POLL: Is a renaissance of NWN1 coming?

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With the advent of NWN2, many hopes have been dispelled. There are many people for whom NWN1 runs fluently on top settings and who can't play NWN2. In fact, on my system, for instance, NWN2 looks worse than NWN1 at half the framerate or less. And you need even more power to play it online. Additionally, there have been many modules, premium from BioWare, Hall of Fame highly regarded by NWVault visitors, and others. Patches have done quite a lot and the final one is scheduled for January (sort of) - long into NWN2. Some of the modules have been released very shortly before NWN2, including the Wyvern Crown of Cormyr, for example, with rideable horses. Now my question is, do you see a renaissance of NWN1 coming or not really?

Poll Information
This poll contains 1 question(s). 31 user(s) have voted.
You may not view the results of this poll without voting.

Poll Results: Is a renaissance of NWN1 coming? (31 votes.)

Is a renaissance of NWN1 coming? (Choose 1)
* Yes, it is - 55% (17)
* No, it's not - 16% (5)
* I don't know - 29% (9)

 

It seems like any time somthing new (NWN II) comes out it reawakens interest in related products, as in NWN I. Interesting remark about playability. My oun system plays NWN all out and can't touch NWN II.

 

Wyvern Crown of Cormyr is pretty good! I'm playing that as I play the OC for NWN2. If they support NWN2 as much as NWN was supported, it will be fantastic. Right now, NWN2 is fun, better graphics, but less customizability.

WCoC is a blast! Horses are cool and the jousting is fun. Overall a great game!

As for a Renaissance, I just downloaded, Darkness over Daggerford...So maybe!

 

for me yes, i cant play NWN2 on my home computer, so im ofrced to play it at friends. that got me kicked into nwn again. while many parts of the 3.0/3.5 rules seems completely silly to me, i love the way you can really costumize builds in it. so currently im having a round through SOU with a dwarf fighter, who will one day be a weaponmaster.

 

Same here. It won't run properly on my modest mshine, and I am unwilling to spend 44 Euros on the game, for the poorly translated German version. I'd wish they would offer language choices on installation, like Ubisoft does (at least in the couple of games I remember).

 

Ragusa, cant you just order the english version over the net?

 

... only with a credit card, which I currently refuse to aquire

 

I'm not sure. I got my copy of NWN second hand from a friend who wound up with two. My old computer couldn't handle it, so I've only now just started playing it.
(Yes, I know I've had my new computer for a year now, but school kept we way too busy to play games...)

 

I am very much enjoying how well NWN runs on my new PC. I never knew the graphics were so good. I am currently playing Hordes of the Underdark again and I still haven't even made it to try and modules. So there should still be plenty of life left in NWN for me. It would probably take me years to get through even the two or three best modules.

 

Just got the 'Diamond' edition for Christmas. Have gotten most of the way through chapter 2 of the original campaign I think but looks like I will have to restart due to what appears to be a game-stopping bug(I was never attacked by "Vardoc" or whatever his name is so Luskan cannot be entered).
Still on dial-up over here so it looks like I will have great difficulty just patching to 1.68 and cannot even entertain the idea of getting the CEP or any modules.

My thoughts so far are that the game is great, overall. The one glaring snafu is that the developers went with this stupid "henchmen" idea(NPCs whom the player has little, if any control over and cannot access their inventories or decide how to develop them), instead of just sticking with the BG tried and true method of RPCs + the main(created) PC.
I know WHY they did this; figuring that the game would ideally be played over the net like an actual PnP D&D session and possibly because of the absurd notion that players controlling RPCs ruined 'immersion' or some such crapola. But it is still a stupid idea that I wish developers would quit ruining games with. Disable or hinder RPCs/henchmen all you want for the multi-player game but for those of us SPers...don't.

On the bright side; the game is still a lot of fun...bugs/"features" and all. The 3rd edition rules are so many light years better and more fun than 2nd edition AD&D(used in BG 1 & 2) that it is not even funny. How TSR survived for as long as they did with THAT crappy game system amazes me to this day. Graphics are beautiful, combat is fun.

But I am also not impressed with the campaign I have played so far. The "No one Ever Really Dies"(N.E.R.D. as per the Neptunes' hip-hop act) mechanic is just loathsome. If I wanted to enjoy wandering into impossible situations, dying for my inattentiveness- but not REALLY dying; just respawning at some point along with my henchman, then I would still be playing Everquest.

What's worse is that not only do you respawn but you can get fully, freely healed, restocked and then jump through a portal right back to where you got killed.

Stupid.

 

Im playing daggerfold at the moment. What a fun mod! I am finding daggerfold slightly better than HotU and much, much better than the NWN OC. If mods like daggerfold keep popping up, I will be enjoying my own NWN renaissance.

 

Runequest, i feel your pain, the nwn OC is a horrible vaste of time, ment for you to suffer eternal hours of strife.

then expansions on the other hand are prety good and you get control over your henchmens inventory, which is an improvement at least.

Also if you want the bg1 feel with some slight adventure feel, download Darkness over daggerford. quite possible the best mod made for nwn 1.

 

I vote "no." Darkness Over Daggerford and Wyvern Crown both came out shortly before the release of NWN2 as a kind of last hurrah. Bioware has said that the next patch will be the last.

If NWN2 doesn't kill off NWN1 then Dragon Age will.

 

The answer is "yes," and the reason is Obsidian.

People are still making mods for BG2, for god's sakes, so yes - a renaissance is absolutely coming, for all the reasons Chev mentioned. I think Obsidian made a huge mistake in creating a game with such unnecessarily high system specs. There are two year old games out there that look a hell of a lot better and play a hell of a lot better. Guild Wars - lame and boring as it is - is a perfect example of how to make a game look great on the average system without sacrificing much. I don't think NWN2 will really hit it's stride for another year or so, when today's hot PC processors and graphics cards drop dramatically in price.

Part of the reason NWN has done so well is because Bioware is such a fantastic developer who keeps giving back to the fans in the form of new content, community support and nearly constant updates and improvements. I don't see that happening with Obsidian, especially after the immense disappointment that was KoToR2. I don't blame Lucasarts for that failure after the fact, I blame Obsidian.

 

With computers advancing the way they are, soon everyone will be able to play NWN2. I say no, the end of NWN1 is nigh

 

rumors, started by nwn2 haters, who said Atari closed down the life team after nwn2's release, the lifeteam (who makes the nwn1 patches and deal with premium modules) said that it was purely rumors. that said, i cant see the reason for many more patches after 1.69 (if it includes the last bug fixs, colored capes in the original campaigns, release of horses and the extra prestige class for wyvern crown.

but rather then a renaissance, i think we will see some people having hard time letting go of one form of modding over to another, the system specs for nwn2 aint that high, my 3year old computer can run it, its only my graphic card that is to old and to be fair, that has been to old for 2years no, even Kotor 1 complained over my graphic card (it ran, but it warned me every time i started it)

secondly, obsidian seems to have taken up the smae strategi as Bioware, having a lifeteam who communicates with the fans (thorugh biowares boards) to fix as many problems as fast as possible.

thirdly i think its unfair to blame a small company like obsedian for a forced prerelease by Atari.

Also i think a lot is forgetting how crappy nwn1 was when released, it sucked compared to the old BG games.
but with the current sales, the fast moving computer technology and the patches i think nwn2 will be a success.

 

Argh! I get this game, install it, play around a bit(without messing with ANY files or settings or any of that) then decide to TRY and patch up to 1.68, even though I am on dial-up.

The patch is 45 MB or so so I know this will be an all day thing. I hit the update button and go off to get some work done. I come back several hours later(probably like 12 hours or so) to find that the game has downloaded the entire patch...BUT there was some error in some specific file and so the whole thing had to be aborted. I am also told to download the 'Critical rebuild' version to fix all of this.
Now I could see if I had this game for months and had been downloading fan-made mods or hacks or something. If that were the case then shame on me and I should not be surprised to find that the auto-patcher did not work properly.
But this game is the latest retail release of NWN, right out of the box! How can it have an incorrect version of some file and why doesn't the patch program catch this BEFORE going through the entire download/patch process?!

On an unrelated note I decided to just quit playing the OC and started up the SoU campaign. Much more enjoyable save that, while henchmen are improved in that you can access their inventories and have some say as to which class they develop/level-up in, you have even LESS control over their combat tactics now. I decided to take the half-orc sorceror along with my half-orc Barbarian/rogue and he is Hell-bent on putting away his crossbow and charging into hordes of enemies with his dagger, forcing me to stop my carnage-wreaking and try to heal him up with a kit or potion.

And that Je'Nah sorceress is proving to be a pain in the arse! Came real close to killing her once but evidently my potion of elemental protection wears off just in time for her to deliver a volley of ice-blasts at me and the surviving gnolls(and the henchman), killing us nearly instantly.
And yes, I have the dragon's potion thing which I use on her right off the bat before I use the element protection potion.

 

yea i have the same problem with deekin in hotu, for some reason if i let him use spells, he decides to use a touch spell then shift to melee, even though his ranged weapon is better. so Deekin is not allowed to have any melee weapons or shields in his inventory. that solves the problem, sort of anyhows.

 

I agree with Equester.

The Bioware NWN2 forums, especially the Official Campaign forum has a lot of pages with topics and it is Obsidian's developers who is moderators. And they tend to answer peoples questions.

My computer is 3 years old too and it can actually run NWN2 with the current graphic card (ATI Radeon 9600 TX).

But why shouldn't NWN1 get a renaissance? There is probably a lot of people now playing NWN2, and some of them would be curious about how NWN1 is.

It is not different from the BG series where some people discovered BG1 after playing BG2.

And people tend to forget there was quite some patches for BG2 also.

Besides that I am probably one of the few on this board who liked NWN1 OC. But there could be others....

 

Okay, so you made me go and search nwvault.com for a quote from David French -- Live Team Producer of NWN: "1.69 will be the final patch for NWN1."