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Be wary of thinking of anything in NWN [hereafter the
grateful contraction of Neverwinter Nights] as single player.
The main story can indeed be played by alone offline, or can
just as easily be completed online with a party. In our opinion
though, you should play it through alone in order to best
experience it, since playing online with other people can
be a very mixed bag, depending on who you end up playing with
and if it’s a regular session.
The plot in the storyline is good, if not as personally involving
as those in Baldur’s Gate. It lacks for twists in our
opinion, and is fairly predictable throughout, as well as
feeling much more linear. If there are three scattered items
that you will need in your quest, you’ll very likely
find that there are three areas directly accessible from your
base of operations at that point in the story, which makes
things more straightforward, but does lend a sense of everything
being a little contrived. These however, are small quibbles,
since the game certainly stands ahead of almost all other
offerings in terms of the quality in which the story is told.
Gone in this game are the 2nd edition Dungeons and Dragons
rules, replaced with 3rd edition. Players familiar with the
previous rules may spend a little time adjusting to the differences,
while new players should pick up the ideas faster, due to
the more intuitive style that the newer rules adopt. The rules
don’t lack for flexibility though, and allow the same
concepts to be handled in a generally much more straightforward
manner. NWN hides the rules well, so that you don’t
have to be intimately familiar with them to play, or understand
what’s going on.
Players of the previous games may be disappointed to learn
that their characters can not be imported into NWN, as was
promised in Baldur’s Gate 2 – part of this must
be due to the differences in the rules, another part probably
being that NWN has a level limit of 20, meaning that characters
from the end of BG2 would be very close to the maximum that
they could get to, and those that went through the Throne
of Bhaal expansion would certainly have gone beyond it. From
a story point of view, the decision also makes sense, since
the player is intended to start as an unknown adventurer who
makes his or her own fame, and not a character of near legendary
proportions that already has it.
NWN attempts to personalise the story by only giving you
one character to play, not a whole party. A lack of well rounded
skills is addressed by allowing you to hire a single henchman
(or henchwoman) who will follow you around and help you, but
will not be directly controllable. The benefits of the new
system are that you don’t feel quite so schizophrenic
trying to manage six different characters, each with items
and abilities that you need to keep track of. On the other
hand, this sanity and improved simplicity comes with a price
– even with two characters, you’re well below
the traditional idea that a party supports itself with say,
a thief for the doors, two fighters for the front lines, a
cleric for healing and perhaps a mage for all sorts of magical
solutions to killing things. You’re much more reliant
on the strengths of your own character in all situations,
which is when the weaknesses of your character in some situations
make your life difficult.
The AI for your henchman is also problematic – where
a mage henchman might be expected to take spells that cunningly
complement your abilities, you’ll find that they pick
things that they want. While a thief may have a ‘use
items’ ability allowing him of her to use scrolls, your
henchmen won’t be able to use it, meaning that you may
find yourself completely without the use of any big magic
spells. Knowledge that you were about to walk into a fight
used to mean preparing by casting some spells before hand,
so that you’d be ready, unfortunately you won’t
be able to do this either, since you can’t tell your
henchman to do it. These and other small niggles crop up fairly
frequently, and can become a source of irritation.
Romances with Non Player Characters feature in NWN, and are
well done, but interactions between your character and your
henchman however are a poor second. You must initiate the
conversations with henchmen through the spoken interface to
the commands and settings for the henchman, and can only start
the new parts of the conversations after each level –
it feels overly contrived, and reminds you that you’re
in a game with characters that level up, which will suspend
your disbelief.
You’ll discover that there are many hours worth of
gameplay in the main story, even if you go through it all
very quickly. There are a lot of smaller side quests to complete
for extra money, experience and enjoyment, and to their credit,
Bioware have managed to make it so that any sensible choice
of character and henchmen combination will be able to complete
any of the ones that are generally available, but there are
also ones that are only open to certain alignments and character
classes.
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The potential for NWN in multiplayer is vast – it
comes complete with a very functional server browser (although
along the same vein as many other recent games it’s
built in Gamespy, something that I’m not entirely fond
of) and a module editor that both staggeringly powerful while
also being very easy to start using. In order to put together
a very rudimentary level, you’ll need no more skills
than pretty much painting by numbers and some idea of the
types of monsters and items. After people have had some time
to fiddle and get used to the editor, I fully expect that
we’ll start seeing some very professional modules released
by authors across the internet.
Lag is a small issue – as I always seem to find myself
saying, 56k may leave you in some difficulties, despite being
playable. If you have it, broadband should be a much more
satisfactory experience.
The biggest problem that you may have is finding a playing
group that you get on with. Simply popping on and looking
for an open server will often leave you a server or dungeon
master that’s more or less focussed on combat than you
would like, despite servers being given classifications by
their administrators / DMs for levels of combat and story.
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NWN has great graphics, and bearing in mind Morrowind’s
lack of good animation to back up the graphics, you can rest
assured that NWN doesn’t suffer a similar problem. Excepting
some dedicated fighting games, NWN does one of the best jobs
I’ve seen of portraying the swinging, parrying and dodging
of swords while lightning is thrown across the screen by mages.
While the basis hasn’t changed much from Baldur’s
Gate, there have certainly been a multitude of improvements
in the formula, and NWN has turned out as colourful, beautiful
and tasteful, although it lacks some of the personality and
details that the pre-rendered backgrounds had.
There is already work going on online to produce new tile-sets
(the basic building blocks of the levels) for NWN, and they
should certainly add greater breadth to the graphics.
I can’t get away without mentioning the amazing customisability
that’s available for armour – you can individually
select different parts out of some large selections, then
select metallic and leather colours from presets.
NWN’s graphics aren’t perhaps as envelope pushing
as say, Unreal 2 or Doom 3, but they really don’t need
to be, they do a great job of supporting the real content
of the game, and you can’t ask much more of a game.
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Great roleplay system in background
Poor implementation of henchmen