Neverwinter Nights

The Good
Neverwinter Nights (NWN) is a very difficult game to review because there are so many different ways to play the game. NWN's biggest strength is as a platform for game development since it is so expandable you never run out of things to do whether you are a player, a Dungeon Master, a world builder, or all three.

The pre-made modules make up a good RPG with good characters and a fun, if somewhat cliched storyline. Bioware did a good job of making it possible and fun for any class to solve the game using class-specific special abilities and your henchmen helper. The graphics, while not as good as Dungeon Siege, are still very good, and the quests and dungeons are well done.

Gameplay is straightforward and easy to get into. Bioware gave you three sets of configurable hotkeys for activating abilities, weapons, emotions (like waving or anger), and spells. The character sheets are well laid out and easy to read and the automap and journal make it easy to figure out where you are and what you are supposed to be doing.

The journal is especially well done, letting you sort your quests by priority, completion status, and several other criteria as well as giving you the option of adding your own entries. The automap lets you mark locations on the map, and is automatically updated with obvious marks such as local stores and points of interest.

Multiplayer play is very easy to set up (I mostly played a few PvP modules and played some cooperative games through the main game). I can't comment on the Dungeon Master modes yet as I have not tried them, but I had a lot of fun dungeon-delving with my friend through Neverwinter.

The editor is easy to get started with, and has all the tools you need to make a game just like the included Neverwinter Nights (unless if you want to add new graphics, movies, or sounds of course).

The Bad
The main problem with Neverwinter Nights is that it is not an exact implementation of 3rd edition Dungeons and Dragons rules. The combat is very well done, but the lack of crafting, professional, and knowledge skills really limits the flexibility of a Dungeon Master trying to add spice to his campaign. Other notable skill and feat omissions are: no Tracking feat, no acrobatics, balance, jumping, climbing, disguise, or forgery skills for thieves, no magic item crafting feats for magic users, several fighter feats are missing including Great Cleave and Whirlwind, and my favorite weapon, the spiked chain is not implemented.

Bioware initially stated that flying, climbing, mounted riding, and crafting skills would not be included, but why get rid of knowledge and profession skills, even if they aren't used in the Neverwinter campaign? Any creative DM could put in skill checks when necessary, even if the skill isn't directly supported in the engine. Also, I was very disappointed that you had to take Parry to get a defensive skill because the Acrobatics/Jumping combo was one of my favorite thief or Monk skill combos.

The omissions in NWN may be fixed in patched, hackpacks, or expansion packs, so this may only be a temporary issue, but it should have been addressed in the first release.

The other problems with NWN are only minor. The automap, as it is used in the NWN campaign, tends to reveal too much as you explore. It is a little anti-climactic to see a marker on the map labelled "Orc Chieftan Throne Room" when your character would really have no idea what the room was for until after he had entered it.

Another gameplay issue (for single player play only) is that compared to earlier Bioware games, interaction between your character and NPCs is not nearly as involving as some of the romances and inter-party conflicts in Baldur's Gate 2 or Planescape: Torment. This is mostly a design issue: since you can only hire one henchman (henchperson?) at a time, your role-playing is limited to your interaction with one teammate instead of five teammates.

There are other minor quest and scripting issues in the game, some of which were fixed in early patches. None of them keep you from finishing the game, but they can get a little annoying.

Another design decision that I didn't like was to use tiles to create the maps. The result of this decision is that NWN is the only recent 3D game that does not support smooth terrain such as the rolling hills and steep mountains trails in Dungeon Siege. It may make the map design easier, but I hate the "terraced" look of the wilderness maps.

The Bottom Line
Neverwinter Nights is an implementation of the 3rd Edition Dungeons and Dragons game on the PC with 3D graphics, sound, and the ability to design and run your own games. It succeeds at providing a good bundled game and a well-designed if somewhat complicated construction set to build your own games. Of the three big RPG construction sets released this year (Dungeon Siege, Morrowind, NWN), Neverwinter Nights is the most successful at what it aspires to do.

The Good
I liked Baldurs Gate 2. I thought that it was a marvelous game, a shining beacon of light in the darkness of average RPG-s, so of course I was very interested in Neverwinter Nights and hoped to find the same kind of quality in it. I was hoping it to be better than BG2... which sadly it wasn`t.

It seems that someone in Bioware came to a bright idea to do a Diablo-clone. Why Bioware? Why? What about the story, the content, the meaning of the game? It is missing in the endless randomness (I was like level 3 and happily walking around in the city of Neverwinter and looking into barrels and stuff, and then I found an ancient über-cool armor of the Sun God of Mulhorhand in a barrel... kinda breaks the immersion and believability of the world, doesn`t it? EDIT: I understand that this was a bug because what you find in barrel depends on your level; this means that I was supposed to find that armor in that barrel when I would have been near level 20) and boring hack and slash quests. You showed the world that RPG-s can be more than "I kill the mighty dragon with sword of elemental evil of destruction which is doomed +8.... and save the princess of course" and the next thing you create is Diablo.

I liked what you did with shadows, and the clothes were nice and there was something that resembled a story... but I never thought that you could mess up a story which would be a perfect dramatic tale of loss of innocence in a cruel uncaring world, where people only care about their selfish fleshly needs and the innocent ones die tragically by trying to save the world, or by just trying to live according to their hearts. How can possibly anyone mess that up? What happened?

The Bad
Really...what happened? Remember Jeremy Soule - the musical genius behind Icewind Dale. Remember how beautiful the music was in that game, how inspiring and romantic. His music in Neverwinter Nights is boring, awful, uninspiring and unromantic( His Kotor work wasn`t much better in my opinion).

Remember the party members in BG 2, how interesting they were, how they interacted with the world and other party members? Well forget it about here in Neverwinter. You only can get one henchman, and they just kill everything that is red. Although some of them have nicely written backgrounds. But talking to them leads only to quests which are like "find-the-most-rare-and-sacred-flower-of-fallen-angels-in-a-barrel-in-the-middle-of-nowhere-please".

And they only give you information about them when you have gained enough levels. "Hey, Tomi. I am now almost level 10. Can I now hear your story?" "Hmm...nope." "Why? I just killed 10 000 orcs. I deserve to know your story." "You have still 3 expierence points missing to hear my story!" "Aaarrrghhh...please. I just want to believe that this game is more than hack and slash...that there is beauty to it....please talk to me...have mercy on me...be interactive." "Nope, can`t do." *In frustration the player kills himself.

Remember how interesting the Forgotten Realms world was in BG. In Neverwinter Nights I found out that FR is a patchwork of genres, it tries to be a little bit of everything.... and it does it horribly (another dimensions, heaven and hell, polytheistic religions, western, fantasy, pulp fiction, over thousand secret organizations all trying to conquer the world, etc). It goes way over the board. In BG Bioware used the most interesting parts of FR and fitted it in nicely and logically. In Nights they dont try to achieve realism. There is an ancient alien-like race, who are called Creators, and they try to bring back the glorious days of their old empire; then there sacred barbarians, demons, evil brotherhood of mages, politics,... it just is too much... it doesnt have the one single feeling which the game needs to have a sense of believability.

They have lots of sidequests in Nights, but they all contain bad dialogue and hack and slash solutions. But you learn more about FR, unfortunately too much. Speaking of dialogue.... it is quite horrible, especially for Bioware. And the voice acting... lets not better go there. In BG 2 there was a nice balance between the personal story and the sidequests story. I myself don`t care about sidequests, I like it when my games are personal, linear and dramatic. The more personal, the more it affects me emotionally.

NN consists only of sidequests... and there isn`t actually any freedom of choice in them (I only tolerated Fallout because there you could make choices). Either the " I-love-people-they-are-very-nice-and-I-like-flowers-because-they-are-pretty" way or the "I-am-so-selfish-and-evil-I-want-lots-of-money-I-luv-money-I-love-killing-people-for-money-I-love-me-with-money" way. Talk about deep moral choices.

And now, Aribeth. She was the character I fell in love. The only character in the game that seemed like character... atleast when she wasn`t giving you quests. Basically Aribeth was another try of Bioware to do their Moral Crusader who-is-to-brutal-in-enforcing his/her-views-on-the-world (like Anomen in BG 2) kind of character. Now Aribeth was the innocence which I mentioned earlier. She was the only noble and pure character. Everyone else in the game were selfish, low, full of hate, etc. And what does Bioware do? Bioware enforces the player to believe that the people in the city of Neverwinter are good (they raped,killed and tortured each other...and not some evil maniacs, but common people) and that Aribeth was evil; she tried to help the people in Neverwinter and they hanged her lover.... of course she goes mad and wants to kill them all... and Neverwinter deserved such punishment.

Unfortunately you can`t choose sides. You have to kill Aribeth for the good of Neverwinter because the noble Lord Nasher demands it (noble lord who hangs innocent people because the mob demands it). The twisted one-sided moralism in this game sickened me. There was no love in this game, no mercy. Only hatred, violence and money.

Edit: Other minor things. Because of tile-set design, new locations did not feel new (all the villages, caves, forests looked same). It kind of intensified the feeling of been there, done that. And I swear those barrels were everywhere.

The Bottom Line
Bioware trying to be Blizzard. No love, no redemption. Only killing... and killing... and hatred.

The Good
I'm not going to comment much on the whole toolset, since I couldn't get it working right on my machine. It should be noted that the toolset is basically what Neverwinter Nights is about, and in that, it probably is one of the best things to come to computer RPGs in a long time. The ability to create your own RPGs, and the ability to play the DM online is something AD&D fans - as well as people like me who just like to create things for others to see and play with - have wanted for a long time.

I did get the thing to work, it just crashed constantly and it wouldn't let me play any of the maps I created. But what I did see, and what I did play with, it brings the complexity of other RPG creators to the simplest form possible. It was easy for me to create maps, create custom characters and even custom items. It couldn't have been simpler to create walking paths and dialogue was easy enough to figure out, though I wasn't able to get very far in that. I can't say much about the toolset because I couldn't get it to work worth a darn, but it looks very promising for anyone who can get it to work.

So that's all I have to say about the editor in "the good".

The game that comes with the editor is interesting. You begin in a sort of training place, training to become a guard for Neverwinter. It works as a good tutorial to familiarize yourself with the controls of the game and some of the more basic rules of AD&D. At the end of this tutorial, events happen that throw you into your journey to be the "hero" of Neverwinter.

Most characters have a voice, if only as a greeting, but some of the more important characters voice everything they say. The acting ranges from good to...eh...laughably horrible.

Along the path, you're able to get a henchman and a familiar to accompany you. They can be of great help to you, whether they aid you in combat, open chests, or disarm traps. And who wouldn't want a little bird to keep you company, and peck out the eyes of your enemies?

It was great to see the characters actually dodging attacks in combat, instead of just sitting there swinging their weapons around without moving, like in Baldur's Gate. They have many different types of attacks, like "sneak attack" or "attack of opprotunity". I didn't know what these meant, however, since it wasn't explained in the game and since I was borrowing the game from a friend I didn't have the manual.

Much of the dumbass rules from AD&D have been updated in 3rd Edition Rules that make the game much more enjoyable. Wizards can wear heavy armor now, but it will restrict their spell use - just like it should have been from the start. Now you have an incentive to give your spellcaster weak armor other than "he can't wear that".

The graphics are pretty good. Character models look more detailed than, say, Dungeon Siege, and with certain cards you can activate "shiny water" which makes the water look a bit more realistic.

The journal is good. It displays a bunch of quests which, when clicked on, give extensive information regarding them.

There is some nonlinearity in the game. Your choices in the game effect your "evil" and "good" status, which I assume bears some effect in the overall game.

Spell effects were pretty cool, particularly the "magic missile". In fact, the "magic missile" spell thing was one of the nicest looking spell I've ever seen in a 3D game.

Lighting in the game is usually pretty good. Shadows could be cast from multiple light sources and looked realistic (in conjunction with the character).

The game has very high resolution textures. Finally, I was able to zoom in as far as I could and not see a blurry mess of a texture.

The Bad
(I could complain for ages about why the AD&D system sucks, but that would be kind of dumb because the main purpose of Neverwinter Nights was to bring the pen-and-paper experience into a computer game, so I'll try and keep that to a minimum)

The editor, while easy to use, is annoying. Everything is tiled, and most tiles are huge, so 99% of what you might see in the game - all that nice architecture and furniture placement - you don't have any control over in the editor. You can't place a couch, you just place the giant room tile that has the couch in it.

That's not entirely true, actually. You can place specific items in a room, but the editor doesn't come with couch items. You can probably download them with ease, but it doesn't help with the giant room with the couch in it that you can't get rid of. Oh, you can just download another tileset, but most of the unofficial tilesets (not all, though) available for download on the major websites look like they were made by a monkey on crack.

My particular video card caused the editor to crash-crash-crash-crash every time I tried doing anything. I had to disable almost all video options to get it to work right. It was a fairly common problem with my card. But even then, when I tried to play the map, it gave me some wacky error and, well, then I gave up. It was too frustrating.

The game that comes with the editor sucks. The cinematics suck - aside from a few, they're nothing but narration and sliding still pictures (though they are drawn quite well). The entire story of the game is boring and predictable. I might be spoiling something by saying you'll get betrayed very early on in the game, but if you're too thick to know this after talking to the guy the very first time (he just oozes with "I'm going to betray you all!") then you shouldn't be playing this game, as it is a "teen" rating. (Get it? Because you'd have to be very young to have such a low intellect...ahhh forget it.)

The graphics aren't too bad, but chances are, you'll see many many many buildings and "tiles" again, and again, and again. With the maze of tiles that all look alike, your only guide through the game will be your map, which is far too large on normal size, way too crunched and undecipherable on small size, and it can't be manually moved or resized. Also, some parts of the map are specifically marked, like exits. But not all exits are marked, and some important places that are marked on one area aren't marked on another. At least it lets you manually mark special spots yourself, but you shouldn't be obligated to do it some of the time.

The first chapter is too linear. You basically have four major locations to visit, each one with some big bad boss at the end of it. The second chapter is just long and boring with nothing worth mentioning in it, and I gave up there. Yeah, I didn't finish the game. So sue me. I can still complain about the graphics and gameplay.

I don't know much about the AD&D rules, but it seems to me that the Ranger is a useless class. By the second chapter, I had the "best bow you can get" by that point (according to a friend) and even with my dexterity and strength way up there, I did more damage with my wimpy sword than I could ever do with my +2 composite something bow with acid arrows. I wanted to be able to stand back and fire off arrows like the Ranger class should be able to, not have to resort to using a sword and doing low-damage-but-not-as-low-as-my-arrows to the enemy.

There were some other class advantages, but due to my large armor I couldn't use any of it - and since my henchman and familiar turned out to be all but completely useless I had to wear giant obtrusive armor to survive.

I love the idea of not controlling your allies. I think it's the biggest way Fallout was such a great game. The fact that you're playing the role of you and you only adds so much to the game. But Fallout was a much simpler game, especially for your allies. In Fallout, your allies basically just followed you around, attacked who were hostile and healed themselves if they had something to heal themselves with. If you wanted them to do something, you could tell them to do something, and if you wanted to change their behavior, you could do that, too. But in Neverwinter Nights, a much more complex game, having allies is a real pain in the ass. You can change their behavior...kind of. I told my ally to "stay close" to me, but I often found him running clear off-screen if he saw something that interested him.

Yeah, your henchman and familiar are stupid and almost completely useless. I had this halfling idiot as my henchman - I chose him because I needed someone to disarm traps and open treasure chests for me, but he couldn't do that worth a damn. If anything got in his way, like a chair or air, he'd get stuck. Other times, he'd just not obey me, or he'd screw up. Here's a typical situation:

Halfling spots trap.

"Ah, it's done!" he says and runs back to me. And here's another: I try and open chest, but it turns out to be locked.

"Ah, I can handle that," says the Halfling.

I wait. Nothing happens. I try and open the chest again.

"Ah, I can handle that," says the Halfling again.

I wait again. Nothing.

"What, are you bragging?!" I yell at the screen.

Three attempts later, the halfling runs up and starts picking the lock on the chest. As he's doing this, I take a few steps back.

Uh oh! I walked too far back. Halfling stops picking the lock and rejoins me.

Halfling then spots trap and kills us all. Fortunately, my rogue Halfling was better with a sword than anything else. Another bad thing about your henchman is that they will magically acquire healing potions, but you'll never know when they have them. Sometimes they will just pull one out of their coat and drink away, regaining lost health. But other times they won't. It's up to you to guess when you'll have to come to the rescue and save them before they get killed. You can't give your henchman better weapons or armor. You can give them potions, but they will drink them right after you give it to them. The giant spider is a completely useless familiar. He dies in one hit and there's no way to protect him. Pathfinding is laughable. I thought pathfinding in Baldur's Gate was bad, because if something got in one of your unit's way, they'd turn around and go in another direction. But at least they'd try to find a way around the obstical. In Neverwinter Nights, your NPCs - and you - don't even bother. They just stop and stay there until YOU come around and help them again. What's the point of not controlling your henchman if they can't even get around on their own? Also, my henchman seemed to have a real problem with charmed animals. Even if the animal was never hostile, even if the animal never attacked me or my henchman, once it was charmed (that is to say, it became a temporary ally) my henchman would go attack it. But I do recall one hilarious incident that occurred because of this. I charmed a chicken just for fun, and my henchman went and killed the chicken. But then, all the other chickens in the area came and attacked my henchman! For some reason, he didn't attack back, so for a while I just stood there watching these chickens surround him and peck at him. Sometimes, when you kill a big bad boss, he'll stay alive and say "if you let me live, I'll tell you where to find a special item!" or something, but your henchman will continue hacking away at him until he's dead and I'm not able to hear what the guy had to say! Playing a Ranger did have a certain advantage, although it was a very cheap one. It was very easy to fire off an arrow and run around in a circle. I was always faster than the monster, and able to fire off an arrow, run away from him, run around certain obsticals, fire off another and keep running. Or, I could just wait for the monster to bump into a rock or something and get stuck so I could kill him that way. The "forest" tileset is cool. You see leaves falling to the ground and all. But forests from the outside look stupid. You'll see some polygonal trees and a poorly hidden flat texture of a "dark forest" behind them, with odd looking leaves that look more like a straw roof of a house than anything else. While most of the tilesets in the area aren't that great, these "forests" just make it look worse. The "shiny water" thing didn't look all that convincing and slowed the game down way too much for me to care to leave it on. The game is way too easy. You can almost forget about strategy (though with henchman like this, there isn't any, really) because if things get too hairy, you can just teleport back to the temple. Or, if you die (or your henchman dies) you just teleport back at the temple. Pleh. It would have been very nice to have more camera control. You can only zoom out so far, and you can't tilt the camera at more than a 45 degree angle (estimate). This makes planning battles all the more harder (though battles have almost no strategy since your NPCs are stupid and you can't tell them what to do anyway). Attacks are determined upon the start of the swing or the sword or the pulling of the bow, meaning that if you're a mile away from when the enemy actually swings his sword, you're still going to get damaged, or if you click to attack the enemy, but then decide not to and run away, the arrow will suddenly fire out the back of your head and at the enemy. Arrows home in on the enemy. If the enemy is running sideway when you fire the arrow, you'll see the arrow change its course and hunt the enemy down. The game (without the manual) assumes you know D&D by heart. Though most things had descriptions for you, they really never explained exactly what effect they have. What the hell does a +1 armor check mean?

**The Bottom Line**
For DMs and those who want to create an RPG for themselves, this is what they've been waiting for - if you can get it working. But the game that comes with it is just plain awful, and the gaming faults and bugs will carry over into your custom RPGs without some heavy custom scripting or patches that will hopefully be released. The game is a bit spendy at sixty dollars. Personally, I would have rather paid thirty bucks for the toolset and just skipped the game.