, they've got you covered.

On the other hand, KoTOR had two really strong things going for it.  One, it had interesting characters.  Bastilla was basically Aribeth with a lightsaber, but it's obvious that they actually put some work into Bastilla's development.  You get to have conversations with her, to know what she likes and doesn't like, to know where her failings are and where she thinks yours are.  You don't get that with Aribeth; she basically goes straight from "Perfect Noble Paladin" to "Deluded Psycho" without the player knowing much more than "I guess she really liked her husband."  All the characters in KoTOR (with the exception of that buzzing R2 thing) had at least this much development; none of the other characters in NWN came even close to this.

The other thing KoTOR did better was the setting.  The worlds in KoTOR felt like actual worlds rather than hub zones, the way towns in NWN were arranged.  The game felt more cohesive, partly because some effort was put into the graphics (wheras NWN's world was very obviously built on tiles), and partly because the story seemed more fluid.  In NWN, you tended to get a kind of "We need four critical items for something.  In an amazing coincidence, there are four exits to this city, each leading to an area suffering from bandit raids/an ancient curse/monster overpopulation/zombies.  I wonder if there's some hidden correlation, good luck.  P.S.: The zombies are the easy one."  In KoTOR, it flows much more naturally.  You don't know, when you land on a planet, exactly what you'll be doing, or where you'll be going.  Heck, there might not even be a dungeon (but where else will we put things for people to stab?!).

[HaemishM]

I forgot two other things I didn't like about NWN. I hated the lack of a real z-axis. You couldn't build multi-level maps. You couldn't climb up stuff. KOTOR suffered from this too, making it feel as if it's forcing you through mazes, even in open terrain. For KOTOR, that's more a limitation of small system memory on the X-Box. The other thing was the asstastic default camera, which caused me to use the camera hack that I had to get updated every time they patched. The camera never went low enough for me.

[Xilren's Twin]

That kinda what I was expecting.  Personally, the more development that occurs along the lines of NWN the better, as i think pushing the boundries of a small group game to the persistant stage may be a better alternative than further and further subdividing mmorpgs.

To that end, here's a few food for thought items.

1.  NWN2 was announced, and guess who's doing the development?

Obsidian Entertainment, the makers of Kotor2.

There's an unofficial FAQ here

2.  Bioware itself is working on a completely new game named Dragon Age, which they call a spiritual successor to NWN.  Basicually they want to do their own game not married to they D&D rules and license.

3.  In the short term, BW also has experimented with selling modules they write themselves for NWN1, well, they and some members of the fan community they hired to write some.  For details visit the
Bioware store.

I had actually written a small article on this subject but Schild never got around to posting it up...the lazy blighter. :)

Xilren, questing for decent mp rpgs...

[Furiously]

For me it was that your character always looked like ass in NWN's.

And that it was WAY to fast. D&D to me is turn based.

[Disco Stu]

While NWN was obviously a half-ass story made to showcase the capabilites of an engine to a mod community that was expected to carry the burden of real content.

And they did. NWN was unless you were intrested in designing something a real waste of money when it was released. Now with all the free mods (many of them being very high quality) NWN is one of the highest value games out there.

Personally I think the only major mistake (aside from the first 2 chapters of the original story) was the decision to only allow you full control over one charecter. It ment they had to speed combat up to a level where most of their players found it too action RPGish. If they had implemented a control system similar to that of KOTOR I think the game would have been far better than it was.

[Riggswolfe]

Are you sure they use the same engine? I just don't see it, there are too many differences, not the least of which is the control scheme and the non-tileset feel to KOTOR.

Anyway, my thoughts on why I like KOTOR better:

1) Better story
2) Better NPCs
3) Less cookie-cutter look. (Downside of the tiles)
4) No party feel to it. It's DnD. I want a party. Not one person.

Two out of the four of those could have been corrected by the Bioware writers.

KOTOR, even though you could only party with two others, still felt like a party. Part of that is because of how the NPCs interacted with the PC and with each other.

[Jealous Deva]

The short answer is that NWN had too much diablo and not enough baldurs gate.

The small party really hurt the game, 2 characters in D&D can't even cover the holy trinity of fighter/cleric/theif you need to actually complete adventures, much less get into the cool  classes like druids bards or mages which aren't really necessary but are really fun to have around.

In order to make up for it they had to use too many cheesy work arounds, like having every chest in the game bashable or letting everyone heal up fully by resting for 30 seconds.  This all really distracts from the setting, it seems really out of place.

These same kludges also reduce the fun of multiplayer.  What's the point of having a theif when the fighter can just bash everything?  Why do I have a cleric when everyone heals instantly?   It doesn't ever feel like you really have to use your class abilities, since everyone can do pretty much anything that needs to be done by themselves.  

And the story sucked.



I'm not as big of a KOTR fan as most people,(I thought the story was a bit shallow and I didn't like the fact that your non-main characters become obsolete half-way though the game and you have to switch to a whole new set) but it did do what it was supposed to do, which was be a 3-d rendition of the Baldurs gate series set in the star wars universe.

[naum]

Eh, my big problem with NWN was the magic system implemented that is much more suited to P&P than a real time CRPG — it just didn't translate well, and the feel was like this is cool in a turn based P&P deal, but...

Also, the tool set, while wonderful in many aspects, lacked a good UI for non-programmers to use. Even I as a programmer struggled to produce the minimum of content and felt quite constrained as many things were missing from what I thought should have been included in a basic D&D GM toolkit. I gave it enough of a chance, it just didn't work for me…

Ditto on the camera complaint too…

[HaemishM]

Are you sure they use the same engine? I just don't see it, there are too many differences, not the least of which is the control scheme and the non-tileset feel to KOTOR.

Having designed (or tried to) a good bit in the NWN construction set, I actually DID get the tileset type of feel from KOTOR. They disguised it well, but things like the zone walls and lack of being able to tilt the camera upwards felt really restrictive in KOTOR, IMO. It only "hurt" the game in a few places, but that was more than made up for by the story and characters.

[eldaec]

For the sake of balance, some bad things about KotOR...

1) Tiny zones and worlds. I mean *really* tiny. I know it has to be designed for a circa-1997 PC X-Box, but I don't care. The result is that places seem like worlds when you first land, and look around that first couple of streets; but when you hit the edge of the planet after travelling all of 50 yards, the illusion is shattered. Espeicially on Tatooine. Remote sand people camp/dragon lair my ass.

2) Trivial combat. By half way through, Mission and the squeaky droid can take on all comers (actually Mission and anything that can stun or hold aggro can do this thanks to sneak attack). And every other character in your party is stronger than those two.

3) Shitty engine, yes circa-1997 PC again, but given how much time you spend in a dialogue closeup, I want KotOR:Source. Yes, I know NWN is no better.

4) Short. Kotor runs for less than a week. NWN, if you find the right modules, lasts much longer. Hell, Baldurs Gate runs for much longer.


Where Kotor beats NWN, is that campaign is a million times better written than 98% of what is available for NWN, and Kotor isn't saddled with D&D rules that don't work without an active, live GM who can intervene where the mechanics provide too much cheese or unfun encounters.

I've said this before. But a strict interpretation of D&D rules leads to much suckage. Computers, since they can only interpret rules strictly, do not make good D&D GMs.

[Rodent]

I've said this before. But a strict interpretation of D&D rules leads to much suckage. Computers, since they can only interpret rules strictly, do not make good D&D GMs.

I've said this before, Temple of Elemental Evil. While the campaign isn't much to cheer for unless you're a big fan of dungeon crawls, the D&D rules worked very well within the game ( when patched ofcourse ). Pity most publishers think turnbased combat is evil.

[LordDax]

I liked Kotor better because it had more variety and character development and interaction. To me NWN(which I still play but only custom campaigns) quickly became.

Go here.
Get this.
Go there.
Get that.
Go over there.
Get some of that.
Come here.
Rinse.
Wash.
Repeat.

I played the orginal, HoU and SoU and while the expansions changed the game a little not enough from my tastes. I highly enjoyed Kotor with its varying mission styles and new events/scripts for the onese that seemed to be the same. But I think the main reason I did not enjoy NWN is I started playing the game expecting another Planescape:Torment....

[Xilren's Twin]

I liked Kotor better because it had more variety and character development and interaction. To me NWN(which I still play but only custom campaigns) quickly became.

Go here. Get this. Go there. Get that. Go over there. Get some of that. Come here. Rinse. Wash. Repeat.

I played the orginal, HoU and SoU and while the expansions changed the game a little not enough from my tastes. I highly enjoyed Kotor with its varying mission styles and new events/scripts for the onese that seemed to be the same. But I think the main reason I did not enjoy NWN is I started playing the game expecting another Planescape:Torment....

Point of order; Kotor1&2 fits that exact same pattern, hell almost any rpg does.  Just b/c the "get this" part of Kotor is more "talk to X" doesn't change the fedex part of it.  Whether you going to point A to kill a mob, get an item, discover some information, or talk to a jedi master, it;s still the same pattern.  "Go here, do X".

If my mission styles you mean the 3 minigames they included (card game, racing, and shooting) only 1 of those 3 were part of the main plot, and even then i think you could skip most turret pieces.

It was the NPC interactions and advancement, story and settings which made the difference, not the nature of quests/sidequests.

IMHO, the best quest pattern would be more having different methods to solve a quest, so it become "Go here, do X choosing betwen 5 different methods depending on your char and playstyle".  

Xilren

[Paelos]

In other words, you want Deus Ex.

[schild]

Everyone wants Deus Ex.

[Rasix]

In other words, you want Deus Ex.

Or Fallout 1&2.  Games that can completely change and adapt depending on how you want to play them are truly beautiful.

[Xilren's Twin]

In other words, you want Deus Ex.

Sure, as long as it was DX1 :)

There's no real reason more options can't be deisgned into following a quest.  If you have to "go here, get x", make it so you can kill the mob who has X, sneak in an steal X, or talk/charm/fool the mob into giving you X at a minimum.  Both NWN and Kotor can already do those 3 so long as the quest was designed well, but in most places, you're locked into 1 path for getting X.  Of course, you are constrained by the medium, which is why the comment about magic in D&D not translating well to a crpg stikes home.  Creative use of magic it practically a staple for roleplaying experiences; simple stuff like using a fireball spell outside of combat for times it would be useful (burning stuff, using it's light for a signal, warmth, etc etc).  

It one of those areas that can be hard to justify cost wise b/c unless people replay a game, they would select a single way to solve X and the other options might as well have not even been coded.  Tough balancing act; desirable free form gameplay vs cost of content.  But, i think the cost would be easier to justify in a mmorpg b/c lots of people could utilize the variety of options presented.

Xilren

[Evangolis]

I'm most of the way through KOTOR for the PC.  I am very pleased with the writing, particularly the stuff  that happens on Manaan.

On the downside, on my PC, KOTOR crashes about every 6th time I zone if I don't save, quit, restart, and reload.  Some graphics incompatibility issue.  Pathing also sucks when in crowded areas.

NWN doesn't really compare to KOTOR to me.  One is an RPG, the other a construction kit.  As a construction kit, I have several problems with NWN, mostly because the tilesets aren't compatible in how they handle things like the z-axis and scale.  Also, I'd like to have seen a default set of common items present in all the tilesets, so that you could thematically link different maps in a campaign via repeated objects.  Finally, I would have liked to see default floor plans for the building models in the rural and forest tile sets included as part of the interior tileset setup.

Scoping back out, I would say that while the two products are very different, KOTOR has a consistency of elements that NWN lacks, which means KOTOR comes togather where NWN falls apart rather easily.

[Sky]

Short. Kotor runs for less than a week.

My first playthrough was around 65 hours, the second around 45. I don't really call that short, especially with shelves full of 10-20 hour games.

[Rasix]

Yah, but as you've mentioned here, you sloth your way through games.  It's beatable in a week (less than and you're seriously delving into 10 hour play sessions).   I'm not positive, but I think my second go round took a bit over 20 and I completed every single quest an evil bastard could.

[Strazos]

I too was sorely dissappointed with NWN. I thought me and my PnP buddies could finally have a good PC medium to RP with, but once i saw how craptacular the kit was, I just said fuck it. The SP campaign was a nightmare....i wanted to be a rogue, and picked up the bard chick.....lol. the game was been gathering dust since about 2 months after initial release (I didn't go for the expansion packs).

KotOR, on the other hand, is actually a good...no, Great game....great character development, and combat that's actually fun again....and except for a few minor snags (graphical choke? on a console? absurd), KotORII is a more than worth sequel. Heck, i can even get away with using the non-jedi characters; i somehow have the scout chick (don't wanna give things away) , using a single heavily-modified pistol, doing slightly more damage and shooting with a slightly better to-hit number than my main dual-wielding beast of a jedi main character...now that's balence

and since someone brought up DX.....i dunno about all of you, but DX2 was complete and utter shit for me. open it up, see the horrible lag even on my good machine....upgrade to 1024mb ram, with no improvement. shelved the game for good about a week after release....fuck you warren spector, for charging me to play through a shitty beta PoS

[Rasix]

Edit: Actually, a shift key image doesn't cut it in this case.  You obviously know where it is.  Just know this: your post made me claw at my eyes for a good five minutes.  I hope you're happy.