I read your knit-pick about the game...but i have a question to ask. What could be done to make it better for you so that it doesnt get easily picked apart as it did in your post?

Nit pick? That's not a nit pick, it's a review (unlike many of the shameless promotions that show up on this page as MUD reviews), and a fairly well-written and balanced one at that. I've never played the game (or any of the other games mentioned), so I can't speak for accuracy or offer my own opinions, but I find it sad that a review that discusses both positive and negative aspects in detail is considered nothing more than "nit picking."

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i think you took my comments way too personal...but that is your right to be as sensitive as you choose to. if you post a review expect it to be criticized....if you cannot take the heat get out of the kitchen...sorry i offended you...

You, my friend, are barely able to spell. You are completely unable to punctuate, and your grammar "skills" are nonexistant. You attempt to criticize a well-thought out and detailed review (And an overall excellent one, as well, imo. Even if he gave NWN more credit than I personally would.), and yet you insult any reader that possesses a modicum of intellect with your horrendous posts.

Threshold: Great review, bud. Pretty much agree with it, but NWN feels like a D2 clone to me, from what I've observed so far.

-D

as i said....taken way too personal

oh btw....i still ask the original question what could be done to make it better? or were you so busy trying to smash on me that you forgot that i actually asked a relevant question in the beginning?

i guess knit-pick and reviewing dont have any similarities. as far as my spelling it is atrocious at times. i can take the constructive knit....oops...i meant criticism.

As I'm not Threshold (last I checked), I don't see how I can take your response to him too "personally." Further, as I've never played the game (as I said), I certainly can't offer my constructive advice for what would make it better.

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Been waiting a long time to be able to post that review have'nt you Threashold? Since the game has just hit the stores in the last week or so it seems you were rather anxious to express your opinion. Your review is not too bad really, you make some assumptions that you have not really been able to test yet (like Multiplay and suitablility for Persistant worlds) but your comments on the single player game were not bad at all.

People keep focusing on the 64 player limit, that is online at one time, a single server can hold 256 player profiles which is not a bad player base. To run a large server for NWN is going to require a powerful machine, and something better than a personal connection. However there will be a massive re-optimization with the patch that should help with this problem.

There are also a number of things that have to be addresses to really get NWN ready to handle all the Persistant World projects that are already underweigh. BioWare has consistantly pledged to work with the community to address those issues. Building a game to handle single play, multiplay and PWs is not exactly a simple thing and no one with any understanding of that expected the game to be perfect right out of the box. But we have a pledge to make it so and that is more than we have had before.

Tell you what Threashold, when some of the current PW projects get going I will be sure to let you know. I have great faith in the Creators in the game community and I think you are going to find some impressive games being created out of the raw materials that NWN provides.

A.T
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Mmm. Sloppy design, Tau. Sloppy design.

I don't suppose you've heard my rants on that. A good design can make up for almost any deficit you can imagine, in the code or otherwise. However, a bad design is a bad design, no matter how much you try to make it into a good system.

Also, I find it vaguely amusing that you won't even give Threshold the respect of spelling his name correctly. Very amusing.

(And a sidenote: NWN appears to be rather sloppily balanced. WTF is this, friendly fire can hit you if you raise the difficulty? If your a spellcaster, you CANNOT have any hirelings, period that way really. And if you aren't, you sure as hell better not have a spellcaster in your party. Good lord. That is a terrible, terrible design for a MP game.)

-D

I think most of us knew that NWN wasn't going to be some "silver bullet" solution, however I still think it's another step forward.  I think it's important to remember how long it's taken text-based muds to get as far as they have.  Just like text-based muds, graphical muds will have to evolve, and that's going to take time.

And as an aside, isn't that "friendly fire" difficulty thing the same as is used in Baldor's Gate?

Mmm. Good point, KaVir. However, you do sum up it best - it is an evolution and not a revolution as some people here swore.

As that gets rubbed into certain people's faces, they get rather...aggressive about it. Heh. Amusing to watch them.

-D

Do not play this game until it becomes more stable. I repeat: Do not play this game until it's more stable!

I'm using version 1.19 (the latest as of this writing), and I've lost nearly 9 hours of work in the game due to savefile corruption. The game was fairly solid for about 20 hours, but then a crash took out my quicksave. The next closest save I had was 2.5 hours away -- it crashed on loadup, going corrupt as well!

Others have had worse stability problems than I, though. If anyone is interested in this game, at least wait until it's in a usable state. Remember: The game was perfectly fine for me for 20 hours, but one bug can destroy a great deal of work. This sort of thing leaves a very bad taste in my mouth; the last time this happened, I abandoned the game altogether. (Damn you Phantasy Star Online!)

Ok, that being said, I might as well throw my thoughts of the game (when I could actually play it :/) into the mix =). This game gets a few things right, and a few things wrong. I haven't done any multiplayer (and I don't know if I will), so I'll concentrate on the singleplayer game.

On the shiny side of things, it has a pretty interesting story while still having a non-linear feel to it. Although it's got nothing on Morrowind in that regard, it still beats out Dungeon Siege by giving you a reason for killing so many monsters. Overall, the game is mostly fun if you like killing endless waves of monsters.

The AI is good sometimes, and atrocious othertimes. My little pixie familiar automagically disarms traps for my inept wizard. But she'll automagically disarm the first trap she sees, flying right through the trap I detect immediately afterwards to get to the first trap! She also has a great deal of difficulty orienting herself to pick locks. I have to click on the thing I want her to pick, then quickly move away so she can get in there and unlock it. Forget about pathfinding in this game: It's nonexistant. My pixie often gets caught on the most ridiculous obstacles, and you can easily "lose" monsters by running around a corner. My own character often fails to acquire a target in the middle of a battle, so I'll kill one monster only to have her sit around until I click on the next guy. Monster AI is horrible: They just rush you and swing. I find it a little nonconvincing for one mugger to charge so unnervingly when I've just reduced the rest of his troupe to ashes with a fireball.

The interface is rather nice in some areas: I've liked radial menu systems ever since they made their debut in the Secret of Mana. I wish the game would autopause whenever I enter the menu, although that's a minor annoyance. The graphical interface, as Threshold noted, is severely lacking: You can't move the windows around!

I really wish that we could have the graphical engine of Dungeon Siege for this game. Trees and caves are laughable compared to that excellent engine. Overall, the graphical quality of the game is not very high (but I don't care about this much ;)).

They seem to do a good job of providing varied circumstances with which to have tens of monsters rush at you with murderous intent, and it's certainly appreciated. And there are certain special areas that I always love, like the gauntlet in chapter one. This game definately needs more scripted events, and I beseech future module designers to concentrate on quality of area over quantity (something the original game designers have forgotten in many places).

Battle is... strange. I knew nothing about the "Attack of Opportunity" in D&D3 until this game. It makes wizards nigh useless in battle, which is a serious problem for my character. I have to force my pixie to engage my foes (who are of course happy to futilely slice at my nimble pixie) while I obliterate them. It makes for very frustrating play at times with a wizard, although this may be a problem with D&D3 and not with Neverwinter Nights. Maybe I'm just a masochist, but I don't like hiring henchmen either: I very much prefer to be the only person in the game. That the difficulty settings "assumes" I will hire a henchmen is somewhat poor planning on their part. Back to Attacks of Opportunity: It seems to be very very broken. Because of the "losing" of targets I mentioned earlier, enemies often get more Attacks of Opportunity than they should. Threat ranges also seem to be calculated strangely, because I get an incredible number of Attacks of Opportunity while polymorphed into a giant spider: It seems that the enemies have to stay just outside of my threat range (which is the center of my character?), and because my form is so large, they go in and out of it while fighting, giving me tons of these opportunistic attacks.

Overall, the problems I've noted could likely be fixed with a little elbow grease from the programmers. I'm disappointed in a few areas, but I'm sure the game will provide adequate entertainment. The only thing I've not mentioned is that the game is pretty addicting for me, and despite its flaws, I find it pretty fun.

I understand the comments about the graphics but you really need to realize two things. The first is that the game is intended to be accessable to more than just people with cutting edge hardware, this was a specific design decision with a point. The second is that a year of legal battles put the whole existance of the game in doubt so rather than reworking them from the ground up they just went forward. When you combine those two things you get NWN graphic.

Dulan it is the height of Twitdom to comment on another's spelling, grammer, or typos. That was all I did, mis-spell a name, it was not an insult as you suggest. When I insult someone it is clear and very obvious. Threas, if you were indeed in any way insulted by my mistake you have my most sincere apologies.

The biggest thing I am currently focused on with NWN is a real persistant data solution. But my Guild has a whole Forum site dedicated to that and any other fundamental script needs. It is called the Foundation project and open to the public. There are problems, we will help to solve them.


A.T
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