NWN 2 has arrived...

[Kulyok]

I'm afraid I have a whole other bunch of quests to finish first, but, yeah, you're right. Thanks!

[Bri]

Tell me about it. If I thought some of the expansions would be worth it, I would be tempted to tell people to buy NWN 2, but as it is...well, it is not a must-buy in my opinion.

[Domi]

Well, if all is good, I will know tomorrow if it runs on me machine I am looking forward to it despite all. A new toy, woo-hoo!

[cirerrek]

Ugh, NWN2 keeps crashing on me. It was doing it some with patch v1.03 and seems to be doing it more frequently with patch v1.04. One of the developers has PMed me asking for savegames, so hopefully some useful action will come of it, once I can get them to them. The save games are rather large (say ~20+MB). Glad I don't have to upload them over dial-up!

 

I've got my first (maybe last?) NWN2 mod up over at the Neverwinter Vault. It changes a monk's Wholeness of Body class feat to work more like the paladin class feat Lay on Hands.

 

http://nwvault.ign.com/View.php?view=NWN2S...amp;id=82#Files

 

Incidentally, I don't recommend playing a monk if you are a min/maxer. For a lot of reasons (damage reduction, maxed hit point rolls, knockdown being attached only to STR, middle of the road hit die, middle of the road BAB, etc.,.) the ability to dish out damage is king and monks come out of it like paupers.

 

Semi-spoiler!

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For the official campaign, I'd probably suggest playing a Ranger/Rogue, Cleric, Sorcerer, or Mage.

 

Ranger/Rogue - depends on if you can stand the PC rogue that is available, plus tracking is cool, and sneaks attacks while dual wielding equals mucho damage, well at least until you run into undead, constructs, or the majority of the bosses. Sigh whatever happen to the well placed sneak attack winning the day? Of course, choosing the appropriate favored enemy helps a bit there.

 

Cleric - For a long while your only option for a friendly neighborhood healer is a druidess and they can't spontanously cast healing spells. Plus with the base AI, the stupid druidess loves to turn into a badger with STR 8 and WIS ?, who immediately becomes encumbered and loses the spell slots that she gained from all those nice WIS boosting items.

 

Sorcerer or Mage - again, depends on if you can stand the PC sorcerer or mage that are available.

 

I don't mean to suggest that you can't further tailor some of the above character builds beyond just a Cleric or just a Mage, the pure clases are just easier to explain.

 

2/2/16 - Paladin/War Priest/ Cleric

 

2/10/10 - Fighter/Mage/Eldritch Knight

 

Or an interesting one that I just found but haven't been able to try out because my game keeps crashing, grrrr!

 

The billing on this one was:

 

-You want to deal insane melee damage and mow through enemy hordes like an armed tornado but don't want to spend 10 rounds with buffing before every bloody fight?

-You want to wear Paladin Armor and an amulet of pure evil at the same time while wearing monk boots ?

-You want to scare your enemies ***less while maintaining good diplomatic relationships with friends and allies and talk questgivers in handing out the extra rewards ?

-You want to be the last one standing ?

 

1/4/10/5 Bard/Fighter/Red Dragon Disciple/Frenzied Berserker

 

with maxed out Diplomacy, Intimidate, Taunt, and Use Magical Device

[Gabrielle]

Having meticulously cleaned my disc, I installed this thing only to find out that my ATI 9000 video card does not support DirectX 9. Meh. It's either chasing someone from their computer and using their ATI X800, or buying myself a new laptop, and somehow I do not fancy either.

 

Nearly fifteen dollars wasted - for now, at least. Grrr. I think I am going to kill someone... now, where's me axe?

 

Ah well. Someone, tell me it is bad, so I don't feel *too* disappointed.

It would be near unplayable with a 9000 series ATI card, a reason why I had to upgrade my video card. I good graphics card is a must have if you want to play it.

[Gabrielle]

Also try System Requirements Lab. It will test to see if your computer can play NWN2 or any other game.

[Lord Ernie]

Hrmm... good site, but not entirely correct. For one, my laptop is capable of running the game (not smoothly, at all, but I can squeeze out 6-7 frames with minimum settings), but it flunked the test.

[Gorilym]

Hrmm... good site, but not entirely correct. For one, my laptop is capable of running the game (not smoothly, at all, but I can squeeze out 6-7 frames with minimum settings), but it flunked the test.

Do you consider 6-7 frames with minimum settings to be at all playable? Just wondering - personally I think anything below the 15-20 range would be too frustrating to bear.

[Gabrielle]

That would be unplayable to me.

 

When I buy a game, I want to the ability to have all of the neat graphical and sound effects turned on, not off. No point having a game if you can't enjoy playing it to its fullest.

[Domi]

Well, I installed it. I have to say that 7-disk installation procedure did not impress me much (should've bought DVD, but the CD's were cheaper). That's as far as I got before being sidetracked into something else.

[Smoketest]

That website is accurate to a degree, Gabrielle. Screen resolution plays a big role in determining just how fast a game will run. You might have recommended hardware (like I do), but that doesn't mean you can play the game at 1680x1050 resolution. I currently run it at 1280x960 (4:3 aspect) with settings about mid-way. I also over-clock the CPU from 2 GHz to 2.22 GHz. This gives me frame rates ranging from 15 to 40 depending on my camera orientation and how 'busy' the scene is. (I use tree movements to tell me if my frame rates are "playable"; fluid tree movements are good, stuttering tree movements aren't good.)

 

I'm playing a male human monk right now. I have patch 1.04 (and hotfix) installed and the game runs okay (though a bit slow as usual). Thankfully I've never had the game crash on my current system (it's a very stable computer).

 

My core specs:

 

CPU: AMD64 3200+ (single core)

Mobo: NVidia Nforce4 SLI

RAM: 1 Gigabyte generic DDR400

Video: NVidia Geforce 6800GT (no SLI)

Sound: onboard Soundblaster 24-bit, EAX 3.0

Drives: twin SATA 250Gb striped (RAID 0) for effective 500Gb storage

OS: Windows XP Pro SP2

 

Everything is fully updated. I installed AMD's processor driver for WinXP rather than using WinXP's generic driver. I use several NVidia drivers due to both the video card and the motherboard using their chipsets. And I make routine visits to the Windows Update site.

 

All things considered, this computer won't run newer games very well. Half-Life 2 Episode 2 will overpower this machine, and so will Dragon Age, most likely.

[Domi]

So far, in Tutorial, game runs just fine, and my missgivings are miserly:

 

-there is no Kivan (the sad but forseeable short-fall) and I am stuck instead with a couple of humans for a party

-map keeps rotating on me like some crazed flying carpet

-my female Sun Elf looks like anything but the 'unearthly beauty'. The male elf (step-dad) looked very nice though.

-Ranger attire looks uhm... bad, but better than paladin's where my elf suddenly got a huge bossom (comes with being a paladin???)

[berelinde]

Hey, you gotta keep the attitude somewhere, y'know?

[Domi]

Duh. I would have understand the bottom, but the ... Oh, well, maybe.

[Smoketest]

So far, in Tutorial, game runs just fine, and my missgivings are miserly:

 

-there is no Kivan (the sad but forseeable short-fall) and I am stuck instead with a couple of humans for a party

-map keeps rotating on me like some crazed flying carpet

-my female Sun Elf looks like anything but the 'unearthly beauty'. The male elf (step-dad) looked very nice though.

-Ranger attire looks uhm... bad, but better than paladin's where my elf suddenly got a huge bossom (comes with being a paladin???)

- Kivan is an old Bioware character, this is a new Obsidian game. You are living in the past. You'll have to deal with the game's obtuse party management system, unfortunately. On the flip side, it's campaign-based, so new mods could provide much more freedom and flexibility with party control.

- There are camera scroll settings in the Options menus. These are important since patch 1.03 separated camera scroll speed from rendering frame rate. I recommend setting them somewhere around 25% of the slider, and then tweaking to taste.

- Face quality is hideous in NWN2. Of the humans, there are perhaps two decent male and female faces. There tend to be fewer faces for the other races, thus reducing the number of decent faces to one or zero (excluding Orcs who are always ugly). It is very annoying, as all my characters tend to use the same face. I couldn't find a decent elven male face to use, so I didn't bother playing an elven male. Obsidian really needs a better 3D artist. Perhaps a fan-made mod will address the lack of decent faces.

- Robes/dresses look hilariously ballooned around the characters' legs, almost like they're Vaudeville dancers or something; Elanee's default outfit is a good example of this. For some reason female breasts seem to grow and shrink depending on what armor you're wearing. I could understand shrinking under heavier armors, as breasts tend to be flattened more, but I've seen them larger under chain mail than under lighter leather armor, which makes little sense. This is partly due to Obsidian's painting the armor onto the character as a skin texture, rather than overlaying the armor over a fixed character model. Given how much of a performance hog the game is, I suppose we should be thankful they opted for the unrealistic shortcut.

 

As with the original NWN, we'll have to wait and see what fan-made material comes out. Perhaps someone will address the issues with female characters and their armor. I'd also like to see less clipping of capes into armor, and hair into hats/helms.