Obsidian dumbs "downer"

[Gorth]

I loved the NWN2 OC.

Me too.

I don't know if I would go as far as calling it "love", but I definitely liked it. It's just that it was a bit of a bumpy ride in places (and NWN1 had coloured my perceptions, so I started the game with negative expectations).

[Jaesun]

NWN2 is one of the very few games I STILL have installed on my computer. I delete so many others, but this one game still remains.

[thesisko]

It wasn't really a radical shift, but an adjustment to ramp up combat more over the course of the expansion. It was always intended to start out pretty easy (which it did) and get harder. The amount of ramping was what changed, and it changed because I and other people played it and found that the low difficulty got old quickly. MotB still isn't a "hard" expansion, but the final product is harder than it was to begin with.

 

Still, it seemed like a shift in Obsidian's attitude. Initially you were saying that a lot of people found the OC to be hard and wanted to tone down the difficulty in the expansion. Personally, I think the general lack of tactical challenges in the OC was a mistake. For someone like me, who was new to D&D the low difficulty combined with the lack of variety in the encounters caused me to lose interest in the combat system rather than try to learn it.

 

The level of challenge in the OC might have been appropriate to players who weren't interested in the combat to begin with, but those should be catered to with an appropriate and forgiving difficulty setting.

 

Personally, I would have appreciated a separate "New to D&D" option that provided a simplified character creation and cut down on the number of spells and feats during levelup to a handpicked list appropriate for your chosen class, along with stronger tutorial elements. Concentrating on fewer skills and designing encounters to encourage their use by slowly ramping up the tactical complexity would have been both exiting and rewarding for new players.

If the party wipes during a hard encounter, the game shouldn't ask "Do you wish to lower the difficulty" but "Would you like some tactical suggestions?"

 

There is a tendency in modern games, even complex ones, to primarily cater to someone who wishes to ignore their complexity, but offer little for someone who wishes to learn it.

[sorophx]

I loved the NWN2 OC. I hate feeling so alone in that. Ammon Jerro! Mephasm! The Warlock class!

I'm with you on this one. I actually liked it more than MotB but I never finished MotB, so it isn't saying much.

 

the game shouldn't ask "Do you wish to lower the difficulty" but "Would you like some tactical suggestions?"

that's what Gamefaqs.com is for

Edited May 29, 2011 by sorophx

[Walsingham]

I'd definitely concur with the notion that NWN2 was tactically weak. Cretainly copmared with the challenges in Baldur's Gate, which were practically Valve-esque at times. Unless that's just my memory deceiving me.