Posted on: August 7, 2022
tukkek
Games: 39 Reviews: 10
Balance issues
While NWN greatly reduces the micro-management of earlier Bioware games by changing the party from 6 to 1 hero under your direct control (slight 6x adjustment in complexity), it carries with it many of the problems from those games as well. Despite 4 releases over 20 years, it's still hard to enjoy it. Balance is a major issue: even on your first post-tutorial quest: you will go from fighting many groups of 2-3 escaped prisoners at a time outside the Prison to 10 at once inside the prison. If you think a power level variation of 500% between two adjacent areas is fine in D&D then you might enjoy the game. If you want to do every single "optional" side-quest and explore every city house before progressing in the story, so that you are able to face said encounter spikes, you might enjoy the game - but probably not the many 2-prisoner encounters that will be completely meaningless at your power level after that. The interface is not bad but definitely clunky. You can't rebind your hotbar keys and by default they are assigned to function keys while the number row (1-9) are never used; if you select a ranged weapon and attack before the draw animation completes, your hero will move to mêlée range... it's all clunky. There are a dozen options between official campaigns and premium modules plus perhaps one or two hundred fan-made modules. Maybe somewhere out there one of those makes everything click together but the main campaign should be the ultimate showcase and I'm not impressed even at 80% discount. I tried this game at launch and despite being a huge Black Isle fan at the time, I never managed to enjoy myself enough to get through Act 1 of the Wailing Death. 20 years and 3 re-releases later, the Enhanced Edition did nothing worth noting to make Neverwinter Nights more appealing in 2022.
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