Neverwinter Nights

[Version played: Diamond edition v.1.68.8109 -English-]

I tried this game years ago and eventually gave up at the start of Chapter 2. I felt in the mood for RPGs lately though, so I picked it up again this past week and I just managed to finish the whole campaign.

So... why had I given it up in the first place? I felt bludgeoned by the game's weaknesses and quit too early to appreciate its strengths. So I'll start by explaining the weaknesses, because -sadly- I think they define this game (its main campaign) the most:

1. Be prepared for a good bag of fantasy clichés. Okay... as a disclaimer I have to admit that I'm new to the d&d thing. This is the first game I ever played related to the Forgotten Realms or any other tabletop RPG setting. I don't know if the stereotypes present here are some kind of standard or basic thing for those games (maybe I'm misunderstanding the genre, you know, like calling an action movie silly for being mostly action or something like that). I just found everything too predictable and shallow as far as plot and character development goes. Weak stuff in those regards; not much interesting stuff going on there in my opinion.

The quests themselves are a mixed bag, and although it would be unfair to dump them all in the 'boring cliché' category, I think most of them fit well in it. They felt just very simplistic (go there -> find/kill that -> bring an object back to the quest giver). Many of them have some kind of simple persuasion option apart from the straight way to solve them and that's it. I really enjoyed a handful of them which surprisingly were way more original or complex than that, though, byt they were few (the jury quest was interesting, and the one inside the magic ball was too).

2. There's some serious recycling of resources here. This one really hurt my immersion at first. I can take a shallow plot and underdeveloped characters if there's something else making it entertaining, but please, don't use the same portrait for different important characters. I can take simplified locations, but please, don't make the inside of every single house in a district to be exactly the same. You know, I can take several characters sharing voice actors -which are good here, by the way- or external appereance if they are going to be of no importance to the player, and if you're going to make detailed portraits for some characters, I think it's better to leave the rest without a portrait, rather than reusing them. It breaks the immersion heavily; it's like you're in a world full of clones. Even the portraits for the player character are recycled from/for the NPCs!

3. How schematic, linear, and repetitive the unfolding of the campaign is. Each chapter has a little handful of main goals, which are achieved in one of each different locations that the chapter has to offer. When you familiarize yourself with this dynamic, you can already figure out that every new direction in the map is just the place where one of the different quests' goals are located. I'd say that several places feel too much like a simple necessary product of a quest -instead of the other way around- and nothing more. Each of the few places are either the 'receptacle' for a quest goal, or just a path to go to it. So after a while, exploring becomes a chore because everything feels a little artificial.

It's true that the game lets you chose which part of the main quest -within each chapter- you want to do first (as I impled above, by picking in which direction you want to go first), but this choice offers nothing to the player because there is no good reason for you to go to any of these places, other than the quests themselves, which require no order nor imply more urgency than each other. There is no logic behind picking one place/quest over any other; in this regard, I'd rather the game to push the linear aspect more directly and just give you a reason to do any of them in a certain order. You actually feel a little lost being left by yourself to pick at whim, moreso when the avaliable world itself is not exactly built for exploration. After finishing each quest, you also have no real reason to come back to any of those places; no game mechanic excuses their existence neither are enemies respawning anywhere. So after you finish all the main quests, the chapter ends, and you are teleported to a new map that simply follows the same logic again.

As I just implied, you are not able to go back to the places of a past chapter, but I was actually thankful for that. In some RPG video games, you enjoy moving throughout locations and going back to some of them, because the graphics are nice and/or distinctive, or maybe you always have something to do there that you enjoy. Even if some places in Neverwinter Nights may be cool to look at, the designers gave to a no small amount of places an unnecessary labyrinthine shape, forcing the player to go round and around the same place just to go to an upper or lower layer, making impossible a direct crossing. It makes the player to stay longer in places, despite not having anything to do in them anymore and just wanting to go. I was really glad each time all quests for a place were over and I had no reason to cross the damn same meandering place ever again. For these reasons I rarely enjoyed my stay in places and was mostly impatient to move forward.

4. The character building madness. Don't get me wrong, this is actually the game's main strength -if you play it far enough to realize- and I'll talk about that later; at first it has some serious drawbacks. In fact, the exact point where I dumped this game years ago was when I realized, underwhelmed, that I was regretting my level-up choices every 2 levels or so. The game tempts you with the choice of adding two extra classes on top of the main one, once you level up enough, but if you're new to the mathematics and ability sheets of each class, you don't really know what you're getting into, and you'll possibly regret several choices which sounded very interesting at first. In this regard, researching the potential abilities and limitations of each class -in the wiki, per example- is mandatory, or you'll become very frustrated. If you don't know the rules, things may end up feeling pretty restrictive, even when the game has an insane amount of choice regarding the customization of character abilities. I still think that some details go too far into the effect calculation fastidiousness for its own sake; like some classes being held hostage by certain alignments, even after you already are of that class. Part of the logic there is indeed a little restrictive, and in my opinion, could be stripped down just a little bit.

So, you may think, what is good about this game, then?

1. The character building madness. It was the point when I stopped giving a funk about level sheets and what are the good/bad choices for multiclass, and just leveled up as I wanted to -with already a little knowledge about it-, when I actually started to enjoy this game. See, my main character for RPGs is an average human girl that only excels in talking and magic resistance. Other than that, she's as useful as a tiny little fart. She depends on companions for fighting, and magic, and you name it. She also has a little of magic ability in the psychic branch of things (more related to perception than to typical offensive/defensive magic), and she has a great empathy and understanding of animals, with the ability of projecting herself in a fake animal shape. Neverwinter Nights happens to have such an engine for character development that allows all of this in awesome detail. At times I had even imagined her using a spider-like projection instead of a wolf one, and as soon as I made her a rogue/druid/sorcerer -a bad multiclass choice for becoming a hero, I guess-, I realized I could eventually do exactly all of that. At the moment I could summon 3 animal companions, and walk around myself as an animal companion of my henchman. How cool is that?

So in the end, I could make her as weak or apt as I wanted to in every single area I could imagine, more than in any other RPG video game I have played until now. I just wish the campaign was more responsive to this amount of options (like the possibility of animals not attacking me if I shapeshift into one of them or things like that). I have to admit that, as I was able to capture the essence of my main character within the game, my henchman did the campaign more than I did, but that's exactly how I liked it (although the campaign is still not very responsive to it; I had him hail me as the true hero of Neverwinter, which was pretty laughable).

2. The game mechanics in general, as I already implied. That's what kept me playing until the end. Abilities, spells... the amount of choice is quite a treat. The game is quite accomplished in that area, specially for a game this old.
I also think that the difficulty level was well set. I had to load game sometimes, try different things, and think things twice, specially in boss fights. But it is not unfairly hard at all either; I think it leans slightly towards the easy side once you learn to use all the tools that the game makes avaliable to you.

3. The art behind the game in general is quite good. The portraits are really cool themselves and the textures more so -obviously, in the context of early 2000's graphic possibilities-, managing to make some places look interesting. In fact, the graphics make some places interesting enough to give the plot some life (I remember the 'Warrens of the Damned', the plane of the Spirit of the Wood, and the whole Charwood part as being somewhat captivating). The atmospheric sounds and music also play their part well, but the 'artificial vibe' of some places and moments can water down their immersion effect.

I guess that's it.

So, in the end, I'd say that the problem of this game is the campaign, or more specifically, how the campaign was arranged (if you can take the kind of shallow fantasy plot anyway). But I have to admit that, overall, I had a good time playing it, and I may revisit it someday.