Just got MOTB, haven't finished the OC yet. Should I install?

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I just got the Mask of the Betrayer expansion for $5. However, I've only really begun the OC as I've been playing other games while going back to night school to get a higher college degree.
Will I get benefits in the OC like installing Shadows of the Undertides and Hordes of the Underdark benefited the OC of the first NWN games?

If I do so, will it mess up my saved games? I'm still in highcliff as I haven't decided if I want to play a Bard, Warlock, Monk, or Ranger, so losing them won't be that big a loss.
Even if it won't mess up my saved games, would I be better off starting over because of better feat selection or additional items, such as how one of the expansions added the bones dropped by the skeletons in the tutorial of the NWN1 OC?

 

I haven't tested this stuff recently, but here's my understanding.

All NWN2 patches and expansions are backwards compatible with earlier ones, so you should have no problems with your earlier save games, and should see at least some of the benefits.

You won't see all of them, however, unless you start a new game. For example, your only chance to play as one of the new classes like the Favored Soul will be to start a new game.

As I understand it, MotB also provides some performance enhancements to the game engine that were never directly ported over to the OC, so to benefit from them you need to install the expansion. That alone is reason enough to install it if you ask me. NWN2 has never been a great performer. I have plenty of games that are visually far superior that perform far better, so any performance enhancement you can get is worth getting.

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One other note about performance, I am now playing NWN2 on my third, progressively more powerful PC. My current PC is quite a monster and even with all graphics settings maxed I'm getting around 50 FPS most of the time.

But occassionally, even on this powerful system, the game will slow to less than 10 FPS. This happened at the end of the SkyMirror quest. It has also happened once in the docks district. There's something that the devs never got quite right with this game performance-wise.

And then there are comparitively much more beautiful games like Dragon Age that run like butter even on somewhat older systems.

 

Oh really? Dragon Age works better? I've been hearing a lot of good things about Dragon Age, but since I thought it used the NWN2 engine and all that, that it would perform even worse on my system than NWN2.

Should I try it on a system with an ATI Radeon 3450 graphics card, AMD Phenom 9550 quad core processor (~2.4 ghz) , and 6gb of RAM with Windows Pista Home Problems?

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Oops, that should be Windows Vista Home Premium.

 

You should be able to run it with that system, although perhaps not with all the graphics options cranked. Your video card is your weak spot. Upgrade that and you would be in much better shape.