NWN unofficial happy fun slander sucks thread !

This is a thread about why NWN sucks !
This thread is completely unofficial and in no way affiliated with NWN bioware or biofreak boyz .
NWN and Bioware are trademarks of Bioware.


I want Your opinion sirs and ladies.


My reason ?

Aribeth . The worse npc that i have ever met in any game.

It would be much easier to post one or two things one likes about NWN (if any of course) then post huge itemized lists of fuck ups. Just for the record, I didn't like anything about it. Although marketing hype machine was pretty good. :wink:

I kind of liked the online play, but only because I lucked out and played with one of the Best RPer Groups Ever(tm). After 1-2 months of it, though, the shallowness of the engine made me leave it behind for good. (as a side note, I can only recommend Ameryth to all roleplaying-inclined NWN'ers here, they are really some of the best online RPers I've ever met -- and I've been MUDding / playing private UO shards for 7 years now, as a player and as a member of their staff)

Now for the bad... sheesh, where to begin? In no particular order..
- The Official Campaign: Ph4t l3wt in crates, town portal, uberness, eating the entire Monstrous Manual for breakfast. No. (I didn't bother with it once I got past the prologue)
- The Gameplay: This is what turned me off NWN for good. It's basically diablo with D&D skills/spells, like it or not. The roleplaying additions are nice, but at the end of the day, NWN doesn't have anything on MUDs or UO shards. And don't get me started on the hideous gameplay imbalance between various skills / spells / items. Would it have hurt to have customizable skills (ie. the server admin can add / remove / edit them at will), perhaps even with <gasp> non-combat ones among them? It can be simulated, but eh..
- The Scripting Engine: For all the praise it got, it's clunky and requires insane effort to get something nice done. Which smart guy decided that NWScript wouldn't need I/O functionality?! Or arrays. Or custom datatypes. Or...
- The Bugs: I spent my first month under the baleful gaze of the Happy Fun ICB. Nuff said. Oh, and my (admittedly not top-of-the-line, though I did dumb all details down) computer died each time there were more than 4 characters onscreen. Even worse, any lag from the engine translated directly into network lag, eventually booting me from the server and resulting in massive glitches. Blarg.
- Persistent Worlds Suck: Yep, no matter how well-developed a PW, no matter how hard the creators work on it, no matter their talent, NWN will make it suck. Pretty much the only way to get around it is to nix ALL experience / l3wt sources and only award them during DM'd sessions. Ameryth is currently trying a 'constant-level' model that might or might not work -- but then it's not really D&D anymore, is it?

That said, I don't hate NWN as much as some people here... I just think NWN is, at the moment, little more than broken promises and misused potential.

phew, it doth feel good to rant.

-- Z.

Slander sucks or NWN sucks?

Well my stab at NWN slander..

NWN sucks cause it killed my parents and raped my dog and is hiding somewhere in Canada to avoid prosecution.

Interesting..

This thread is completely unofficial

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Heh, no shittin'.

My problem with NWN was not that it was awful, just that it was awfully average.
Most aspects of the game weren't bad, but they weren't good either.
Maybe if I hadn't been spoiled by BG and FO (and Morrowind of late) it would have appealed to me more.

vault666 said:

My problem with NWN was not that it was awful, just that it was awfully average.
Most aspects of the game weren't bad, but they weren't good either.
Maybe if I hadn't been spoiled by BG and FO (and Morrowind of late) it would have appealed to me more.

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I factor in the dev time with it's averageness. For five years, all the money Interplay had to pour in to this, and 75 people working on it at one point.. For an average game, those stats drop it straight to awful.

Sp, isn't an average game an average game no matter what? I would think so. Perhaps calling it a dissapointment would make more sense. The word awful should be reserved for truly awful games - namely POR2.

Not that I found NWN to be dissapointing as I got what I expected. If anyone expected a FO type of gaming experience; they were waiting for the wrong game.

Not when that average game is billed as TEH BEST RPG EVAR. If a developer has the time to make something great, and the resources to make something great, and they churn out something like NWN... Well, they're just not putting in much effort. When they make that average game and it's held up as SUPAH RPG, then you've got problems because the bar's been lowered, yet again.

BioWare's been lowering the bar for CRPGs since they've been making them.

I can accept faults easier knowing that one guy in his basement is making a game, versus a huge, mighty development house with five years and an army to toss at it's development. That's what I'm saying.

I don't mean to sound petulant, but I really don't understand why you would complain that a company would hype a product that it wanted to sell. Every game that a company releases is "the best game ever," or at least they'll tell you that to try to get you to buy it. DId you expect their PR folks to advise them to say, "This game is .. well, going to be okay. But you should buy it anyway."

My opinion is that Bioware is trying to make too many different types fo players happy - they marketed it to the Diablo players (and you really can't blame them, since Diablo sold a bajillion copies). The marketed to the hack 'n slash RPG'ers, they marketed to the hard-core RPG'ers ... they were trying to cater to everyone, and when you do that, you're rarely going to make all of them happy (and chances are you're going to drive away a good chunk of each type).

As I mentioned in another thread, if Troika does a great job with ToEE (and they sell enough copies to make a decent profit), then maybe the focus for CRPG's will shift back to heavy roleplay & maybe even turn-based, instead of real-time. I would certainly like for that to happen (if JA3 turns out to be real time, I'll be really irate).

S.

Saint_Proverbius said:

Not when that average game is billed as TEH BEST RPG EVAR....I can accept faults easier knowing that one guy in his basement is making a game, versus a huge, mighty development house with five years and an army to toss at it's development. That's what I'm saying.

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I completely agree with both statements.

First, when game is being billed as "TEH BEST RPG EVAR" it raises the expectations. The positive: the game sells better, the negative: every flaw is magnified tenfold. And we all know how many flaws there were. So there you go. That makes NWN a "mediocre poorly executed title with a paper-thin plot and the most memorable NPC Aribeth", let's call it awful for short.
As for the hype, we all know the rules of the marketing game. Nobody ever says 'Listen, guys, we just made a game. It looks alright. Go play it and tell us what you think'. But what BioWare did was too much. There is a difference between marketing and blatant lies.

Second, you can't simply compare games without accounting for all the factors involved in the production. It would be unfair to apply the same criteria to NWN as to Prelude, for example. It would be unfair, mostly to BioWare, saying that 75 people working for 5 years using a licensed (i.e. already developed) material did a worse job then 5-10 guys working for a year with a brand-new world.

I understand what you're saying Vaultdweller, and I actually don't disagree with a lot of the assessments here. The Single Player game was horrible, there's no other way to describe it. Someone in a different thread described them as spending a lot of development time on the Toolset, then spending most of the rest of the time at the bar celebrating and getting tipsy (and developing the Single-player game while still under the influence). I have a feeling that may not be that far from the truth. It's pretty apparent, at least to me, that their heart(s) wasn't really into designing the single-player campaign

Developing and debugging a series of modules as large as the single-player campaign would be no small task - personally, I would have been happy if the Toolset was released on its own (at a lower cost, natch) and the single-player campaign could be bought as an expansion by those truly masochistic. But then again, I'm no marketer and if I was in charge of those kinds of decisions my company would probably go bankrupt (I have too much of a conscience to say some of the things our marketers do, and I'm a terrible liar). I digress ...

Anyways ... I'm not a huge fan of Bioware, but I don't hate them either, and I certainly don't wish on them some of the truly horrible things that I've seen here in the past few days, like death-by-cancer, being covered in feces etc. Perhaps I'm just an old fogey, but if I don't like a company, I just exercise my market power and not purchase their products ...


S.

well, just because I read some people saying all devs overhype games... I thought I'd just paste here a counter-argument.

The Game: Galactic Civilizations http://www.galciv.com
The Dev: Brad Wardell, lead developer
The Place: http://www.apolyton.net
The Post:

Let me take this moment to lower expectations:

* GalCiv is single player only. There will not be a multiplayer "patch".

* There is no ship design. There won't be a ship design patch.

* There is no tactical combat in the sense MOO has it.

GalCiv's development focus has been on:

1) The computer AI. I feel confident in publicly saying that most players will be very satisfied with the computer AI. That as you increase the intelligence, it really does get more intelligent.

2) The random events. Having random events that you have a lot of control over whether they occur or not that add story and cut scenes and just gives the game personality.

3) A simplistic design that has a lot of complex strategies available to players. Freighters are my favorite example. A new player will say "Heck, you just build a freighter and send it somewhere, big deal." But there's so many strategies involved with where you send those freighters because of the trade ships that follow your route back and forth.

4) And of course the updates. Lots of games promise this but anyone who's downloaded Stardock Central can quickly tell that this program was a massive undertaking and it exists soley to provide easy updates.

But not everyone is going to like it. *I* don't like tactical combat in this kind of game. I liked it in MOO 1/2 but it would not work out well in GalCiv since you have free form moving in the galaxy (i.e. no starlines and whatnot). But some people will consider that a big minus.

Ohter people will find that the lack of multiplayer kills it for them.

Some people will feel that being "forced" to play as humans kills it (though I woudl argue that few games have as much customization at the start as GalCiv in which that customization delivers real gameplay differences).

And of course there's the graphics. It's not a 3D game. It's 2D (mainly so that we coudl keep the requirements low and let people make their own mods easily).

It's not a game for everyone. It's not like MOO for instance.

I can say though that the area we definitely deliver on is AI. I can't imagine even a single reasonable person complaining about that after release and each day we continue to update it, tweak it, etc.

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SP, that's a fair view to take. I don't share it. My outtake is that I judge the game itself. All the extra stuff like how many people worked on it, the cash is involved shouldn't really matter to the end user. If a game sucks and was amde by 100 people, or if game sucks and was made by 1; I'll say it sucks. And it be the same for if I think a game is great.

Here's one appropriate to the topic title; straight from nwvault.ign.com:

1. Were you expecting the current level of frustration from the Linux crowd? And do you find it tiresome?

We are seeking to deliver a product to the Linux crowd that meets their expectations. Unfortunately, this process has taken longer than originally anticipated but will ultimately meet performance expectations. I don't find the interest of our fans to be tiresome in any way! To me, its more of an indication of just how passionate our Linux fans are. They keep us honest.

Comment made by Trent Oster, I think.

I'd be amused to see you discuss this with the bioware boys Proverbius.

Bunch of them are regulars at the Quarter To Three forum - which is actually one of the smarter boards I've seen.

There is not much to argue. It's clear what the majority here thinks of NWN. If the "bioware boys" disagree or have a "perfectly logical explanation" they can come and post it here for everybody to see.

I can't even remember the single player story. Everything after Neverwinter is a bit of a blur. I forget what I was doing in that castle, (was that in the 3rd chapter?) I forgot the second Chapter entirely (unless the above was in the 2nd chapter, in which case I forget the 3rd!!!) What happens at the end? Honestly, I'm not being a smart-arse - I remember minute details from Guild War and Lone Wolf but I'm without a clue for the original campaign.

Its only been six months.

EEVIAC said:

I can't even remember the single player story. Everything after Neverwinter is a bit of a blur. I forget what I was doing in that castle, (was that in the 3rd chapter?) I forgot the second Chapter entirely (unless the above was in the 2nd chapter, in which case I forget the 3rd!!!) What happens at the end? Honestly, I'm not being a smart-arse - I remember minute details from Guild War and Lone Wolf but I'm without a clue for the original campaign.

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This is more than likely why NWN fanboys say things like, It's just a multiplayer game! or It was billed as an RPG maker, not a single player game!. Most people pretty much know the single player is hideously bad, even the fanboys, so they dismiss it as a bonus, and even claim that BioWare wasn't even interested in it over some other feature.

I basically love this argument, because it's so easy to refute by posting BioWare press releases and pointing out that the editor manual doesn't ship with the title.