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Role Playing (Games)

Neverwinter Nights 2 Expansion Announced 56

Posted by Zonk from the kill-the-monsters-take-their-stuff-rinse-repeat dept.
Next Generation is reporting Atari's announcement of an expansion for Neverwinter Nights 2 entitled Mask of the Betrayer. "Mask of the Betrayer will put players back into the Forgotten Realms (of Dungeons & Dragons fame) shortly after the events of the original Neverwinter Nights 2. The expansion will incorporate a new campaign, more feats and spells, races, weapons, monsters and enhanced modding tools, among other new features. Developer Obsidian Entertainment, the same studio behind the original Neverwinter Nights 2 and 2004's Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords, will be handling development of Mask of the Betrayer."
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Neverwinter Nights 2 Expansion Announced More

Neverwinter Nights 2 Expansion Announced

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  • .. is an add on to Obsidian's Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2 that actually fills in all the missing stuff and stops it looking like a rush job. If it can be done for Fable, it can sure as hell be done for KOTOR 2.

    • Re: (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      http://team-gizka.org/ [team-gizka.org]

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by Channard ( 693317 )
        I know they're working on it, but they won't have access to all the original voice files, even if they can access some of the old ones stored in the game. Nor will it hit X-Box. It's an admirable effort, but I'd really like to Obsidian go back and finish it properly a la The Lost Chapters.
  • ... is the expansion to make the game playable by people with less-than-bleeding-edge video cards.

    We paid to upgrade two of our computers, in order to improve the experience with NWN2, and found it was only marginally less jerky. What we saw was impressive, but we don't think that having to buy 2 $200 video cards in order to play 2 $50 games was a Good Idea.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by horatio ( 127595 )
      I just bought a brand new 680i, dual-core 6600, with an NVidia 8800GTS (640MB), 4GB of memory, etc. I'm not happy because even with that system (arguably it doesn't get significantly better than that given available hardware on the market right now - assuming that buying a pair of 8800GTXs is over the top), I finally had to turn down some of the graphics options because there were several "zones" where the game became unplayable - < 6FPS and herky-jerky trying to move around. And IIRC the worst was in

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by afidel ( 530433 )
        Yep, I upgraded my main gaming PC just before NWN2 came out and it performs like crud even on the lowest settings. I have a Athlon 64 x2 4200+, 2GB ram, Geforce 7600GS and a RAID10 array using 4xSATA2 7200 RPM drives. My friend has a similar system with SLI'd 7600GT's and he barely has any improvement. My goal when making my PC was as little noise as possible from a gaming PC so I could use it in the livingroom, and while I succeeded for most games I can't play NWN2 because I get so frustrated at the crappy
        • I wouldn't touch this game with less than a 7900GT. I have one and there are things that I had to turn down to make the outdoor scenes workable. SLI isn't going to get you much here.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by afidel ( 530433 )
            Considering that the Recommended, not minimum, graphics card is a 256 MB DirectX 9.0c compatible Video card with Pixel Shader 3.0 (ATI Radeon X1600+ or NVIDIA 6800 GT/GS+ or better) and that the 7600GS is substantially faster than either of those cards in PS 3.0 performance I don't think I should have to put up with sustained 8-11 fps in many zones. Heck the 7950 was the fastest card available when NWN2 launched! As others have said, anything less than 8800 SLI sucks for performance in NWN2, that's over $1K
      • Really? I didn't have any framerate issues with my computer running this game, and it's significantly less badass than yours. It's an Athlon X2 4400+, with a BFG Geforce 7900 GT OC, and 2 gigs of ram. I played the whole game through 2x, once as a mage and once as a paladin, and never had any of the extreme framerate issues you did with everything maxxed out. Though it did make my videocard overheat once and start drawing artefacts...

        I do agree with you, however, that the UI definitely could use some w
      • Hmph, with custom settings on medium and high except for shadows, I was able to run it at a comfortable 30 fps or so with a PIV 3.2GHZ 1.5 gigs of ram, and a vanilla 6800. Mind you, tossing shadows in would absolutely kill the framerate.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by simtel ( 798974 )
      One thing to note: there was a significant bug with Xfire that caused EXTREME slowdown in NWN2. Xfire was installed by default. Made lots of people unhappy. I don't know if it's been fixed yet, as I uninstalled Xfire and never looked back.
    • with a x1900xt (oc'd to 668/775), i've been running this at 1920x1440 with everything at max (except the shadow size, that's at low, 512?) and it's actually smooth at 22-26 (lowest fps, it gets a little jerky at 2048x1536) - unpatched (if that actually fixes anything).

      when i first saw this come out, i saw people with 8800's whining about framerate and choppiness... once i played it, i immediately decided that these claims were hogwash. am i to believe that everyone with a step below the cream of the crop h

      • You misunderstand. We briefly -- briefly -- considered the $200 graphics cards (similar to nuking the site from orbit), but determined that every monthly newsletter from Micro Center showing the price decreasing would feel like the death of the thousand cuts. We were upgrading to faster motherboards and CPUs anyway, with more memory, so we thought that that should be enough.

        We'll try out the "Uninstall XFire" suggestion tonight, and see what that does. I'll let you all know, as I have no doubt that you are
        • my best recommendation is to jump onto the c2d bandwagon; personally, i think the best boards are ones that will let you undervolt a lot. i'm using a gigabyte ds3, iirc (single pci-e 16x), and @ 2.33ghz my voltage is only 1.075. this translates into the temp never going above 50C while it sits under my desk churning away at seti 24/7 (stock cpu cooler)

  • Wish-list (Score:4, Insightful)

    by RogueyWon ( 735973 ) * on Thursday April 12, 2007 @01:07PM (#18705511) Journal
    Ok, I really quite liked NWN2, once I'd applied the 1.03 patch to fix the most vicious of the bugs and interface problems. The engine wasn't the greatest, but the writing and general feel of the game was excellent. So, a few things I'd like from an expansion:

    - More customisability for non-PC party members. It kinda sucked just being stuck without any flexibility in their class-level choices and meant that you couldn't really experiment with different prestige classes in the main campaign unless you actually did multiple playthroughs.

    - More tilesets. NWN2 suffered from the same problem as NWN1 here... it relied on the same few tilesets to make up the vast majority of its locations. I say to hell with the toolkit for once - give us some decent looking unique locations in the main campaign. This added a lot of atmosphere in BG2 and it needs to be done again.

    - Better rounded party interactions. Don't get me wrong, I liked the fact that NWN2 brought back a lot of the kind of dialogue we remembered from BG2 and missed from NWN1, but it didn't go far enough. Most of the dialogue trees in the game seemed to be focussed on just a few of the characters. Other characters never really got developed much at all.

    - More "political" sections to the plot. Combat's fun, but so's politicking your way through the cities.

    - Continue to throw in the planar elements from the plot of the main campaign. I enjoyed these a lot. The Forgotten Realms setting on its own can get a little stale. Mixing in elements of the Planescape world in NWN2 added a lot to it, in my experience, and this could be expanded further.

    - Give us a proper ending this time. Oh come on, were you even trying last time?

    - Epic levels? I can take 'em or leave 'em. It would be nice if they were there, I guess, but don't go building an entire expansion around them.
    • They damn well better at least give a proper ending for the last one in this one.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by bahwi ( 43111 )
      Did 1.03 fix the camera problem? I played nwn2 for about 15 minutes and couldn't get the camera to ever look at my person or surroundings or follow or anything useful that games have been doing for years now. :( I really wanna play tho!

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Scuff ( 59882 )
        Did you try looking at the camera settings? there are a bunch of follow options that seem to be what you're looking for. As far as I know, they were in there before any patching.
      • Yes, most people seem happy with the camera controls now with the latest patches. You know you can quickly switch camera mode by pressing * on your numeric keyboard?
    • More tilesets. NWN2 suffered from the same problem as NWN1 here... it relied on the same few tilesets to make up the vast majority of its locations. I say to hell with the toolkit for once - give us some decent looking unique locations in the main campaign. This added a lot of atmosphere in BG2 and it needs to be done again.

      I assume you mean the interiors? NWN2 exteriors use heightmaps and can be almost infintely customized even without adding new textures. I think you'll be surprised what some of the cu

    • Frankly, I found NWN2 to be very mediocre, and I doubt that an expansion can elevate it above that. The game is fundamentally flawed. The first game wasn't very good either, unless you were into modding or multiplayer.
    • - More customisability for non-PC party members. It kinda sucked just being stuck without any flexibility in their class-level choices and meant that you couldn't really experiment with different prestige classes in the main campaign unless you actually did multiple playthroughs.
      - More "political" sections to the plot. Combat's fun, but so's politicking your way through the cities.

      I agree totally with these!

      - More tilesets.

      A given. They have more experience now with the tools and the code, and can concentr
  • . . . are they going to add support for epic levels? Once I got epic levels in NWN, there was no going back for me.

  • Dark Waters (Score:3, Informative)

    by PIPBoy3000 ( 619296 ) on Thursday April 12, 2007 @01:57PM (#18706369)
    Admittedly this is a bit of self-promotion, but the first module of the Dark Waters campaign [adamandjamie.com] should be posted on the Vault [ign.com] tomorrow. It has lots of custom content, voice acting, scripting system, and hopefully a fun little storyline. For people impatient for the expansion, this might tide them over.
    • Thanks for the link, checking it out now.

      One of my beefs with NWN2 is that I thought the campaign was...well, kinda crap. I keep hoping the community will take over and give me some replayability, but I have little desire to replay the builtin campaign again...
    • Awesome I loved Demon, Shadowlords and Dreamcatcher. I'm glad to see that you have kept modding, your modules along with Stefan Gagne and Rick Burton made the game worth playing. Granted both games NWN and NWN2 had great campaigns. Everyone in the NWN community appreciates your hard work.
    • Thanks for all the great work PipBoy. I will play this next week, really looking forward to it!

      Granny plugin announced, nice 1.06 patch content announced, expansion announced, Dark Waters release... It has been a good week for NWN2. I would have included the 1.05 patch, but.... you know. :)

      Oh well, I'd rather wait a few more days than have a patch that infuriates the community.
  • ... a Linux port than an expansion.

    • Re: (Score:1, Troll)

      by crossmr ( 957846 )
      As long as you're willing to pay $2000-$3000 for your copy, I bet they'd do it. That's a completely scientific number based on an unscientific guestimate of how much it would cost to make a port divided be the number of linux users willing to buy it.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by crossmr ( 957846 )
        Awww. Someone couldn't handle the truth? Simple fact is, the game was done in DX9 this time. Its going to cost a lot more to port the game than it did last time. Obviously they don't think there is going to be any return on investment, so the price would have to be higher to sway them to do it.
  • I haven't turned it on in months - between the horrific performance and the plethora of bugs (plus friends having the game crash in Act 2/Act 3), I figured I'd wait until it was stablized, then start playing.

    So is it playable, or are they just trying to get more money from us for an unpatched game?
    • I haven't turned it on in months - between the horrific performance and the plethora of bugs (plus friends having the game crash in Act 2/Act 3), I figured I'd wait until it was stablized, then start playing.

      So is it playable, or are they just trying to get more money from us for an unpatched game?

      I think its playable as it is now. I still wish they could improve performance more, but it is slowly getting better with every patch; and I'd rather have new neat adventures to play. So I think it was good that t

  • Why.... (Score:1, Flamebait)

    by Penguin's Advocate ( 126803 )
    Obsidian has a well deserved reputation for taking good Bioware games and making crappy sequels that look and feel rushed. NWN is a great game, NWN2 on the other hand is crap. The story is crap, the engine is crap, and it's held together with crap. It's like what they did to KoTOR (ie KoTOR2), but on a grander scale. I was very excited about NWN2, I pre-ordered the collectors edition as soon as it was available for pre-order, I convinced my friends to get it, we got all setup to have a lan party on it's
    • I hate to break it to you, but most of the complaints you have about NWN2 were equally applicable to NWN, especially before the two expansions and numerous patches. The main campaign in NWN had a truly wretched story.

      NWN's graphics engine wasn't as demanding as NWN2's, granted, but that doesn't change the fact that NWN was rather dull without expansions and/or good PWs.
    • "NWN is a great game, NWN2 on the other hand is crap. The story is crap, the engine is crap, and it's held together with crap."

      I'm sorry but the original NWN *was a total disaster*, it was only good for the user made content but even the engine itself was awful and cumbersome. It was a game you simply *watched* rather then played. Automatic combat, maybe clicking a few buttons on you command bar now and then after all the tedious and god awfully slow *navigation*. Not to mention all that while looking a
  • Instead we got the same - a graphical engine improvement over NWN, worse writing, more cliches, abysmal artwork (has there ever been a fantasy game with armor as ugly as NWN2?) and no actual functional improvement. Targeting was worse, pathing was worse, areas felt smaller, and the story - argh! Companions were either tedious or worthless (and the romance options just horrible - which are the least-interesting stock characters - yeah, let's use those two) and the story was just an excuse to go from one figh
    • It's amazing how different you can experience a game... I loved it! I respect that it might not lived up to all your expectations, but some things you say I think are a bit unjustified:

      , worse writing, more cliches

      Than the paper thin NWN1 original compaign, which was more of a demo of what you could do with the toolset? Really?

      no actual functional improvement

      Now that is BS... How about having a real party again like in BG2, with up to....I think it was 6 (?) controllable characters in the party, rather than

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