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Do not buy this game at this time

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 104 / 170
Date: June 25, 2002
Author: Amazon User

Anyone thinking of buying this game should skip over the hype reviews on what it contains, and go read the forums at http://nwn.bioware.com/forums/viewforum.html?forum=49 and read about all the bugs it contains. This is Bioware's forum for bug reports, and only four days after release contains 60 pages of bug reports from hundreds, possibly thousands, of people who cannot get the game to run due one or more of about 11 major bugs. Everything from the anti-piracy scheme on the CD making it impossible for legitimate users to install the game, 3dfx Voodoo cards cannot be used with the game, the game detects processors faster than 2Ghz as being "below the minimum requirement to run the game." Random freezes, crashes, corruptions of data, and lots of other grief. Also notice that all the posts with suggestions on how to fix these problems are from other customers, and all that Bioware can find to say at this time is, "Update your drivers. Update your drivers. Update your drivers."

Well, I don't need to update my drivers. I have an Alienware Area 51 2.26Ghz... it arrived the same day as NWN with all the latest drivers installed and finely tuned for gaming. Quake III runs 235 fps, but NWN freezes up in the character generation screen.

Bioware, update your game.

My advice: wait another six months (hey, you waited five years already, whats another six months?) Keep reading the reviews to see when they finally get their product past the beta stage. Then buy it. Don't pay to be a beta tester...

there's a 90% risk that the game is not compatible ...

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: July 10, 2002
Author: Amazon User

The game crashed my hard drive and forced me to BUY a new one.
All of that happened after I unsuccessfully tried to install and run the game. I have a computer and engineering background, so this senario is not typical for me! I know what I'm doing and if it takes too long or if it crashes, most likely, it's not my fault!
The whole installation process was lagged (it would take several seconds for every move you'd make to respond) ... in the middle of the installation I was already frustrated but decided to finish it all the way, and then restart my system and see if it made any difference.
Well, it didn't.
I tried any display settings I could think of.
I updated (or checked for updates) on all my drivers.
I double checked anything I could possibly think of ...
and at the end, the game ran slower than a snail ... and to add insult to the injury, the next thing I knew, the infamous blue-screen was there!!! Last time I had a "blue microsoft screen" I was running windows NT, not XP!! Need I say that I was never able to recover my computer, or the data on my harddrive? I had to buy a new hard drive as the old one had been damaged beyond repair and ended up losing lots of data.
You've been warned! Buy and install at your own risk.

More bugs than 99% of the games out there

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 6 / 13
Date: September 07, 2002
Author: Amazon User

This game has been incredibly buggy for me. I've tried every patch, and 1.23 and 1.24 (only available on the support forum right now) do not work for me -- the game just won't even play. So I've reverted to 1.22 for now. Each patch fixes some things and breaks some others. Here is a list of all the bugs I personally have had to deal with. Some of the bugs below have finally been fixed with patches, but some still exist (freezing 4 minutes after launch is what happens if I use the current patches), so be forewared before buying this game.

After initial install, the first run of NWN causes a config utility to launch. It tries to autodetect your hardware. It crashed at 11% every time.

Upon launch, the initial company logos/movies play, and then the screen fades to black and stays there.

Once in the game, FPS drops to 1 per second, or less. Character movement is nearly impossible, and certainly unplayable.

The game has a bug which causes it to sometimes corrupt a file and then it won't display ANY text. Dialogue becomes impossible, and clicking buttons is guesswork.

Going into the Advanced sound options caused my settings file to be set to the wrong sound card (even if the correct card was displayed on screen), which caused the game to freeze.

Random freezes about 15 minutes to 4 hours into the game, forcing reboots.

Consistent freezing exactly 4 minutes after launch, while still in the "create character" screens (usually around the Alignment selection, but if I went fast I could squeeze a few extra clicks into that 4 minutes).

One particularly brutal freeze somehow corrupted my disk, and when I tried to reboot, my computer complained that there was no bootable OS installed. I had to wipe the drive and reinstall Windows from scratch.

Bugs and more Bugs

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 7 / 12
Date: July 03, 2002
Author: Amazon User

Bioware has already made 2 patches for this game. Yes it worked for my high end computer system but the graphics were choppy. Choppy enough to make the game more frustrating than fun. Besides game perfomance issues, there are also some in game bugs. Quests will become impossible to complete, unable to pick up items, friendly people attack and kill you without warning etc. You can read all about these nightmares at the publisher's website. Stay clear till they fix these. It was a good concept though.

Woe is me

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 11 / 18
Date: April 01, 2003
Author: Amazon User

Alright lets try and be fair. The game is pretty good. Amazing graphics, interesting and challenging plot twists. It's pretty good if you have recently beaten one of the Zelda series of games and are looking for something along those same lines. But I have eagerly anticipated the sequel to Baldur's Gate, and instead I got this. I felt the same hopeless depressed feeling I got after watching Highlander II. (You sci-fi geeks out there know what I'm talking about). The Baldur's Gate genre has been mutated and defiled, and nothing will ever make it right again. (The Highlander TV series almost made it right, but even then the franchise had to pretty much pretend the 2nd movie never happened, but I digress)

I miss being able to control a party of unique, quarrelling individuals. Instead I control one individual and must chose between a limited number of henchmen. Even then I must fire one to hire another, and I cannot control them to any extent. I can't have them hold stuff for me, see what they have, even tell them who to attack, or especially important with magic users, tell them which spell to use.

You know I don't even think the same company made Neverwinter Nights as made Baldurs Gate. I seem to go to a whole different website.

Give the game its due. You scripters and creators out there can do some amazing things with the toolset. It almost makes me want to take the time to learn scripting. And the graphics and updated items on the web and the general support of the game make it far more versatile and allow for a great deal many options than you ever could have had with Zelda. But my chief complaint I guess is that I have been anticipating the sequel to Baldur's Gate for a long time...and instead I got this. Worse yet, it is painfully (and I do mean painfully) obvious that there will be no sequel to Baldur's Gate. That story has ended.

Oh yeah, one more thing just to keep my review honest. I have played Warcraft, Starcraft, Baldur's Gate, etc...and I just plain don't bother playing the online versions of those games. If I wanted to play against a human, I would play a board game. So I have no information to share with how great or [bad] playing Neverwinter Nights online can be. (Maybe someday when I have DSL I will give it a try.)

An ambitious experiment in PC gaming but a failure

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 11 / 14
Date: August 13, 2002
Author: Amazon User

Neverwinter Nights is really not a computer game in the traditional sense. It's more of an electronic version of the pen and paper role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons. If you are an avid D&D player who can't get your group together at your own house, you now have the internet to do it. While this is fine for pen and paper D&D groupies, the rest of us are left out in the cold.

Basically, Neverwinter Nights is set up in the hopes that a community will help it grow. The game comes with a sample campaign to play but it also comes with a complete editor that lets anyone design their own D&D adventures. Either with the official campaign included in box or some of the community made mods (there are already 500+ available online), you can play Neverwinter Nights by yourself or online with a group of players. To further enhance the pen and paper D&D experience, there is even a dungeon master client in the game. If you don't know what a dungeon master is I can already tell you you're purchasing the wrong game. Basically, a DM watches over the mod and controls the adventure to hopefully provide a better game for the players. Sort of like an invisible referee.

This all sounds great when reading it on the back of the box but I'm not sure it really works. For one thing, while the editor has a lot of capabilities, every map has that same square-look to it to fit in the D&D grid system. Nothing looks natural and after playing a few mods you've seen everything the game has to offer and it all starts to repeat itself. Also, for a game that relies on the community to invent new adventures, the editor is more difficult than it should be. If you don't know programming basics, you're going to have a difficult time with the editor as every simple action has to be scripted which is basically simple C+ programming. To accomodate this new system and catch up with its competitors, Neverwinter Nights also has a new 3-D system that reminds me of hack and slash games like Diablo more than the company's previous classic release Baldur's Gate I and II. In fact, the official campaign included in the game is NOTHING compared to the Baldur's Gate games and I would recommend that you not buy this game if the official campaign is the only thing you will play. The included campaign is boring, linear and not that creative, it's more of a sample for the editor rather than an epic adventure.

If you plan on only playing online, be careful if you only have a 56K modem. You'll never be able to host more than 3 players on your computer without lag. Also, you'll have a difficult time joining the large servers with 20+ players if your connection is slow. Neverwinter Nights comes with an ingame browser that divides online games by category. You can join the action channel, the roleplaying channel, etc. Most of these games are called persistent worlds and are basically smaller versions of Everquest. While they can be for awhile because of their small size and limited equipment, quests, etc., they never provide much fun. The best way to play the game is to get together with a group of friends and meet on a weekly basis just like you would the pen and paper D&D. While you can find people to play with through online fan sites, you'll have a much better time with this game if you already know people that own it and are willing to play the same mod with you at scheduled times.

After trying this game for a month, frankly, I feel cheated. I bought the game because it promised gamers that even if they didn't want to play online or use the editor they could play the official campaign included in the game by themselves and have just as much fun as they did with the company's other epic releases Baldur's Gate I and II. That's a misleading claim because the new mechanics of Neverwinter Nights and the boring campaign included are pitiful attempts to live up to the company's previous PC D&D games. This game is really only for people that want to enjoy an electronic pen and paper version of D&D, the rest of us should move on to Icewind Dale II or Morrowind or hope that another company manages to design a great singleplayer RPG as fantastic as the Baldur's Gate series.

Want premature white hair? Then definately BUY THIS GAME!

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 7 / 13
Date: July 09, 2002
Author: Amazon User

I have never been so angry with a game publisher in my life. I have a relatively new (6 months old) Pentium III 1 GHZ system with 384 MB RAM which runs EVERYTHING I have ever tried without a problem: Diablo II, DungeonSiege, you name it.

Then I installed NWN. I spent over 8 hours trying to get it to work. I updated drivers. I browsed their support forum. And in the end, I paid $150 to have my computer rebuilt and spent another 8 hours re-installing all of my software.

What do the developers say in response? "Hey, it works on our computers -- we've been playing it 8 hours a day!" (paraphrase, not exact quote). Well, I'm very glad they've spent their time writing a game that they can play -- I hope they have fun with it. I just think it is incredibly stupid and unprofessional to release software of such poor quality. Maybe the game is great, but the deployment package is absurd.

Neverwinter Nights - very limiting hardware requirements

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 20 / 42
Date: June 20, 2002
Author: Amazon User

Hello,

I've been looking forward to NwN for quite a long time and I finally got it. To my disappointment, I cannot play it and will have to return it.

Bioware has decided to limit users to only 2 graphics accelerator vendors (Nvidea and ATI) rather than support a wider variety of chipsets with various levels of graphic quality.

I am a laptop-only user since I frequently game in various locations. If I had a desktop machine, I'd just buy a new graphics card that NwN supports. But that isn't an option on a laptop. My laptop is a top-of-the-line machine, only 6 months old, an IBM Thinkpad T22 1GHz, 256MB, 20GB, 1400x1024 LCD. All other games run GREAT on this machine including the latest and greatest graphics-intense ones.

Sorry - only a very few of the most recent laptops have an ATI Radeon 16 MB laptop graphics controller. Unless you have that one, you are OUT OF LUCK if you are a laptop user as this game WILL NOT WORK ON YOUR COMPUTER!

I think this is a REALLY POOR decision on Bioware's part. While nice graphics are a good feature, they are not the only feature. This game is 90% about roleplaying/adventuring with a group of people (aka content) and only 10% about graphics (aka glitz). The graphic quality of BG or BG2 would have been plenty good. To preclude many users, even those with modern equipment, for that 10% of extra glitz just isn't smart.

So I'm out of luck and will have to return to BG2 or perhaps give the new Morrowind III a try. What a major disappointment.

Never Played NeverWinter Nights

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 1 / 5
Date: September 24, 2002
Author: Amazon User

What a shame. I purchased this game, installed it but it just won't run. Make sure before you spend your hard-earned dough that you check to see if your video drivers are up to date. I only have a Pentium II 10 Gigabyte computer which is still only 87% full but there is a conflict with the video drivers & because of this, the game will not load.

GAME FREEZES

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 15 / 47
Date: June 19, 2002
Author: Amazon User

This game simply does not work after installation. I have already tried uninstalling and re-installing updated versions of video and sound drivers. I have also reinstalled the game itself to no avail. If you take a look at the bioware forums you will notice that a significant number of people are having problems having the game start. This is very disappointing.

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