I loved "The Thing" and "Marked for Death", Keith, and I think it's great that you will be appearing in Saints Row 4.

IMO, Neverwinter Nights was marketed in the wrong way, and consequently a lot of fans of the Infinity Engine games were disappointed and didn't really give it a chance. Neverwinter Nights is not just its original campaign but mainly a powerful modding tool, and it's not a good game only because it was modded, but because it was made for modding. They didn't want to replace and surpass the Infinity Engine games with it, they wanted to do something totally different and revolutionary by giving their players a game that at the same time is a very versatile tool for realizing all kinds of role-playing fantasies (single and multiplayer). Sadly, they didn't stress that part enough and instead sold it as a single player campaign type of game like Baldur's Gate, as which it's rather average and bland. It's also not really finished, they had much bigger plans for the OC but had to drop them due to their deadline, because, as nijuu said, it was more of an afterthought and the real thing is the engine (personally I'm doubtful if they could have saved the OC, but who knows).


I must have missed the post where someone was claiming it. The engine is what it is not necessarily because it is superior to the Infinity Engine, but because it's better suited for modding, which is what NWN was made for, as mentioned above. They probably could have made NWN look much better and maybe even work better, but that would have restricted its ease-of-use for amateur modders.

Anyway, I haven't played any more recent Bioware games either, but declaring Bioware as good as dead just because you didn't like one of their games sounds quite irrational to me. It's not even as if they always employ the same writers for each game. But I admit that I'm biased myself, because I'm not really convinced that all the old Bioware games are really great either. Baldur's Gate is historically important and it might have slightly better storytelling and gameplay than NWN's OC, but IMO the story is still boring compared to Baldur's Gate 2 and many of the available modules for NWN that you chose to ignore. Same goes for Black Isle, in my personal opinion: I absolutely love Torment, but the IWD games are nowhere near Baldur's Gate 2 in terms of story and story-telling. Not saying they're not fun to play, I just think this "Black Isle good - Bioware bad" is a bit one-dimensional.

Let there be no rush, no haste. Instead, savor the series in all its glory, one by one, as they were originally released. This is the way God intended for them to be played and this is the way in which you should play and enjoy them.

So it was written, so it should be done.

if you want to go oldschool,I recommend the Wizardry gamer or the Might and Magic RPG series

I haven't played any NWN mods because I bought the game expecting a single-player epic a la the IE games. I like to install mods later if I like a game but I don't expect to have a piece of crap sold to me which just might become epic if later on modders decide to utilise the included tools. It was just damn cheeky of Bioware to release NWN in the way they did. They must have realised in the middle of the development process that they were just all technique and no creativity. NWN (unmodded)is the shittest RPG I've ever played. If modders have made it infinitely better in the meantime then kudos to the modders. Perhaps Bioware ought to pay them seeing as they created such a shit game in the first place ? The glory belongs to the modders who have enhanced the game, not to Bioware.

The NWN engine, imo, is definitely NOT better than the Infinity Engine, in spite of the fact that you can rotate the camera around. Third-person perspective engines are not bad per se but they don't work very well when it comes to playing party-based games. If you have six party members on screen at the same then you need an "isometric" ("God's eye") perspective imo in order to keep track of everyone's positions. But Neverwinter Nights did away with the six party members of course because Bioware were trying to be "down with the kids" and to dumb their games down in order to appeal to the mass market. But if my suspicions are correct I think they must have realised that after Black Isle Studios departed the scene they no longer had enough writing talent and so they decided to make a dumbed down game instead whilst still trading on their reputation, which had been established by their collaboration with Black Isle in creating the wonderful IE games.

Neverwinter Nights (unmodded) is a garbage game if you come to it straight from the IE games. I think it's incredible that this game is even spoken of in the same breath as even the lowliest of the IE games.

And P:T is great but it isn't greater than the Baldur's Gate saga and it is only just better than the Icewind Dales. All these games use the same game engine and play in pretty much the same way so it's just down to personal taste which ones you prefer (I'm not offended if someone thinks that the IWDs are better than Torment and the BGs for instance, though I would beg to differ personally). But there is a whole world of difference between vanilla NWN and the IE games : NWN is a pile of rubbish compared with the IE games. The quality of the writing in NWN is appalling. It's almost as if it was composed by an accountant, it's so boring and generic, there is no personality.

You keep repeating yourself and frankly, it sounds as if you didn't really bother to acknowledge what I wrote about NWN explicitly being designed as a modding tool. I'm the first to agree that NWN's OC is rubbish and that it wasn't a very wise move to promote the game in the way they did, emphasizing its greatest weakness and understating its strengths. Your reaction proves what an unwise move that was - and not only yours, actually I've heard it all before from other gamers who chose to judge NWN only by the single player campaign it was shipped with and stubbornly ignored the rest of the package. And - I repeat myself, too - noone here has claimed that NWN's engine was superior to the Infinity Engine, so why do you insist on refuting that straw man?

Still, none of what you say devalues NWN as a modding and multiplayer role-playing tool, which is what it is at its core and in that regard it is excellent. And modding in NWN doesn't mean a little this and that to enhance the original campaign - it means you're free to completely ignore the OC and have endless fun playing or creating other adventures. Bioware was not creative and original in writing the OC, but they gave the average player the means to express their creativity themselves without prior knowledge of programming and modding, and that's an accomplishment and something quite rare in gaming history. I'm sorry that Bioware sold this to you under the wrong label and you have reason to be mad at them for this reason. It's just not what you were looking for, never was.

Anyway, as much as I liked Black Isle, I don't buy into your theory as long as you base it on one single game you didn't like and you didn't even play a single one of Bioware's more recent titles, or NWN 2 for that matter (or did you play it? Obsidian has former Black Isle employees, so maybe you would like it :P ).

I didn't even read what you wrote about NWN having been explicitly designed as a modding tool but I did comment on this fact by saying that it was a very disappointing decision for those of us who had been expecting an epic single-player game "out of the box". Yes, I keep repeating myself because there isn't really much to say : Neverwinter Nights (vanilla)is CRAP and Bioware ought to be ashamed of themselves for releasing it, because it wasn't really a game but just the framework for a game, with tools for other people (who wouldn't be getting paid) to improve it - and it certainly needed improving because it had about as much soul as a lump of mud. After all those years of development and all the hype too ! They were lost without Black Isle Studios and they knew it.

I MAY play another Bioware title and if I do it will probably be Dragon Age : Origins, but frankly I expect this to be a dumbed down version of Baldur's Gate so I'm not sure if I ever will play it to be honest. Bioware is one of the most overrated publishers / developers since the IE games in my opinion. I've avoided their games ever since NWN purely because of what they did with NWN.

Perhaps I will eventually buy Neverwinter Nights and mod it up and experience the wonders which the modding community has created for it, but that isn't going to alter my opinion of Bioware. They think the sun shines out of their collective arse whereas really it was Black Isle Studios which made the IE games so special.

Planescape Torment!

Second best game of all time, behind the Baldur's Gate saga as a whole : D

omg, thank you..I could NOT remember the name of this mod to save my life, and I enjoyed it greatly when I messed around on it ages ago...I need to find this again, along with the fan remake of Maniac Mansion :)

And another thing, Leroux : not all of us follow a game's development so we don't know what to expect. It shouldn't be necessary to follow a game's development to know that it is not going to be released as a proper game but only a framework of a game with modding tools. Bioware did not make a point of advertising this fact. What they did was to release the game, lap up all the money from the sales and then watch on as other people (who weren't getting any money) modded the game to make it better (which frankly can't have been very difficult). Why did Bioware suddenly decide to go down this route after having created arguably the greatest series of games ever (the IE games) ?

I don't defend Bioware. I don't really care about them, I only meant (a) to defend NWN, because to me it isn't shit but something extraordinary that's entertained me for more than five years, despite my strong disliking of the official single player campaign (which I abandoned after the prologue before switching to community modules), and (b) to point out how shaky your arguments about Black Isle being the creative minds and Bioware going downhill actually are when they're based on nothing but a single example. So to me the discussion isn't really about Bioware vs. Black Isle but about Reason vs. Ranting. But I can agree with your "end of chat" suggestion, that sounds like the most reasonable solution here. ;)


I agree with all of that and you'd know if you had paid attention to my posts.

Test.

Oh it worked this time, how convenient ! I just wasted about 20 minutes composing a reply to Leroux only for the post to fail to process. What a marvellous waste of my time and energy that was.

@Leroux : We seem to agree on the main points but we have a different attitude towards the facts. You think that NWN should be praised for what modders have turned it into, and I'm not arguing against that, whereas I'm criticising Bioware for releasing the game as they did without bothering to advertise the fact that it wasn't up to much without modding. I find your attitude mystifying : is this practice perfectly okay in your opinion ? Don't you think that developers ought to release games rather than frameworks of games ?

Actually the original Neverwinter Nights was a MMORPG published by SSI released in 1991 and running until 1997.
So even the name was not original...

I tried the OC of Bioware's NWN and I agree with your sentiments about it.
But as Leroux pointed out NWN was much more of a modding tool to make your own adventures than a single player game in its own right. Too bad they went for a shitty 3D engine where you are constantly fighting the camera, though, as that is a major deterent to actually trying all those wonderful user made modules.