The Big "How Is It?" Thread

On multiplayer. The way I see it, the OC is unmultiplayable because of the compulsory NPCs, dialog pause, and forced party area transition.

The dialog pause, according to the devs is a scripted feature for the campaign. That means that Obsidian specifically designed the OC without MP consideration. Well, that's a big turnoff for me, I spent many many hours playing the NWN OC with friends in multiplayer, and a lot of fond memories associated with that.

Forced area transition seems to be just a feature of the game. When you move from area to area, your party moves with you, no matter what they're doing. Walk into a house while exploring an area? Everyone in your party follows, no matter what they were doing at the moment. Newsflash, Obsidian, folks in multiplayer form parties, and they still want some independence at it.

Now, persistent worlds in this game are next to impossible. Moving away from the tileset areas makes modules grow, bloat, take up huge chunks of disk space and system memory. We need to download maps without any custom content outside of the game if we want to play them, and server hosters face the size limitation for their modules. 2 gigabytes of system memory taken up, and the capacity of the 32-bit memory addressing in Windows is exceeded. From the feedback of the people who tried, 2gb is far from an unrealistic number for large and well-scripted modules.

My personal pet peeve is that this game is non-immersive. Characters are plastic, animations are minimal, apprearance variety is non-existent as most of the faces are butt ugly and hairstyles similar and also poorly done. It doesn't pick on me so much in singleplayer (oh what the hell, it does), but in multiplayer I will not enjoy my and everyone else's character having the personality and vitality of a GI Joe doll. Voice command keys don't exist, emotes are minimal - just to add to the pile.

I guess a lot of people don't care about persistent worlds or active multiplayer in general, but that's what NWN was to me. The OC, both in NWN and NWN2 is, well, just a module. In NWN2, it's more interesting. But if you take the factor of the OC out, then NWN2 is a pretty broken and not very functional development platform.

 

^ You can pull statistics and percentages out of your ass all you want, but NWN was a (great) multiplayer game. If you don't understand how the features I mentioned affect er.. destroy multiplayer, then I guess you're one of the lucky people who aren't affected by the issue. Voice commands are the smallest part of it, by far.

No surprise, really. The engine wasn't designed for MP at all, and if Obsidian failed to implement even the basic modifications for party control into it (what does it take to make your character selectable by clicking on it? Every game in the genre has that), I shudder to think just how they coded the MP capability into the engine from the ground up. But then, licensed core, proprietary animation model, recycled sounds and music... They must have been doing something for two years?


Bel, x1900 should do you fine. Your Radeon most likely sits in the AGP port, so make sure to ask for an AGP card - most cards of the current generation would be offered primarily for PCI Express, but they should have AGP alternatives hidden on the same shelf.

 

Forget PhysX. Almost nothing is designed to use it.

 

I was able to play a little more last night (just an hour or so), and I have to say the game is lots of fun.

I'm not seeing the extreme linearity some are complaining about. Almost as soon as I left the inn in Neverwinter, I had four things to choose from including a choice between what seemed like an evil and good path to getting into Blacklake.

Barmy's right that there isn't a door to open in every house and the alleys aren't littered with chests to open like in NWN1, but as I recall that was one thing people complained about in NWN1, and there are still plenty of places to go.

It really reminds me of BG2 in that you are restricted in where you can go based on the locations that show up on your world map that you have learned about from talking to people.

 

Crafting of what Bel? Weapons and armor are straightforward.

I've found a bunch of books of recipes for other stuff, but I don't have anybody to try them yet.

 

Normal weapons and armor: Look at the mold and it tells you what you need. Metal ingots and a mold for melee weapons (two ingots of the same type for large, one for small). Wood planks and a mold for bows. Leather hide and mold for leather armor. Etc.

Apparently you can enchant any weapon or armor, but I haven't tried it yet (nobody to do it yet, unless that Sorcerer I just picked up but haven't used can do it).

EDIT: Oh yeah, you also need a workbench to put the stuff in and a hammer to forge them. You will get all that stuff in Fort Locke.