Neverwinter Nights

[NiX]

A bunch of buddies want to start playing it together on the net. Since we're all spread across ontario cause of college/university and stuff we wanted to get into something to make up for the lack of seeing each other. I was just wonder if NWN has something out or coming out beyond the gold that has both expansions? Paying 50 bucks for the gold and another 50 for underdark.. doesn't sound appealing for a game that outdated.

Also, do the expansions require a cd key as well? I remember a friend of mine going through hell because his CD key was in use when I first tried to play.

[Pig Destroyer]

First of all, no way you should be paying $50 for Underdark.  It was like $29.99 brand new.  And yes, you need CD keys for all expansions.

Hordes of the underdark came out earlier this year I believe, which doesn't really make it outdated in my mind.

[schild]

Meh, play something new with your friends. The shininess of NWN will wear off halfway through the second chapter of the first storyline. Looking back at how much time I spent with that game, I wish I hadn't. It's just not worth it.

[geldonyetich]

Get ye the expansion, Schild.   The original storyline is shit.   Shadows of Undrentide is very good - played through it at least twice.   Hoardes of Underdark is probably better yet (, if mysteriously lacking out of the box multiplayer support,) but I've been too distracted to meddle with it.

The best thing, I say THE BEST THING, about Neverwinter Nights is that it's far and away the easiest graphical, multiplayer compliant, fully customizable isometric RPG on the market.   You can, and people have, put together all kinds of amazing Campaigns and expansion material for it.    The developers have continued to provide post-product support and add-ons for NWN that rivals even Half Life.

About the only downside of Neverwinter Nights is that it's hopelessly mired in the AD&D Third Edition ruleset.    As we've learned from Deus Ex 2, too much streamlining can be a bad thing.

Also, do the expansions require a cd key as well? I remember a friend of mine going through hell because his CD key was in use when I first tried to play.

Yes, each expansion has it's own CD-Key

[Soukyan]

A bunch of buddies want to start playing it together on the net. Since we're all spread across ontario cause of college/university and stuff we wanted to get into something to make up for the lack of seeing each other. I was just wonder if NWN has something out or coming out beyond the gold that has both expansions? Paying 50 bucks for the gold and another 50 for underdark.. doesn't sound appealing for a game that outdated.

Also, do the expansions require a cd key as well? I remember a friend of mine going through hell because his CD key was in use when I first tried to play.

Why not just get together in an IRC chat and play D&D? You'll save some money and you can jump right in.

[Paelos]

I bought the Gold recently and I've been struggling to even pick it up and finish it after I got through the first chapter. It's got this very Diablo-like feel to me of go here, whack this, find something stupid, repeat. I really don't get jazzed about the online capabilities simply because I like single player RPGs a lot more. Perhaps there is more to the game I'm missing because right now I'm having a hell of a lot more fun messing around with KOTOR.

[Signe]

Meh, play something new with your friends. The shininess of NWN will wear off halfway through the second chapter of the first storyline. Looking back at how much time I spent with that game, I wish I hadn't. It's just not worth it.

Something new?  Like what? I'm not being a prat... just trying to find something new, myself.

[Alluvian]

Something new?  Like what? I'm not being a prat... just trying to find something new, myself.

Exactly.  It is a pretty damn small genre within a genre.  RPG with multiplayer coop.  The bioware games are really the ONLY ones that come to mind at all.  BG1, BG2, NWN and expansions.  What else is there besides the very good suggestion of IRC.

With IRC in mind, aren't there even front ends that have monster manuals and dice and shit built in?  I thought one of them even had a system where you could import maps and stuff.  Never used any of it, but vaguely remember being on a site like that one time.

Or you could all fire up net meeting and share a photoshop map.  Hell, the dm could have a black layer on top of the map that he erases as you explore.  That would be pretty nice.

[Wukong]

Gamestop has a pretty good deal on Gold+HotU.

I've been playing NWN a lot lately. I always come back to it after getting burnt out on MMOGs.

[Furiously]

My problem with NWN's is that you go in thinking you are going to play some 3rd edition goodness, in reality, you are playing diablo 2.

I'd much rather they had slowed combat down and made it strategic instead of a clickfest.

[eldaec]

The best thing, I say THE BEST THING, about Neverwinter Nights is that it's far and away the easiest graphical, multiplayer compliant, fully customizable isometric RPG on the market.  

um, what would the second easiest graphical, multiplayer compliant, fully customizable isometric RPG on the market be?

[schild]

Meh, play something new with your friends. The shininess of NWN will wear off halfway through the second chapter of the first storyline. Looking back at how much time I spent with that game, I wish I hadn't. It's just not worth it.

Something new?  Like what? I'm not being a prat... just trying to find something new, myself.

If you haven't played them, Spellforce or Beyond Divinity.

[El Gallo]

The original campaign pretty much sucks, if you ask me.  The second is OK and the third is pretty good.  [heresy]I liked it better than KotOR[/heresy]

[Threash]

Don't even play the original campaign, it will turn you off two very good expansions.  Play shadows of undrentide and hordes of the underdark.  The second expansion is much better than the first, but its its a sequel to shadows so it helps to play it first, and its cooler to keep using the same char rather than have on artificially bumped to 15 for HoTU.

[Signe]

Meh, play something new with your friends. The shininess of NWN will wear off halfway through the second chapter of the first storyline. Looking back at how much time I spent with that game, I wish I hadn't. It's just not worth it.

Something new?  Like what? I'm not being a prat... just trying to find something new, myself.

If you haven't played them, Spellforce or Beyond Divinity.

I played the Beyond Divinity demo, I think, and I liked it.  I forgot about it.   :)  I didn't know about Spellforce... I'll give it a go, too.

[waylander]

Yeh the first game's storyline is horrid.  The most annoying thing to me about NWN is the dam puzzles.  I do like DL'ing the player mods and gaming through them too.

I wish they would have turned it into an MMO though.

[geldonyetich]

um, what would the second easiest graphical, multiplayer compliant, fully customizable isometric RPG on the market be?

Vampire: The Masquarade, I guess.  

Morrowind if you're willing to change the defintion of isometric to include FPS.   (Insert: "YOU KNOW WE DON'T" <club!>)

The thing about NWN is that they did a doozy of a job of it.  If the field were flooded with multiplayer complient, fully customizable isometric RPGs, NWN would still rank the best among them.

[Fabricated]

A bunch of buddies want to start playing it together on the net. Since we're all spread across ontario cause of college/university and stuff we wanted to get into something to make up for the lack of seeing each other. I was just wonder if NWN has something out or coming out beyond the gold that has both expansions? Paying 50 bucks for the gold and another 50 for underdark.. doesn't sound appealing for a game that outdated.

Also, do the expansions require a cd key as well? I remember a friend of mine going through hell because his CD key was in use when I first tried to play.

CD is required to play online, and I think Hordes of the Underdark is only $20 now.

It's worth it, especially if you get some good fan-made modules. The main quests that come with NWN and the expansions suck ass.

http://nwvault.ign.com/Files/modules/HallOfFame.shtml

I recommend:
Honor Amoung Thieves
In the Company of Thieves
Elegia Eternum (This one is near professional quality.)
Excrucio Eternum
Penultima City and Penultima Rerolled
A Halo of Fires
Shadow from a Soul on Fire

[Pig Destroyer]

Seriously, there are so many different modules and Persistant Worlds out there for NWN that you could play everyday for a year and not have tried them all.  There is tons of stuff you can do with NWN.

[Alluvian]

My problem with NWN's is that you go in thinking you are going to play some 3rd edition goodness, in reality, you are playing diablo 2.

I'd much rather they had slowed combat down and made it strategic instead of a clickfest.

I really wish we could merge NWN with Temple of Elemental Evil.  I LOVED the detailed third edition TURN BASED combat in TOEE.  Too bad the aggro and scripting was abit screwy.  I wish there was a turn based way of playing NWN.  The interface was also way better in TOEE.  If you are going to use a radial menu, don't use cryptic symbols.  Give me fucking WORDS.  I can read them on their side you know.  Not only does it take up far less space on the radial dial allowing FAR more options but it also makes more sense and is more intuitive.

My problem with NWN is that it is almost unplayable for me without constantly pausing it.  I don't mind it with just myself and my wife playing on our LAN, but online it became a nightmare because the pause option had to be disabled for sanity.  At that point you could not access your characters special abilities very easily and it essentially became diablo (like had been said before).

Beyond divinity might be a good suggestion, I have not played it.  hopefully it is more in depth than that shitfest (although pretty) called "Sacred".

Spellforce as I recall was an entirely different type of game.  It was more of an adventure RTS than an RPG.  You built bases, structures, units, and attacked the enemy or roaming mobs with them.  Unless I recall the wrong game.  I would certainly not suggest it as a replacement to NWN.  It may very well interest those who do like NWN though.  It was... weird...  I don't know if I liked it or not after I finished the demo.  I found it abit too tedious to ever want to purchase though.

[Sky]

My problem with NWN is that it is almost unplayable for me without constantly pausing it.

Bingo. I'm not some adrenaline-amped kid slamming Red Bulls and Mountain Dews and clicking like I own stock in Logitech. Same gripe I have with the RTS genre.

I don't mind that there are RTS games out there, I don't feel I should like every genre. But when RTS plows through the TBS landscape, it kinda sucks imo (I'm looking at YOU, Brian Reynolds).

[Dren]

Meh, play something new with your friends. The shininess of NWN will wear off halfway through the second chapter of the first storyline. Looking back at how much time I spent with that game, I wish I hadn't. It's just not worth it.

Something new?  Like what? I'm not being a prat... just trying to find something new, myself.

If you haven't played them, Spellforce or Beyond Divinity.

So as not to derail this thread, could you start a new topic and do a quick review on Spellforce?  I searched for it and didn't find anything.  The box looked good on the shelf, but there are so many of these types of games out I didn't know if it had anything to put itself above the pack.

Yes, I could look for reviews in a lot of places, but I'd like to get this group's opinion on it.

Thanks.

[Alluvian]

Grab the spellforce demo.  Much better than us explaining it to you.

[Kenrick]

Dungeon Siege.

=P

[Dren]

Grab the spellforce demo.  Much better than us explaining it to you.

Ok, I finally did this.  It seems like a playable game so far.  I got through the tutorial last night which was painfully slow, but I did learn a lot tricks that made the game more playable than first perceived.

The graphics are fine.  The RTS is basically Warcraft with some added shiny.  I haven't had much experience yet with the RPG aspect since you only lvl twice and in the campaign you get your avatar is very high lvl.

I noticed in the campaign that your Avatar has a TON of items and spells.  It demonstrates how item-centric the game probably gets, which is fine for a single-player with Multi-player option game.

The thing I really liked was the ability to jump up to an overhead view and then all the way to a almost first person view of the geography.  The game is running quite smoothly on my older game playing rig with no problems.  I'm quite surprised I can zoom in and out, rotate, etc. so well since my v-card starts coughing on heavy CoH battles or fast super jumping through skyscraper downtown areas.

Another cool thing was the way the scripted "cut scenes" are done with whatever backdrop you have created.  In the tutorial, I had several workers and a large army along with a few buildings near that portal thing when the "cut scene" started.  All of that was there.  The main characters moved in and out of my workers and army to get to their positions during the act.  The buildings were there too.  It did a lot for immersion I thought.

I might have to pick up this game when the price drops after their expansion comes out.  I noticed that on their website.  I also noticed a rather active community surrounding the game right now too.  That's always promising.

Thanks for the tip.

[Signe]

I have the demo, too, now.  I haven't played it but I will when I can concentrate again.  We're moving soon and I seem to be suffering from an attention span shortage and total thought scatterage.  I might pick up Beyond Divinity, too.  For some reason I thought I had but, in reality, I only played with the demo.

Things are not 'right' in my head, lately.  I wonder how many times I've made an ass of myself in front of you lot in the past few weeks.  :(

I'm sad.

[geldonyetich]

<casts ressurect> (Target fails constitution check.  Corpse turns to dust.  "Oops.")

I've downloaded and am messing around with the Neverwinter Nights Community Expansion Pack.

It adds 450 community creatred creatures, 14 new weapons *types*, 324 new shields, 772 new inventory icons, 1448 new placables, 121 new NPC portraits.   Other things too, likely.

That pretty much kills any excuse I had that NWN was lacking in assemblable.    I'm picking up my old half-completed module and seeing what I can do with this.

[Pig Destroyer]

I reinstalled the Gold Edition and HotU as well as downloaded the expansion pack this weekend as well.  The CEP is freakin overwhelming, I can't believe it was free.

One day, I will actually complete a module.  One day...

[geldonyetich]

Initial dabbling with the CEP looks good.  

Creatures added are relatively straightforward and often not entirely complete.  Stirges, for example, don't seem to have any life-sucking capabilities.    (I thought the vividly naked Succumbi was perhaps unneccessary.)

The new weapons are mixxed in with the same catagories of the old ones fairly successfully.   The vast majority of the new weapons are eastern in nature.    Numbchucks [sic], Sais, Tofna, various eastern Polearms, ect.

The placables are perhaps the best addition.     One stumbling block I've often run across in Neverwinter Nights is that, even with both expansions, there's one ugly table you can place.   Any other table you see is either part of the tile set or a desk.    The CEP adds about twenty new kinds of tables you can place: rock on!   I also like the various shop signs.

The module I'm working on is currently very large and ungainly.   I made the mistake of designing entirely from the inside out, while at the same time intending to create an open ended module.    As a result I have no overall focus on which direction the module is going.    Got to take this back to the drawing board.

[Alluvian]

Yeah, I started a few modules just to test the scripting language and then started making a story up to go along with all my scripting tests.  So I have a story now involving orcs, goblins, and um... dancing circus bears.  If I polish the story it can probably become quite amusing, but I doubt it will ever make much sense.

That is what I get for putting an old man in the woods with three bears playing ring around the rosie and responding to communication trees to do tricks.  I swear I was just playing with the emotes and the pretty funky dynamic pathing...  But then I liked my trick bears too much and made them the basis of the adventure.

Then I went and made an elaborate bear training grounds with goblin masters in a cave.  It is actually pretty neat, they all do tricks (some attacking combat dummies, some running laps, some doing slalom tricks, other playing dead then standing up).  If you pay attention to the ambient goblin chatter you can find out that loud noises will anger them, so I scattered a few ways of making loud noises in your pen near the bears.  Once the noise is triggered the bears actually break open their containments (or so it looks with vanishing boxes and explosions) and then I revert them back to normal AI that hates gobllins and is neutral to all else.  The players escape here as well.

Does this make any sense?  um... not really but it was some neat scripting.  So I had to make up a backstory of a goblin lord who accidentally stubled across some artifact of animal control and took over the woodland bears with it.  Dressing them up as orc for midnight raids on the nearby town.  So that the orcs would be killed by the townsfolk and leave the goblins alone.  The old man in the woods is actually an accomplished druid and he can set the bears right and dispose of the artifact if you return it to him after killing the goblin lord.  You can either kill the orcs first in their camp or get the orcs to rush off and attack the goblin caves if you have done that part first.

This is what happens when you build an adventure around random goofing off and bits and pieces of scripting.  Now my WIFE actually wrote a story first and her adventure was making sense.  And was so much more artistic looking than mine as well.  Too bad neither of them ever got done and I don't even know if we have the files anymore.

[Jain Zar]

Have they actually made NWN levels creatable by people like me who can't code their way out of a wet paper bag yet?

[geldonyetich]

Yes.

As I mentioned before (I think?) the community is the main reason NWN has quite an infinite future stretched out before it.

Case in point: Lilac Soul's Script Generator, which is excellent for those of us who can't code our way out of a paper bag.   Just answer the questions and it gives you a script.  Cut it out of the script generator and paste it where it tells you to, and voila, you're good to go.

I'm not a bad coder myself, but this thing is a real time saver.

[Signe]

Thanks, Geld!  What a nice wee bit of fun that script generator is!  And clever, too... it generated this for me:



    $_=q`$_='    
       @8GCI';@a=/./g;        
      $j=9;$k=9;$w=25;$            c=35;$e=  
     8;$u=2;$v=1;{$k+=$v*      =$k<6|$k>16?-1:  
    1;$j+=$u*=$j<9|$j>60?-    1:1;my(%l,$m,$n);      
    for$y(0..22){for(0..70   ){$r=($_-$j)/1.6;$s=  
    $y-$k;$d=(($_-$c)**2+(  $y-$f)**2+(($w-$r**2-$
    s**2)**.5-$e)**2)**.5;  if($r**2+$s**2<$w){$m=
     $d<$m||!$m?$d:$m;$n=   $d>$n?$d:$m;$l{$y}{$_}
      =$d;}}}print"\ec";    for$y(0..22){print$_>6    
        9?$/:(($d=$l{$y      }{$_})?$a[($d-$m)*5/  
           $n]:$")fo          r(0..70)}select$q,  
                               $q,$q,.1;redo}`;
                                 s#\s##g;eval


Thanks!  Seriously, though... it's much more fun fiddleing with NWN using this.

Edit:  Unfortunately, it doesn't display  properly and I'm too lazy to care.

[schild]

   $_=q`$_='    
       @8GCI';@a=/./g;        
      $j=9;$k=9;$w=25;$            c=35;$e=  
     8;$u=2;$v=1;{$k+=$v*      =$k<6|$k>16?-1:  
    1;$j+=$u*=$j<9|$j>60?-    1:1;my(%l,$m,$n);      
    for$y(0..22){for(0..70   ){$r=($_-$j)/1.6;$s=  
    $y-$k;$d=(($_-$c)**2+(  $y-$f)**2+(($w-$r**2-$
    s**2)**.5-$e)**2)**.5;  if($r**2+$s**2<$w){$m=
     $d<$m||!$m?$d:$m;$n=   $d>$n?$d:$m;$l{$y}{$_}
      =$d;}}}print"\ec";    for$y(0..22){print$_>6    
        9?$/:(($d=$l{$y      }{$_})?$a[($d-$m)*5/  
           $n]:$")fo          r(0..70)}select$q,  
                               $q,$q,.1;redo}`;
                                 s#\s##g;eval

omfg. it says ur a furry.

[Rasix]

For someone that's always wanted to really dabble in game creation (I used to make text RPGs on my old TI-83 calculator in high school), the additional content added makes picking this up very attractive.  Creating a module looks like it might be a way to keep my rudamentary scripting skills fresh and create a little adventure of my own.  But just how much can you alter with the game?  It is possible to introduce new classes? Can you set up your own cinematics? Can you do some pretty advanced AI scripting with the tool (like could you write a mini-war type scenario where you direct some troops and initiate some skirmishes)?  

However, it's still 40 bucks for the gold box and 30 for the expansion.  I like to keep my game purchases hovering around 50 bucks.  Still, I might pick this up.  On a good note, however, it looks like they're releasing a platinum edition in October for $40 which I assume will contain all expansions and some other goodies. Perhaps by then the gold box and expansion will have dipped to 20 a piece.