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The second expansion to Neverwinter Nights 2 is here, and so far it looks like it's taking the series in a completely new direction.
Gone is the focus on a single character and instead you now create and control a whole party of adventurers, allowing you to experience different classes without fear that you've created something too weak to survive or that wouldn't compliment NPCs you've yet to meet.
It's the first of many nods back to Icewind Dale, Baldur's Gate and even the Gold Box series of Dungeons & Dragons games.
Like Icewind Dale, the story is presented as the retelling of a tale, this time as recorded by the infamous scribe Volo.
Indeed Volo has more than a passing role to play in the game as the fresh party find themselves travelling with him at the start of the game, which is set just after the events of the original NWN2 story. His presence and somewhat happy-go-lucky demeanour also set the tone for an overall lighter style of fantasy game, again more like the old school D&D games. It certainly makes for a pleasant change from raft of titles taking themselves too seriously and attempting (with varying degrees of success) to be dark.
That's not to say the game has abandoned other things the modern cRPGer looks for; character skills play a much larger part in Storm of Zehir than they have in previous NWN games. The first way this is obvious is during the new party conversation system - now there are a plethora of different responses dependant on skills, but better, if another member of the party has skills which allow different responses a bubble appears over their portrait and you can click on them to see what they have to say. It might seem a bit schizophrenic, but it kind of makes sense that a party of adventurers might all join in a conversation rather than sitting back and saying nothing all the time. A second large use of skills is during the new overland map system.
Instead of just teleporting between locations, or clicking on icons on a 2d map, Storm of Zehir has a fully explorable 3d world map. Your party traverse this in real time, encountering wandering monsters, friendly patrols and discovering locations and loot along the way. Character skills determine how fast you can travel, your success at spotting monsters, whether they spot you or not, your ability to find hidden locations etc. It works amazingly well and is just plain fun to spend time in - I can't wait to see how the community use it too, given the amount of freedom that has been given to builders with the new system.
As well as the new story, setting and systems, this expansion brings new spells, feats, special teamwork benefits, prestige classes and one new base class. The AI has also been revamped using some of the community's skilled work.
Technically there have been some performance improvements - shadow performance has improved quite a bit and the engine seems to run a fair bit better given the large amounts of detail present. Sound has also improved in that it's now a fully orchestrated score performed by the City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra. The composition isn't quite up to Gothic 3 standards, but it is suitably engaging and actually reminded me of the Indiana Jones score on a couple of occasions. Voice acting is generally good, with a large amount of content both during conversations and also in the backgrounds (which are full of ambient sounds, again reminiscent of Icewind Dale). Some of the actors are better than others, but Volo's voicing stands out as excellent so far.
Anyway, we'll see how the story and gameplay progress after more time - I'm especially looking forward to the trade/caravan runs.
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Originally Posted by sleepyhead
I missed that first section in your opening post...the first picture took my eyes away from the text.
I didn't discover RPGs until a couple of years ago (was an FPS lover) but now I'm hooked and I pretty much only buy games with an RPG element. Baldurs Gate would probably work on my Eee actually so I might invest in a copy.
