A Thorough Look at Neverwinter Nights

[Music] [Music] in the history of digital role-playing games there are titles that stand as towering classics unforgettable irreplaceable examples of some of the best of that eras design baldur's gate to the witcher 3 skyrim and then there's the other role-playing games the ones that were just as hard to make but slipped farther and farther away from our collective memory as time goes on Neverwinter Nights was an incredibly bold industry-changing title when it was released it was the first game where Bioware as a company shifted away from storytelling as a primary design value and look towards what it was mechanically that these digital worlds could accomplish with an eye towards multiplayer engagement particularly it was one of the very first games to release extensive DLC with their years-long premium module strategy pumping out expansion after expansion between 2 and 4 years after the base game came out Neverwinter Nights was a turning point for the whole role-playing sub-genre it was a weathervane for things to come and a nostalgic anchor for game design techniques from long ago it even spawned an obsidian led sequel Neverwinter Nights and end its expansions premium modules community modules sequel and the expansions for that sequel represent a mammoth amount of creativity and development effort and yet they rarely pop up on anyone's top 10 lists they're not forgotten not exactly but they were niche products even at the time metacritic shows the final expansion for Neverwinter Nights 2 with just shy of a dozen official reviews internationally I didn't even know that the expansion existed before I read about it being bundled into the GOG edition of the game when you get a top 50 RPG list you'll see some of than everyone tonight's titles maybe another few if you dial it out to a top a hundred list but what list is appropriate for the premium modules how do you rank something like Rivard and crown of cormier it's got the most intense ghosting ever seen in a Dungeons & Dragons adventure god damned you Jost but these games are old awkward and very wildly in quality in length their games stuck in between one ERA and another a strange compromise between the story first isometric era that obsidian and paradox have come back around to in recent years and the increasingly mechanically oriented multiplayer minded Bioware that's about to release anthem here in 2018 the last thing like the Neverwinter it's games was Bioware's Dragon Age Origins which was in many ways a direct descendant of what Bioware did here with their Forgotten Realms titles but Dragon Age is a classic never won her Knights - is not baldur's gate is a classic Neverwinter Nights one is not how come playing and talking about a classic is always comfortable grounds there's already a whole trail network of thought and critique of assumptions and understandings and plain old memes about the game already available never won tonight's though feels different for some of these premium modules I could only find a single professional review contemporary with their release they seem to be completely absent from the broader conversation about RPGs in any meaningful way at all and yet each of these games has this gleaming core of creative ambition smaller and smaller studios and development teams finding themselves with a shot at an officially licensed DMD product every last team no matter how small took the weight of that creative responsibility seriously to talk about the RPGs we all know are classic it's exciting to be part of the conversation to engage with an obviously meaningful landmark work this video though we're gonna do something different within everyone tonight so you're not at the front of the library with a staff recommended table and the new releases this video were going back into the stacks where the shelves grow taller and the light turns flickering dim under an old fluorescent bulb take a volume down though blow off the dust and the adventure begins again unaware of the passage of time never won tonight's one is a platform for storytelling more than it's a story itself itself conception was never solely rooted in a single adventure like the isometrics with their hand-drawn backgrounds from the beginning the idea was to give the player the ability to create and participate in D&D adventures as both player and Dungeon Master to create a digital environment for interpersonal multiplayer role-playing in 2002 they were doing this it's a hugely forward-thinking design and a bold one for completely re-examining the assumptions of the Bioware RPG up to this point namely that story and character are the bedrock of a computer D&D experience in the world of exquisitely detailed 2d backgrounds it usually had to be story gives direction and a density of storytelling lets you use one single hub map for a huge variety of quests and content Neverwinter Nights would be different because it's 3d engine allowed it to be different it's worth noting how willingly in starkly different a game this is then any that Bioware had made before this point never won tonight's is at its heart a tool set the campaign Bioware metaphor it is one of the most truly boring half-assed ones they've ever done Mass Effect Andromeda for all of its failings is a much deeper and better presented script than this never won tonight's one is the single most mediocre story and BIOS catalog but by the time you're done with it you're left with two important pieces of knowledge one you know how a campaign is structured how the maps are bound together in a module how quest triggers work and what the general limitations of the aurora engine are you learn all this because these usually hidden processes are completely transparent in Neverwinter Nights the environments are angular and bare it's a game of hallways and doors all the ways things hinge together all the thresholds you cross to trigger conversations or traps all of them are plain against the largely undecorated background conversation is even relegated to a small corner of the screen where once the words were given a whole half of the visual field now they're simply another menu mode alongside your inventory and character sheet dialogue is a feature of third edition Dungeons & Dragons but it's not the primary one quests as a result are primarily transactional it's not who you know it's what no new trigger that counts good dialogue and everyone tonight's is a problem that gets solved in a few different ways as we move deeper into the content but in starting to talk about the first game the foundation of a half decades worth of storytelling and more the most striking and important element of the base experience is this naked mechanical formatting never won tonight's never really even wanted to hide the rules of the game from the player the implementation of the tabletop roll set and the world building tools available to player in Dungeon Master like in this digital environment was the game it was an attempt to be newly faithful to the source tabletop game by translating it differently than before more mechanically more structurally than any 2d ice made isometric including Icewind Dale had done or broadly been able to do so when you're finished with the main campaign its construction is no mystery you see how the trick was done every not every bolt every weld and then the second piece of important knowledge trickles down the muted nonsense that there's got to be a way to do this better isn't that the job of a template to provide definition without personality to encourage those using the template to fill all the details in with their own creative priorities the main campaign of the original game is in every way that counts default Bioware three-act structure check ancient creator races coming back to destroy the newer civilizations checker ooh before Knights of the Old Republic before mass effect before Dragon Age this played with the exact same general setup companions with slowly revealed backstories check all the features of what we think of when we think Bioware all their signature little flourishes find them right here but presented in the most straightforward lackluster agonizingly stretched out way possible truly if Neverwinter Nights had been even slightly memorable in the details of its storytelling people would have thrown up their hands and said you've done this before when it comes to something like Mass Effect but the difference is that the later game hits all the storytelling beats this one missed with an energy and a visual bombast far beyond anything neverwinter nights initially offered Mass Effect is a classic Neverwinter Nights is not who could forget the Reapers but even among people who have beaten neverwinter nights a lot of the ones I've talked to kind of forgot about the whole long convoluted plot about how lizard people from thousands of years ago had enslaved the sword coasts and conspire from the shadows to do so again to be fair the campaign takes nearly 80 hours and lizards don't take a huge amount of that time but they have in terms of importance similar weight and the script as the reapers do the scale and length of Neverwinter Nights main campaign foils any momentum that these revelations might have built up each act takes 20 hours and more and are proportionate about as evenly as the user interface a little bit of dialogue a lot of inventory management and a lot of fiddling with spell books in abilities the first act takes place in the city of Neverwinter hunting magical creatures across four districts each with their own theme they can be tackled in any order the second act has you looking for clues as to a mysterious cults whereabouts it's the longest of the acts and also has four major components which can be done in freeform order this act takes place across wide-ranging wilderness and small rural settlements classic adventuring stuff the third act does the same but with higher stakes for higher levels it ends with dragons but it's only here at the margins of the third act where they start going ham on the ancient reptilian conspiracy it's easy to remember the format the openness the sense of adventure it's equally easy easy to forget when the game comes to you at the last minute to say also dude the lizard people are real and they secretly want to rule the world because never wonder Knights was designed with multiplayer in mind the party dynamics of the single-player experience are agonizingly bad there are companions available for any kind of character class in the game whatever you like but only one of them at a time Dungeons and Dragons as a whole is oriented around the party the more players the better balance the more options you'll have to navigate a dungeon and most of your time in the main campaign is all about the dungeons the majority of items in the game are randomly generated from loot tables just like as the core rules say you're supposed to do this often means that the majority of items are worthless and garbage its hellacious to try to save money you'll still be picking up less than a dozen gold pieces at a time at level 15 the exceptions to this are random loot for large chests which are with just a tiny fraction of exceptions trapped and locked [ __ ] all of them and so are most dungeons in general with traps that often instantly kill your character causing a penalty in experience points in gold what you really need is a robe you can play one yourself and choose freely from the other companions or you can choose literally any other class for yourself and find yourself completely at the mercy of locks and traps that he plumbs elite trip over one entanglement spell blending into another fireball trap blending into the umpteenth instant kill negative energy trap listen when I tell you this campaign is just insufferable without a dedicated rogue luckily they have one just one good old Tomy under gallows I've played this game three times twice when I was younger and once for this video I have never used a companion besides Tummie because I almost never want to play as a thief myself Tommy has repeating dialogue from most activities across 80 hours of play ago I think I've heard each of his repeating lines somewhere between 1 and 20 billion times and I still barely know anything about him as a character unlike modern Bioware games or earlier Bioware games for that matter the dialogue triggers for Tommy are based on your character leveling up before hitting certain triggers playing on evenly or forgetting about Tommy's quest for a level can easily result in missed triggers and missed quests I tried hard to get Tommy's dialog to trigger this time around and it still only very sporadically did but what I did get was as generic base template as the rest of it Omaha fling thief I am I am is his whole stick it doesn't get nuanced it doesn't get better he just tells you more stock standard stories of chaotic neutral adventure the other characters from what dialogue I saw are similarly familiar combinations of race class and alignment they're instantly recognizable as the indie archetypes and instantly forgettable as such - they're the characters you see on the cover and in the illustrations of the players handbook useful cliches to springboard off of when designing your own material familiar but anonymous mechanically Tommy is indispensable I hate adventuring without him because he spots the traps and unlocks the chests I hate adventuring with him and because he's annoying as hell and he never shuts up a classic adventuring relationship to be sure especially with a halfling thief being the annoying one but consider each trap each individual chest has a countdown timer a long one and the line of acknowledgement dialogue if you open 50 chests you wait maybe two and a half minutes total and you hear or consider it done fifty times and then maybe another two and a half minutes of nose-picking timer bars and fifty line readings on top of that to disarm the traps it's just awful it's time-consuming and repetitive in the worst way and because the loot is randomly generated that likelihood it'll be worth your time is a huge long shot if I hadn't have looted the dungeons I would have been done in 40 hours or less but looting is a huge component of the dungeon crawl experience a critical one and here that critical component is interminable in borin it's the campaign's greatest failing by a big margin lack of creativity being the runner-up in general what's funny is that this failure to make Luton compelling is a feature of the main campaign and not never win tonight's in general you can do it differently and after going through all of these disappointing timer bars I'll have had time to think of a half-dozen better ways to do it yourself but this this is the default the default says roll the loop table to determine your loot is it fun no but it's the damn rules to navigate this rule driven world you need practical solutions a thief is practical the idea is that a total fidelity to these systems will allow for the same creativity of interacting with the systems as a tabletop game but there are concessions a party of two makes massive sacrifices in agency over the bottom baldur's gate model but also increases mechanical challenge you're not down there to solve interpersonal problems you're down there to fight monsters and open chests if you're not playing online with friends there's one guy for that your old pal time only Tommy isn't remotely real as a person or a character he's a can opener with a backstory you can't talk to him much he talks to you based on predetermined triggers you can choose someone else but you give up massive conveniences in navigating what makes up most of the actual gameplay experience you can't even say to him Tom for one [ __ ] night would you just cool it with the accent like you might in person the single companion system is Bioware's most Awkward underwhelming approach to the traditional tabletop party in their catalog they abandon it and amend it in favor of something more interesting as soon as you hit the expansion's but in the meantime tommy is what happens when he try to design a role-playing game adventure based on a manual instead of on a module it's in the open construction of the second and third act though that the game finds an independent identity it hadn't been since the original baldur's gate but so much effort was spent on meandering low-impact outdoor space what that captures is the sense of possibility and lurking adventure that much more modern open world games build on as a foundation the first act in ever winter is a real slog difficult on account of the low level of the protagonist with most of your times been swinging and not connecting with in combat but also claustrophobic in the miniscule focus of each district here's your two hours of zombies your two hours of pirates your two hours of escaped prisoners and miscellaneous bandits by the time you get to the second act and realize you have these huge unknown areas in every cardinal direction from the hub town it is joyfully liberating it's these local vignettes where the game sometimes does coalesce into a memorable nugget of storytelling like the town of char wood village it's been frozen in time deep in the forest one night long ago all the children disappeared into a nearby castle and never returned then the centuries began to blend together for the townsville the celestial powers have determined what happened within the castle is a crime against existence but would like a mortal to judge what happened exactly there's to witness slash suspects interview and a surprise third suspect in the form of a powerful demon that you can summon in question you need the testimony of all three for a positive outcome your judgement will determine if the souls of char would find agony or peace it's rich engaging storytelling if only for a moment venturing deeper and deeper into moody Twilight forests filled with monsters and mysteries that's good the engine might be dated but it honestly does a better job with the outdoors than it does with the indoors the light and the foliage from gently falling leaves to grass that sways in the breeze helps slightly disguise what an undecorated stone hallway doesn't about the fundamental from template construction of all of these maps the game's distance fog artificial and pointless indoors actually does help set the scene outdoors now all the outdoor environments are built on obvious elevation tears with bottomless canyons and flat top hills they're just as much bolted together hardware-store sets as the rest of it but here it's something where creative effort was put into the into it to counter the artificiality for dungeons the right-angled mazes are part of the intended experience as well used to be people would make their D&D maps on graph paper and this is meant to capture that particular thrill not the effort to make something convincingly naturalistic but the effort to make something artificially structurally crafty a better mousetrap for the players and that's the thing that's ultimately so exhausting about the game the main campaign is essentially a celebration of the format of done and Dragons and so it's elements are all self justified in a way that strips the middle of a lot of meaning there are a lot of dungeons out there in the woods some even with a quest attached but they're there because it's assumed that I like them by default you go down and into the caves and you kill an orca chieftain and then you kill a troll chieftain and then you kill a bugbear chieftain anyone would do but different animals to enemy types for different level ranges so kill them all there's a dozen too many crypts in the game but they're full of loot and opportunities for paladin and priest characters to shine so pile them on the game's laziness of writing hits a peak when they do a whole series of quests where the local troops are poisoning an indigenous tribe with plague blankets and then justifying their hostilities when the tribe lashes out I mean there's phoneand and n and then there's using famous historical war crimes as filler content not to mention the you know literal reptilian conspiracy that makes up the main plot the best vignette material of the most creative side quests that you'll find out in the deep wilderness surrounding the city of Neverwinter are all relatively self-contained a story well told is equally as mechanically valuable or maybe less than Neverwinter Nights the new dungeon crawl through through troll tunnels little of it makes an impact besides experience points in loot but looking back it's those moments like char wood that I actually remember of 80 hours of play I had maybe 10 that stood out the rest quickly fade receding into fog and unloaded from memory like everything else more than 50 feet from where the player is standing and everyone to nights doesn't see its landscape in terms of traditional art like the fixed perspective isometrics did with their lush hand-drawn backgrounds it sees it like the dungeon master always has instead lines on the graph paper that become with the application of human imagination so much more than that of the details of a room or a place in the game are communicated through text more than through the 3d assets what you see isn't exactly what's meant to be there what you see is the board and figures on the board they're representative of a more detailed more nuanced full image that's built inside the mind still that's why the old isometrics preferenced story so heavily the imagination is already running at speed from just the words alone the images and the emotional investments and the general believability of the narrative all elevate the action up in a way from 2d sprites on a screen within everyone tonight's the shift from 2d to 3d tried to make the world seem more concrete and less imaginative the swords spark and clink the camera pans in any direction the world is less obviously a painting the approach is more technically sophisticated in the programming and more technically minded in the play experience but the 3d is so rudimentary that the imagination is required to pick up most the slack anyway and without the character-driven world building that made that load an easy one to lift in games past refer again to Mass Effect Andromeda the story is half-hearted in cliche like this one but the experience flies by a lot quicker and a lot smoother because of all the pretty shiny things and the grand sci-fi vistas it doesn't do a good job of firing the imagination but it does do a good job of being cool to look at and normally enjoyable in its core in mechanical loops of shootin and pressing the used key the main campaign back here in 2002 is more rote and derivative than Mass Effect Andromeda by a good margin and yet the 3d world has close to nothing to distract from that visually in fact you're given ample time to consider what other games you could be playing while you wait for another lock chest in another sparsely decorated room to be popped open by our old pal Tommy when even the dungeons are boring the game is a true digital purgatory not truly awful not remotely good with no seeming beginning or end the dungeons though can be well considered and have obviously received the most creative attention out of anything in the campaign in the third act there's a dungeon with a time-travel gimmick with one version of the dungeon in the past and one of the present swapping back and forth is required to navigate it here in 2018 and you've got games like Dishonored 2 that pull the same trick better of course but the trick sure is a good one and opening the puzzle box of the dungeon is just as satisfying in this older configuration with an actual party of characters I was invested in it would be perfect but it's just me and Tommy in our own private production of no exit I killed the monsters and he slowly disarms and unlocks the path ahead over and over until the end of time it's worth comparing never when tonight's main campaign to Knights of the Old Republic which Bioware would release the following summer nights uses a d20 system almost exactly like third edition D&D and mechanically speaking they are very similar games it's a 3d world ranged according to the old isometric structures Knights the Old Republic uses the previous Bioware model of party driven dialogue focused progression and a much tighter more selective approach to designing the levels and presenting itself generally there are six worlds to go to and Knights the Old Republic each one distinct with a rich local plotline that ties back to and progresses the main plot by contrast Neverwinter Nights has at least three times the amount of physical space as nicely Old Republic we have half the variation in environment and half the density of quests in dialogue sure most dungeons have quests but they're almost either bring me the head of chief whoever or I've lost my magical suppositories or something else that involves little player choice in fact the opportunities for actual role-playing are a few and far between your options for a quest are usually yes enthusiastic yes/no and a persuade role to get 200 extra gold for saying yes everything people complained about regarding the simplification of role-playing between fallout 2 and 3 or new vegas and fallout 4 also happened here within the Bioware catalogue but the novelty of 3d and the reprioritization towards combat and engineering or enough to lead many people to forgive it a PC game review from the time were first the story is one of quote sweeping grandeur and I wonder what kind of mindset you'd have to be in to feel that way about it even by the standards of Icewind Dale this is a come down in quality take the game's most important NPC lady era Beth you begin the game in a heroes Academy which is a blatant excuse to have mandatory tutorials for the first half hour of the game when hero school gets out you graduate and air Beth hens you your adventurers diploma what a complication arises so she sets you on a path to find the creatures stolen from the Academy which will help cure a plague in the city etc etc era Beth is married to fin thick a naive good guy elf whose palace with dester a priest of helm who is obviously visibly villain so by the end of the first act Finn Thicke laid it all on the line to help his buddy destro you know with his important secret ritual which she chose not to ask questions about little dis fence ik know about the reptilian conspiracy so when the act is over if n think his sentenced to death alongside Wester in the second act this makes lady arrow Beth very sad she's a paladin lawful good she must abide by the justice that took her husband by the end of the second act she's been turned to the dark side I'm sorry too chaotic evil becomes a blackguard which is the reverse paladin prestige class for third edition and now works for the lizard Queen this is all apparently because she loved fanfic so much you see and what even is justice if a well-meaning elf like him etc etc there's a phrase among players for people who play lawful good in a way that is irritating for everyone and makes no narrative sense called lawful stupid this is lady era Beth from head to toe her internal conflict only exists because she's apparently unable to be a nuanced enough character to deal with fen thix poor judgment without violating the alignment of her character class if a player were to ask the dungeon master in this campaign can I be mad about finta can still be a paladin the DM would say obviously of course in the game would continue but this whole plot the longest-running plot thread in the game is completely dependent on a fundamentalist interpretation of lawful good as one that can't even question lawful action era Beth continually acts like a first-time player might play a paladin sacrum a good and flexible in perspective sent into melodramatic fits by even a hint of moral gray if you've gotten her back story during act 2 it's possible to redeem her in act 3 but even that feels Hollow since her characters arc is so flat and irritating you're making a persuade role on what ought to be common since era Beth is a character who like the others seems to come from a generalized example in the core rule books more than a specific example in a linter module or a Forgotten Realms novel era Beth is a narrative built from the rule that says that paladin's cannot level up in their class if their alignment shifts away from lawful good her late act self is a template for how to use the blackguard prestige class in a campaign for your character or an NPC you might have in mind if she was in illustration in the core rulebook a brief paragraph of text in italics her story would be perfectly serviceable but this is a big deal Bioware campaign her story strung out across hours and hours of play three acts era Beth to me underlines more than anything else that the main campaign of Neverwinter Nights is a vestigial peripheral thing - what never when tonight's really is it's an attempt to translate the game of Dungeons & Dragons the dice and the graphed paper and the rules where Mulder's Gabe was much more an attempt to translate the experience of Dungeons and Dragons the main campaign is devoid of personality almost by design to show an example of a game with a truly impartial digital Dungeon Master and deliberately familiar motifs the numeric plot the generic of gameplay of the generic characters these are just examples of what the game can do never won tonight's is more it's a platformer it's a toolbox all these elements of plot quest design level design their reconfigurable assets like the doors like the hallways the game is a great stack of creative firewood all in a tidy pile and surrounded by kindling but it'll take a spark of something more than what's provided to actually set it alight and warm yourself by the flame the first expansion shadows of under entired was developed mostly by a smaller studio called floodgate entertainment you can tell right away while the expansion mimics much of the three-act structure of the main campaign at every juncture it presents itself with more personality and creativity than anything in Bioware's default template campaign shadows Bundren tide has an authentic feeling of a human dungeon master not some impartial digital one it's willing to tell jokes provide convenient weapons offer multiple solutions and best of all it has companion characters that are actually tied to the greater arc of the story more than that though is that the game has a kind of casual feel to it not breaking the fourth wall in obvious ways but more willing to be playful with its cliches and less likely to present them straightforwardly from the beginning it presents an alternate vision of the rough structure of the original campaign you begin at level in a heroes academy but not an institutional generalized one they're one of several students of renowned adventure master drogon one night Grogan is poisoned by a mysterious assailant and even though you are not ready your final test will be to leave drogon school for the greater wilderness and find a way to save him not only is this more engaging than thanks for completing the tutorial here is your hero's diploma it puts the player right in rural adventuring mode the mode that was the most satisfying exciting thing about the second and third acts of the main campaign the original campaigns choice to keep the player inside Neverwinter for the early levels made the difficulty of low-level D&D more pronounced than it has to be because it was all hallways and dungeons once you were released into the greater world you are already at a level that let you utilize your class in a comprehensive way I'm sure but the fun of low-level D&D is that you just aren't much good at anything yet you're fragile and clumsy and as such the scale of your conflicts are smaller and the victory is more surprising Baldur's Gate 1 was built very specifically around only the low levels and it made it venturing through all that seemingly inconsequential wilderness feel much more dangerous filled with greater possibility shadows abundant I'd immediately leans into that feeling taking the player from levels 1 to 8 or so across a sprawling first act in a snowy forest but even in the first hour there's more to pull you in than the main campaign your companion has chosen from the other students depending on what class you'd like and while each is grounded in a fantasy archetype they all feel a little more specific in their personalities than Tommy and the crew Dorna traps Springer is this expansions the Finn cheese is actually a very likable character cheese's green as you are to start and her arca the story runs on the same curve as the player characters affected by the same events sure she does always push for a profit angle but she's got a core goodness that does make her likable and none of what she says or does is unreasonable within the setting more she doesn't tell rambling stories of wacky hijinx from outside the scope of the story there's not a huge difference in creativity required to write a cliche a character like Tommy who's completely interchangeable into nearly any story and cliche character like Dorna who's definitively tied to a single place in time but the difference in making the effort to ground a character and what's actually going on is huge that might seem like storytelling 101 but never won tonight's was a widely acclaimed and highly reviewed product that didn't even make that effort with companion characters it's the low point and the whole Bioware catalog for dialogue writing and they never went so flatly generic again so lesson clearly learned but he put the expansion in the original campaigns next to each other and man the little alterations stack up into what's both a damning indictment of autopilot fantasy writing and a celebration of but a personal touch small studios can bring to a story when given a turn in the spotlight the end of the first act has he fighting a dragon at way too low level and instead of being a big mechanical obstacle it's a pretty damn funny puzzle instead so there's a kobold named deacon he's real good at playing guitar low guys a cool bard and he's got an important piece of the puzzle about what happened to drogon but he'll only tell you if you free him from the dragon who owns him now you can bargain for deacon or while questing on the opposite side of the forest you can acquire an artifacts that will turn you for time into a frosted giant which the dragon happens to have a phobia about in the main campaign you only encounter dragons when you're high enough level to slay them or else have opportunities to go and get those levels then come back pretty quick here the dragon is a conundrum in the way a dragons so often used to be treated in the tabletop settings something you'd be an idiot for facing head-on you'll have to outsmart it grovel before it or take a gamble on powerful magic to defeat it finding the solution means exploring the forest thoroughly and engaging with a majority of the other content in the act and it all feels so fun and so free the experience of loot flows quickly and freely in each diversion is worthwhile to explore each element of the game world feels deliberately crafted many item and character descriptions including little jokes or some element of casual absurdity while still not really breaking the thematic integrity of the fantasy setting it's like with a human DM some people are just a little more casual and jokey with their players and others freer with the loot quicker with the rewards a DM who's more likely to laugh along with a player's harebrained scheme than to sourly command them to make an immediate dexterity check in comparison to Bioware style including the better fantasy of Baldur's Gate flood gates effort feels very much like that friendly fun-loving diem take this scene with the Dragons other kobold servants there's a giant stone head blocking the path and only the kobolds can raise it with a bucket contraption once you earn their favor and their command to stick the kobolds will line up jump off a cliff into the bucket and slowly fill the bucket with their scaly little bodies in order to open the passage this is a lot of funding for the kobolds they love this [ __ ] it's one of the most willfully goofy things I've ever seen an official D&D campaign and shadows of unturned tide is filled with smaller moments of whimsy a lot like it and it works because the game isn't completely goofy when it counts it takes the emotional lives of its characters quite seriously there are moments of doubt friendship and sacrifice that land better than any of the main campaigns melodrama it works because the creative effort is there to bond the player to the characters you laugh with them you fight with them you worry with them what makes a worthwhile D&D game is it rolling dice is it telling stories it's never really either one in isolation the mark of a good campaign is the smoothness of how well a writer a developer or Dungeon Master can blend the raw mechanics of D&D with the human dimensions of its world building the dragon on the winter woods are just the first act anyway shadows of under and tide is a hefty piece of content a true expansion pack from the days when post release material had to be large enough to merit a standalone retail release of its own once drogon is cured and back on his feet the real Chase Begins Rogen's attackers are fleeing deep into the a Naraku desert with a powerful artifact and nefarious intent bad news right the second act shakes up the structure of the game again pivoting from hub town surrounded by free-form wilderness to a funnel journey across the desert he'll make three stops in the way to your destination some planned some not and the journey can't continue until these local concerns are addressed you'll be attacked by scorpion people who make you fight a Manticore in an arena deep beneath the sands you'll defeat an ancient mummy whose zombie minions have been fouled a sacred Oasis he'll bargain with drunk archaeologists and raid a dozen tombs yourself it's a different flavor of environment in a different pace of adventure from anything neverwinter nights had offered so far leaving behind the stock standard told a squirrel to head into the Forgotten Realms other weirder locales The Forgotten Realms setting is pretty huge actually encompasses a wide variety of influences in aesthetics in its different regions the games are often set around the Sword Coast but there are thousands of miles further out to set stories in as we go along we'll start to see more and more of that in various modules shadows of under entired is the first one to use the most generic part of the setting just as the springboard for a grander adventure on a more ambitious scale the second act has fantastic momentum to it because of the vignette format the players in the mid levels now getting exciting loot and fighting weirder monsters appropriate to that power level deeper you get into the far reaches of the desert the more prepared you feel Rogan was right you're gonna be ok at the same point of the main campaign you were still fighting orcs to check off fetch quests and score randomly generated loot at the end of the second act here you found an ancient city under the sands nether all the greatest magical empire of all history which had cities that floated in the sky then one day the magic was interrupted all magic everywhere and the cities fell to the ground and shattered gogans lost artifact will restore one under an tide to the sky you get there just barely barely too late to stop it Grogan sacrifices himself so you can keep going and stop the plot before the city can be used to bring havoc to the realms so the third act then is all dungeon as you navigate the city and try to break into its control rooms there are old golems deadly traps and the secrets of a lost evil magic civilization to boot it's just [ __ ] great and now you're in the 12 to 18 range for levels your peak capability for dealing with danger so danger is what you get in great heaping fistfuls every act in shadows Avenger and tide is tied to the ideal kind of pacing and encounter difficulty for Dean Dee's level ranges each part of the story is mechanically and environmentally distinct and each step the way feels full promise and possibility when I thought to myself maybe I'll play Neverwinter Nights again almost all of my memories turned out to be from shadows of under and tide it's got that spark the little bright flash of creativity that turns a game into an adventure if the main campaign was essentially a demo for what the engine and tool said of Neverwinter Nights is capable of shadows of under anti it was proof that the underlying foundation was a solid one after all with the technical structure of the base game and the creative flesh of the expansion the potential of the game was becoming more readily visible the second retail expansion horton's of the Underdark proves the creative flexibility of Neverwinter Nights by going even farther afield than either of its predecessors into the epic level range beyond 20 and even beyond the material plain of thier own into the cosmological backstage of Dungeons & Dragons Great Wheel hordes of the Underdark is a full Bioware production but more wild and experimental than anything they did the first time around with Neverwinter Nights main campaign strangely it even seems to acknowledge the first game's awkward and lackluster writing at a few different points and in varying degrees of self-criticism the first is that in choosing a player character whose story to continue hordes of the Underdark strongly preferences continuing your character from shadows of unrented many conversations assume a familiarity with deacon the kobold bard for instance Deacon will even give you a book he wrote about your adventures together in shadows of under and tide and when he asks you what you thought of the book you can say that at least it was better than the hero of Neverwinter story we're two expansions deep in a year and a half after the initial release we can laugh about it now can't we so the game starts off with a vision of a drow priestess in full maximum camp costume and an assassin at your room in the inn but instead of setting insights outward to another open ended wilderness romp the expansion sends you down into the realm of under mountain playground of the mad wizard Hollister Hollister is basically a jackass version of elminster the drow are planning something characteristic nasty and you've got to go down and figure out what the deal is with that cordis evander dark walks in interesting tonal balance on the one hand it is nearly as self-aware of shadows wandering tide as being primarily high fantasy camp not to be taken entirely seriously on the other hand it uses the unpredictable utterly blown out power curve of epic level Dungeons and Dragons adventuring to continually escalate the stakes higher and higher to widen the scale of the world more and more until it becomes hard to not take what you're doing seriously on account of the raw audacity of it all the is in the escalation the slow boiling absurdity under mountain is a series of difficult deadly dungeons leading ever downward it's not really free or open the way other campaigns are in their first acts but the dungeoneering is much harsher and more engaging you're long past orc chieftains now you're into that real bizarre extremely dangerous part of the monster manual where you're fighting giant gelatinous cubes and undead dragons so the first act is comfortable and unambitious within the world building and action verbs of the game it's just a dungeon crawl albeit a denser and more unpredictable dungeon crawl than you've seen before the funny thing about epic level dungeon design though is that since the player is getting near godlike in their classes capabilities and well leveled into one of the many prestige classes which provide even greater edge not every combat encounter is necessarily dangerous so puzzles come into greater focus and most levels of the under mountain pivot on a central puzzle or combination lock of some sort getting to the bottom of under mountain is an act of besting one of Bioware's most intricate dungeons though watchers keep of the new 3d approach and the dungeon is just the appetizer the first act ends with you liberating Hollister from the drow but since he's kind of a dick he repays you by binding you to a magical spell requiring you to kill the Valor s the scenery-chewing elf from the cutscenes you begin Act two in a settlement of nice growl followers of Elias tree from here you'll branch out into the Underdark with as much freedom as anything in the main campaign a huge and sprawling act with six major quests each containing multi-level dungeons and their own side quests when he went into the Underdark in baldur's gate - it was in the upper mid levels you were wildly outclassed by most things especially be holders the Balder dungeon here is just as brutal but since it's designed at the epic level it's got a much bigger population and much more patently unfair climax fight for those who enjoy the mechanical challenges of third edition hordes of the Underdark delivers dungeons and scenarios meant to flex the most powerful spells and abilities that characters have using routinely the ninth level magic that before was only seen around the very climax of an adventure the Underdark is a well chosen setting for epic level content on account of its whole thematic come everything down here is menacing evil ominous sailing quiet underground oceans lit by algae trying to match wits with an elephant elder brain in its very own City unraveling the cult of an ancient and demonic enemy any direction you choose has a detailed and dense subplot to investigate and conquer the anonymous vague fetch quests of the original campaign give way entirely to exciting story hooks and imaginative twists even in quests that do seem at first to be mundane the companion system continues to improve you can have two at once now and all the companions in the expansion have extensive and frequent conversations with you in the first act they even brought back companions from the original campaign like you know [ __ ] Tommy under gallows but this time even his voice actor seems to know to cool it a little bit and he's much more even keeled and maybe even slightly more believable as a character than his original configuration a change of the guard in the writers is partially responsible this game was one of the first that David Gaider was laid writer on gator would go on to be lead writer on Dragon Age Origins and especially Dragon Age 2 even wrote novels in the Dragon Age universe but before all that he did the final official Bioware expansion for Neverwinter Nights that is one of the really interesting things about revisiting these old titles the adventures aren't just engaging as the indie games they're like discovering the early albums of bands you like where the sounds are less produced and the ideas are more haphazard but the vibe is still recognizable even in its creatively larval stage never won tonight's is intimately connected to the greater history of Western RPGs but not in flashy huge ways it's full of references to games that came before with elements that preface design choices and writing priorities and games yet to come the games may not be classic exactly but the closer you look the more important they do seem to become the hinge between one style of writing and another can be seen by a glance through the companions it's not just the Tommies chilled out and matured a bit it's that the game stopped treating him as a general idea of a character wacky halfling thief and added the basic emotional truth that no one can maintain that kind of energy level in momentum forever and more professional and quiet to me he's been a hero for a while that makes it harder for him to be a scoundrel and then Deacon especially deacon is on the surface every bit the novelty character a jar jar binks ish figure unless you take him straightforwardly that he's one of what's considered mindless foolish species who feels genuine curiosity about the world and expresses it through art through his music and telling his bards tales of heroes Deacon came to emulate the archetype honest courageous helpful Deacon is a hero because he set his mind to it and didn't let anyone tell him different even though everyone constantly belittled him and laughed at him to have deacon here as an epic level companion means that Deacon is a more accomplished adventurer than most ever become but he's still humble and goofy and genuinely endearing ways deacon reminds me of one of my dogs a little blue heeler who puts her ears down and her tail between her legs when she's confused and worried by something silly like the vacuum cleaner but then always leaps up to Barker guts out and pursue anything she perceives up as a real danger like shapes in the darkness beyond a campfire deacons acknowledgement phrase a hesitant um okay has become kind of a meme between my wife and I with this dog of ours it's in that way that Deacon is likable he's got the utter earnest loyalty in goofy companionship of a dog combined with the wits and opposable thumbs that allow him to be a real adventurer like the tall folk deacons kind of a low-key mascot character for him for the franchise to appearing else oh and never went to Knights - but the apex of his journey is in the under mountain out of his depth and hesitantly optimistic anyway it would have been so easy to boil Deacon down to shtick like the Companions of the original campaign but hordes of the Underdark took him seriously more seriously than you'd think maybe you ought to and in doing so made him feel real or real enough for D&D anyway the new companions - ideologically opposed drow are with you through the second and third act and feel almost ahead of their time and how they challenge the players at ambitions and assumptions in the party dialogue but the most surprising and even shocking bits of companion writing are reserved for none other than Lady aera Beth whose soul is trapped in the frozen hell of Kenya for what she did in the events of the main campaign she isn't even a significant part of the third act just a stop on the way to completing a larger quest and there's little guarantee that she'll actually with you but in going over the events of the main campaign she tells you a revisionist account of events that put her whole character in a new light she says that when she got here mephistopheles Lord of this hill knew her deepest secret and dammed her with it the secret that she never loved fanfic at all who were overreactions her absurd treason they weren't melodrama over the events in front of her but a hidden anguish over the knowledge that she didn't want to be who she was she hated herself pious sanctimonious Arab EV was a front to hide her existential discomfort so when thin thick died as she didn't turn evil out of mourning she turned because she kind of always wanted to because the despair she gave into was an old wound deep enough to fall into and never come out here in Hell all this seems distant to her now she recounts it with a rise sadness that's more humanizing than literally anything she ever said or did in the main campaign hordes of the Underdark does a great job at what you do expect at epic level Adventure and intricate dungeoneering but it does an even better job at things you'd never expect like taking the saddest rags of the original campaigns plot and weaving them into something bright and eye-catching and new the structure of the second act has you organizing defense for the Elias tree believers while dismantling the balfour s is our mains piece-by-piece if you spend too much time bouncing back and forth the battle will come before you've had a chance to do it all but it doesn't matter how much you do because at the end of the second act which feels so thoroughly climactic you're killed without hardly and effort by mephistopheles and damned to the hell of Kenya escaping hell is the surprise third act and man is it ever surprise this final fight of the expansion is in many ways a love letter to Planescape torment even though Planescape didn't make the transition from a D&D to third edition the cosmology did they even throw in a ton of sigil slang like Burke clueless etc sometimes it feels a little excessive but when the game does things like have a deadly ancient black dragon tend bar at the tavern and sends you off to learn the true names of demons from an ancient creature with the body of a butterfly on the head of a woman the tone certainly feels pretty Planescape it's kind of striking to trace the path of what novelty is to the player and the player character across the two expansion packs and shadows abundant I'd it was neat that the woods had snow and it wasn't the same old late spring of the original tile set you started out being vexed by Colts and here you are breaking out of the coldest part of hell the actually coldest part of hell that's the kind of bizarre thrill of following a single BMD character across the whole power spectrum into the epic levels the escalations of conflicts start to become absolutely preposterous given enough time loot and experience points by this level in baldur's gate you're on the cusp of actual godhood of the child of Baal in all their horrifying glory well the first act of hordes of the Underdark was dungeon puzzler and the second act was a surprise open-world this third act even mimics the level design of the isometrics by presenting a dense hub oriented series of environments more dependent on dialogue and combat air exploration your main quest is even peculiar and that old Planescape kind of way where there's a celestial with knowledge you seek who is sleeping a magical sleep until he finds his true soulmate the woman the universe literally intended for him to wake him you cross his acolyte and she can die in the conflict when he finally reached the knower of names you can learn the identity of his true love now I've read that this can actually vary from person to person sometimes it's even the player character or one of the players companions but for me it was a tragic answer his acolyte the one who died to stop me from waking him was the one he was waiting to see her devotion was true when I returned I told the sleeping man what had happened and he attacked me I feel like that was a valid response but I had world's to say if so I killed him too and the epilogue had tracked to this outcome and commented on how bards would be inspired by the bitter tragedy of it all for decades to come the sleeping man quest represents a massive amount of development effort poured into a weird late-game quest in a weird niche appeal expansionpak there's no reason that this quest should have been so reactive and varied other than the satisfaction of having made a quest that both mechanically and thematically does live up to the legacy of design of Planescape torment and in this particular instance they sure did never when tonight's can be dumber than a bag of hammers depending on what campaign you're doing or just how boring the game is being at any given moment but heart is at the Underdark has this one wildly complicated willfully weird tribute to some of the best painter writing of all time and RPGs and that makes it impossible to write off the game as pure pulp and pure nonsense the complexity of options extends into the climax to have had the mind and the money to do so the knower of names can tell you Mephisto filiz is true name you can skip the final boss battle and cast one of the most powerful beings in the Dungeons & Dragons universe back to hell with a quick word and a snap of your goddamn fingers day saved mischief managed hordes of the Underdark is an incredibly fitting into the primary run of campaigns in this way and the original campaign showed what can be done with the software of Neverwinter Nights and then shadows of under tide showed how it can be done better and with heart hordes of the Underdark sneaky and surprising escalation show that there really is no limit to the kinds of stories you can tell with the tools provided even stories in long gone settings like Planescape you can do whatever you like you can start with kobolds and then end with the 8th hell of bait or the baldur's gate games were better stories in most every way but they were only one story never win tonight's can be a thousand the final retail expansion for Neverwinter Nights wasn't just one story either it was three strangely none of them take place in the Forgotten Realms campaign setting in 2004 a Bioware launched a digital storefront and never won tonight's became an experimental kitchen for them to cook up what was one of the first successful DLC patterns from a major developer new adventures would be released as premium modules an official stamp of approval to set some of the highest quality modules aside from the bulk of user made content and sell them for cash money the first three premium ahh jewels were collected in the retail package named after the lengthiest adventure of the three kingmaker for many hordes of the Underdark is where they parted ways with Neverwinter Nights but for those intrigued by the lingering possibilities of what storytelling could still be done with a rapidly age and never went tonight's platformer premium modules would be continually released all the way into 2000 six the first of them is called witches week and it's a fascinating module to start with because of the mismatch between ambition and reality on display within it you see witches wake isn't just a generic being the alternative to the Forgotten Realms it's a completely new setting that one of Neverwinter Nights lead designers for multiplayer Rob Bartel came up with in an extensive interview with online magazine wild surge Martell talks about how one of his pet projects for the Bioware live team that handled multiplayer and post release content was to do weekly tech demos demonstrating what the engine was capable of Wizards of the coast told them at the time in 2002 that they could release whatever they liked so long as it wasn't a Forgotten Realms campaign and didn't need to go through Wizards of the coast approval process hence all the premium modules of kingmaker are either original settings or variants on generic D&D witches wake though was the very first and was originally released by Bartel as a tech demo for what kind of storytelling was possible within the aurora engine toolset this was still in 2002 long before the premium module program even existed Bartel says in the interview that community motors were skeptical that the engine could support a sophisticated kind of narrative presentation using the base tools provided so Bartel puts this incredibly sharp condensed piece of storytelling together and releases it for free as part of the live team's ongoing effort to encourage the multiplayer in modern communities Bartel said in the interview that the games opening where the player wakes with no law knowledge of who they are and a dim memory of battle is a nod to Planescape torment and that torment influenced him quite a bit well witches wake isn't just a nod to torment it's an experiment in mood that draws from torment to not only set its stage but also paint the characters and guide the tone witches wake showed before the expansion packs ever did that everyone tonight's could be many things beyond traditional generic fantasy the module is only part one of an intended 5 but after kingmaker Wizards of the coast had changed their mind about content now the live team could do anything they wanted so long as it was a Forgotten Realms campaign and did go through the official approval process all the subsequent modules after the kingmaker 3 set in the realms and a module with sci-fi elements called hex coda had to be cancelled witches make sequels were not permitted because of this agreement in one way that place to the strengths of the tool said it was designed for the realms after all but in another way it's a clear creative handicap after playing something as wild and free is which is weak Martel describes the decision to only hire one voice actors to do the narration as cost saving one but that choice ends a big most stylish thing about the module witches wake begins with the dim sounds of battle and your kingdoms friends dying next to you as he both bleed out into the snow magical tendrils of black ooze rolled from holes in the ground something is deeply wrong a woman's voice narrates it all in a gentle moody tone that deepens the sense of mystery an old woman a ragpicker finds you there in the snow and you begin the adventure by looting the corpses of the battlefield and burying the princes body she suggests that you go and seek out the night hag of course the ragpicker is the night hag the amnesia is the obvious torment tribute but witches wakes main NPC is also clearly a riff unravel puzzle well and that's okay she's a great character and the module does well by trying to thieve a little of her legacy most things in the environment tombstones vistas characters are all narrated by the same distant eerie voice with its promise of shared secrets it's the voice of the witch and the voice of the world both modules final revelation after tracking down a fellow survivor from the battlefield is that your army had gone to kill the night hag the princes dying message tell the king she is dead it's the witch he was referring to and yet here she is not only helping you but telling you the secrets of the plain of sorrow giving you access to a hidden place perched above the River Styx - retreat - should you die with that knowledge and a cryptic message about the fields of battle lying in the hearts of men the module ends across five modules perhaps the single narrator might wear out its welcome but with just this tiny slice of story and the which woven throughout is dungeon master NPC and guide it feels like a fever dream told by the witch herself there are just a couple little side quests in a single town and even then the biggest thing to do in the town is visit a museum that tells some of the history of Bartels new setting every bit of witches wake feel is professional the first chapter of a truly grand adventure in a bizarre dark world and then it just ends all that effort all that setup no payoff this is the flipside of the creativity coin with Neverwinter Nights yes it can act as a platform for tremendous creativity within the limits of the toolset but finding the time to actually make that creative vision manifest is another thing entirely how many tabletop campaigns meet the same fate how many Dungeon Master's have kingdoms and worlds and stories that will never see the light of day some of the best fantasy stories ever written could be the ones sitting half-finished and spiral ring notebook stuffed into the back of drawers of desks the world over but we'll never know so far simulating VND has been about simulating the game when it works as intended but witches wake inadvertently captures one of the most common frustrations and failures that D&D brings with it the massive / preparing for a thing that never actually comes together maybe you do a session where your amazing new setting goes through its introductory steps and everyone's really on board with it but then well Dan's hard to get a hold of since he got promoted and then there's Angie's wedding coming up I guess and Friday's not gonna work for anyone what with the freeways shut down soon Christ there's a lot of emails here I haven't read and that is it for the world you made for witches wake it was Wizards of the coast that put a stop to it but anyone who's ever seen a beautiful campaign dissolve out from underneath them for mundane everyday reasons can certainly relate to the feeling the ambition on display here is spectacular and is part one of a story that'll never be finished that ambition is preserved in amber a coiled spring that never finds release the second preemie module shadow guard by Ben McJunkin is also part one of a grander adventure that was never finished but we're witches wake had a clever enough hook to warrant a brand new setting and the promise of future installments shadow guard is kind of rote and basic fantasy storytelling whose cleverness mostly lies in the pacing and structure of the module itself before I read about the initial requirement that modules couldn't be Forgotten Realms adventures I had wondered why shadow guard had bothered with an independent setting at all the setup is solid your character narrates their backstories the only child either son or daughter of one of the top men of the Empire outside of the Empire the Crimson prophet gathers his forces the game picks up at a graduation from the Imperial Academy with a ritual where you judge a soul to either be condemned to the hell that awaits it or to be pulled aside and bound to the material world as extra punishment it's strange and unusual dilemma even by these things by how these things usually play out and suggest some more interesting cosmology to come your father misses the ceremony and a surprisingly large amount of early dialog gives you a chance to articulate your characters relationship with their father is it broken and distant sick of fainting tense there's a good amount of role playing to be done and the module rewards you for playing alignment and is even mindful to shift your alignment if you don't towards the end of the module you finally do meet with your father who's been intense diplomatic negotiations all day not only did we miss your graduation he missed an attempt on your life besides everything seems to be loosening at the seams for the Empire but in this conversation you're given a sincere apology and a chance to repair the rift between the two of you that moment of closure is how you know he's about to die of course but the amount of a detail and depth put into grounding your character in the world is more than you'd think of from a one-off like this the majority of the module is spent meeting members of the shadow guard an organization that honestly doesn't seem that much different than the Harper's the four that you meet are all clever attractive adventuring types that are obviously being built up into the core of the story yet to come but dividing the tasks this way you get the sense of a very busy well populated city from which the quests actually radiate looking back the quests were pretty much all main quests with few side content but the process of discovering and following the plot threads is extremely organic and satisfyingly freeform when you've tied everything up satisfactorily and go to meet your father at your state your house explodes killing all within the crimson profit steps out the siege on the city has begun it all falls apart and all you and the shadow guard can do is fight through the burning city to their ship moored in the harbor shadow guard is actually wonderful at articulating the feeling of this particular story beat in a longer story the calm before the storm and then the catalyzing disaster you get to know the city well and so it means something see it burn in the library you might have even read some of the eight volumes set of setting history for extra context or not because the setting doesn't matter so much like it did in witch's wig here it's the feeling that matters the escalation from curiosity to comfort the chaos that a calm before the storm story is built on shadow guard didn't suggest it was going anywhere especially interesting in the plot and I'm not put out that the story arc was never completed but it did function well within the limits of the actual module had shadow guard been less ambitious had it sought to tell a condensed and insulated story it would have done itself a favor suppose the end of the module has the Crimson prophet actually killing the player characters suppose the module was oriented to be straight-up tragedy from the beginning that might have been sharper more memorable but instead it tries to mimic the scale of storytelling in the main campaign in the expansions sprawling high fantasy adventure with a player character is too important to die like a lowly NPC that's the thing about a toolset that promises unlimited storytelling it is very tempting to aim higher than you have the strength to climb kingmaker by Band Whiteside and quarry may is the longest and most technically impressive of the original three premium modules and if it wasn't for the stylish and clever writing in witches wake I would say it was the best it limits its ambitions more than shadow guard and as such gets going quicker and sticks in the mind better it doesn't have an Eightball yoom history for the world it's just regular old DMV in a home-brewed location cyan keep this is evocative of the kind of more casual world building common to the tabletop game the module begins with a discussion between an adventuring party besides a we're at thief fire against AI warrior a rock sasha sorcerer a manic-depressive druid all very strange character combinations that also evokes the kind of party a tabletop group might come up with under a very permissively wacky dungeon master Neverwinter Nights 2 when it finally rolled out in 2006 let the player choose a much wider range of racial backgrounds than ever when tonight's one likety flings and ginn sized and grey orcs and such but in the first game you had more traditional choices for the most part so in kingmaker your character is referred to as the normal one of the of course there's a secret about your past to unravel and all that good stuff the way kingmaker kicks off though really is distinct from the other content by how immediately and heavily it puts the player and the half serious half joking mood that you get with a roomful of friends in the tabletop game all the companions are given voice actors - and pretty good ones for the most part the high point is the woman who voices the rock Sasha she's got a delightfully a moral perspective on things that she delivers with a kind of sparkly familiarity the low point is the we're rat thief who's actually an okay character but whose vocal performance is just exhausting to listen to with its deliberate nasal snivelin frankly though it's fun to be able to even have opinions on the voice work when so much of the dialogue and all never when tonight's content is just words on the screen like the insular claustrophobic mood created by witches wake singular voice actor for narration and dialogue both the voice of the dungeon master kingmakers voice acting emphasizes the playfulness of personality on display in most D&D adventuring parties one of the objects of creating a good character after all is to create someone who can be part of the larger ensemble of the party who can contribute to the flow of storytelling in meaningful ways that's one of the reasons lawful stupid is such a widespread annoyance that perspective causes storytelling gridlock inside of most any group dynamic kingmakers party are all in the chaotic good chaotic neutral range generally well-meaning but able to cause some mischief if it's mischief that's called for effectively this means that however the player character wants things to go down it seems pretty reasonable that most of the party would be agreeable to it here's the brilliant catch though all of you die in the first five minutes of the game and you can only choose two of the four to come with you back to the Material Plane there's even complications within this small interlude like the fact that your druid actually does want to die and there's a demon waiting to drag her to hell should you choose to release her spirit she says she's the easiest choice but she's by far the hardest because of this luckily she's not real and you can reload the module so in the grand scheme of things it's fine to pick whoever you prefer for mechanical or narrative reasons but that's the thing about kingmaker its structure and generalities are all well-worn and familiar cliches but its details are often clever and engaging king maker also has one of the best structural concepts of all the premium modules because it's willing to recognize the common limitations of the premium module format namely it is actually an obscene amount of work for just two or so people to make an adventure on par with the official expansion packs if you followed the general pacing and depth of detail for the first two premium modules out to what might have been their intended conclusion they would probably end up being as long as shadows of undern tithe if not longer and there were so many dedicated professionals developing that expansion so kingmaker creates this flagpole like structure of a story where there's an election to determine the ruler of sian keep and you must convince at least four of ten guilds to vote for you and then the player spends the game hosting themselves up the flagpole and flying themselves at the top at the top you get the climax dungeon and the module wraps up what's interesting is that the election is triggered very easily and can often occur before you're ready at the very least it's close to impossible to actually get all ten guilds on your side each has an Associated quest that caters to a particular classes strengths there's dungeons to delve bribes to make mysteries to solve even a love triangle leaf and resolve if you happen to buy a haunted mansion in the keep center the latter one is actually the most complex bit of quest formatting in the module first you have to kill off the goblins to impress the leader the trade guild she'll sell you a haunted mansion and returns who know how to handle things obviously inside the mansion is a trapdoor do you follow it and then you overhear your primary rival in the election preying on one of his maids a dexterity check will allow you to snatch his signet ring now previously you met the leader of the military guild and he told you there was no way he'd ever vote for you but to come have a drink with him anyway so go out to the tavern and he reveals that he used to be in love with your rivals wife the wife happens to run the nobles guild if you confront her with a ring and the hard evidence that her husband is a total [ __ ] he'll she'll drop him like a hot rock and give you her vote tell her that the military man still loves her and then he'll give you a vote out of sheer gratitude so that's halfway to your victory condition right there and you've not only become a landowner but won an incredible amount of renown and favor from one of the most powerful people in town besides there are more straightforward quests like the priest skill requiring three proceed check and a thousand gold bribe or the hunters guild wanting the pelt of a Manticore but the fun of it isn't having more than you can accomplish there are a ton of solutions to kingmaker and all of them are satisfying in one way or another by the time we get to the climax in its revelations like how you're talking sword is really the spirit of your grandfather and he's got a real good time getting in oh yeah it's hard not to feel curious about the stuff you missed the first two modules were full of content you could squeeze the last drop and they would still leave you high and dry with their irresolvable cliffhangers kingmaker withholds some of itself each playthrough and stands absolutely complete as is it's not that it's unambitious for two people kingmaker is a hell of a lot it's that white side and may tempered their ambition enough to actually see it through to the end and that put this module on the cover of the box which is why creator Rob Bartel did another major piece of DLC with a live team the Pirates of the sword coasts premium module it's the first of the back three premium modules after Wizards of the coast reversed their opinion of what kind of content was acceptable now demanding that it all take place in the Forgotten Realms released in 2005 it's the first of the premium modules to try and tackle the scale and pacing of adventure in the expansion packs with any success it's shorter than shadows of hundred and tide even shorter again than hordes of the Underdark but as fully as long as one of the major acts of the main campaign at around 15 hours or so I honestly didn't think I'd like this module very much because we are pirates is such a gimmicky direction for a thing to go in typically the module distinguishes itself though by taking the route concept and absolutely running with it piling on comically large complications the point that your character begins with shore leave and never winters docks district and ends by sailing a ghost ship full of the undead into the depths of amberleigh's underwater what realm worth living cannot tread pirates the Sword Coast makes the now extremely familiar graphics and gameplay of never won tonight's refreshing again through constant playful access it rarely goes exactly where you think it's going it goes there and then two steps further into the realm of the truly ridiculous pirates of the Sword Coast accomplishes this scale of storytelling by heavily streamlining its progression there are definitely side quests to be done especially at the two hub areas but they all feed a central purp and there are no real optional areas the maps in the module are all quite large and take a while to churn through making the pace slow enough to feel longer than the number of total maps might suggest like the opener it's the docks district just like you saw in the name campaign but there's around 2 hours of stuff to be done there from a sidequest about a gang war from which you can nicely equip your character to a lengthy conversation quest for Shadow and what's to come we're a member of your crew quits on the spot rather than load a mysterious statue into the whole of the ship you also make the villain of the module a priestess of umber Lea who the player can if they want continually try to talk down from their schemes when you meet her though she's being attacked in her room you kill her assailants but it turns out that those assailants were her former servants who had just realized that she promised their wages to your ship's captain wage thievery is a pretty bad foot to start out on but if you persist in treating her like she's just a misguided she'll bring your crew back to life at the end of the module treated with hostility and you're all doomed to on death just the creak of the boat and the rattle of your bones for the rest of eternity that's a high price to pay considering that the priestess really is just an awful person but the long build-up to the split ending is well done structurally what are the biggest things you'd have to find your way around to forgiving her for is killing your captain and tossing you overboard you wash up on a remote island with no inventory the idea of the sequence fighting for basic survival while marooned is sound the execution though is very fiddly outside of a forest setting or the desert canyons of shadows of under type the in a group the inadequacy of the engine when it comes to rendering terrain comes into sharper relief they're gathering sticks and stones and occur from squat doofy palm trees on levels one and two of a small outdoor maze I'm a hundred percent on board for what it's trying to do here but you're left with an inventory half full of sticks that take a full five minutes to dump when you're done and these kinds of fiddly interface related frustrations add up quickly and SAP the enjoyment from the sequence however once you arrive at civilization again at an island town the structure of your tasks conforms better with what the toolset was designed to do in the first place and the flow improves it's not that creativity should be punished it's that the practical limitations of the toolset and its focus on adventuring verbs and not survival verbs trips up deviations from the norm adding unnecessary layers of complication that the module designer has to work around and then mitigate in spend rift town you're tasked with finding crew for a ship there's like nine crew members you can recruit but it got to narrow it down to a top five being able to recruit so many in so small a space means you're chewing through new characters in side quests at a breakneck pace a major shift from the methodical exploration of being marooned this is where I really started to warm to module as the variety of pirates and pirate archetypes they're able to cram into the two maps is very colorful some of its woefully stupid like the pirate whipped william is married to the governor's daughter and has ever since been forced to be respectable to recruit him you have to steal his weapons and armor from downstairs while avoiding his family its dumbass pirate nonsense on par with that who's Trace and who animatronic and the Pirates of the Caribbean ride other pirates include a Minotaur and a so called noble pirate who the other ones make great fun of this is also where treasure maps are introduced a scavenger hunt mechanic encouraging to seek out landmark such-and-such a number of paces in a certain direction away from the last one none of it is marked on the mini-map so you have to stop and re-read directions from the treasure map itself as an item which feels appropriate by the time you crew is put together you journey to the Isle of the Dead to perform a ritual the captain says will allow you to reach Fiddler's Green the underwater realm of Amberleigh the Isle of the Dead uses fog and ghosts to disguise the island shape more than earlier maps giving a greater believability in the sense of place in the distant fog broken ships litter the coastline the treasure hunt here takes you to all four corners of the island and then the center when you're done the captain betrays you and turns you all into gone dead it's so campy but brazenly camp a to the point that when it winks at you it's just hard not to smile and wink back pirates of the sword coast is a full campaign the first true campaign of the premium modules it's unlike anything before it and trial in tone or structure helmets by a developer who knew better than anyone what had and hadn't been tried yet at this point with never win tonight's one and the aurora engine it's that personal touch and that consideration of what still counts as novelty that makes going deeper and deeper into the backpedal who never winter nights so enjoyable Bartel also worked on the fifth premium module but this one reflects his deep familiarity with an every winter nights as a technical work and not necessarily as a creative one this module is infinite dungeons a random dungeon generator that can take multiple characters on a journey from levels 1 to 20 and beyond in dungeons that can be tailored for appropriateness to their class selection and experience level on the one hand this is kind of a staggering thing to have actually work within the aurora engine the dungeons are massive interconnected things filled with puzzles and rudimentary randomly generated quests it even peppers in camps to rest in and merchants to trade with within the frame of the realm of under mountain which you journey through in the first act of hordes of the Underdark I am very impressed with the customizability of the dungeons I'm impressed by its scaling range I'm impressed by the fact that it does cohesively hold together and it never crashed on me once the thing is this module references Planescape torment in a completely different way than witches wake in torment there's a little artifact of a Madonna being of pure law manipulate his little feet and wings and you're sent into a randomly generated dungeon constructed by the mode ron's to study the impulse of adventure why do it it doesn't on the surface of it makes sense as a generalized concept risk your life for golden items to help you risk your life for more gold and more items what's the deal with that and so the mode Ron maze has items like a note that says on one side a clue and on the other says you understand better what's going on that's what adventures like right clues and items and enemies and stuff but none of it actually means anything and it can go on well infinitely there's not a lot getting around the fact that infinite dungeons is a next generation mode run maze and the mode Ron maze was meant on some level as a good-natured critique of hack and slash Dungeons & Dragons play this module is a bit of a marvel in terms of scripting but when it comes to the human experience this is no question some kind of hell from me personally everything I didn't like about the main campaign like autopilot dialogue dungeons for the sake of just having dungeons and excessive waiting around for traps and locks to be designed is in abundance here once a quest giving imp told me no joke that important to a friend of his that I go a map transition up and touch and earn that's it earning fondled quest completed some of the puzzles are actually excellent though and I wondered how many puzzles there are total and if they scale and level along with the enemies I can't be sure though this is the only module that I bailed on early I played a dungeon then I called it quits we are now eight official adventures deep into Neverwinter Nights 1 and at this point the idea of doing anything without a finite structure and a real climax gives me a weary headache I've read that some people have happily put in a hundred hours or more into this module of it with various character classes I believe absolutely that that is possible and for some people even possibly enjoyable but for me the mode Ron maze was a cautionary tale and not a model for engagement in May 2006 the premium on troll program was cancelled ahead of the upcoming Neverwinter Nights 2 from obsidian this left what many regard is the most impressive premium module darkness over dagger furred orphaned with no warning just weeks before it was due to come out developer Ossian Studios released it for free that August anyway but here's the amazing thing this past year in 2018 the developer beam dog released an updated version of Neverwinter Nights their enhanced edition beam dog has decided to carry over most of the premium modules as modern DLC right now it's three bucks a pop for pirates of the Sword Coast infinite dungeons and Riverton crown of Cormier the surprise six premium module that we'll talk about in a moment beam dog is also currently offering darkness over dagger furred at a whopping ten dollars it's an updated rehabilitated version that Ossian says features over 500 bug fixes and general improvements I'm playing the 2006 version here because I began this project before the enhanced edition came out and I figured I might as well keep doing the games in their original form but make no mistake this is an amazing unique story in video game development Austin made something truly heartfelt and hefty and then they were massively screwed by publisher Atari who were responsible for canning the program 12 years later 12 years and ASEAN has given a chance by beam dog to perfect their original vision and have it released as a true expansion pack the most premium of the premium modules is far as the enhanced edition is concerned so what makes darkness over dagger furred so special well more than anything else it's the modules on canny sense for hitting the tonal and structural high notes of baldur's gate 1 it's much more than simply reusing motifs and organizations more than dagger fir'd being just down the road from baldur's gate geographically there's a Quincy to the dialog conversational kind of banter between player and NPC that's got a lot more heart to it than the kind of transactional dialogue of the original campaign or the expositional or heavy dialogue of many of the subsequent modules Ossian Studios set out from the beginning to make a soft sequel to Baldur's Gate which company founder and lead designer Alan Miranda talked about in a 2006 interview with sorcerer's net quote my goal from the start had been to make a game with the baldur's gate one feel and my approach focused on exploration which involved having a world map and large intriguing areas to discover each team member then brought their own favorite things from Baldur's Gate 2 dagger furred for example our writers wrote heaps of dialogue for some very colorful characters which resembled the conversations who hadn't Baldur's Gate we also put in a lot of effort into designing very fresh and creative D&D quests which was also something who saw a lot of in Baldur's Gate 1 and Baldur's Gate 2 aside from that there were never any specific step-by-step plans for imitating Walters gate and more or less flowed from our knowledge and instinct keep in mind that this was Austin's first RPG game as Baldur's Gate one was Bioware so there's something magical to be said about the creative electricity and anxiety surrounding first projects end quote it's modest to say that this all flowed from knowledge and instinct but more than that it's fascinating to consider how well such a casual approach worked out when you compare it to the deliberate multi scape throwback bean dog did 10 years after darkness over dagger furred when they released siege of dragons beer siege of dragons beer just felt too damn modern in the end its structure was too streamlined its companions too talkative it was a good adventure but it was awkwardly stuck between several eras of game design it was fascinating to me to play darkness over dagger furred because it was like discovering a missing piece of the puzzle when it comes to figuring out why bean dogs expansion fell short of the mark I think a lot of it comes down to what Miranda said about the electricity of first projects Sidra dragon's beer had a tremendous weight of nostalgic baggage and a lot of creative handicaps as a middle chapter of a story that originally skipped that whole interval of time there was no way for siege of Dragon's beer to be beam dogs gained the way that darkness over direct dagger furred is ostians game beam dogs expansion was burdened with having to take the specifics of what they liked about baldur's gate specific characters specific story beats specific locations and use them in ways that felt fresh darkness over dagger furred Beals mostly with a generalized impression of Baldur's Gate one with evoking the feeling more than connecting the dots plus Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 are structurally in tonally quite different games and siege didn't seem to quite know how to bridge them with its linear approach it was an act of deliberate nostalgic recreation long after a moment had passed and like so often happens in Dungeons and Dragons summoning the spirits of the dead and forgotten did have its complications darkness / dagger furred isn't an act of replication so much as an act of tribute a game that stands alone as an independent creative work but with hundreds of little connections and remembrances and callbacks that bring up the feeling of the original work better than an attempt to roughly replicate the material that was the bitterly disappointing things about a thing about Neverwinter just playing the main campaign after having already played the baldur's gate games there was a hope that Bioware could make the transition from 2d to 3d and still hold on to the particular creative flavor of those early games that persisted despite our after bland hour - of proof to the contrary in the main campaign especially in the second and third acts there was a feeling that if only you could marry the wide open 3d space of Neverwinter Nights with the imagination and class of Baldur's Gate well you'd have something special and something lasting so far each expansion and premium module had done something more and more interesting with the aurora engine had edged the game in different creative directions and explored a multitude of storytelling and dungeoneering styles yet none had captured that truly old-school feeling some of that was certainly the rush to establish an independent personality for the expansion or the module darkness / dagger furred is standard mid-level high fantasy along the sword coasts rivers forests and beaches it doesn't have an immediate hook or gimmick like kingmaker or pirates of the Sword Coast the things that make it stand out are smaller and more it's in the player dialogue which is the best of any modular expansion even in achingly mundane situations of which there are few the player can respond in ways that either foster role-playing by representing different motivations and perspectives or contribute to the immersion by allowing the player to make jokes or behave with deference or be snide without immediately provoking combat too often player dialogue is written without much personality to allow the player to project better on to a blank slate but baldur's gate and even moreso Planescape torment weren't afraid to let the player character be an independent character to let them speak naturally and conversationally even at the slight expense of player control over the specifics of the conversation in effect this allows a player to be surprised by the things that they might be able to say in Mass Effect you are likely going to choose either red or blue and you knew that before you even started talking here in darkness over dagger furred or the old-school isometrics from which it draws inspiration I never know how an interaction will go beforehand unless it's like a troll on a bridge and even then again the game might lay me down a real zinger on the troll before the combat begins in a nostalgic work like siege of dragons beer you know what you're going to get because it's trying to give you that second helping of whatever it was the first time and an adaptive referential work like dag referred the loser it holds on to the smarts material the tighter its grip on the ability to still deliver novelty and surprise to put it another way siege of dragons beer adapted baldies gate by emphasizing detail over structure and it's real strength was in making those minut connections of plot and background details dr. nasir photographer it has a structure that's much more immediately recognizable as baldur's gate with its world map and interconnected wilderness areas full of detailed side quests in terms of detailed reference Allen Miranda seems especially fond of the fact that both baldur's gate 1 and darkness / dagger furred have very complicated talking chicken quests he mentions it at at least two interviews and damn'd of his talking chicken quest isn't intense a whole circle of druids has been turned into birds and you have to rescue all four one after another each with its own unique skill challenge or extended joke it's a half-hour side quest based on nothing more than a pun about being stricken with a foul curse yet the adventuring is in enjoyable it's more it's a more creative scavenger hunt than most previous Neverwinter content like the treasure maps and Pirates of the sword Coast the jokes are awful but grinning lay off Elana doing way that got me laughing despite myself I mean all the stock standards self-serious druid dialogue being interrupted with involuntary squawks and clocks is just me slapping lis excellent after module after module that would have just presented the same kind of conversation straightforwardly this is what I mean by structure over detail the only shared detail is the assumption that a talking chicken in the wilderness is worth investigating but the shared structure is to have side quests with unexpectedly branching detail and deep interactivity where skills and character build has bearing and how the quest goes down even in the retrieval of errant penguins and the original baldur's gate the massive majority of the game world was unrelated to the main plot and only by adventuring through each large wilderness map could the mosaic of the world map be fully unlocked the world map here in darkness or Photographer it is smaller but the module does the exact same thing with about the same quest density of two to six side quest / optional area depending on size the scale of adventure like the literal scale of mountains and mileage and area traveled is almost exactly the same as Baldur's Gate even seemingly dull setups have complicated payoffs like a story about an Amish family who makes cheese a younger member of the family wants to convert to ranching for beef as this quest develops you guard a caravan of cheese against bandits witness double-cross uncover an agent of the Iron Throne the organization Sarawak founded in baldur's gate 1 and then have an opportunity to either kill the agent or run a double-cross yourself like the cheese quest I didn't expect much from darkness / drag referred when I first saw it this was the 12th of 14 adventures I cover in this video that I played and I was sure getting tired of orcs and elves I was wrong to prejudge its surface simplicity darkness / dagger furred was much longer much more complicated and much more interactive and reactive and ultimately much more fun than I would have expected from something so utterly obscure and neglected having played it I find myself excited by the fact that the enhanced edition has singled out as being hefty enough of creativity and content to be priced at $10 12 years after its publication the original edition is still available if here short the $10 but in a certain way price is status when it comes to video games on a marketplace like Steam a lot of any games feel like they can't price themselves higher than even five dollars or so and spending ten dollars on an unknown developer with an unknown title can feel like a hell of a gamble most times to have priced darkness over dagger furred at the price of a full piece of modern DLC at the same price as something like Mass Effect 3 citadel legitimizes darkness over dag referred in a way that had previously alluded it it's always had something of a cult classic status within than everyone tonight's community but in terms of broader reach it was for all its professionalism still a mod and not an expansion it relied on word of mouth but now it's price speaks for it too more than any of the other premium modules more by a concrete $7 darkness over dag referred is a game worth revisiting it's better than shadows of under and tied by a huge margin it takes the humor that was on display there and tempers it working in more types of humor and less fourth-wall stuff resulting in more of a high fantasy tight 5 than the basement jokes tourism of your longtime DM it's better than shadows of under and tide at controlling its scale to doing an adventure of levels 8 to 16 and not the ridiculously long and fast curve of 1 to 18 in roughly the same timeframe I think darkness over dag referred might even be more total Maps than shadows of under intime the only difference is that when shadows of under tide came out never won tonight's was still just a year old and when darkness over dagger furred came out it was 4 years old with an official sequel just months away dagger furred ought to have been treated as an expansion in its own right so much more impressive in scale and execution is it than the premium module counterparts and now it is darkness over dagger furred is a game that illustrates in a really comprehensive concrete way how arbitrary a process it can be for what stories and experiences become canonized in pop culture and which one slipped through the cracks the barriers to entry for newer smaller developers and overcoming a notion of competition and a perpetually skeptical consumer base are massive that's one of the things that makes these modules so enduringly fascinating for every developer in the premium module program this was a shot of the big time not right away of course but a popular release where the Wizards of the coast pedigree opens doors gamings history barely even remembers their time at bat nowadays darkness over dagger Freud's enhanced edition steam release has at the time of this writing just six user reviews its release was favorably noted by many gaming sites but not explored in any detail besides a brief by the way this happened dark stands over dagger furred like Neverwinter Nights as a whole isn't much of a classic but sure does feel like one and in another role of history's dice maybe things would have been different that way the way things did go is stranger still because Atari made an exception a month after darkness a photographer was released for free and added the wyvern crown of Cormier into the premium module catalog months after the premium module program was officially cancelled it was a weird kind of snub for dagger furred wearing crown of corn Mary is an amazing module certainly the most extensive and complex of the official six but it's only about two-thirds the length of dagger furred and it's storytelling is not nearly as creative Atari for its part price twittering crowd at whopping twelve dollars and kept it there until the premium module authentication servers were shut down in 2015 it was for the original release what dagger fir'd was to the enhanced edition the most premium of the premiums the final and greatest of the official content reverend crown of Cormier is the crowning achievement of a modders collective called dla or the dragon Lance Alliance they rose to prominence in the modders community adapting the dragon Lance setting to the Neverwinter toolset Drag Alliance is a creative universe you don't see much of in video games but per the agreement with Wizards of the coast the post 2004 modules had to be Forgotten Realms adventures so although the dla gained a lot of professional and credibility when Bioware tapped them to do the premium module it came at the expense of the setting that brought them together in the first place I'm not that familiar with dragon lions myself but I suspect it might help explain some of the tonal differences in world building between wyvern crown and the other mods by contrast to the previous ones it's got a much more medieval Renaissance Faire kind of vibe compared to the tolkien-esque high fantasy of the majority of Forgotten Realms content now that's either a function of the local culture of core mirror which is more legalistic than most nations or a function of the storytelling habits of Dragonlance aficionados burton crown is kind of noteworthy for how faithful it is to the customs of Cormier even going so far as to incorporate the law of requiring adventuring parties to have a registered Charter into the plot the set up is well worn as a story but different from the others in the premium module program by virtue of how traditional a sword and sorcery story it is the basic beats of the narrative almost certainly predating Dungeons & Dragons itself your family's farm is destroyed by brigands in the opening moments you and your brother had been away in the woods when it happened as common folk you can only hope to venture to see the Lord of thunder stone and appeal to the nobles for justice the nobles of course do not wish to hear your peasants complaint so you ride in the joust and claim victory and in doing so qualified to become the Lord Squire as a squire you investigate the brigands as your investigations bear fruit you become knighted as a knight you can avenge your family and rally the Kingdom but not before a final climactic joust against your brother who is now turned evil and writing in the joust disguised as the Black Knight I mean nuts but too fine a point on it but writing in a joust against your nemesis the Black Knight is such an ancient cliche that it even got turned into an episode long Family Guy routine in 2001 here in wearing crown of cormier you get to live out this feudal rags-to-riches story without even so much as a hint of satire it's a little strange to be honest especially compared to darkness over dagger furred but also compared to much of the expansion and premium content River and crown is mostly humorless the dialogue isn't aimed toward the player at getting their laughter or their curiosity outside of the context of the story at hand the dialogue is aimed squarely at the player character and never breaks the fourth wall to suggest that maybe this is all a little familiar or even present an absurd element for absurdism sake raven crown presents Cormier and the City of Thunderstone in a completely sober straightforward grounded way even for the realms it's a little weird Ede greenwood setting creator is known for being extremely quim's eagle and his novels and RA Salvatore is continually exploring cultures like the drow who have customs that creatively range far beyond dukes and nights in the pageantry of two dudes riding horses at each other with big wooden poles this simplicity and artist nough sends up working in the games favor though this is the ninth official adventure Finn everyone tonight's tenth if you count bag referred and to still be able to establish an independent creative identity and a novel tone of this latest stage in the game shelf life is no small feat although jousting may be kind of silly on the face of it something you might see in Las Vegas if you happen to be drunk enough in the right casino playing it so straight and refusing to abide by any snickering or talk back from the NPC's or player character makes it hard not to get caught up in the actual intricacy of the sport which river and crown spent what must be an enormous amount of time implementing in real depth and complexity it took me over ten minutes to read and understand the in-game instruction manual for it and even then I barely got it until after I had seen a joust - - there are points on the opponent shield you aim for which you then augment with a writing style and seat position depending on how your opponent has chosen to ride his shield target in his seat position you either get a point for a solid blow no points for glancing blows or no points for a Miss if you get knocked off that's three points to the opponent who knocked you three points wins a match so it's either a war of attrition over several bouts or a dramatic D horsing in a single round it's actually a lot of fun weirdly strategic and there are so many little details they added like opposing riders making comments to you as you ride back to your start positions after about that doesn't result in an overall win you can customize your horse customize the colors you ride under it is just flat-out the finest ghosting ever seen in a licensed Dungeons & Dragons product possibly the great digital jousting sense well ever sends doubts to the arcade cabinet does its thing with flying ostriches and that is something that a larger game with a higher profile simply would never have been able to get away with there was a furor earlier this month about fans being angry that certain puddles in the new spider-man game where it is large as in demo builds what do you suppose those people would say if role-playing game came out in the developers were like yeah we spent a quarter of our development resources on faithfully implementing a medieval sport what of it [ __ ] blood in the streets man obscurity was a license to make game design choices that emphasized things you might not expect for all its creativity darkness over dagger ffred was to deliberate Baldur's Gate throwback ribbon crown of Cormier is singular nothing quite like it before sense in the official catalog it's position as an extremely late addition to the Neverwinter Nights Canon meant that those deviations from expected design the sheer self-indulgence of it were major positives for a novelty hungry audience who are perhaps getting weary of Ed Greenwood isms for its part withering crowd of corners Thunderstone is everybody's large and dense a place in terms of quest content as dagger furred the rural areas though are mostly done in linear order and feature a few side quests of their own the module itself is confidently paced because of it it builds its momentum deviates little and then climaxes with the player leaving a massive assault on the witch lord's army outside an ancient marrow in the deep woods in a way it is fitting that the premium module program ended on withered and crown of Cormier it's a tight professional work with a unique feel and look but it's also giving back to the root cliches of the main campaign circling around at the most creative deviations of past modules and arriving back at the satisfying portrayals of stock standard fantasy tropes that characterize the original campaign revving proud of Cormier was surpassed in size and complexity not just by darkness over dagger furred but by increasing numbers of community modules it took a long time and many updates to the toolset for the greatest ambitions of the user base to bear fruit but eventually they did for some people the release of the enhanced edition of Neverwinter Nights in 2018 must have been a bit of a head-scratcher wasn't that just a boring older Bioware game from back in the day well no the platform provided by the Aurora toolset did for RPGs with the gold source engine of half-life did for shooters it made practical development tools available for anyone with time patience and vision the premium module module program might have been cancelled in 2006 and Atari might have moved on to Neverwinter Nights 2 but the community continued to tinker and dream I have limited the scope of this video to just the official releases and it's still taken me nearly a year to get through what I've done here this video if I included other user modules could be 10 hours long 20 hours long a hundred hours long the enhanced edition is meant to future-proof the community to provide a version of the game that will be stable on modern systems for the years to come so that the vision of Neverwinter Nights as a platform is the ink and the pages and the binding for the stories of others can persist through time there are servers that act as miniature mmo's our servers for doing a constellation of custom-made seldom-seen adventures there are servers for pornographic roleplay the game is many things to many people and will continue to be that way for as long as operating system support it Reverend crowd of Cormier is like the main campaign that makes it feel okay to let it go and move past it to embrace the even more obscure creative works that do it better so the premium module program ended so what there are sixteen years of free stuff weirder and wilder and more successfully experimental than anything passed through the Wizards of the coast approval process when Reverend crown came out there were fewer than six weeks left before Neverwinter Nights 2 released but when it did the game would invert the design philosophy of the original game never won tonight's - is almost all about the official content its toolset was harder to use and demonstrably must much less popular its lack of user friendliness actually helped sustain than ever when tonight's one community by failing to give them a seaworthy ship to jump to and so we go together into 2019 with darkness / dagger furred on the sales floor for the first time and a new lease on life for the original game while never one two nights - remains shoved so far back in the Obsidian catalog you got to make a spot check to notice that it's there I think one of the things that really throws people about never won tonight's - is that obsidian and Bioware have the opposite dynamic within the franchise that they usually do typically it'll be Bioware or maybe Bethesda that does the time-tested relatively safe thing and then obsidian will go off and do a weird variant or a somatic deconstruction of it this time Bioware broke the mold of what we expected its role-playing games to look like and sound like looking everyone tonight's one and then obsidian tried to correct backwards the other direction by offering an extremely traditional predictable Forgotten Realms experience with a party of four talkative companions and heaping gobs of dialogue Neverwinter Nights 2 is still trying to address the shortcomings that the premium modules had already spent so much time addressing when it comes to the base original game shortcomings and writing and reactivity and player agency as a result everyone - Nights 2 is a tremendous improvement over Neverwinter Nights 1 and its expansions as well if you stack up mask of the betrayer against hordes of the Underdark and stack storm of Zaheer against shadows of under and tide but it doesn't quite ever get experimental or playful with the Forgotten Realms setting and the way that you might expect obsidian Knights of the Old Republic - after all was an incredible and bold reevaluation of the entire system the entire value system of the previous game and of the Star Wars universe in general by contrast this is like if Knights of the Old Republic - had omitted every moment of cynicism and doubt and replaced it with cantina banter it's kind of amazing how uncritical the whole game is considering the developer by the time we get to the expansion that'll change but the main campaign of Neverwinter Nights 2 is in many ways every bit is by the numbers as the main campaign of Neverwinter Nights 1 the difference as we've seen is in personality and style Neverwinter Nights 2 emphasizes companionship and group dynamics more than anything in any number when tonight's one module featuring nearly a dozen recruitable companions with big personalities and extensive backstories their dialogue may be cliche but there's a certain kind of joy in it of writing dialogue and quests within a format of traditional Forgotten Realms adventure fantasy pulp is the object of the exercise and so the effort is there to make the pulp as delicious as possible the fact that there isn't any catch any hidden layer of subversion leads a lot of people to call this obsidians worst game I disagree it's not their strongest but it's arguably one of their largest games only will you dwarf to buy Fallout New Vegas the scale of the thing and the success with which they execute the story over such a long time frame is impressive it may not recall baldur's gate in its writing but it does recall baldur's gate in the execution of a grand ark for the players journey from basement beer adding to godhood there are well over a hundred novels than the Forgotten Realms setting not all of them are going to be great but most of them are gonna be fun most of them are going to be on some level comforting this is where Neverwinter Nights 2 fits into the Canon a digital role-playing not as a classic genre-defining work that gets reprinted every few years but as the paperback with a title obscured by creases in the spine taken off the shelf and opened up again once every few years or so when the rain is really coming down and the idea of getting anything important on that day seems preposterous a lot of my affection for the game is rooted in what basically amounts to its tutorial the bright and beautiful afternoon of the West Harbor Harvest Fair you having livid an entirely uneventful life in the town under the care of your distant foster father Dagon are teaming up with your friends bevel and Amy to win the harvest there are four games they teach basic melee combat basic ranged combat basic magic basic thief skills the framing of all these things though as harmless games of the Faire is what really catches my eye there's truly a small-town feeling to the whole thing of everyone knowing everyone for a long time and having an appreciation for both the strengths and failings of their neighbors you your player character belongs here in West Harbor there's even small-town gossip about a Harvest Fair many years back when a famous rivalry between a man named Cormac and a man named Lauren came to a head he'll meet both these people on the journey to come but in the meantime there's just this carefree afternoon where the worst thing that happens is the disenchantment if an enormous pig to return it to regular size its pastoral peaceful it's easy to roll your eyes at such a thing but this moment is an important moment in a story at the epic scale the end of the beginning the moment when the day's stop blurring into one another and the shape of destiny begins to trace itself on the characters faces you don't begin at some stupid hero's academy like you came out of a dispensing machine for adventures no you have a home a good home and another hour's playtime you'll have to leave it for the safety of everyone one of the best things baldur's gate did was starting you off on a similar final day of innocence kind of moment candlekeep and Ryan were touch stones for grounding the players journey all the way through the end of throne of Ball West Harbor isn't as significant as candlekeep to its story but the lesson was well learned and it's just as effective here this is part of what I mean about not being especially experimental but being deeply satisfying and hitting the narrative notes it does hit when things go wrong and West Harbor is attacked Amy dies she wasn't being set up as a companion after all this way the story can bare some teeth early and make sure the player feels the weight of leaving Bevell your other friend goes with you to your first dungeon but dehghan prevents him from going any further with you with a companion you're tough enough to be an adventurer bevel was just barely tough enough for West Harbor much much later on bevel will become part of the staff of the castle you're given you him a couple others very few of the people you meet of the harvest fair and in these and directory moments will actually survive through the end of the game the game doesn't have to deliberately flashback to these moments to keep them in the players mind either it's an old adage that you can never go home again and beyond the town simply being burnt down several times over this kind of opener in context with the long journey ahead evokes one of the most elusive elements of childhood nostalgia the melancholia that comes from knowing that nothing will ever reconstruct those past moments and the further they recede into the past the less real they seem to be winning the harvest Cup isn't the first act of a hero it's the last act of a child there's a lot of emotion you can pack into that moment because everyone has their own version of that moment and all of them are sentimental powder kegs that's part of what fantasy is good at as a genre exploring the idea of who people can be if they rise to the challenge that life gives them seeing the humble become heroes and seeing the cruel become villains the thrill is in the process of becoming experiences and experience points both accumulating into someone more powerful and capable than they were when they started out to answer that call to heroism is to abandon what's comfortable to leave home the more concrete a picture you have of what home is the sharper the feeling when you put boot to trail and find out what comes next never won tonight's two starts building your permanent party immediately after you leave West Harbor you'll meet Kel gar a hard-drinking dwarf like almost any other hard-drinking dwarf he likes fightin and drinkin and that's Kel guard at first anyway the thing about the companions in every winter nights too is that they all present as familiar cliches at first but unlike the original never went to nights they actually do start to grow out of those cliches as you go along again if you're used to obsidian being more cynical in tone it might feel a little weird to be so unapologetically archetypal with its characters it might simply be that part of Dungeons & Dragons is enjoying the creative repetition the familiarity of the different professions and races for new players these tropes can act as a guide to figuring out how to navigate these imaginative situations and in the beginning the cliches are useful to the learning curve to begin an adventuring party as a group of routine cliches is a common low-level experience but as players adventure together they can respond in specific ways to specific circumstances and thus color in the details of their characters personality based on concrete experience and not sort of vague idea you don't know just who the characters will really be and what their significance in the story will be until you throw them all in the mix and shake it up a bit Kel gar for example wants to be a monk at first it's simply because he envies their fighting prowess but the abbot asks kalgard undertake a series of self-betterment quests some he completes by confronting his past and the rift he put between himself and his plan some he completes by realizing he fought better when motivated by justice and righteous anger instead of competitive bravado by the end of it all kalgard becomes a much more believable rounded character it just takes time and willingness to have patience that characters will develop if given time and space that is the hope anyway sometimes characters don't necessarily need an arc if they just fill a background role the peloton casts aveer for example is pretty much exactly who he appears to be and any nuance is brought by the voice actor who does give a winningly solemn performance but paladin's are always transparent as part of their shtick it's okay less forgivable is Bishop another obvious bad guy who does obvious bad guy things when the script requires it and is just a total jackass the rest of the time Bishop illustrates why parties are usually predominantly good or predominantly evil the contrasting alignment just sticks out like a sore thumb and is on some level almost required to throw wrenches into the gears of the party point the party's plans Bishop is who he is and there's nothing you can do about it besides throwing some occasional shade at him and leaving him out of the active party but what our never won tonight's one gave you a single companion who had no bearing on the plot whatsoever never won tonight's two demands that you take every companion with you to be on hand for the events of the game even if you don't actively choose them for your three companion slots so bishop is mandatory even if he sucks sucking is his purpose really to be a sullen foil for the jovial heroism of the other characters the ensemble is carefully considered balanced weighted each character has a role to play and not being able to much argue or am into those roles produces twists in the plot that feel at best confident and at worst contrived the second companion you meet Nishka is a good example of how the slowness of the character arcs can be very detrimental Nishka is the first horns and tail tiefling thief since Anna from Planescape torment in digital role-playing but where they went tough with anna Nitschke is more of a comic relief character she is essentially a clipped ammoniacal D&D version of Megan Mullaly and sometimes that actually does work well the thing is Anoushka doesn't develop very much until quite literally the final room of the game her subplot is more about acceptance than change for her sidequest she acts as she asks you for help and out thieving arrival and nothing you say will persuade her from it you can either encourage her or ignore her in a certain way this is solid writing to have a character inflexible to the players usual airbending charm Sten in Dragon Age Origins is a good example but with Anushka the gimmicky parts of her personality stand out so much because it's hard to not want her to change just a little at least sync Elgar discovered deepen deeper meaning in his capacity for violence is genuinely fun to see and be a part of and Mishka is not afforded a similar journey but at the very end of the game it does pay off in interesting ways the king of shadow is the ultimate enemy of the game tries to rile her demon blood and turn her against you if you've been unkind or dismissive it'll work but if you have let Nishka be Nisha for all the mischief and inconvenience that might entail she defies the magic and remains loyal to you and letting her find her own voice in person she has the strength to resist the call of her nature it's suitably climactic but does it take too long to get there in the absence of another arc I can easily see that she might feel to some people like a Tommy under gallows type and over talkative mandatory pest but that is the test of what there is of her character's arc in that final influence check can you get past that she might be annoying and treat her well anyway the best way to appreciate Neverwinter Nights 2 is to try as best as you can to just get into the mood of it to take it seriously even when maybe the game hasn't earned it take Shandra Neman Jarrow for example a Manjaro is the villain of the second act a powerful mage with a sanctuary full of demons chandra is his granddaughter a farmer you've met back in high cliff during act 1 Emin is a ham a murdering bastard with an all-around disagreeable personality it turns out that you and he were both working against the king of shadows all along but that comes out only after he kills Chandra to try and thwart your plans to defeat him once he realizes what he's done he joins her party in her place he's still a jerk but he is anguished over his [ __ ] now this is all melodramatic cheese for sure but the game spends a lot of time and effort humanizing Kandra even showing her reactivity to the player by having her testify at a trial either for or against you depending on what kind of quest solution she'd witnessed you choosing Chandra is more of a regular kind of person among adventures and at first she worries about her capabilities in the journey ahead but by the time you get to the end of Act two she is truly strong in both her spirit and her sword arm which is when Ammon kills her and there's nothing you can do about it it's a contrived emotional circumstance yes plotted and telegraphed well in advance but if you're willing to meet the game halfway and try to have sympathy for the arc of Chandra's journey to appreciate the bravery of who she's become over the course of your travels then the tragedy of the moment is there to share in if you're willing it might have the sophistication of airport fiction but the books they sell in airports they sell because they're fast and fun and relatable enough to make people's flights go by without having to be very present for it creating comfort fiction is as much of a skill as boundary-pushing as a skill Neverwinter Nights 2 has very few moments that are surprising and even fewer that us that are subversive but if it was a song it would be one that I'd find myself humming along to without even really realizing I was doing it the three-act structure has a much grander overall feel to it than the first neverwinter nights as well thanks to a lot more diversity in quest design than the collect for things to continue motif of the original game after leaving West Harbor there is a long journey to even get to Neverwinter which features several optional areas and plenty of side quests in many reviews this is seen as a slow start in general I might agree but it's also an important interval on the life of a Dungeons and Dragons character the first 5 levels are always tough small challenges loom large so having a several hour period of somewhat freeform wilderness questing makes a person feel accomplished and powerful when they finally do arrive in the city of Neverwinter you also come up to the full four-person party but the addition of L&A the druid you've got some gold you've got some magic items you fight some lizard Foulke in the swamp and some zombies in the graveyard good times had by all rather than getting clever with these more banal elements of D&D adventure obsidian seems to be celebrating them they certainly could have gotten right to the point if they wanted to but when you journey back through these areas in the third act and find them in dire situations it wouldn't have the drama if you hadn't witnessed them in a moment of normality when you were feeling normal about it yourself and the first act it's a narrative long then once you're in Neverwinter you get a major branching choice it's binary you can either help the city watch your Moira's thieves control the docks district but you can only choose one and it affects the rest of the game in minor ways that kind of reactivity was largely absent from any of the neverwinter nights one campaigns and at the end of the act you'll journey northward through a small town called ember and arrive at a stronghold of gift Yankee after a silver sword a piece of the sword is embedded in your chest it is a crazy escalation from rural calm too swampy adventure to mercenary hijinks to extra planar creatures giving cryptic revelations it all happens slowly enough to feel if not exactly reasonably plausible enough for D&D like the jousting and Webern crown the pacing here is certainly self-indulgent but by the same coin there's something to be said for being open to what it was that made them want to indulge in the first place never won tonight's one might have been more about multiplayer connectivity in the toolset than about storytelling but Neverwinter Nights 2 is very much obsidians chance to explore what they love about Dungeons & Dragons campaigns its enthusiasm its affection for the high fantasy format and the sights and sounds of the sword coast carried me as much as the plot did maybe farther so the game will pull a move like making spend hours preparing to give testimony at trial and then spending the better part of 20 minutes inside the courtroom itself is this a diversion from the main events or is the multitude of threaded diversions more or less the whole point of the experience the trial sequence is a great example because you can completely zone out skip everything and still win and a trial by combat a trial by combat that gets invoked even if you do prepare for and prevail in the courtroom portion the entire first portion of the second act is essentially optional the assumption though is that you'll take the potential death penalty seriously and investigate the butchering of the town of ember yourself eyewitnesses say was you who did it but there is obviously magic at work there are only a few areas to search but if you're very thorough you'll find many pieces of exonerating evidence and even discover surprise witnesses to take to the stand with the testimony of magical creatures and some fancy lawyer and provided by sand a sarcastic elf wizard you met when he first arrived and every winter the can commence it's one of those moments where the fun of it is in the distance traveled sand is an old pal by now and things have developed in wild direction since you first arrived in the city boots muddied from the lizard fold cabin caverns the trial itself is absolutely absurd and how it allows you to present every single piece of evidence you found and how each witness actually gets to be cross-examined by each side sand can ask questions and give responses to Tori oh and then you have your own go with a whole different set of questions and answers and then Torrio gets her own turn with a set of questions and answers this sequence is by far the longest and most complicated trial ever put into one of these games and you can see why it's only truly fun if you've done all the digging around to prepare for and also if you have high bluff and diplomacy skills if not you get hammered by Torrio's cable TV quality twistings of the truth but if you do happen to play that way holy [ __ ] is it ever treat caching Torrio and lies or swinging the opinion of jurors back around after a lengthy speech it's all so complicated so delightful and so fundamentally unnecessary the whole thing seems geared towards assuming you won't be to completionist about it and if you lose and are sentenced to death well there's always the murder contest if Torrio loses even if she loses by a unanimous vote in your favor she will always invoke the trial by combat you fight here Lorne the bully from West Harbor that they talked about at the harvest fair a million years ago so it's a moment that the developer wants to happen regardless this showdown between the West Harbor outcasts the only thing you get to take with you from the trial is a reputation marker on your character sheet a small official acknowledgement that your character once lowered their ass off and then the plot proceeds the same is that what if you hit the escape key over and over again while chugging a beer is it bad design because it doesn't force you to bother with its high highest effort achievements and thus condemns them to potential irrelevance or is it good design because no player is penalized for disinterest during the course of a gigantic 80 hour campaign one of the things I enjoyed about Baldur's Gate 2 was its willingness to let things slip past the player there's an entire undersea city with multiple side quests and great characters that you can miss if you take a more obvious route along the main plot path never won tonight's two follows in those footsteps by putting tremendous attention to detail into things that are arguably as frivolous as a realistic jesting simulation yet this isn't like in never when tonight's one where it had D&D stuff like dungeons and quest just out of a Cobb Legation to have those things here all those things are grounded in lore and character and the assumption that if you're given a good reason to feel curious you'll see where that curiosity will take you the most successful and memorable unnecessary thing in the game is definitely crossroad keep the character is stronghold player strongholds are something that pop up every now and then and fantasy RPGs and fascination with them largely started with the darkness keep quests of Mulder's gate - while different classes had different strongholds in that game like a theater for the bard or a temple for the Paladin warrior types got a whole damn castle with quests about how to run it to themselves what kind of ruler the player wanted to be that kind of thing it's an extra step of power tripping not just how you'd be as a character with great personal power but one with meaningful political power as well while it was used as a starting point for other quests and not a mini management Sam darkness / dagger furred also had a player stronghold and Alan Miranda directly cites the darkness keep quests as inspiration for it after Neverwinter Nights - you've got stronghold management elements in Dragon Age awakening and also Dragon Age Inquisition although the management elements would become more streamlined during the Dragon Age iterations cross road keep is the most complicated finicky and fundamentally pointless out of all of these strongholds it's also the most compelling the tricky thing about it is how its timed each occasion you enter and exit the main room of the keep the time elapsed percentage bar inches closer to a hundred percent so you need to always be purposeful and doing something with the system each time you visit the keep interior or it just flows right past you the exception to this is when it pauses for you to complete story content like moving from X 2 to X 3 depth grade your soldiers armor and weapons to the highest level you need to find every resource node in every act so you have to have been mindful of this minigame since the extreme beginning of Neverwinter Nights - to achieve the highest level of competency and discipline the money among your troops you need to counter intuitively refuse most new recruits only accept the best bevel your old west harbor friend will come on to lead special quests into the surrounding areas which Lieut there's a lot but I only triggered a scant handful in like in my given percentage another sergeant who you meet in the orcish campaigns of act 1 trains your troops a third a strange woman who you meet back three can slightly boost the number of extremely good soldiers you recruit a steady consistent rotation of troops between patrolling their all the roads and patrolling the woods is required to keep the trade routes safe you can spend huge gobs of money upgrading the roads with pavement and guard towers upgrading the keep you never see most of these changes you just pay the money and people tell you about them like the trial the game is designed to function just fine if you ignore pretty much all of this and never bothered with it you might miss a couple side quests my not building structures and you might make the battle where the king of Shadows attacks the keep at the end of act 3 a little more difficult but only just a little there's a huge amount of effort you can put into this system and the rewards are almost solely imaginative you can see it in your mind the skirmishes of your well-trained men against the mandates see the roads looking clean and clear and pristine but not on the screen on the one hand what's the point then but on the other hand is an imaginative projection pretty much the name of the game when it comes to Dungeons and Dragons the stronghold system and its quests are more content where they're only as engaging as players willingness to engage with them crossroad keep is a big experiment in giving the player on nobles responsibilities and it mostly doesn't work that well it's fine to ignore it but like the trial you'll be skipping parts of the game where it actually gives itself a memorable self-identity by the time you get to the third act the game is still adding complications and characters and doing very little to wrap things up every layer of villains so far the gift yong-ki Anand Jarrow black Darius they were all just a prelude to the return of the king of Shadows the third act is primarily a lore dump where after having finally exhausted every other possible MacGuffin you actually do get a clearer picture of what's going on this is a lot of what people feel as the game's major narrative imbalance there are huge portions of Neverwinter Nights to that function is prelude or digression and when you've already put 50 hours into the thing only then does it yield and finally get to the heart mater this is unusual pacing for video games but not really uncommon pacing for Forgotten Realms novels long series take big diversions to build up the ensemble dynamic they have villains specific to one book and absent larger arc they do a lot of world building right at the end because the last book of the series is still an independent book and needs its own narrative arc echoing that pacing is another example of the main game being at its root much more celebratory of The Forgotten Realms than critical or experimental the whole long arc of story is designed to methodically move through the archetypal phases of an adventurers career from low-level unknown upstart to the mid-level mercenary making waves to the revered and respected hero leading the charge to save the kingdom the third act may feel a little more linear than previous acts as he moved from exposition revelation to confrontation in short order but you still do a hugely diverse array of adventurous things like going to visit the ghost of an ancient and evil dragon the only being old enough to remember the king of Shadows when he was still mortal armed with that knowledge you can visit the ancient elfin ruins where his monstrous form was created meet the spirit of librarian who gives you another massive lore dump and then solve a disgustingly irritating puzzle where you try to corral four ghosts into a single area like some kind of elven spirit rodeo it's packed with stuff it's an understood of game design that higher levels take longer to get to then lower levels but in Dungeons and Dragons that's always been an excuse to draw out to the amount of time that a players in various stages of competency and fame a long huge adventure where you only gain a level or so controls for a consistency of play in the individual adventure a lot of pen and paper modules are made that way only four characters four to eight only four characters ten to twelve only for epic level characters etc the first never won tonight's used third edition but never won tonight's two uses 3.5 if you don't know a third edition maybe that sounds like a minor change but the third and a half edition adds a whole lot of customizability like a new emphasis on prestige classes and a whole lot more consistency in Challenge meaning combat feels sharper and quicker there's less time spent swinging and missing third and a half's changes are most apparent at high levels so when you finally reach the top of the power curve you're powerful and more interesting and useful ways then you might have found yourself before myself I aimed for a prestige class called the Eldrick night warrior wizard I'll be honest it is a terrible build but while it was aggravating an underpowered in the first 10 levels as it got deeper into the prestige level as my character finally felt useful in both both its roles as a wizard and a fighter and it wasn't just a few short hours at the climax I had to play that way either I had the entire back third of the game a hard one power plateau I'd struggled to reach all Adventure long so far so if you're expecting tight writing the third act is admittedly a scatterbrain kind of thing but if you're looking to savor the Dungeons & Dragons experience at the exhaustively slow pace it does mechanically encourage the third act hits the mark dead center one of the most annoying things by the end of Mass Effect 3 was how it marooned your companions on some planet somewhere and refused to elaborate on their future fate Mass Effect 3 was infamous for how much frustration and bad noise among fans the underwhelming low effort epilogue generated never wonder nights to pulled the same stunt and it's barely remembered positively or negatively when we finally get to the suitably creepy boss chamber a lot of last-minute drama erupts nuschka either stays loyal or defects and then Quora either stays loyal or defects in the final room and then once the last die is cast in the big scary dude falls the temple collapses and no one knows what happens to you or your companions the only ones who do get epilogue slides are the ones who left your party further back for me that was Elenin she's supposed to be the mail player characters love interest and so she's written to be a rationally jealous of Nishka if you're supportive of her alan lee picks fights and forces you to choose sides resulting in large reputation lashes with whoever you snub it's really frustrating there is no reason why they shouldn't get along but the writers evidently felt that having multiple women in the party was intolerable if they didn't act stereotypically Cadi to one another for whatever reason as a result L&E refused to stay with the party when the chance came to reunite with the remnants of her druid circle it was a good ending for her but I often felt like Ellen E's independent character got lost inside of her intended role in the story as a romantic partner of course if she had stayed she'd just be mysteriously entombed with the rest of the supporting cast so good for her I guess the epilogue is generally pretty good at being reacted to the largest choices in Haven the game although it fails to recognize smaller more emotionally weighted choices on the level that Fallout New Vegas did so how did neverwinter nights to get away with the same variety of underwhelming cliffhanger that Mass Effect 3 had mostly because it's broader cast failed to resonate with a lot of people and so a lack of a nod on their end of the story threads had little consequence or weight I'd liked most of the characters and even then I find it hard to care that much that they didn't get epilogues I liked them well enough for the journey we had and we all defeated the bad guy so I guess that's the end of the story this is the negative consequence of being so formulaic you already know the ending you already knew the ending from a long way back you know what the minute they said king of Shadows you thought to yourself oh he sounds unpleasant and from that moment you knew you'd eventually defeat him and all the NPC's would say yeah you did it and you'd say to yourself yeah I did it and that's it that's game over man in a tabletop group a victory like that is two things it's a narrative experience and a social experience the campaign on top of being a campaign is a shared memory of many nights of fun and friendship but with a digital role-playing game you're left sitting in your chair with a tiny goofy flag that says hooray for me and the sound of distant traffic all her companions never had a future after the game ended anyway I mean the game just ends never when tonight's two plays it's so safe that you never really forget that you're playing a game and so even if it's a fun game and an enjoyable one it never suspends its disbelief high enough to make a racket when it comes crashing down never won tonight stew is a good drag Dungeons & Dragons adventure it has heart it has spirit it has a great understanding of what makes sense and Dragons such an enduring ly unique way to experience high fantasy storytelling there's dozens of wonderful stories that you could say the same thing about but that doesn't really stop them from lining the shelves of the sci-fi fantasy section and goodwill sitting next to a 99-cent copy of how elminster got his groove back this dedication to Forgotten Realms traditionalism in the main campaign is what makes the unbound relentless creativity of the first expansion pack so surprising this expansion is mask of the betrayer one of the most obscure of the truly great western RPG stories of the 3d era from the first conversation the writing style is much more genuinely novelistic than the main giving the player far more interesting and varied dialogue often with major branches of dialogue accessible only through skill or class or attribute checks it isn't just having more intricate conversations that makes the writing truly phenomenal though it's the willingness to engage with symbolism and things more personal in melancholy than the usual range of expression it would be in the adventure mask is often compared to Planescape torment in theme and content and while the comparison is sound what makes mask of the betrayer standout even from intentional follow-ups like torment tides of numenera is the fact that it isn't trying to reuse details of world building and approaches the storytelling that feel imitative instead both mask of the betrayer and Planescape torment use the mythological framework of the DMV cosmos to spin physical journeys out of emotional ones they both preference solving quests through curiosity and subterfuge over combat and scavenger hunts and most critically they both have a lot of sympathy for the existential smallness of individual people in the universe quite literally of gods and monsters so why is mask of the betrayer so often overlooked when it comes to discussions about the legacy of Planescape and RPG design well two main reasons the first and most obvious is that an expansion pack to a middling lis popular mechanically routine D&D sequel released in the same year the Elder Scrolls for Oblivion was changing the way everyone looked at RPG design was it release kind of doomed to obscurity from the get-go but maybe doomed isn't the right word when it comes to mask of the betrayer a developer blog by George Zeitz published long after the game was released explained that if it wasn't for low publisher expectations for an obscure fringe product mask of the betrayer might not have been half as good Zeitz writes quote when NX 1 never went to expansion 1 was first described to me it was pitched as a simple hack and slash adventure never won tonight's 2 was expected to do reasonably well and the expansion would be a quick relatively low-cost way to provide a follow-up product to fans expansions never sell as well as the original product so their budgets are proportionally reduced I was not particularly excited about making hacking slashers so I pushed back on that particular point to the credit bar to the credit of our lead Kevin Saunders allowed me to pursue a much more expansive vision that required more work and longer hours also because mask was expected to be a simple hackin slasher the publisher paid little attention what we were doing effectively we operated under most people's radar this was great because we were able to pursue a vision that was shared among the team and didn't suffer from interference from outside as an enemy industry outside interference is a reality of game development sometimes it works out fine is when higher-ups are heavily invested in the franchise understand the core vision and give well-informed feedback that improves the product but the more a publisher or executive is separated from the project the more likely they'll give a direction that doesn't strengthen the game end quote mask of the betrayer like darkness over dagger furred is an example of an official D&D campaign almost entirely without corporate oversight but much larger and more intense than dagger furred by far it feels just as amazing as that sounds the second reason for its obscurity in the larger conversation about RPG design is that the game does depend on having already experienced than ever when tonight's two main campaign and built up a character in its world mask of the betrayer is an epic level campaign like hordes of the Underdark but in each area where hordes of the Underdark quest can't be an excessive mask of the betrayer is Moody and introspective it picks up with your main character from the main campaign waking up in a deep underground barrows surrounded by runes meant to contain a great evil the shard of the gifts silver sword that was lodged inside your character's chest is gone ripped out and raggedly sown back up in its place is the evil that these runes were meant to contain the curse of the spirit eater it's like having a symbiotic relationship with a black hole it eats and it eats and it eats and the more it eats the more it hungers in the meantime it gives the player fantastic powers to acquire its food and rip the souls right out of living creatures when the hunger eventually becomes too great the curse is passed on to another it's been a presence in local folklore for hundreds on hundreds of years and it's always both tragic and fatal and now it's your turn it's great way to deepen the connection between the world and player during the absurdities of ethic level play if you're willing to feed the beast it'll turn you into a kind of dark demigod giving you access to power completely beyond what's appropriate or balanced for your class if min maxing and playing for mechanical dominance is your jam this doubles down on the power leveling thrill of the epic levels if you're playing mostly for plot then the slow starvation of the spear will damage your character and create extra challenges to temper the feeling of being too powerful it makes you fragile in a way that the regular rules don't allow for at that level finding ways to suppress the hunger and try to dodge the bullet of your new destiny pays off in fantastic ways once the game really gets going so there's payoffs either way you choose to play it and they both roughly align with the two major play styles for an RPG like Neverwinter Nights the system is sometimes frustrating because the bar takes lower and lower as time goes on no matter what you do and as you feed the hunger that bar will go down faster in a given area there's only a few suitable souls to consume so there's a pressure there that's unfamiliar to the generally leisurely pace of adventuring in previous neverwinter nights content but I didn't feel like it was an unwelcome pressure at all it lends a sense of finite mortality to the level range where all of that usually starts to fade away more than that though is that it inverts the special destiny plot that stands as a cliche in so many role-playing games The Shard that may be special is gone tossed aside like garbage the destiny you have now is more special more magical by far and it's not only creepy but it's painfully terminal so right away the expansions doing subversions of tropes at the main campaign was extremely happy doing straight the earnestness of the base game was a key part of its personality but this is the kind of creative risk that sets mask of the betrayer apart and it was risky a lot of critics at the time were very unfavorable towards the spirit eater system but if that system was simply part of the dialogue and there was no actual risk to your character in a mechanical way it would be a theme and not a curse as it is you aren't allowed to forget it's there it's hunger is knowing and constant and while this does provoke an anxious mood that wasn't there in the base game an anxious mood is exactly what the whole expansion is aiming to create on every level it takes place in Rashomon a land ruled by witches and their berserker protectors where at Minsk Boo and Dyna hear him from prior to the events of baldur's gate 1 instead of the dungeon focused under dark roschmann is a wild land of spirits and mysteries the Barrow you wake up and serves as an introductory dungeon to at all which is kind of a weird inclusion for an epic level expansion there's really not much tutorial isin that means to be done at that point it matters more as a way to draw out the transition between Rashomon and the Sword Coast starting with caves and dungeons that feel comfortable and familiar before what putting you on the bad side of a bear god named aku aku is no question one of the most goddamn majestic bears in the history of video games it's a character designed like it was described in a campfire retelling of some old tall tale about the great bear spirit with the sunset in his fur aku is a great way to set the tone for what is unique about Rashomon from the sword coast region more exotic and colorful and legend in landscape both and aku is determined to hunt you down and gut you although you did although you defeat him in the introduction you soon find yourself from the bad side of the city of Multan tear when aku returns with an army of spirits to lay siege to the place until they cough you up for him at this point you have your first real test of how far you want your spirit eating powers to go once you've found a party and gone out to face aku you can either take that big ole ancient soul of his and shred it into nothingness absorbing his essence to grow your own power or you can deny your hunger and in doing so slow the rate of its consumption of your own soul if you spare him he honors your control over the curse by offering to come with you looking for a cure aku is one of only a very small cast of companions but the game has enough variables and enough true player choice that you can consume his soul remove him from play and progress the story perfectly well if you do have him come along he even has his own unique backstory quest confronting the ghosts of his ancestors who are driven mad by the spirit eaters imprisonment in the barrel aku has always always fought the spirit eater but it was him who conspired with another poor mortal who had the curse to trap the thing down there in the Barrow it was aku who soured his people's own the holy ground for better or worse you can only resolve the life's work of this noble godlike beast by either freeing yourself and dissolving the curse or else succumbing to it and proving aku ee the fool for having trusted the words of a mortal the main plot is woven around the deep backstories of the characters like Ivy around a column so that no character feels like an archetype or an idea they're all completely grounded in the events and places of the game inseparable from the story being told old kalgard Mishka Elenin all solid characters but they could fit into most any Forgotten Realms story and still make perfect sense where else but mask of the betrayer would have fallen celestial a red wizard of fey a hag spawn a bear God and a terrifying wrathful ghost functionally work as an ensemble supporting cast on the surface maybe that sounds like more novelty fluff like the adventuring party in the kingmaker premium module if massive the trailer was less detailed maybe it would be but each character in this expansion means something something tied to the journey of the player and something tied to the overarching themes of the plot in this way mask of the betrayer successfully imitates a lot of the overall field Planescape torment there's hardly any scrap dialogue hardly any throwaway quests hardly any characters that don't in some way contribute to the overall direction and mood the main campaign of Neverwinter Nights 2 was all about those sort of digressions diversion after delightful diversion this is much tighter in every way smaller of scale and physical space more focused in its themes and dialogue more purposeful with its dungeons like the central curse characters talk about it like an illness and like a monster and it is both it was once a person anyway a kochia mortal who once used the same silver sword whose fragments ended up in your chest to attack the realm of the god of death himself he did it for love but the legacy of his devotion is the pain and death the curse is spent centuries causing all of that comes to a head in fascinating ways resolving akashi's crusade and his unfinished business while simultaneously seeking your own salvation and mounting a crusade on killing boars thrown yourself like Planescape torment the mythological elements work in harmony and sympathy with the personal emotional stories of the characters getting the frame right is important which is why the lore has to come first once you've made it to the city of Milson tier you eventually need to find a sealed vault that the god of the dead kept except not the current god of the dead kalampore caliber is harsh but fair a respectable god before him was Michael a cruel and vengeful God who took true delight in the judgment and punishment of mortal souls now Dungeons & Dragons takes place in universe where things like gods and goddess in Heaven's and hells and different flavored Purgatory's all demonstrably exist you die and are judged and then go to an eternal reward that suits you you can literally summon the spirits of the Dead and they'll tell you flat-out that's the way that it goes there's no excuse really to not believe and not have faith in something since there is a day for not just all the points of the moral compass but all sorts of different enthusiasms and beliefs even within a compass point and more importantly they do answer when you pray to them to not believe to not care is something Michael took great offense to so he built the wall of the faithless any soul who rejects divinity in all forms is entombed in the wall and it slowly painfully devours their memories in essence until they no longer exists in any way it's a wildly harsh punishment it is unfair and spiteful and just plain evil that's Michael for you though in his judgment of souls he's apt to have you drawn and quartered for a parking ticket so achacha was one of his high priests and the woman he loved would have wound up in the ball so he ground against the gears of the great wheel itself and tried to tear down the ball he failed he became the curse of the spirit eater he would do compulsively to the innocent exactly what the wall he fought against does each spirit consumed would glorify me Cole Revere his sadistic legacy even as the old gods bones float quietly and the winds of the astral plane a little bit of an improvement over black garrison the Lord Of Shadows isn't in achacha is known as the betrayer and so the title of the expansion is referring to you the player what are you are you the mask of flesh hiding the spirit eaters hunger like how all the companion characters in Planescape torment associated with the nameless one on the basis of that emotion the torment of a conflicted nature masks are the central connective metaphor of the cast here - gone is the most obvious of them the hag spawn spirit shaman whose specialty is walking in the dreams of others hags are known for being generally murderous and awful but they covet and sometimes they love and the children of these unions are renowned for being both beautiful and intensely broken gone of Dreams is something of a cliche as the handsome and flirtatious bad-boy sort kind of like Geralt in The Witcher games but more vain however the way he balances his everyday narcissism with an interest in grand heroic gestures and being seen heroic lay does feel human and real after a while selflessness starts feeling a little more natural to Gahan than reflexive self-interest it's a small character arc but it's a smaller game and anything more dramatic wouldn't feel as convincing and real Gahan is mostly a [ __ ] when he meet him and eventually he's less of a [ __ ] when he realizes he can have actual friendships if he gets his head out of his ass every now and then that's a relatable character arc plus later you meet his mother the thing was Gunn's mother actually did love his father among the society of hags such weakness is a crime they chopped up Gunn's dad they fed it to Jon's mom and then she went mad with grief all his life Gahan was shown that sincerity and connection make you vulnerable love kills so he puts on a mask of a man who doesn't care who's lovable in a way where he never loves back a privately depressed drifter lothario more exotic of nark is that of kale indeed of a celestial who has become more and more jaded and disappointed by the moral state of the cosmos the more she sees of it this is not to say she's visibly angry on the contrary she is utterly serene and unfailingly kind to the player she was one of calvo's doom guides Priestess type who helps the living prepare for the cosmological sorting hat of death but when she learned of the wall of the faithless when she saw how petty the gods were towards innocent souls who simply led spiritually introverted or disconnected lives she resolved to do something about it even if it means crossing Killam for her journey echos akashi's and so naturally she's drawn to your cause you're both making your way to the same destination the mask she wears is her celestial nature her smile said an unchanging marble she's a creature of obvious divinity yet she cares more for mortals than she ever did for the spinning of the plains willing to forsake her heritage her religion and her future in her crusade against the wall she's driven by rage sadness rah defiance you've got to get her know her pretty well before the ferocity of her feelings becomes clear and should you find yourself at cross-purposes down the line that ferocity will be solely directed you mask the betrayers mid-game takes place out in the wilds of Rashomon and in the shadow side of molson tier with the Black Gate Akashi walk through to assault the city of judgement still stains it's all pretty free form is open as anything in the main campaign but more dense and content for the maps that you do explore you do things like adventure through an ancient forest whose spare to stop talking to the Druids when who thoroughly explored the forest brought either harmony or chaos to the full of it you'll meet the wood man he's the voice and essence of the entire forest in the lower levels of Dungeons and Dragons mythology is something that gives context to what you do hearing stories learning clues raiding old tombs and temples in the epic levels you participate directly in the making of new myths speaking as equals with incredible and wondrous creatures who would have seemed all-powerful back in your rat smashing days and still a diversity of choice for the player you can consume the forests essence and have a big ol pine fresh belch afterwards or you can heal the spirit use your own dwindling essence and force it out of your own soul into the forests to heal it if you do it once you can do it again you learn this new skill where you can use a portion of your hunger bar to heal companions the wood man will tell you about how this is not his first time meeting the spirit eater either the curse is a cycle it wears new masks but the hunger is always the same until now if you help him anyway there's a beautiful narrative satisfaction in breaking these ancient cycles and the fixing things that have been long broken but the game doesn't force you into that role you can just as easily eat the wood man his defeat bringing glory to the player glory to Michael this kind of quest threaded so tightly into the overarching themes and plot direction are all over the quest one after another there's barely anything in the game that doesn't mean something in some way in the context of what's being explored in a general kind of sense the only area that's bloated and out of balance is a late-game visit to the fame Academy it's about three straight hours of puzzles some good some profoundly irritating like having to balance two rooms of fire and ice methods with only a single lever operated trapdoor to do it with there's some side content to most notably Equestria bargain with demons for the souls of Ammon and arrow the villain turned companion from the campaign Gero tells you what he remembers of your companions who lived who died a creature of shadow earlier in the game gave you some idea of the same since it was that creature that plucked you from the climax of main campaign and brought you into the new story Gero though is pleasantly credible and one of the only familiar faces you'll see in the entire expansion he joins you for this portion of the game and assuming he lives through it joins you again in Kellum borås city of judgment but he doesn't get the aku treatment they didn't seem to be able to get the voice actor to come back for Jarrow and he has only a few brief lines of dialogue it's alright even though a man gerra was the most conflicted of the main campaigns companions he just doesn't hold a candle to the new ones Sofia is the first character you meet but the last one to have her backstory fully processed making her a bit of a friendly enigma for much of the game we're gone can have a romantic subplot with a female player character Sofia has romantic subplot with a male player character if you're interested in that sort of thing Sofia is a little unique among RPG romances though in that her subplot is explicitly an echo of long ago things you discover about the main plot a Koch's lost love is still magically alive she founded the thaen Academy in fact in not only Sofia but her mother and her sisters that he met earlier or all facets of that same old soul broken off and given purpose that whole puzzle sequence that was all about experiments to move Souls fragments Souls fused souls together it was foreshadowing with puzzles and as much of a slowdown in the game's pacing as the thaen Academy is it does make the revelations about Sofia and the founder feel convincing when they come so the chemistry between the players character in Sofia is that sincere or is it an echo of a catchy reaching out to an echo of someone who seems critically familiar to him the issue of masks for Sofia isn't so straightforward as it is for Don for her the question is how much of her being is actually independent how much is free will and how much is reading from a script written for her long in advance in reclaiming independence from the curse and reclaiming your identity and agency Sofia can do the same with the strange circumstances of her own existence Sofia would have made a stronger impression as a character had she been developed earlier but she holds up a significant amount of the game's larger plot the way they did do it for the revelation to work and have meaning you have to lay down a huge amount of exposition about how the lore works first and then you have to have a casual friendly understanding of Sofia as a well-meaning person who she is on the day-to-day stuff and then you need to tie all that together with a big climactic reveal a reveal that works even better if you throw in an entirely optional easily miscible romantic subplot it's bold and risky storytelling not risky because it's transgressing any boundaries but risky because it's a very weird house of narrative cards that's either going to turn out to be an extremely impressive and intricate accomplishment or a messy pile of flattened possibilities where Neverwinter Nights 2 is as familiar and comforting as snow on Christmas mask of the betrayer weaves its characters into the plot and not expected genuinely surprising ways the plot itself goes into unexpected philosophically dramatic territory the main campaign was about the most earnest root value of Dungeons & Dragons friendship matters the party is the foundation of all fun and adventure vascular betrayer instead asks if the structure of the universe is unfair and even the gods know it is it not then now your burden to ripe that moral and balance yourself what is the higher virtue to abide the laws of the gods or to have compassion for mortals to exercise your will and serve your own interests mask of the betrayer offers so many dialogue options so many scenarios that branch in unpredictable ways that you're not just offered a chance to answer those questions it's impossible to navigate the plot at all without forming some kind of concrete moral philosophical perspective and opinion on the matter it's bishop from the original campaign who ends up clarifying the stakes of the expansion Bishop was dislikable sure but he was only human he was selfish cutthroat and chances are good that he killed the [ __ ] out of him at the end of your original journey together but does he deserve the slow annihilation of his entire being there are three strange dreams in the game before it all comes to a head in one you see a boy in another the red woman the soul who made the mold for Sophia's in the third dream you appear yourself before the wall of a faithless long before your climactic confrontation with it Bishop is being absorbed into the wall but recognizes you enough to lob some insults your way he's putting on a brave face like with air baths and hordes of the Underdark this expansion humanizes a character I'd find I'd found shallow in the main campaign bishops fear is real the smallness of his person the grand scheme of things is clear and yet he's still got this brutal fate ahead of him no matter what sure it felt just that he died the first time around and you always knew he gave no shits for anything spiritual but this this is like discovering the guy who overcharged you for weed in high school was sentenced to death by a giant snake swallowed and dissolved slowly in some bizarre ages old ritual it's too much man Bishop hands you a final fragment of a mask to match those from previous dreams each is a memory the final unresolved memories of achacha the betrayer his family his love and his knowledge of the walls and justice all that's needed to heal the sucking wound of the spirit eater curse the most satisfying ending in the game where the curse is healed and CACCI goes on to the afterlife he'd been denied is only possible with these mask fragments without memory without context all he is is hunger with the restoration of self knowledge comes restoration of the self for you too of course when you reach the city of judgment it can go down a couple of ways the most obvious the most exciting option is to continue akashi's crusade in which case who order round two catches older tenants to lay siege to three districts in any order you choose alternately you can respect kelmer's authority as you know a god and defend his city against the crusade in return for his favor in undoing the curse if you do this kaylynn the devil will turn on you her conviction deeper than her loyalty to you personally even at this late stage small actions matter one of the koch's lieutenants is a demi-wedge named Ron Ock just evil to the core and extremely powerful it's convenient to just go along with Roenick and accept his help but if you do in the epilogue he'll kill Kahlan in a moment of petty betrayal and then you reach the wall of the faithless that at last in the end you only tear away one soul your own but Kellum war allows it to happen he wishes you well provided your actions show that you meant well Kahlan says that what you've done is a symbolic victory more than anything but these are the plains belief is reality the wall of the faithless is not on yielding and in knowing it can be torn down even a brick the mortar of the whole thing begins to weaken the LP the epilogue slides here are fantastic with detailed explanations of what happens to everyone like kayln continuing your crusade without you and having even more success making her kind of a saint to the faithless unless of course you casually bargain with Roenick in which case she dies the player even loops themselves they return to West Harbor and crossroad keep and if you've been pursuing a romance the pair of you get married there the game won't say if you stay in West Harbor that's between the player and the modules they download but the looping here serves a larger purpose from the very beginning your character has carried a burden first it was the shard the weight of special destiny that drove you from the town with the blood of your friends still wet on your clothes then it was the curse the negative destiny that you successfully appealed as far up the chain of command as cosmologically possible now for the first time since that sunny afternoon a million years ago when you solved the case of the two large hog and won the harvest Cup your character is free obsidian second expansion for never won tonight's two went in a wildly different direction and I don't blame it a bit for doing so mask of the betrayer is a difficult act to follow so they follow it with an axe that doesn't even compete to do the same things with it if Neverwinter Nights twos main campaign was kind of stock standard dialogue-driven RPG and mask of the betrayer was its contemplative moody follow-up then storm of Zaheer would tell a deliberately colorful light-hearted story of pure pulp adventure it modeled itself much more an eye Swindell than Neverwinter Nights and even echoes older a D&D computer games from the Goldbach's era storm of Zaheer like the later premium modules of the first Neverwinter Nights knows that at the tail end of a product shelf life its novelty that makes new content eye catching storm of Zaheer may well be the strangest game and obsidians catalog in all the good and bad ways you might expect such a game to turn out it's excessively ambitious heavily stylized and defiantly quaint in a way that feels unusual for obsidian I loved it for all of that it's always fun to see Studios make major deviations from their tropes and so obsidian putting out a Dungeons & Dragons adventure that's light on plot and even later on dialogue is a hell of a curiosity even just on the surface of things in the details of the thing storms a here is like the crossroad keep stronghold minigame expanded to more and more aspects of design oddly complex systems implemented in largely optional and awkwardly fussy ways it feels much less predictable and straightforward than main campaign but the experimentation being done is implementing an even more traditional D&D approach than the main campaign did storm of Zaheer and a lot of critical ways takes up the banner of the first Neverwinter Nights and its attempt to translate the dice rollin scaled check-in game of Dungeons and Dragons more than the imaginative experience of collaborative storytelling the most important and obvious element of that is full party customization this is fraying in a way because instead of choosing from a small pool of pre-written companions you can get waist-deep in the roll book and make a custom balanced part in the catechol a tailor to your individual play style you can play around with races and classes you'd never choose for a full game protagonist because you have so many slots to fill if a character dies you can roll a new one to replace them there is little penalty to being playful and how you construct your characters even more critically the dialogue window has been retooled so that you can use any party member to speak at any time and they'll use their own skills to unlock unique dialogue so you don't have to have one character your main character with diplomacy bluff and intimidate you can have three characters with one skill each and then a fourth with taunt on top of it all four of those characters might get a unique dialogue choice and all four of those choices would be available to use during the same line the trade-off is that all four of those choices will probably arrive at the same outcome the system is utilitarian and the writing often is as well what's being rewarded is not the players creative choices but the players mechanical choices these skills are meant to open up new paths the same as a rogue can pick locks and the skills often allow you to skip steps of a quest or skip fights but you won't really use the social skills in the context of character based role-playing like other modules and expansions the design differences between storm of Zaheer and obsidians other campaigns are roughly equivalent to stylistic differences between tabletop play groups not every group is going to be so into narrative as electronic campaign we are some people don't like the improv aspect some people are shy and some people just preference the combat numerical progression an average everyday D&D group is likely going to have a party of characters who are two pages deep the character sheet the inventory on the back and a pages scribbled backstory and the original baldur's gate this kind of functional companionship was a notable design difference even from baldur's gate to scripted games in general can do more storytelling than tabletop games are often able to accomplish because they can have so many different voice actors such carefully curated areas in quests dialogue that's not only premeditated but edited and arranged for clarity it's not like the tabletop way where if you're the dungeon master you have to speak for every single character not the party at some point you just worry you're gonna run out of voices tabletop play is often digressive a party will frequently come up with quest solutions outside of what the dungeon master expected they'll explore in directions not prepared for both in terms of on the map and what they prioritize in their general course of action open-world role-playing games in the electronic sphere capitalize on that impulsive digressive rhythm of play conversely the mostly linear mask of the betrayer portrayed and explored the theatrical side of Dungeons & Dragons and grander ways than the tabletop game could do and it's linearity was a design choice favorable to that theatricality it controls better for pacing and for tone storm of zaheer on the other hand tries to bring that impulsive explorative side of Dungeons & Dragons to life in a more exciting way than the tabletop game might be able to present it is in a rough way an open world expansion the game is divided into two gigantic overworld maps which you Traverse in real-time 3d when you leave an individual location like a dungeon or a town you choose one party member as leader and then use them to navigate the overworld random encounters appear which is a fun novelty at first but quickly becomes extremely tedious with a multitude of loading screens that never went to Knights two throws at you every time you transition between maps there are also neutral and positive random encounters strange travelers or beings like a blue dragon may be an evil druid in his pack of Panthers or even one of many an evil companion from mask of the betrayer who makes a cameo here if you have spot and move silently you can sneak past most of the unwanted encounters if you have search you can find all sorts of caches of valuables and crafting out on the overworld map with the saturated colors and bright promise of classic unrefined adventure storm of Zahira has a kind of casual feel to it that it's hard to pin down as much as scripted companions are meant to fill the void left by other players this upbeat and whimsical tone is intended to mitigate what's lost when you lose that social fun of the tabletop experience the collaborative thrill of deciding where to go next and applying the skills of your character sheet to the world at large that common memory of players and Dungeon Master's of a xeroxed map on the table and dice in the hand is what storm of zaheer is interested in replicating more than its interested in telling a story much more the story is mostly there to frame and organize progression through the map there's around a hundred locations in the game and well over half of them are completely optional the areas are also all short and to the point a puzzle a combat encounter a cave or a tower with a few profitable rooms it's actually a bit of a warm-up for obsidians biggest open-world project Fallout New Vegas one of New Vegas is divisive differences between it and fallout 3 was the fact that its dungeons were similarly compact and scaled down to architectural II reasonable proportions in contrast with with Eze des Elder Scrolls style dungeons that meander and whined to the point where it can take over half an hour to explore even the most tangential ruin storm of Zaheer's world map knits dozens on dozens of small fun moments of curiosity and danger into a comforting quilt of familiar pulp adventure there's also some experimentation and seeing what sorts of other roles than adventure that a player might be able to experience in a fantasy world so star moves a-here implements a trading system letting the player play merchant between towns for fun and profit in the first half of the game it's underutilized and limited in utility you can make some money with it but you aren't able to trade more than ten things at a time and the profits to be had are pretty minimal this is in the jungles of Chilton an overgrown paradise with snake temples and trained dinosaurs but then at the end of the first act you go back to the sword coast to never went to high cliff port last West Harbor and crossroad keep at the keep quelle gar is running things but the original voice actors been replaced by someone else who is just awful the cow gar here also seems disconnected from any personal growth that quel gar went through in the main campaign we're back to a stereotypical dumb dialogue he gives you some quests but more importantly he lets you set up a trade hub for your company in the keep from there use the lumber and leathers that he traded for in the first act to set up trading posts in all major towns and cities these settlements each produce a unique high-value item to trade at much more profitable rates more you can pay to establish caravans between any two settlements and have them automatically generate profits as you explore an adventure each trade route has a paragraphs description allowing you to dramatize the system in your imagination better when the network is set up the Overland map becomes populated by dozens of little covered wagons hauling goods back and forth sometimes they get attacked and you can actually help them fend off the attackers in a random encounter other times they break down and you have to bring them repair materials like iron to get going again they pay you absurd amounts of money but rather than breaking the economic system these constant massive profits subsidize and other of storm of say here's unique design choices party primitive in games with scripted companions having having them be vulnerable to dropping completely out of the whole story contempt can tear ragged holes in the plot and leave it feeling incomplete so most companions in every winter campaigns pop up again at one hit point if the player lives through any given combat situation RPGs like Fallout 1 and 2 had permadeath companions for sure but the companions also had much less dialog than most modern RPGs in stro of zaheer each member of the party is mechanically important but completely interchangeable as far as progression and coherence are concerned so when a party member goes below 0 hit points they must be healed or bleed to death if they die for good they can be resurrected by a spell per the usual rules but they can also be left behind or disintegrated or otherwise removed from play so from time to time you might need to roll a new character and equip them also in crossroad keep is an academy for adventurers run by Jared and his party their heads who kept coming to see you in the keep and during the main campaign for one gold per experience point you can train any new character up to be the same progress point as your farthest along character in terms of experience with a trade network in place you can afford to do this as needed in the late game when difficulty gets jacked way way up prem death also contributes to the tabletop feel of the expansion to the rhythm of chance encounter and chance resolution the merchant minigame takes the unforgiving nature of the perma death system and provides a safety net that's fun all all on its own you can also do things like upgrade the roads and the equipment of the great cloaks even if you already made those investments in the main campaign it's expensive to do so and close to meaningless in mechanical terms but it does affect an epilogue slide storm of Zaheer is every bit the hack-and-slash adventure that atari expected mask of the betrayer to be but even here there's creativity and experimentation to be found in the safe obscurity of a latent stage expansion pack the merchant system the perma death system full party customization they're all polarizing choices and reactions the storm of Zaheer were very mixed on release but in retrospect it's these strong unapologetic explorations of niche design choices that make storm zaheer worth playing at all there's a collection quest for the merchant system where you've got to collect one of every luxury good when you do you're given a most unexpected reward a sensory stone brought by the quest giver from sigil holding it you see a moment from Planescape torment the nameless one and the rest of the party wandering down an avenue it's not unreasonable that the stone would be here the sensorium was already filled with recollections of nameless one and the transition from a D&D to third edition so war that destroyed all the guilds and consumed much of the city of sigil and chaos and bloodshed you can lose a lot in that confusion over and over and over again we've seen tributes and references to torment it never seems far from memory of for the RPG writers who had to follow it up in the years since a strange and wonderful thing about Dungeons and Dragons though is that not only do both these games storm of Zaheer and Planescape torment take place in the same universe they're both equally valid expressions of the route tabletop game from which they've sprung mask of the betrayer is clearly much more explicitly tied to torments legacy but the things that mask cares about when it comes to Dungeons & Dragons are more on the dungeon masters side of things mask of the betrayer was concerned with deep lore intricate world building complicated characters with meaningful secrets all things that come up most often outside of playin Dungeons and Dragons with a pile of source books on the dinner table and the spiral learning notebook of doodle naps and encounter notes open beside them those source books have thousands and thousands of pages of things to scoop out and layer into a story to make it better places and monsters and ideas beyond what you might imagine alone that aspect of D&D is a huge part of the appeal and getting lost in all that make-believe history and geography and monstrous biology can take up just as much time or more as playing Dungeons and Dragons that's the dungeon masters job to drink deep from the communal pool of myths and legends and then sweat out as many coherent and memorable plot threads as you can the DM is just one person though everyone else is just reacting and riffing and requires no real planning whatsoever to actually play the game of Dungeons and Dragons to be a player all you have to do is follow your nose and stay faithful to your character concept mask of the betrayer fulfills a dungeon masters fantasy a grand story that squeezes the source material for every last drop of narrative potential tighter and more totally consistent than you'd likely ever get away with in live play storm of Zaheer is a player's fantasy diving headfirst into the jungle with a couple of quests a vague plan and little ambition besides having a shit-kicking good time strongly Zaheer does have a variety of NPC companions who can come with you and they do get unique dialogue choices as well all of those choices are shallow and cheesy and yet when you're stoned ass be able to come up with anything better deep into Saturday night be indie marathon the script isn't good if you compare it to mask of the betrayer but bear in mind a lot of the same writers worked on both projects their games and deliberately cross-purposes so don't bother to compare them compare instead of the script of storm of Zaheer - your pal Keith when is two beers deep and making a bluff roll when you defeat the new snake God's slithering minions hacking and slashing or sneaking your way to the top of the final temple there is no reason to expect anything fancy and you don't get anything fancy like with the king of Shadows the big boss fight is an understood inevitability you don't even have to stop Wednesday here's plot is foiled you can explore the world as you please afterwards there's even a secret region that sup if you follow the right side quest then when you're ready you can retire and trigger the epilogue slides you can actually retire at any time even before the main plot is complete of although obviously that changes the epilogue some point is though the main quests of storm of Zaheer is an obligatory formality storm of Zaheer is a buffet of small adventures to be picked at and gorged on until you loosen your belt slump at the table and say no more surely though you have room for one last wayfarer thin module after everything that happened with darkness / dagger furred Ossian studios continued to maintain a friendly working relationship with publisher atari this led to a second shot at doing an official adventure this time a full expansion pack set to be released in 2007 just a short year after Neverwinter Nights 2 came out and then Atari made a small request a brief delay while they worked out the kinks of a new suite of digital rights management software this delay went on and on for 19 months in time both obsidian expansion packs would come out and still no authorization to finally release mysteries of Westgate then even more time would pass Osteen spent this interval ensuring compatibility updating the expansion so it'll be current with new builds of the game finally in 2009 the expansion was released as a digital download only while Austin's reputation within the community as the creatives behind darkness / dagger furred meant a warm reception for mysteries over West Gate from Neverwinter enthusiasts it would have been extremely difficult for Atari to set up the module to fail any worse in the popular market as a digital only release in 2009 it was the kind of thing you'd have to hear about by word of mouth and deliberately seek out like I said the very beginning of this video part of the reason I wanted to cover the whole run of official and everyone tonight's adventures is because I had thought of myself as a big fan of the second game and I had never heard of mysteries of Westgate either until it came packaged with my new download when I purchased it again if I missed something as big as mysteries of Westgate how deep did the rabbit hole go a year later and now I know the hole is actually bottomless when you get deep into the user content but never won tonight's ones community is still going strong why isn't everyone tonight Stu so and today why didn't have a premium module program like the original mysteries of Westgate is shorter and simpler than darkness over dagger furred taking place entirely within a four neighbourhood City at around 10 to 15 hours this is perhaps half the length of dagger furred and a quarter of the physical space how come well all those questions share a common answer the tool said was more difficult and time-consuming to use than the original games Aurora toolset in that entity with vile Serge magazine witches wake creator Rob Bartell said of the new toolset quote Dragon Age in never went to knights - took a different approach than everyone tonight's dawn they focused on professionalizing with toolset and making it more powerful time consuming and fiddly rather than popularizing it making it easier more compelling and more efficient to use the communities and content suffered for it I remember a sad discussion with some of his key decision-makers on Dragon Age where they consciously wanted to make the toolset harder to use on the basis that it would weed out low-quality work unfortunately insisting that all science fiction writers be astronauts doesn't make for better science fiction it just results in significantly less of it for us to enjoy end quote as role-playing games have gotten better-looking and more complicated those not able to keep pace with the money and technology on display find it harder to be seen and heard today the Unity engine and assets as well as more difficult technology like the Unreal Engine drive a lot of independent development the way that the gold source and aurora engines used to back then but making a game look contemporary is a difficult uphill battle and still often requires a larger development team than the small handfuls of people working on premium modules back in Neverwinter Nights one mysteries of Westgate visibly struggles under the weight of more modern production knees trembling sweat pulling on the brow where darkness / dagger furred took its cues from Baldur's Gate 1 mysteries of Westgate feels very much like Baldur's Gate 2 and much of its structure where the original is rural the sequel is urban of Catlow was a much more memorable city than Baldur's Gate and here Westgate feels much more alive and real than dagger for dead or even the main campaigns Neverwinter the city is dingy and draped in a perpetual mist it seems like a real downer of a place to actually live in contrast never went to in the main campaign didn't leave much of an impression at all as somewhere regular people might live and work here everywhere you look is Ram che buildings ramshackle lives in the color of damp logs as far as the eye can see the gloom is atmospheric and if mysteries of Westgate existed in a vacuum that would be great but after the riot of color that was storm of zaheer and more balanced sophisticated use of moody earth tones and mask of the betrayer mystery is a Westgate seems like a module caught in between the aesthetics of never won tonight's one and two it's much more detailed in its visual elements than in everyone tonight's one module but it shares their interest in a realistic muted color palette that the Obsidian campaigns largely rejected in favour of a more saturated Illustrated look it certainly helps mystery as westgate stand out from the others but in a way that singles it out as a bit of an anachronism which is part of the goal to be fair Austen's work is all about trying to adapt the original recipe Bioware flavour to more modern games with the darkness our photographer did they nailed it with mysteries of Westgate though the results are much less consistent there's still a lot of the kind of curiosity rewarding design that made the previous adventure so good with lengthy side quests layered densely into the three main neighborhoods of Westgate take the street vendor telling stories about the legendary Ranger minx and his hamster boo obviously you the player want to hear the story because it's partly our story too if you've played these games but the guy is just making [ __ ] up to sell you rats claiming them to be hamsters if you look at his big bucket of rats though what you're not really prompted to do there is one real hamster in there it squeaks at you in a way that suggests that you should follow it so pirates of the Sword Coast treasure map style you walk so-and-so paces around the district before finding a small cave under the street in it is a tree eat the berries of the tree and hamster becomes enormous and tells you to stop its rival in evil ferret being worshipped by a cult so you go you buy a pair of black robes you infiltrate the cult and then the giant ferret and giant hamster have a climactic battle it's weird hilarious and easy to completely walk by this is the strongest element to Ossian style design the way they make organic discovery especially rewarding by refusing to Telegraph where their best quests can be found recent RPGs and it's easy to understand this when you consider how expensive they are to make have a habit of trying to funnel you into the most high effort content but it's better I think to go into something not knowing what to expect and winding up infiltrating a cult of ferret worshipers than to expect to fetch quest and receive a fetch quest there aren't as many side quests as there are in darkness over dagger furred but ones there are tend to be more complicated and memorable than many of the main quests and mysteries of Westgate a house blows up and before you know it you're teleported that that was a miles away to fight a lich a companion wants to pick up some for old stuff but doesn't mention the angry ghosts that are there waiting for her storm of Zaheer was an expansion with obvious novelty mysteries of Westgate is an expansion with a more subtle novelty a playful unpredictability that stems from sharp writing and confident jokes it's when mystery is at Westgate tries to play it straight that the thing starts to break down I'm gonna spoil the mystery for you the vampires did it that's it that's as deep as the mysteries go it was the vampires the fun of the module is exploring the city and in the side content as far as the main mystery goes it's written much more simplistically than even dialog elsewhere in the module on multiple occasions your player character can chime in with something like more banter a well shut up and have at you and I found myself more or less agreeing with that much of the time when you as a writer have your own characters comment on the on originality of a line of dialogue I kind of feel like you ought to just rewrite the dialogue now I know that's just one possible response of several but still it's an indication that even the author knows they could have tightened up a bit the climactic hour or so of the game is kind of a crapshoot in general they throw villains at you one after another named villains with a role in the plot and the revelation and most of these Schmucks you've just never seen before at all if you visualize the plot structure this is a literal bottleneck to a wide open freeform experience narrowed to a single procession of rooms and encounters for one boss fight that's understandable but this all begins well before what you might consider the true climax so it feels arbitrarily constricting and often confusing trying to figure out if you've missed some foreshadowing somewhere the only part of the comp the climax that really sings and is the personal plotline of man today is the ex paladin he lost control several years ago and murdered some of the knight masks the vampire control gang that serves as the game's villains but he went beyond what was justified smashing the skulls of teenagers who had an actual done anything to justify that kind of behavior in retaliation that night masks took his lover and partner in justice and then turned her into a vampire he didn't know about that and they hadn't seen each other since until now she then does something that I found kind of touching in a melancholy way he despairs his seeing her declaring that this is the moment that he's lost his faith he announces lavander he wants the wall of the faithless to embrace him and annihilate him when he dies this makes his former love feel for him as much as she can feel as an evil as a dead evil thing she still loves him somewhere deep so she baits him into attacking her reminding him of his vows to Lysander she's a monster remember to encourage Manta T's to see her as a monster now is to give him permission to let her go to die by his hands as a release from an eternity of Twilight's servitude and on death for her in the next room with an Xbox it's a death knight who used to be lovers and partners with a woman who's cursed mask kicked off the whole adventure similar to how a manta DS and the other vampire were partners seeing the Fallen paladin makes Manta T's realized just how much farther down he could go and how he hasn't actually slipped as far down as he initially thought so he challenges the death knight to a duel and for this act of devotion Lysander blesses him with return of his paladin's powers his lovers soul and even his lost golden plate nail it's a classic compelling moment it's also slightly undercut by the fact that both these major antagonists had to introduce themselves in the very same conversation that led to these deep outcomes in terms of dialogue it's great in terms of narrative organization it's a disaster what compounds the sometimes confusing choices in plotting and presentation is the fact that the module uses the spoken word cutscene dialogue format in situations where no voice lines were ever recorded theoretically that's a positive correction taking the tiny dialogue cube in the corner of the screen and then bringing it back down to the lower half of the screen where it traditionally belongs in practice though close-up face shots of characters gesturing emphatically without moving their mouths is just super goofy every time and the Aurora engine you rarely got this close to the characters faces and even then there was no expectation they'd actually lip-sync any dialogue the problem is that mysteries of Westgate does lip-sync a good portion of their dialogue creating a lot of uncertainty about when a character is going to read a line or when they're going to hand you the script and point to where they're at on the page had none of the lines been voiced it would have been a more comfortable choice than having such an off-putting inconsistency in an interview with Rock Paper Shotgun from 2009 Alan Miranda talks about how difficult it is for a low-budget release to tackle the modern expectation of having most of the dialogue recorded quote we knew from the start that there would be no way to professionally voice over mysteries of Westgate to the extent that Neverwinter Nights 2 had been done there simply wasn't the budget of course having no voice over was not an option either so we approached it similar to what we would had done for the number one two nights one premium modules which was recording a limited amount of voiceover for important characters or scenes but I think where we went wrong was when we created cutscenes that had no voice over because there was stuck out more for players as being like silent movies we knew the problem at the time but were caught between not being able to afford more voice over or cutting out certain important cutscenes so we left things as they were hoping that players would understand in quote I wonder what mysteries of Westgate could have been had they been able to use that 19 month delay to continue expanding and improving the game but Atari kept them in a limbo where they just never knew if it was next week or next year that their game might go up for sale without the kind of active community never when tonight's one has there seems little chance Ossian will be able to do an enhanced edition of this module the same way they did for darkness over dagger furred and that's okay I'd honestly rather see them do something new than try to rehab this title when you consider the end the problems might run deeper than just a facelift and extra voiceover work could address the evil vampire comes out lectures you for a while about how he masterminded events from beginning to end and then the Sun begins to rise aha you say foiled by your own cliches speech but he isn't he just shrugs it off and warns you to get your ass out of town by next sundown the end it's underwhelming and honestly kinda lame it's a flat note for never won tonight's - to go out on but it's a flat note played to an empty auditorium the way it was released most everyone thought the concert ended hours ago despite any frustrations I had with it I did enjoy my time with mysteries of Westgate what it does well it does brilliantly well what it falls flat on it tried earnestly to make work it might not be as impressive as the obsidian expansions but it's creatively unique from them to Dungeons & Dragons is so many things to so many people and that makes it impossible for any game to have a truly definitive take on the base game Dungeons & Dragons is a game it's a storytelling tool it's the stories themselves the amazing thing about it is that anyone can do it anyone at all all it takes is imagination a rule book and an extort of number of expensive dice game development sadly is not the same way whether dungeon master developer though the measure of true success isn't how many people play it but how much of yourself how much of your own create unique creative voice you can put into it playing a triple a fantasy game is like reading RA Salvatore you know he's going to be good it's a vetted and quality assured kind of deal playing these older obscure modules is like showing up to a D&D game you found out about from a flyer on a quark board maybe nobody knows anybody at the start and nobody knows exactly what to expect we all know the game being played but just saying we're playing D&D doesn't tell you that much about how the experience might go it could be a disaster it could be a night you never forget you just never know until you show up fill out your character sheet and let the words of the dungeon master pave a road deep into your imagination no one likes having their time wasted when it comes to media there's only so much time we've got and everyone wants a sure thing but a sure thing isn't the only thing and he could be missing out on something truly special they'll just have to roll the dice and find out thanks for watching all the videos I do but particularly this video are supported via the crowdfunding website patreon if it wasn't for the individuals who are donating the money to through the month I probably wouldn't have been able to spend the year that I did putting this video together slowly while I worked on other more immediate projects I'd like to take a moment to thank by name some of the people who are currently donating $10 a month or more people like dirt war rule low B under random boat Macklin Mason Gallic Josh Dewey Ryan Puckerman Christian David Carlson Shaun King Cobra Siegelman NK jemisin Bobby Sims norton scanning david beckham court Josh Marcus Ashley ringing nobody Leonie Oh Chris larkey to me only Dylan ball Michael Kamen Coonan Coonan Jeremy Saunders seee King Eric Jepsen Tyler Dow Z Roman Alexander's Carl Gleason Las Olas Darien Desa tell Fergus Polie aurelion Noah Kantrowitz Tom Robert Inc your local mu mu Tong Vickers Danica Patrick calling butene karma Claude cybot D Daniel pining neat Williamson Alexander soon dude Ethan closet Tim Marsh abdul-rahman halassi 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began chef anxiety captain play hurtin Phillip coffee Erik Robinson kazimir Alex allotted Carl Clark Steven Garrett day jean-philippe no we will Edwards Robert Glover Jeanette team Anthony gallant Maurice Despereaux the noble gamer Nemo bend and break dice profit jack party Thomas Kistner and Rockland Earth April Gillis on will work great Noah I know you're reading this out loud Patrick McKenna Hanna Sebastian Perrone a will Adama bill Duggan's Alexander Cronus Luke Murphy John Hendrick ensign Tom pager Oscar Spangenberg Edward Clayton Andrews tin foil pancakes Samuel procopio Xavier Dominic Carlin King Winson Devon burnin bacon with McMillan ties Arabic area middle of Connor Jody Warren Elisha Nelson robot ghost Greg Merlin's Aden ak-47 Josh Bray Tech Shawn Webber Andrew Greg again Hercules Johnson will sigh : Alexander Romanov Jesse lokasenna Alexander Lucas mark on Dez de Moura toad heart Aaron al-bakr Matthew second William Homs Manuel Reitman Zak corpse team Latin Schneider Lara's Ivar Anderson Arturo Oh Lord I'm gonna mess this one up Arturo I can't read what I wrote up your last names I'm terrifically sorry I'll put you at the head alignments next time Danis to care in Glasscock Jeremy McQuaid Nicholas Romo your Genson Peter Frank Tim Dodds Jack 887 7 ac Kevin shell Anthony Bardell Andrew Monta vo Jared Meier Andrea's Larsen Brian Hill Lars reckon Igor Babbitt Dan Thompson Corinne vision Alexander leister Morgan Maud World War 2 3 Aaron Darwin Alya Burke mess Dennis Clark Daniel Pennybacker Corey both filled Jack Dawson Nick Cole in Elton Carol Henderson reference error looky way resident Vance Jordan Falls Zoe chic comfy had any burden Gabriel Nichols Ron Gervais Jeffrey McIntyre said ball Victor Felton Edward Clayton Andrews Simon Anderson Jonathan scene enjoyed James Moscow Tyler Russia Adam looking wiper Lawrence Hurley transient tiefling Jordan Falls Brent Cosman Tom Vickers conceded axis Ludo criticism and Edward Clayton Andrews I want to say thank you as well as everyone donating at a lower amount it all helps and it all contributes the nichkhun of these sorts of videos which I hope will be more frequent I appreciate everything thank you

Channel: Noah Caldwell-Gervais

Views: 1,364,768

Keywords: Neverwinter Nights, Retrospective, Critique, Review, Analysis, Neverwinter Nights 2, Shadows of Undrentide, Hordes of the Underdark, Witch's Wake, Shadowguard, Kingmaker, Pirates of the Swoard Coast, Infinite Dungeons, Darkness Over Daggerford, Wyvern Crown of Cormyr, Storm of Zehir, Mask of the Betrayer, Mysteries of Westgate

Id: QUHeWaDjuZ0

Length: 191min 44sec (11504 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 01 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/StefanGagne]

Hey there -- author of the HeX coda, Penultima, and elegia eternum here.

I feel that NWN's hype was way more focused on the community modules than on any official campaign. The expansions were primarily used to expand on community mods, adding more assets to the toolkit, for instance.

But one down note is that the premium module series, a hybrid of DLC and community content, was from my perspective kind of a mess. I very nearly made a mod for the program. It took months before I was given the greenlight to begin work, and then when I was 90% finished, WOTC canned it over a miscommunication about their IP expectations. That's why HeX coda was released for free.

[u/team56th]

3 hours and 11 minutes. Whoosh. Now that's longer than most of the films out there.

I'm still at the very start but he brings up an interesting point - That in hindsight, it was a precursor to the "games as a service" with its premium module service module and a heavy focus on multiplayer sessions. Come to think of it, they really were a bit different from traditional expansion packs, maybe except for Hordes of the Underdark. The game's focus was clearly not on the traditional storytelling like BG games were, and the attempt to create a shared multiplayer playground was evident and went concurrently with other traditional attempts like KOTOR and Jade Empire.

As is the case with Crystal Dynamics and IO Interactive, what Bioware stands for seems difficult to pin down if you start looking closer into the history. I've been reading Casey Hudson's recent blog posts about Anthem which focuses heavily on how Bioware is channeling its years-old ambitions to create Anthem. Even a die-hard supporter like me had to think whether this is a revisionist approach to the company's history or if he really means it.

Looking closer, however, we do spot these anomalies. Some think of Anthem as a sign that signifies a death of a once great studio, but they did a multiplayer-heavy, DLC-based service throughout early 2000s. It's like how some people thought Bioware was betraying its tradition when they were making a shooter-like Mass Effect, but they also made MDK2 at one point. Seeing how quite a few veterans still remain with the studio, I'm now inclined to believe that some people at the studio have been wanting to do this kind of game for some time.

[u/RufMixa555]

I didn't watch the whole thing but I enjoyed the nostalgia and he is not wrong. I loved Neverwinter nights but I loved it for the player created modules, it was my first "mmo" really. Where I got on a server, talked to people of the message board, help create community events, and enjoyed countless hours.

To be honest, I only remember bits and pieces of the original game

[u/TripleAych]

I thought I had played all of NWN series, but his index has modules listed I did not even know existed!

[u/Databreaks]

As someone who played a ton of NWN I completely disagree with his trashing of the main story. I thoroughly enjoyed exploring Neverwinter, the voice acting was fine (better than some games I've played more recently at least), and the "lizard conspiracy" stuff is such a teeny tiny part of the plot that it didn't bother me at all-- when I was a teen I didn't even notice that subplot existed-- I thought it was just a cult doing cult-ish things.

He also spends several entire minutes complaining about how he NEEDED Tomi Undergallows to help him, seemingly not aware that if you take Daelan instead (voiced by a spry young Steve Blum), any lock or door you can't pick, Daelan can easily demolish for you. (He also doesn't talk much.) There were almost no invulnerable doors or chests that I ever found.

Take one class level in Rogue on the side, and then you can put points into Identify/Disarm Trap and Pick Lock, which renders Tomi completely unnecessary, especially since Daelan dishes out crazy damage (and has a much more interesting backstory, not just random unfunny stories).

This video is interesting, and it covers a lot of the strengths and weaknesses of the NWN1 engine quite well, but in terms of story it sounds like he ruined the experience for himself by keeping Tomi around against his own interest, and turning his nose up at any hint of tropey writing... Which is kind of a ridiculous standard considering this was 2002, and edgy melodrama was all the rage back then.

NWN1 holds a special place in my heart, so I admit there is bias to my love for its story and characters, even if many are apparently "stock examples from the D&D manual" like Tomi. But I think he's uncharitably harsh to it. You can do and say and choose so many things in this game. You can resolve some quests in a number of ways, not always just violence and Persuade checks (although really, find me any WRPG where you have more than those two options, typically, aside from the games this one was inspired by like Planescape).

The title also says thorough, but he really doesn't go into detail about the combat system, or ways you can break the game, or how accurate it might be to D&D's systems, which is a bit disappointing.

His praise for the DLC writing is also odd to me because, last time I played, the writing of all the DLCs didn't seem much different from the main game at all. I definitely didn't get the impression they were written by totally different people, at least. The first DLC about Dogan in particular, is just a microcosm of the entire beginning of the main campaign, collecting info and items to create a cure for Dogan's poison, same as collecting Waterdhavian creatures.

I think overall, Noah's overwhelmingly high personal standards for game writing prevented him from actually enjoying anything he was doing, which is really unfortunate because there's a lot of fun quests (I particularly enjoyed the Spirit of The Wood quest, the Prison section, and the DLC finale with Mephistopheles, among many other moments).

Unfortunate that he was left so underwhelmed by the story, but he's right about pretty much everything else.

[u/vhite]

This is a game where I've spent 90% of time in character creation screen. Creating characters and leveling them was really fun, but the story campaign was so dull. I think I got past the first section set in Neverwinter two or three times, but not once past the forest section after it. At least it helped me to get into proper D&D.

[u/hollowcrown51]

Neverwinter Nights was great. I never particularly enjoyed actually playing the single player campaign (I found the game very hard, especially coming from Baldur's Gate which it could never hold a candle to), but the real star of the show was the toolkit.

The toolkit was just so incredibly powerful. It got me interested in basic scripting, making my own modules and stories, and I think spent way more time making my own maps and little modules than I ever did in game. All this when I was about 10-11 years old. I'd love for such a user friendly creation kit to ship with a game nowadays, it would be great.

Also Crimson Tides of Tethyr was the best module ever.

[u/JuliusBorisov]

For everyone enjoying the nostalgia, there's an Enhanced Edition of Neverwinter Nights available now: http://nwn.beamdog.com/

Steam Workshop for Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition - https://steamcommunity.com/workshop/browse/?appid=704450&browsesort=trend&section=readytouseitems

[u/[deleted]]

I've personally never played the NWN games before nor had the time to do so when they released. So, just like his Baldur's Gate video, I'm excited to listen (maybe watch) on something new to me while at work. I appreciate the hell out of youtube content such as this.

For those that may want to comment against the video length, allow me to highlight something:

It's 3 hours about a game SERIES, and not just ONE game. Yes, I'm obviously insinuating critique towards a certain youtuber with this comment, but I'll leave it at that.