contains spoilers
NWN1
I tried my hand at nwn being very excited that after bg2 I could continue my game. that was the first letdown, that second was the awful graphics, those awful 3rd edition rules, very linear story/game, on top of that you have no npc's unless you count that thing that followed you like a summons. After too much time I got out of the city (finally!) played a bit longer to see if all the things that were annoying me would cease once I got out in the open unfortunately that was not the case and I closed nwn1 and never played it again. Strike 1, thanks for wasting my time Bioware.
NWN2
So Being a glutton for punishment I tried NWN2, to my surprise that graphics were greatly improved. The textures were great but one can see the straight edges on to many of the models. NWN2 has a relative low cost cut-scene engine and they used it a lot which, is fine by itself but they would zoom in on the characters faces you can see that there is nowhere near enough geometry making up the faces it was like watching a cut from Return to Castle Wolfenstein released in 2001, tho this I'd guess is not the fault of the artists. Ok enough about graphics what about the story.
Again very linear I think there was 2 times in the game that you could go to more than one place of your choosing. So the days of open wilderness of BG1 are long gone?
Game play was improved by getting rid of that radial dial you still have to put up with 3rd rules but some like that I guess, you can complete tasks by one click such as disarming a trap or unlocking, also you can stack commands; cast this spell then that spell, however you cant cast spell walk over there then cast/perform other operation. I did however spent many of hour spinning the camera around making sure I did not miss something that is always fun
. That makes me think of why are they even using a 3d engine there has not been one noticeable improvement verses there much older IE 2D engine of the Baldurs Gate series.So a words about NPC's, this time around you can at least control your party which is good. But there cant be anything good w/o the bad when it comes to nwn crew: as you travel along you meet NPC's, you can choose who you travel with, well at least in act 1 of 3
. in act 2 you are forced into taking people that you might not have ever let into your party let alone not just killed on sight There is some good in this game, you get your very own keep that you get to fix up for what reason I have no idea because as far as I can tell it has no consequence to defending it, since you do everything right you will still it will not change the outcome, you still have the same forced linear story line. you spend about 700,000 gp on walls that are 30 feet thick but a door made of cardboard, nice going master Veedle *note to self skin this fool for such poor design.
Act 3 it just completely falls apart they must have ran out of money because it is just awful. you get more of the same forced situations, forced game play, forced npc picks, and non-winnable battles, but at the end you party members leave you to join the dark side??? WTF! what have we been fighting all this time now when we are going to kill the bad guy you want to die by his side? and die they did.
one good thing (only) about the this end game was that I kept my other weapons equipped until I needed to change to the silver sword of gith thanks for not making it a +50 KILLSWORD.
Word of advice, when you get your keep and fix it all up to 100% consider that the end of the game and just think to yourself that your keep defended against the hoards and came out victorious. this is a much better ending then that lousy ending nwn put together.
will nwn3 strike out?