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Neverwinter Nights 2 |
| Genre: RPG |
HD Support: 0 |
| Developer: Obsidian Entertainment |
System Link: NO |
| Publisher: Atari |
Live Enabled: NO |
| Release Date: 2006-11-07 |
| Description: The long-awaited full sequel to Bioware's series based on Dungeons & Dragons rules. Neverwinter Nights 2 continues the tradition with an even deeper and more engrossing storyline, tremendously immersive character development, stunning graphics, and, an expansive multiplayer experience. The player's journey not only expands their personal power, but also their political power, as he rises through the ranks of Neverwinter society and can even becomes a lesser noble of Neverwinter Cities are alive in the game, teeming with the life of children play through the street, farmers lead their animals around, and passersby walk on their mysterious business. In addition, frequented locations change rather dramatically between chapters. Past the campaign included with the game itself, Neverwinter Nights 2 also gives you all the tools you need to build your own modules, campaigns, and adventures.
Features
- Rise in Power, Responsibility, and Renown – In Neverwinter Nights 2, the player's journey not only expands their personal power, but also their political power. The protagonist rises through the ranks of Neverwinter society and can even become a lesser noble of Neverwinter – a full knight with land and title. The player lords over a mighty stronghold, he commands a small army, and he is the last line of defense for Neverwinter itself.
- Cities Are Alive – The cradles of civilization in NWN2 are teeming with life. Children play through the street, farmers lead their animals around, and passersby walk on their mysterious business. Players will even stumble upon numerous one-time events, such as a thief robbing a commoner. In addition, frequented locations, such as the city of Neverwinter itself, changes rather dramatically between chapters.
- Epic Battles – NWN2 introduces a number of new and exciting boss battles to the RPG genre. There are plenty of creatures that simply require brute force to defeat, but strategically placed throughout the story are a few more memorable boss battles that provide defining game moments.
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Neverwinter Nights 2 Staff Review | |
| Overall 8.3 Gameplay: 8.3 Visual: 8.3 Sound: 8.3 | Reviewed By: admin
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If you're the kind of person that pines for the sort of dialog-rich, statistically-sprawling computer RPGs that are all but extinct in the modern gaming landscape, then Neverwinter Nights 2 is exactly the kind of game that will get your blood pumping. Don't mind its name -- apart from the DIY ethos encouraged by the packaged toolset, the game has much more in common with Baldur's Gate than it does with the original Neverwinter. The options for character development are staggering, and the game's adherence to the D&D 3.5 Edition ruleset is impressive (as are the liberties that were taken to make certain rules and mechanics fit better in the context of a CRPG). Only a handful of technical issues ranging from serious (some yet-to-be fixed potentially show-stopping bugs) to chronically annoying (a clunky interface and an overall low level of performance) serve as blemishes marring the countenance of an otherwise stellar game.
Obsidian has very effectively drawn on its legacy to make Neverwinter Nights 2's packaged single-player campaign worthy of its exhaustive pedigree. The game's story is epic in scope and far-reaching in magnitude, making up for its relatively slow start with a handful of surprises sure to excite fans of D&D's venerable mythology. Your character starts out as a simple orphan from a backwater village, though once the story gets going, you'll find yourself flirting with royalty, foiling inter-planar assassination plots, and ultimately locking horns with foes of nigh-divine proportions. And that's only half the story -- built into the game's intricate dialog system are plenty of moral choices for you to make, many of which radically alter the factions you end up allying with and determine how well regarded you are by those close to you.
The one key way in which Neverwinter Nights 2 deviates from its predecessor is in the level of control you have over your NPC companions. Instead of giving you full control of your main character and relegating the rest to the AI, you now have complete say as to what they do in every round of combat. You can also guide their progression as you see fit, to a certain point -- unlike your main character, your companions' multi-classing options are limited by the nature of their backstories. On the plus side, most of the characters that join up with you have cool stories of their own, and if you work towards nurturing your relationships with them, you can open up a bunch of cool side-quests, which sometimes lead to greater options in regards to their development.
At the game's heart, though, is the good old-fashioned dungeon crawl, with all the visceral challenges and material rewards that this entails. You're going to fight a whole lot, and if you're savvy about D&D rules, you can make your party into a very effective killing machine. Combat happens in real time, though you can pause the game at any time to issue commands to your party. If you're not the sort to micromanage your party every combat round, you can issue general commands (like "Heal me!" or "Attack my target!"), though if you so choose, you can play NWN2 as you would a turn-based RPG.
If you prefer to not worry too much about what they're doing, you can set your companions' combat behaviors to very precise levels, dictating, for instance, how frugal they are with spells and consumable items. Conversely, if you want total control, you can set your party members to "puppet mode," which prevents them from doing anything unless you command them to. Either way you approach it, combat in Neverwinter Nights 2 is strategic, deep and satisfying, and acquiring new, powerful abilities with which to dispatch large numbers of enemies is always exciting.
As you'd expect, the more seasoned of an adventurer you become, the more treasure you'll amass. But Neverwinter Nights 2 takes this Monty "Haul" sensibility to a whole other level. Frequently, you'll come out of an adventure with your bags literally bursting at the seams with treasure that is actually good, but due to the game's lack of an effective item-management system, most of it goes unused. Invariably, you end up selling a majority of the stuff you acquire, and as a result, you usually have more gold than you know what to do with.
Later in the game, your character acquires a keep, and though the process of refurbishing and fortifying it acts as an effective money sink, chances are you'll already be filthy rich at that point. You'll occasionally run across a vendor with some really cool stuff, but most often they'll serve simply as a means to clean out your inventory. Perversely enough, the nature of the game's crafting system actually scares you into keeping a lot of stuff that you never end up using. While the system is deep, it's incredibly unwieldy and requires you to cross-reference recipes and reagents to a degree that is ultimately discouraging. A system that sorts your party's inventory in a convenient way would go a long way towards remedying this. But as it stands, Neverwinter Nights 2 forces you to play quartermaster just a tad too much.
Much of Neverwinter Nights 2's long-term appeal hinges on just how enthusiastically the community will ultimately embrace the toolset. As you might expect, the scene is a little barren at this point; a few groups are hard at work developing persistent-world servers for the game, but most are in their nascent forms. Given the nature of the work involved, it's probably safe to assume that it will be a couple of months before the community is truly thriving.
Among the many concerns facing prospective world builders and Dungeon Masters is the lack of out-of-the-box functionality for downloading the files needed to run this aftermarket content. Right now, players wishing to jump into a custom module will have to download it directly from the web, which usually ends up preventing the less savvy from even experiencing this aspect of the game. In the end, for all intents and purposes, most of the multiplayer action going on now is comprised of groups of players playing the packaged campaign cooperatively.
Unfortunately, it's impossible to talk about Neverwinter Nights 2 without mentioning the performance issues that marred it at launch, and are as of yet unresolved. During our review, we encountered a fairly serious bug that we described at length last week in our updated Out of the Box piece. At press time, Obsidian is yet to release an update that addresses this issue, though they have offered a workaround that seems to remedy it in most cases.
A more pervasive issue, however, is the game's shaky performance. Currently, it's hard to make the game run at an acceptable clip unless you tone down some of the more flashy graphics options. Even with everything turned on, the game doesn't look particularly astounding; it's serviceable enough, though you're not likely to be very impressed, especially if you run it at a level that will grant decent performance. Finally, the game's camera takes a good deal of getting used to, and even once you're fully acclimated, you'll find yourself wishing a simple mouselook feature had been implemented.
It says something that, despite these technical issues, we found it very hard to tear ourselves away from Neverwinter Nights 2 long enough to actually write this review. Just like its acclaimed spiritual predecessors, the game is wholly engrossing and begs to be explored. Rare is a game with such meaningful and varied character development, and the plethora of options available will guarantee that many players will want to indulge in its experience from the point of view of several different types of characters. Neverwinter Nights 2 is one of the best RPGs we've played in a long time -- bugs and performance issues be damned.
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