Neverwinter Nights 2 > NWN 2 General

Storm of Zehir Review

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420:
Gamespot posted a review of Storm of Zehir.

Check this out:

--- Quote ---Instead of tackling the usual earth-shattering events of a Dungeons & Dragons game, here you take on the duties of a mop-up crew coming in after the party's over. The King of Shadows has already wreaked his havoc, and you're just some poor schlub out to try to make a buck by ensuring that merchants can once more ply their trade. The quests reflect this mundane storyline. You run a lot of lame errands to kill specific monsters and recover lost or stolen merchandise, and you clean out a bunch of formulaic dungeons, caves, graveyards, and the like. Most locales are fairly small, so they seem more like minor obstacles that can be raced through in a few minutes than the huge strongholds and lairs typical of RPGs. Trading feels more like a minor irritant than a worthwhile feature. Generally, you acquire the game's three goods--ore, lumber, and skins--in one place and then sell them at a profit somewhere else. Transactions are handled on simple menu screens when you enter a town, so you don't do anything more than hit a few buttons to add money to your coffers. And the concluding reveal and battle come up so suddenly and are so anticlimactic that you won't believe they're the ending of the game until you've exited to the desktop.
--- End quote ---

Ouch. And not even a mention of the overland map which is all Obsidian would talk about.

-420

Mo:
Obsidian conceded Gamespot's point already.  They admit the story-line isn't groundbreaking, it's even in Introduction area of the game manual.  This expansion is more about open-endedness and new gameplay features (which Gamespot left out).

MoTB was all about story and that expansion did it very well, with deep NPCs and epic storyline.  SoZ went in a different direction and I appreciate it for what it is.  Obviously the best of both worlds would be nice, so hopefully they take MoTB+SoZ and use the best of each and develop NWN3.

Elessar Telrunya:
It pisses me off when game companies decide to neglect the storyline of a game to expand game mechanics.  It's the same thing that Arenanet did when they put own GW: Factions...

Soul Sojourner:

--- Quote from: Elessar Telrunya on December 02, 2008, 07:11:05 PM ---It pisses me off when game companies decide to neglect the storyline of a game to expand game mechanics.  It's the same thing that Arenanet did when they put own GW: Factions...

--- End quote ---
That's because you're a fish. *blub* *blub*

While I appreciate a good storyline, one can find some of those via modules done by fellow players. The content is more important to me when it comes to NWN. This is because I know I will receive various stories of great quality from imaginative builders, and they will have vast content at their disposal to bring me an excellent quest with excellent cream filling. I also love customization to an obsessive extent and as a builder and a player am over-obsessively thorough. (such as descriptions for everything, even things you cannot read the description for... or checking every walkable piece or terrain for any possible thing that might be there in addition to filling the map, even if the parts of the map I'm trying to fill are irrelevant and useless.)
Content. Plain and simple.

420:
I agree that with a game building title like NWN content is more important in some ways than a campaign storyline but I have a couple problems with how Obsidian handled NWN2.

1. Lack of content: Obsidian released all of 2 dragons (red and black) iin the first game and 2 more (blue and bronze) in the first expansion. By this point in it's product life Bioware had released for free rats, gnolls, kobolds, malar panther and a host of other content through patches. (This was in addition to the initial exhaustive list of creatures in NWN, including all standard dragons.)

2. Obsidian has now packaged a "content" release as a full expansion. Fucking give us the fucking content for the fucking game we already fucking paid for and give us an expansion with a fucking storyline. At least the NWN expansions are on par with the best community mods but Obsidian's commercial products can't even compete with the NWN community talent at this point.

Unlike Bioware, Obsidian doesn't give a fuck about the games they make or the people that play them.

-420

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