NWN 2: Planescape

[Northcott]

For all you Planescape junkies:
http://www.planescapetrilogy.com/

NWN 2 was, for the most part, underwhelming. The fan mods and persistent worlds, however, are turning out some stuff of surprising quality. Among them is the much-anticipated release of a Planescape trilogy for NWN 2, complete with custom models, voice acting, and what seems to be a pretty expansive storyline. The first module alone is clocking in at around 20 hours of play.

[Ergeheilalt]

:drool:

When is the release date?

[Northcott]

Their website/forum says that they're doing the in-house beta testing now, and it's about to be released to a closed public beta. So it shouldn't be too much longer before the first chapter is out.

The guy who did the Shadowlords trilogy for the first NWN is working on a new series, too: Dark Waters. It starts out with a typical "you're a villager railroaded into a dungeon crawl" scenario, but apparently from there expands into high adventure on the seas with custom models and scripts for ship-to-ship combat, use of pistols and blunderbus, etc. Shame is that the pistol uses the same animation as the crossbow... but other than that minor failing, it looks to be entertaining.

NWN 2 was underwhelming, but what the fans and mod community are doing with it seems awesome. :)

[obryn]

This might persuade me to play NWN2.

Overall, I was pretty unimpressed with it. I don't think I got very far at all before quitting & going back to Oblivion.

-O

[Hatter]

w00t! I'll be keeping an eye on this.

[Martin]

NWN 2 was, for the most part, underwhelming. The fan mods and persistent worlds, however, are turning out some stuff of surprising quality.

NWN 2 was underwhelming, but what the fans and mod community are doing with it seems awesome. :)

So basically what you're saying is that NWN 2 was underwhelming but the community is making some really good content.

;)

[Northcott]

So basically what you're saying is that NWN 2 was underwhelming but the community is making some really good content.

;)

I claim lack of coffee during the second post as my excuse.



On that note... NWN 2 was really underwhelming, but the community... ;)

[Dawnstar]

I still want to play NWN2

[Ancalagon]

could this be anywhere near as good as planescape:torment?

[obryn]

I'm playing it again now, and liking it a little better. I still have the basic twofold problem...

(1) I can't decide what kind of character to play.

(2) The first part of the official campaign is booo-ring.

Making characters in NWN is always a huge project for me. I always want to try new & different stuff, and usually think of something new, think "Hey that'd be cool!" and start a new game with that new character.

I'm trying to decide between my Wood Elf Rogue/Ranger, my Gold Dwarf Cleric, and my Aasimar Paladin/Fighter. Right now I'm having a blast with the last one, level adjustment or no level adjustment. The other two are fun too, though...

I had a warlock at one time. Man, that was boring to play.

-O

[Northcott]

I still can't believe they didn't give the Wood Elves an ECL. Half orcs get the shaft on the justification that a +2 strength is a huge thing. Wood Elves get +2 strength, +2 dex, and all the elven bonuses, along with Ranger as their favoured class, and only take a couple of stat hits in return. Bro-ken.

Not that I haven't considered playing one. ;)

If you're looking for games where the characters start at a higher level, check out some of the fan-made modules. Some of the "Hall of Fame" candidates are pretty solid, and there's at least one that starts you off at a higher level.

[obryn]

I still can't believe they didn't give the Wood Elves an ECL. Half orcs get the shaft on the justification that a +2 strength is a huge thing. Wood Elves get +2 strength, +2 dex, and all the elven bonuses, along with Ranger as their favoured class, and only take a couple of stat hits in return. Bro-ken.
Yeah, Wood Elves are definitely broken.

Broken race #2: Strongheart Halflings. They get basically all the Halfling perks, and a bonus 1st-level feat!

(Speaking of, at 1st level is there ever a reason not to take Spellcasting Prodigy for primary spellcasters or Luck of Heroes for non-spellcasters?)

-O

[Dacke]

I still can't believe they didn't give the Wood Elves an ECL. Half orcs get the shaft on the justification that a +2 strength is a huge thing. Wood Elves get +2 strength, +2 dex, and all the elven bonuses, along with Ranger as their favoured class, and only take a couple of stat hits in return. Bro-ken.
Wood elves are basically elves + halforc stats. + Dex and -Con from being elves, and then +Str, -Int and -Cha on top of that.

Broken race #2: Strongheart Halflings. They get basically all the Halfling perks, and a bonus 1st-level feat!

(Speaking of, at 1st level is there ever a reason not to take Spellcasting Prodigy for primary spellcasters or Luck of Heroes for non-spellcasters?)
Spellcasting Prodigy ain't that good in 3.5e since you don't get the DC increase. Unless you start out with an 18 in your casting stat, you won't see any benefit from it until 7th level or so.

[Northcott]

Wood elves are basically elves + halforc stats. + Dex and -Con from being elves, and then +Str, -Int and -Cha on top of that.

They only have penalties to Int and Con. No Cha penalty.

[Dacke]

The FRCS ones have a Cha penalty, at least. Though looking at the MM, the ones in there don't. But you can't blame FR for that.

[Northcott]

The FRCS ones have a Cha penalty, at least. Though looking at the MM, the ones in there don't. But you can't blame FR for that.

In NWN2, they don't have that penalty. Since that's my only experience with them, they seem a tad broken to me. But then I also believe that Dex bonuses are far more beneficial than Str bonuses, and think that the unbalanced kick in the teeth that half-orcs get is a mistake. Blahblahblah. I've ranted about this before. :)

Part of what I like about NWN2, however, is its malleability as a tool set. It wouldn't be too hard to create custom racial variants for a PW that set the races the way that the creator wants them.

[obryn]

Spellcasting Prodigy ain't that good in 3.5e since you don't get the DC increase. Unless you start out with an 18 in your casting stat, you won't see any benefit from it until 7th level or so.
IIRC, you get the DC increase in NWN2.

-O

[Northcott]

IIRC, you get the DC increase in NWN2.


Yep, you do. I've also found Practiced Spellcaster to be a nice touch. It makes multi-classing with a magic-based class much more effective, and if you're playing a human the extra feat takes care of it quite nicely.

I just wish that one of the two Eberron projects had actually gone somewhere. I would have loved for somebody to put the Eberron feat that allows a monk to use a longsword as a class weapon out into the community. I've always wanted to try a monk/paladin as a wandering samurai type. :)

[PWD]

One of these days when I have more time than brains, I'm gonna install NWN2 onto my new quad-core box w/ 8800GTX.

I'll bet you it still wallows like a pig, but it ought to do much better than on my old system, a single-core P4 3Ghz w/ 6800GT

[Northcott]

Never had a problem on my dual core -- not unless I turned on all the graphic features and went with high detail bitmaps.

[Martin]

One of these days when I have more time than brains, I'm gonna install NWN2 onto my new quad-core box w/ 8800GTX.

I'll bet you it still wallows like a pig, but it ought to do much better than on my old system, a single-core P4 3Ghz w/ 6800GT

You should have no problems. The patches cleaned up some of the problem and the better graphics card definitely makes things smoother. I upgraded to a 7950GT and most of my issues were gone after that. (Alternately, I still seem to get lost frames occasionally (along with weird heat spikes) in WoW which is starting to piss me off.)