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Extremely Disappointing

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 12 / 16
Date: November 21, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Yes, this is a weak effort at best. Not because you need a computer that consists of a video card that hasn't even been invented yet to play it properly, not because the character creation tool is very much lacking (compared to oblivion and the like) in any depth, not because this is really just a 3D version of icewind dale with a bit of KOTOR thrown in, not because the load times are almost as bad as vampire: bloodlines. No...I think this game is weak because NWN 1 was soooo bloody good. As was Baldurs Gate, as was Torment. What a disappointment. When Black Isle disbanded, apparently, so did their work ethic, originality, genius...well you get the impression.

Oh, and I have noticed that `impartial' reviewers from Game Banshee, War Cry and IGN have all given this game the big thumbs up...what a bunch of sell-out wankers you lot turned out to be. This game is [...], pure and simple. I hope you're all enjoying the complementary fruit baskets obsidian sent you (cretins).

P.S: I CANNOT BELIEVE they actually used the same voice/sound/music bytes from the last game!! This is so lazy and self indulgent it defies description.

Game Beyond Borked

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 16 / 25
Date: November 13, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I'm a 41 years old and have played every RPG that's ever been released. I'm currently playing Oblivion, Dungeon Siege II and Diablo II. Picking up NWN2 seemed like an obvious choice.

This is based on the DVD-ROM version.

Install: Went quite fast

Multiplayer: Here's the basis of my low score. The Multiplayer options whether it be LAN, Gamespy or just hosting a game for yourself is *Borked*. What i mean is that it flat doesn't work and there are more than enough threads at the NWN2 site to back this up. Be prepared to do a lot of work opening and forwarding ports to and from your router (if you use one). I spent the entire weekend with D-Link support trying to find out why every multiplayer game i tried to connect to or start always tried to connect to IP: 127.0.0.1:5121 That's because that is a loopback IP and isn't a real IP. You're going to need to know your IP or you won't be playing any Internet games. First off, you need to have a goodly amount of ports open to even play this game online. Then you have to be able to do this yourself. I'm no novice and i can't even get it to work right.

Let me say that NO game should be this difficult to play online out-of-the-box. No game i've ever played was this frustrating. To make matters worse is no Devs have even commented on what the problem is or whether there's a patch in the works? There had better be because i spent $100 on two copies so my wife and i could play together and we can't.

To everyone that has said how great the game is you probably have only played single player or you haven't run into the numerous networking/internet bugs this game has.

Single player does work fine, but to be honest, i got the game for the multiplayer option for my wife and I. I have no interest in playing the single player campaign.

I have to say that if you have to buy this game be prepared for a lot of headaches. If it all works for you, consider yourself very lucky. If it doesn't, just remember i told you so.

Just awful

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 8 / 9
Date: November 08, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I have a fairly decent computer (which exceeds the system requirements), have almost all graphical options turned off and the frame rates are still horrible. The menu system is much worse than NWN. I played it for about an hour and was just so disgusted with the control and the frame rates that I quit playing. I downloaded the patch and it didn't help performance at all.

Rushed to shelves, NWN2 is an utter disappointment

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 8 / 9
Date: January 18, 2007
Author: Amazon User

Having worked on PC RPG titles as a dialogue writer / scripter, putting two to shelf, I know about deadlines -- and I sincerely hope (only to explain the poor quality of the product) that the NWN2 staff fell prey to such and more.

The dialogue is often riddled with solecisms, anachronisms, and outright grammatical / spelling errors that would be tedious to list. Its on-load flavor text is often good, but sometimes becomes quite ridiculous (who would accept a reference, in a fantasy world, of a "High Queen *Alicia*?")

The voice talent is often incredible (Neeshka, Grobnar), but falls completely flat on its face after The Final Battle, which, by the way, is nigh impossible to beat without cheating. Such a spectacular accomplishment rewards you not with a likewise spectacular cinematic, but a series of blinking stills brought painfully to life by a Ray Romano clone -- the absolute worst voice in the entire game, at a time when we should all see (and hear) the best.

The gameplay itself is riddled with problems, beginning with savegames that place your PC's in different positions than they were when you saved the game, to quests that don't erase from your list when it is completely impossible for you to complete them (e.g. from the TUTORIAL!), and finally to one of my favorites -- the "do you want to save your game?" prompt, which happens every time you LOAD. Discuss amongst yourselves.

The game is also plagued by bugs that have yet to be solved. For example, you must free one of the first merchants you encounter from his turncoat bodyguards outside a fort. When you do so, you MUST NOT attempt to speak with him, apparently; doing so freezes him in his tracks. He has nothing to say to you, but he stays rooted to the spot, and you are rewarded by being denied two of the most powerful items in the game (bags of holding). Because He Just Won't Move.

The idea of crafting items is half-baked at best, requiring you to spend multiple points in crafting categories, and gather preposterous amounts of items, to realize -- when you could have just placed those points in weapon or spell skills, seeing as how (as a looter) you've already got 50,000 GP you don't know what to do with, which you could use to buy decent items at a merchant.

I'm thoroughly disappointed. If this were the work of an up-and-coming game studio, I could forgive it and think they have promise.

Since that's not the case, I think I'll install Baldur's Gate this weekend.

Disappointing

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 8 / 9
Date: November 27, 2006
Author: Amazon User

As a lover of BG2, Diablo2, NWN and all their expansions, this was super disappointing. I can deal with almost anything but controls that simply don't work...

(The game has an inbuilt "darkness" spell because I spend half my time just trying to move the camera in position to hit the darn thing / click to open doors / click to loot etc.)

I just put in a new graphics card (a 256mg NiVidia BFG)that cost me near hundred half. My PC is running XP pro, 3.4 Intel 4, 2 g ram, so it's a gamer computer and should be able to run this game with no problem...yet I've had to turn down much of my settings just to get a half way decent picture.

I have no idea why the requirements are so high...really, Morrowwind is much cooler and did they want to sell it to millions of people or just a select few with spouse/parents who don't mind their spouses/kids spending a small fortune on a high end pc?

Word is that they will create patches to make it more playable...my suggestion to anyone thinking of dropping $40 on this game...wait, until all the patches are out and it's playable.

I'll drop the latest patch in when it's release and come back with another review.

Update: The patches make it playable and the graphics is cool. Load time is still ridiculous but playing a cleric and watching them blade barriers go is worth waiting for. Let's hope the expansion isn't full of problems.

Wait at least six months.

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 12 / 17
Date: November 05, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I mainly play rpgs on the computer. Because of this I don't have the fastest computer, nor do I expect to play a game with best graphics. Visual appeal is not my highest priority, I look for games with a solid interface that keeps you interested and immersed. This game hasn't met those expectations so far.

The graphics are above par. In particular, outdoor settings look great. Once you start moving your character around, however, things start looking down. Character movement is jerky and unrealistic. The camera controls take some getting used to but are manageable. Being indoors slows things down a lot more than being outside(don't ask me why), to the point where I almost dread having to walk in a room or building. You are also limited to the angle at which you view your characters inside because walls and other objects will block your view.

Character generation is done very well with the only drawback being a lack of personalization features(only a handful of different faces and hairstyles). Inventory interface definitely needs to be worked on. No keymapping. When right-clicking on a character to get a list actions to preform, the developers intentionally add a delay. So you have to hold down the button for a second to get the list. There's a slider that allows you to adjust the amount of delay but no way to get rid of it which drives me crazy. There are several other things that need to be changed or replaced. All these things combined wind up distracting you from enjoying the game.

I've been playing dnd computer games since pool of radiance and in comparison this game rates at the lower end of the spectrum. However, It can and will improve once a few patches have been made for it. I've waited a long time for this game and feel nothing but disappointment that games are allowed to be released when they're not ready to be played.

Thank you atari for teaching me to never trust a distributer and always wait at least six months after a game is released to buy it.

athlon64 3200
geforce 6600
1 gig ram

A disgrace to the name

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 12 / 17
Date: December 03, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I almost never write reviews, but I had to do my part to try to warn people away from this game. Let me start by listing all the good things about the game: 1) The new Quickcast display makes spellcasting much easier than in NWN1. 2) Many of the voice actors are very good. 3) There's no 3.

If you are buying it just to play the campaign, well... I couldn't make it through Chapter 1. I gave up after being bombarded with six conversations/cutscenes in a row. And those conversations begin to feel like a series of traps, where every other thing you say causes an alignment shift and/or a change in "influence" with your henchmen, often in a very unpredictable fashion. Speaking of henchmen, instead of doing anything at all to improve the AI from NWN1, they added a puppet mode, allowing you to take direct control of your companions. So after deciding on the character you want to play, you will instead spend much of your time controlling the characters forced on you by the designers. And you still won't be able to use them effectively, because the pathfinding is so poor that often times they will be unable to even get to an enemy unless you steer them manually. Of course, all of the enemies are stuck with only the laughably sloppy, unfinished scripts left over from NWN1 to control them.

As far as the toolset goes, it is slow and clunky, often pausing for several seconds when trying to do something as simple as changing one of the colors of one part of a suit of armor. That adds up quickly. It takes much longer to launch than the NWN1 toolset, and you will notice that because it crashes regularly. It will also suck up all of your processor power even while doing nothing. Please note that I am running on a Core 2 Duo system, so this is by no means a relic of a PC.

I could go on and on, but the bottom line is, save your money!

Gut-wrenching disappointment

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 9 / 11
Date: November 12, 2006
Author: Amazon User

After the predecessors in this series, I was bitterly disappointed by this game. The one thing that absolutely lets it down is the henchmen, or non-player characters (NPCs).

The most obvious problem is that while the computer is obviously spending a lot of its power drawing pretty scenery (enough to bring even a state of the art machine to its knees), it doesn't seem to have any CPU cycles available to spend on stopping your followers bumping into each other, running into a trap because there's an enemy beyond it, or generally getting underfoot and looking stupid.

The subtler problem is that you can't really control who joins your party. At first glance everything is fine:- you meet a character, have a conversation, and they join up with you for a while. Unfortunately, as you will discover if and when you feel that you have made a mistake, there's no way of saying no to them - or getting rid of them, until later on in the plot.

I get the feeling that the focus of this game, rather than the PLAYER, or the main character who is leading the action and driving the plot forwards, is the WRITER - and his group of NPCs, dragging me along through a series of dramatic conversation scenes.

Time and again one is confronted with multiple choice options, all of which lead to the same conclusion. The illusion of control over one's own destiny is, it seems, only created to torment one.

Wait for Dragon's Age

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 9 / 11
Date: August 12, 2007
Author: Amazon User

The hefty system requirements are not indicative of this game. It requires a lot, but delivers very little. Running it on a 7600gt I thought the graphics would fly, but it seems that for some strange reason, the game play is slow, and the graphics are not that great. Someone else mentioned Oblivion--Bethesda obviously has a better handle on graphics optimization for their games. As a successor to NWN, it fails miserably. There's too many cut scenes, hokey lines, and henchmen potentials that you just want to kill because they're so annoying. The story line seems to have been taken from a bad fantasy novel, and unlike the original NWN where you have characters that you meet that you can actually grow to like, it seems this game is so flat in character development that you don't care for any of them (it's just a game, right? But it's an RPG, so why the lifeless bitmaps filling the screen?).
As for the game play, once in a while the 3d renderer seems to break down and I get to see all the cones, shaders and frames of the 3d objects in their not-so-great glory. I know that this is a problem in the game because it doesn't happen in Oblivion, which has the same graphics requirements.
Sorry for the long-post, but I was really looking forward to this as I am (or was) a big, big fan of NWN. Bioware made a mistake on letting go of their control of this game.
My only recommendation is to wait for Dragon's Age (which, I hope won't take eternity to be released).

Teetering on the Edge...

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 10 / 13
Date: November 13, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Having had NWN2 in hand for the past couple weeks and having used the toolset and played the original campaign I am on the fence about whether this is a worthy successor to the original game or not.

It really feels that a distinct change of direction was made in the development decisions of this game for reasons unknown. Where there were a vocal minority that were distraught that NWN1 was less like the Infinity engine, party-based games than they wanted (ie. Baldur's Gate series, Icewind Dale series), NWN1 took a step forward embracing a more single-character centric and freeform approach which in my opinion helped foster a strong Community following and an unthinkable amount of additional oustanding custom content.

NWN2 pushes the game back to its Baldur's Gate roots in the playability and party management sense. In my opinion, if you were a huge fan of the Infinity engine-based games and thought NWN1 went in the wrong direction, NWN2 is definitely for you. Aside from the aggressive system requirements, you will find this game outstanding.

I however am not sold yet, there is excellent potential here marred by a new clunky UI (without in-game customization capability), a necessity of NPC micromanagement (extremely poor/suicidal NPC combat AI, no NPC autoleveling), and party lockstep gameplay orientation (ie. one character transitioning drags the whole party along, one character entering a conversation pulls entire party into the conversation). An honest attempt to address many of the listed concerns, those listed here in particular, will go a long way in allowing this game to reach its tremendous potential. With these fixes, this game easily becomes a 4 or even 5 for me.

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