Neverwinter Nights

Just picked this up for free at GOG this past weekend, finally getting around to playing it. What am I in for?
>yes I realize how old the game is never got to play before now

Also, what are some similar games in the last 5 years?

A lot of the classes suck and if you don't spec right you can make the game unplayable.

A Dance with Rogues

Nah, it's just a question of healing potions if your build is weak.

Remember to play monoclassed wizard with pixie familiar so you can take a cleric/ fighter companion and have something close to a full party.

How does Sup Forums feel about Neverwinter Nights 2?

I played it on launch and it was awful experience.
Some people claim it's superior to the original.

>really shitty graphics, even for the time
>very clunky UI and mods can't fix it
>pretty boring base campaign
>ok to pretty good expansion pack campaigns
>very good official add-on campaigns
>really awesome fan-made campaigns
>post-20/epic-level stuff is all broken as per usual DnD3E

It's one of my favorite games in spite of the problems, honestly.
The online community and some persistent modules are still kicking about if you feel like multiplayer in an actual RPG, but given that only regulars play anymore, you might be expected to know some meta builds to get along with those who don't RP all that much.

Which classes don't suck? I just created a human wizard with the in-game recommended stats, etc.

Base campaign is tather boring as fuck. With
>AMAZEENK PLOT TWEESTS
that cockblock your character out of getting best girl. Stinky elf bitch need not apply. And unfinished cut content leaves poor neeshka (cultist-chan as a tiefling rouge) unromanceable.

Expansions are Godly though.
Unfotunately the best exp is a sequel to the main campaign so you have to suffer through the base game first.

Main campaign is horrendously bland, but both expansion are much better. Then you get into the real meat of the game - community modules.

Nope.jpg. reroll.
You need a wiz enchantment specialist to spam cc's and a pixie familiar to lockpick and trap disarm for you.

Do NOT play as a rogue. Game hates rogues and you're better off just getting the rogue henchman for when you don't foresee boss fights.

It's alright, the base campaign is slow to pick up and quick to end when it just starts getting fun.
The expansion is probably the best story ever told by Obsidian. Take that as you will.

It looks and sound better than the original NWN, but otherwise plays about the same. Some quests are glitchy / impossible to complete without knowing how to avoid glitching them in the first place, so that's a problem if you don't like metagaming the story content.

Is Neverwinter Nights better than Dragon Age Origins?

this

Ran like shit on launch. Patches make it a slightly superior game with vastly superior campaigns than the first, however it has fewer options when it comes to player content.

> How does Sup Forums feel about Neverwinter Nights 2?

as far as official content goes it's much better than nwn1, but it lags behind in custom content because community simply stuck to the original game.

>dat feel when people shat on storm of zehir because it wasn't more of mask of the betrayer

DAO feels rushed and unsettled in comparison to NWN. The characters are not all that grounded in the lore, and you run into way too many conveniences for it to feel like an epic adventure of your own making.

It was fun. It had an alright-to-good, self-aware OC with a few cool moments, MotB is absolutely fantastic (and probably the best thing based on D&D ever made), SoZ is cool but very different, and it both made bards enjoyable and included the greatest class of all (Frenzied Berserker).

>Which classes don't suck?
Cleric, Druid, Fighter, Paladin, Sorc and Wizard are all good choices. The rest are suboptimal to poor for various reasons (you don't want to be a Rogue in a campaign where everything that matters is immune to sneak-attack and you don't have a party to protect you), but the only way you can totally fuck your character is to stack up a bad multiclass and end up with a huge XP penalty; otherwise you'll just end up varyingly suboptimal
>recommended stats
Hope you like Vancian casting. I don't even remember what the recommended stats are because I hate casting, you'll want as much Intelligence as you can get and probably the Pixie familiar for roguish things. Damage tends to falloff as you get to very high levels, but you should still be okay.

mask of the betrayer is excellent. the rest of the campaigns kind of corny but playable. if you like min maxing d&d classes then it can be a lot of fun.

Depends on what you mean by "better". Origins has far better production values and campaign, bu it's also a simpler ruleset.

>Cleric, Druid, Fighter, Paladin, Sorc and Wizard
>The rest are suboptimal to poor for various reasons

Many immortal monks disagree.

The aim for NWN was "DnD 3.0 on your PC".

The aim for DA:O was "a fantasy franchise that bioware wholly owned".

As others have said, the real meat of NWN was the community modules. If the DnD ruleset allowed it, you could do it. DA:O is a pretty good standalone RPG, but just doesn't have that depth.

This.
Is the dude who recommended me Crimmor here?

>>dat feel when people shat on storm of zehir because it wasn't more of mask of the betrayer
To be fair, it followed such a good expansion and so different in tone it was bound to happen. At least Bioware lucked out in that their best expansion was the last one.

>Many immortal monks disagree.
Fair, I forgot about Monk too because I never bothered finishing one in nwn1. I just tried to go through the list alphabetically in my head and list down the best choices.
Yeah, OP, monk is also a good choice.

2's multiplayer was totally fucked and unplayable for custom realms.

>written by josh sawyer
Into the trash it goes.

>The aim for DA:O was "a fantasy franchise that bioware wholly owned".
And they totally fucked it all up.

>>if you like min maxing d&d classes then it can be a lot of fun
>mfw bard/barbarian/RDD/Frenzied Berserker

>but it's also a simpler ruleset.
Doesn't have as many traps as nwn, though.

>mfw following a seemingly story-encouraged route of turning your dwarf fighter into a monk in in NWN2 results in an incredibly gimped character

Fuck you too, Obsidian.

Trap builds are a byproduct of a system with genuine options, though. It simply cannot be avoided short of streamlining and taking away said options.

dragon age was developed after the EA buy out so it was the beginning of the company being milked into the grave like bullfrog and every other studio they've ruined.

Dragon Age was in develop mt for fucking forever. So long they tested level design in NWN1 editor. EA's real influence was only felt with DA2 and afterward.

OC was horrendous garbage. The first expansion was decent, gave me PST vibes several times, but it was way too short to redeem the whole game, then came the spectacular return to form with Storm of Zehir which felt like a patchwork of tiny tiny modules someone's kid lashed together in one afternoon.

>359824856
but MotB was written by George Zeets
dumb baitposter

>Fuck you too, Obsidian.
But user, the real best ending to Khelgar's storyline is convincing him not to become a monk after all, after he passes all the trials - that's why the option is there, after all.
I mean, they were all about Khelgar learning the true values of service and duty and being unselfish, and he can't lead his clan properly if he becomes a monk, so clearly the best option is for him to decide to overcome his own desires of being a monk in favour of doing his best for the clan.

>horrendous garbage

no, that would be nwn1 oc if you want to compare the two. nwn2's was just very by the numbers, so much so it comes off as intentional.

It was odd to play a 3e game where monk can meaningfully contribute to something.

No, trap options are a byproduct of bad design. And 3e in particular intentionally had scores of bad options because they laid the groundwork for it on CCG philosophy. You should read some of Monte Cock's articles on the subject, they're good for a laugh. Or rage.

True, but mechanically, so many of those options are so underpowered mechanically the only reason to take them is either roleplaying or because they're prerequisites for something else; so you end up with a system where it's incredibly easy for someone who doesn't know the game to make what they think are good choices and end up with a horribly underpowered character. And then you get to how BAB works...

>so much so it comes off as intentional.
It was clearly intentional. Daerred, the Keep, Shandra, Shandra and Ammon; there was far too much thought put into them (and other things) for it not to be intentional.

I was playing the witcher series but could not get past the clusterfuck the second one is.
Holy fuck they have dropped the ball on that one.
I might pick this instead and play this week.

>EA's real influence
Caused it to be rushed to market and what we got was a bit on the blue side, which is OK if you like your content rare.

DA2 was chickenshit though, and undercooking that meant diseases abound. Then arrived the vacant silver platter that was DA3, because they just fucking gave up making anything of substance and could easily spin the reception as "entitled gamers" with their massive marketing arm if needs be. Turned out some people just like empty platters.

EA's influence turned them from RPG craftsmen to SJW blogposters. It may have been slow, but the onset was immediate and painful. You can't say DAO didn't suffer from their obvious tampering.

bioware are just the ea sports of rpgs at this point. churning out rushed, mediocre games to the crack of the whip.

Does Sup Forums like Mysteries of Westgate?

The game looked hideous, the interface and camera controls were a crime against humanity, I was forced to drag along a dozen of painfully unfunny and unlikable morons that I could not kill or kick out, and the only bright thing in it, the big bad, turned out to have been just another bumbling moron and the rest of the game was me plowing through hordes of progressively more annoying undead in order to defeat THE KING OF SHADOWS, exclamation mark! NWN1 OC was boring but NWN2 OC was an insult to anything with a brain. It couldn't even pass as cheesy or pulpy, it was just trash from start to finish. Well, except for the trial, but that didn't matter.

This. Fuck streamlining and handholding in character building. Cookie cutter characters that can't be fucked up are for mindless drones.

3.X was not a good example of character building though
non-magical classes were shit tier, no matter what you did, the more spells per level the better your character.

non magical classes enhanced with magic could be pretty godlike tho

Fun times making dumb scripts

not really no
baseline martials suck donkey balls, especially in 3.5
the only ones that are somewhat passable are the ToB classes and the only way they achieved that is by going full anime

Fun game, kinda dull at times, though never as bad NWN1's worst moments, and I loved Chapter 2's trial, I will never not be salty over Shandra kicking the bucket, I think MotB's kind of overrated, and didn't like having to build my party in SoZ, over having party members with their own stories and pasts already

>Playing NWN games for their campaigns

Like missing the point entirely

Gish builds were some of the broken in 3.5

>will never get to kick Nasher in the balls for being a cunt

Yea.

>gee. Muredering an innocent to placate a mob of retards provoked a disproportionately vicious response last time.

>LET'S KILL THE BIRD WE BROKE ANYWAY.

how did the NWN1 OC end up as bad as it was?
there were plenty of hints of a good narrative in it but somehow it got completely and utterly fucked up during execution

Act 1 was so fucking boring. Jesus Christ. Nothing, nothing ever happens and you're just running plot-irrelevant errands for random chucklefucks for hours. It picks up in Act 2, but pushing through the beginning is a torture.

I'm surprised Helm and Tyr let all that shit that happened in the OC slide

hey user I heard you like orc caves

Orc caves aren't even that bad if you're running a melee dps build.

I love them so fucking much.
It's actually the point where I always got so fed up with the game's bullshit I just dropped the playthrough. It took me a few replays over the years to finally get past the damn caves and see the rest of the game.

even with a well-build melee character they're tedious as fuck

to many orcs, zero challenge

>This. Fuck putting thought and effort into your products, just make it like Magic so lifeless grognards can feel smart about being able to tell which cards are good. Mechanics that don't constantly get in the way of building characters people want to play are for mindless drones.

The multiplayer was fun because of the massive amount of servers at the height of the game's popularity.

The best part about them was that they were all moderated separately. One GM banning you from a server just meant you couldn't go back to that one but still had like 1000 more you could go to. And in most servers PVP was completely open.

I used this to play on roleplaying servers. I would level an enchanter wizard and dump all of my feats and shit into making my enchantment spells as strong and long-lasting as I could. This usually took a while. As I did this, I leveled as you expect on a RP server: roleplaying here and there, grouping with people, making friends, getting involved in a storyline or two.

Then when I got around level 20, I would start going back to the low level areas. I would search for female lowbies, hail them and talk to them in character a bit. Then I would use a jacked up, extended Hold Monster spell to paralyze them fucking forever, and while they couldn't move just start fondling, stripping, heck flat out molesting.

Then I'd just leave.

On some servers I'd get banned outright, but most of the time GMs were cool and would tell the whiners that they had to deal with me in-game. This always created massive drama that eventually boiled down to a 5-star GTA situation with the whole server on a witch hunt for me and me evading, fighting them, only to continue my perverted shit.

This would usually end with me either dead or jailed forever, but man what a ride this always was.

I miss this game.

Reminder that those who got shoved into the wall deserve their fate for being retarded

So apparently, Kaedrin is still working on an updace for his class pack.

But I wanna be as edgy as possible user.

Reminder that the existence of the wall is not a commonly known fact in the setting.

Yeah.

discovered they where giving it for free, 3 hours after it ended.
i want to die.

How are you typing without your hands, Bishop?

I think they took too many
>WE gotta make it grimdarker so the player knows its all srs bizniz.
Choices in the story.

>it would've been far more dramatic and evoke more pathos if fenthick had been consigned to life imprisonment to some vile dungeon with Aribeth's descent into darkness stemming from her assault on the prison to free her man and subsequent fleeing for their lives.

That makes a much better reason for a paladin to oppose nasher wt al without becoming a fallen derp civilian innocents killer.

>I'll punish them for killing sn innocent by killing innocents! THAT'LL show the tyr's justice!

>teleports behind you
pshhh.....

>There will never be a good "DnD" ruleset computer game ever again.
Even if there was some superior classes and many useless stuff I never had as much fun as making a character in NWN than any other games.

t. Kelemvor
t. Myrkul how's that Eternal Rest going, mate?

>how's that Eternal Rest going, mate?
It's over.
Myrkul's back.

>being a filthy atheist in a setting where the gods existing are objective facts, and they have some sweet ass blessings too if they really like you

As said you deserve to be shoved in the wall if you still try to be a fedoratipper

Is wizard the GOAT class?

That's the druid.

Pretty much. It is the only class that has enough cc's to handle the mobs AND kill em with aoe.

Enchanter ftw.

Sarcasm aside, once you put enough time into NwN and actually start to understand the underlying mechanics, you start to meticulously plot out the most broken combination of multi-class that seems fun at the time.

Never happens in Dragon Age and i'm not even a fan of 3rd edition, personally. It has too many things which bother me, like how 1 stat point increase means nothing unless you hit an even number; and it introduced the notion of attacks of opportunity which despite being copied several times since then, never comes with the counter-ability tumble in new games, so everything becomes a zone-of-control cheese fest.

She served both Tyr and Neverwinter with her life and both basically fucked her rump without lube, then expected her to come to work the next day like nothing happened. When she openly switched sides she wasn't a paladin of Tyr any more than she was a Neverwinter loyalist.

>had a lot of fun with a pure Cleric build, just casting buffs on self and then beating the shit out of everything with a greatsword
>all the other builds I tried were either boring or too much of a chore to play

Recommend me some builds, Sup Forums. I like characters who just go in there and fight without too much preparation and constant resting

Premise is shit, and you can't really come back from that.
>I need you to find these four monsters that were stolen because only they can save us from the plague

>how did the NWN1 OC end up as bad as it was?

Departure from their original idea. Read up the leaked design document.

>The original design documentation was leaked to the public, and it contained a different take on the chapters, such as chapter 2 being set entirely in Luskan, and chapter 4 set in the defeated city of Neverwinter. Several different fates were given to the major characters, such as Lord Nasher being killed during the siege of Neverwinter, Sedos Sebile being Aarin Gend's lover, and Aribeth betraying Maugrim to fight for the player.Rob Bartel (of BioWare) has confirmed the document to be authentic and has suggested that one of the reasons several parts of the original design were cut was the change of publisher from Black Isle Studios/Interplay to Atari.

you can always go for a weapon master build
if you use something like say a falchion you have around 50% chance of critting for triple damage on every hit

>Recommend me some builds, Sup Forums. I like characters who just go in there and fight without too much preparation and constant resting
Paladin/Champion of Torm with optionally /Fighter 4
It's like Cleric but easier because you don't have to micro as many buffs and spells. Take Divine Might and Shield and fuck shit up.

Alternatively, Paladin/Fighter/Weaponmaster (or just Fighter/WM) if you don't mind dealing with enemies that are immune to crits.

Eh, I though the initial Act 1 premise was fine enough, what really shit things up was that 2 and 3 just had to force that four fetch quests format on themselves as well, making things a horribly tedious grind

Playing NWN2 OC right now. Do characters like Grobnar get their own questlines, or should I stick with Khelgar, Neeshka and Elf?

>Gods are so fucking lazy and worthless that the overgod reshapes the laws of the universe so that they now have to earn worship or fade out
>Gods build a planar torture engine that devours those that refuse to grovel before them and suck their shriveled cocks
>Don't bother telling anyone about the wall, so it ends up devouring the souls of those that didn't know they had to worship, or haven't found a god they can truly worship
>Don't bother securing the wall very well, so it serves as a soul supermarket for devils and fiends and powerful mortal mages
>Kelemvor, the first non-evil god of death to stumble upon it, turns it off immediately, but is then forced to turn it back on by the rest of the pantheon, then left to try and make things less horrible all on his own because other gods can't be bothered
>Hurr u a filthy atheist if u don't liek eet
If we compare Forgotten Reals to a a garbage fire, Wall of the Faithless is the liquid congealing at the bottom.

Druids ruined it

Literally everyone knows about the fucking wall.

being an atheist in FR is idiotic because the gods clearly exist
being an anti-theist looking for a way to blow up the whole corrupted bullshit is a perfectly logical stance though

>or should I stick with Khelgar, Neeshka and Elf?
Stick with those for now. Some characters do get their own quests at varying stages of the game, but the only ones who need to be in your party for them to trigger are Khelgar and Elanee. The others - like Grobnar's quest, which is in Act III - either trigger automatically or simply through dialogue.
Neeshka a cute.

>Druids ruined it
This, senpais.

>Literally everyone knows about the fucking wall.
>it's mentioned several times in the game that no, not everyone knows about the wall
Great going, user.

I know, it's fun to tinker with. But anyone who actually defends it as an example of good design needs to be shot in the head. It makes running games difficult, it takes teaching new people how to play difficult, it requires the DM to spend most of his time fixing leaks and breakages instead of making content for his games. It's a trash heap.

>HotU basically murders Aribeth no matter what so the MC can cuck the OC hero
Oh come on, why the fuck did I keep that damn ring on my finger all this time then

But like, do the other NPCs get less character development? Seems like they do.

>Oh come on, why the fuck did I keep that damn ring on my finger all this time then
You have to look at it from a meta-perspective, user: since HotU starred a new player character, it was the only way for Bioware to include a 'proper' romance with her.

If you want to headcanon that she and your OC character live happily ever after together, just go ahead.

the systems a lot better if u just put ur foot down and say no u can not be an anal lube wizard prestiged into a ding dongling fandangler with 2 levels in the sentient toilet bowl template to give you access to the flesh to poop power from issue 279 of latvian dungeon comrade magazine.

>GOG
Has GoG connect ever worked for you? I don't have that many games on steam, about 50 or so, and none appear to be elligible.

thing is you don't need to do that with a wizard
all you need to do with a wizard in 3.5 is not pick evocation and you're already better than every single non magical class

You tried too hard.

It's more that why did they even bring her back and make her romanceable is the question, the fact they don't even let the poor guy have Sharwyn even after she mentioned wanting to find the hero of Neverwinter again just feels like they just wanted to give the guy a hard kick in the nuts

is there any way to make Pale Master not suck? I want to summon hordes of undead but that +1 caster level every two levels gimps you horribly as a mage with very little appreciable benefit

should I just take Necromancy school and be a pure wiz? pure negative energy sounds fun but there's an unholy amount of undead in the main campaign

fuck why did they have to go with 'lol fuck party system u can have only 1 companion'