I bought NWN2 the day it came out. I have been spending the last few days trying to make it play. I am not having fun, and getting more and more pissed everyday I play with it. For those of you who want instant fun, forget it. You will spend the next week or so just getting it to where you like it. Here are the bad parts.
1. Immediate Patching Required:
When you take the game home, and install it, you will need to immediately run the updater. If you skip this step and play it solo, or if you try to enter a game on the internet, the game locks up and you pollute a file or two in the install. This jacks up the updater if you go back to try and run it. So the very first thing you have to do is run the automatic updater. There are actually two patches at first. The first one patches the auto-patcher and updater (go figure), the second one is a whopping 82.5 MB's big! Thats roughly 40-60 minute download on DSL (depending on your pipe), and another 20 minutes after that letting it install itself. If you are lucky the install will proceed without a problem. If you are unlucky or named 'DM Celt' then you will have to un-install NWN2, re-install it, then dl the patch again and try to install. I did this 7 times because the servers are slow and crowded, which leave a large gap for your files to become corrupted. I spent 2 days just trying to patch the game.
2. Great if you got to here then you are a persistant soul, and are a glutton for punishment, make sure to stop by North on your way out, and I will give you a floggin!
. In any case Here is the next problem. Lets say you want to head straight for a server and start playing online. Very well noble savage, but first you have to weed out the ones you can play and the ones you cannot. The ones you CAN play, are in bright white, the ones you cannot are in Grey. Grey indicates taht the mod is using a toolset that isnt even available yet. So good luck with that.
3. More online play problems: There are hardly ANY servers out there to play. PW Action has like 4 servers listed so far. In fact almost nothing is PW (Persistant World). What does this mean? Well it means that the Servers probably keep bankers hours. Open at 9am close at 5pm. But seriously PW's are 24/7/365 and there arnt that many yet.
4: Even more online play problems: Online play is ridiculously laggy, you should see some of the 'Ping' times I am getting here. 500-600 isnt unheard of. Its laughable.
5. Yet, more online play problems: This is the WORST THING EVAH! got your attention? good. Lets say you want to play an online server. So you go and connect to the server, then create a character, then hit the 'finish' button to be transported to the mod and BANG! You are locked up. So you restart the game and try a different server. BANG! locked up again. Still you really wanna play so you kill the game, and start again with a different server. BANG! youre locked again! What is going on you might ask. Nothing, thats what is supposed to happen. Thats right, its SUPPOSED to happen. Each server has its own special code/file. So if you wanna play, you have to go to the server, and find the server's website, then download a zipped-file from the internet, and navigate to C:/Atari/NWN2/'some folder here' and unzip what is known as a 'PWC' file (password content file or something) into the correct folder. If you do not do this, you will not be able to play that server. Something else, each server is different, so you will have to get PWC's for each server you want to play.
6. 3L33T5: (elites) They are everywhere and they are a real pain in the butt. I'm already contemplating a new sniper rifle.
7. The game is clunky, chunky, and hard as hell to use. Click on the ground, and wait five minutes before your toon starts running. But before I start complaining, let me share the system I run.
Motherboard: ASUS (not taht dual motherboard crap, a real MB).
Video Card: ATI Radeon 9550 with 256mb of onboard. (by the way, I was reading in the forums today that there are known issues with NVIDEA cards, and their drivers, so expect performance issues if you use em. SLI profiles are out of whack: http://nwn2forums.bioware.com/forums/viewtopic.html?topic=510844&forum=109
Chipset: AMD Athelon 64, and another with Opteron.
RAM: 1 gig of Corsair.
At first I thought I was going to have to get a new MOBO, but after visiting several forums, I found out that it wasn't my system its they way they coded the thing. And here is my first true geek complaint. The completely recoded the entire game using .NET architecture. Thanks Gates and your endless barrage of Microsh*t. Oh well. The coding is very gaudy, which means gaudy playability. This won't improve until they have had time to optimize the code for transitions, gameplay, etc, etc.
8. Playable characters: Yes, you can play a whole party of characters at once! Sounds nice doesn't it? It isn't! In fact its a friggin nightmare! When you solo play, you start off the game with 2 companions. A Sorcerer, and a Knight. When you start the game you level twice right off. Heres the catch, you have to level for your companions. Thats right, you have to level 6 times! You level twice for you, then switch toons to level him twice, then switch toons and level the other twice. This makes for extremely long periods of down time. Plus they are different builds, so you have to think through what to give each one of them, AND hope that they use the skills you give them during combat.
9. Boring Story Lines: Yes just like NWN1, NWN2 is repleat with meaningless dialogue. It is supposed to be immersive, but I don't find that the case here.
10. Miniature Maps: Because NWN2 is so graphics intensive, large maps are completely out. You will no longer see areas the size of Neversummer. Map sizes are very, very constrained with very little in the way of exploration. You just can't have very big maps here, and I don't expect this part to change, even when they get the bugs out. They are so small in fact, I couldn't even call them maps, they are more like rooms.
11. New spells: Yes there are new spells for mages. I havnt tried them yet, but what sticks in my craw is that they reslotted alot of our old favorites. Mass Heal for instance is now a level 9 cleric spell! The D&D 3.5 rules are more closely adhered to, sure, but you will have to pay careful attention to the details, character building will be more than just a challenge.
12: Feats resloted: yes all your favorites will for the most part be reslotted, and new requirements will be found too. Pay close attention to details.
13. Levels: You are supposed to play to level 60 on the Epic side of things, however, so far most of the online servers only support up to level 20. There are 3 or 4 that support level 40 play, but I'm not sure they are even accessible at this point.
14. The HUD (Heads Up Display) is just pure crappy and gaudy. Great big Icons for your party-mates, and a bare minimum of usable buttons. Even the F-slots don't look right. It's just plain ugly, figuring out how to add spells to quicklots is a pain in the butt as well, the radial-dial menu is completely gone, you won't be right-clicking any more, you'll have to find it in the weird HUD, which is a feat in itself.
15. New Races, subraces, and classes add comlexity to the game, without seeming to add any real benefit. I read over the new Warlock class and it doesnt really blow me out of the water. People have really already been creating Warlocks with the origninal NWN toolset, its called a 'Pale Master'! Really I dont see much of a difference. What it boils down to, is that Warlock is really a fighter-mage.
16. The book is a piece of crap. Remember that beautifully spiral-bound book that came with the platinum edition? Ya! thats gone.
It's getting late, I'm gettin tired and finding it hard to focus on this. More news to come later, but my recommendation is to wait for about a year or so before you buy this. At least that way you can get a mor eimproved, and debuged software.
return of BG is what I can keep thinking. Sure this isn't BG3 ? Whats this AMN business ? 