The Witcher Enhanced Edition is out!!!

[Pidesco]

Omg there's naked nymphs. I thought the full monty was in user mods.

 

Wait till you get to the nurses. Note the plural.

[Moatilliatta]

In the middle of a war zone no less.

[Kaftan Barlast]

Everyone said Witcher was rubbish when it came but I played Chapter one EE now and its quite good. Being on this forum here I'll try to be gentle, but The Witcher makes NWN2 seem like it was made by a gang of drooling idiots. Its prettier, its runs better, it doesnt crash all the time, the story is actually interesting, the characters less annoying, the animations doesnt make the characters look like they had polio as children... its undeniably a rather large step up in terms of quality.

[Gorgon]

The NWN2 engine stacks up rather poorly with contemporary games, add to that that the only reason to get the game are the expansions, and I think you have part of the explanation. It's simply tradition that the NWN OC is a steaming pile of crap. You can't mess with tradition.

 

I think obsidian got Mask of the Betrayer just right, just a shame it had to be on a poor platform, it would have been more enjoyable if it wasn't epic level as well.

[Tigranes]

I don't know. I loved the NWN2 OC enough to play it twice over. And while there were people slagging it off way back then, I don't remember nearly as many people taking the OC's crapness for granted now. It's as if when MOTB came out, people (including journos) started saying, "hey, get this, it's awesome! Oh, you didn't like nwn2? Well, the OC wasn't as good. It was crap. This is great!" Not saying people did some sort of mass hypocritic turn, just saying the general opinion about it seems to have changed for the worse around that time.

 

It's interesting, because MOTB *was* certainly a lot better, but I thought the OC's high points such as the Trial and the Keep, and some of its NPCs such as Bishop, were great; and if it wasn't great all throughout, well, it was a massive campaign. Certainly, in terms of gameplay hours, I thought there were very few horrid areas (Orc Caves, mystery invisible assassins barracks).

[Moatilliatta]

NWN2 OC sucked and I haven't played MOTB yet so you can't use that excuse.

 

I'm sure some of you (perhaps even a majority of gamers) are capable of playing through it but I couldn't. NWN2 has some of the crappiest (by modern standards) combat that I've seen in a long time and there is just so goddamn much of it. I mean, we've seen games with less than stellar combat put the player through a lot of it before e.g. VtM:B. The difference here is that bloodlines had action filled and relatively responsive combat that was satisfying at some level even if most of it was constructed in a manner that would make any game designer blush. NWN2 has nothing except mindless stupid grind, in amounts rarely seen outside MMORPGs, withering away on your soul.

Now, it's true that NWN2 has a few positive aspects, characters for instance and the characters are indeed wonderfull, if only they a game made.

 

Did I mention how crappy the quests are? The average Bioware quest is more interesting than working for the city watch and I don't like Bioware quests.

 

It's true that there are moments that shine, like the oft mentioned trial and keep parts. Only problem here is that these parts are very small parts of the overall game and come very freaking late in a game that has more in common with a car crash than than something supposedly AAA.

 

Oh and the engine sucks from a player standpoint.

 

[/rant]

[newc0253]

I don't know. I loved the NWN2 OC enough to play it twice over. And while there were people slagging it off way back then, I don't remember nearly as many people taking the OC's crapness for granted now. It's as if when MOTB came out, people (including journos) started saying, "hey, get this, it's awesome! Oh, you didn't like nwn2? Well, the OC wasn't as good. It was crap. This is great!" Not saying people did some sort of mass hypocritic turn, just saying the general opinion about it seems to have changed for the worse around that time.

yeah, i always found the retrospective attacks on NWN2 a might weird: once MOTB came out, suddenly NWN2 was crap and awful.

 

maybe with a little more hindsight, we'll see neither NWN2 or MOTB deserve their current reputations: NWN2 was actually, despite its flaws, a very good effort and MOTB, while also a very good effort, is hardly the non plus ultra of CRPGs. despite its superior graphics, for instance, i'd definitely rank it below HOTU.

 

speaking of retrospective attacks and back on-topic, i also don't understand Kaftan's earlier comment that 'everyone said Witcher was rubbish'.

 

really? who the frak said that?

Edited October 1, 2008 by newc0253

[Kaftan Barlast]

speaking of retrospective attacks and back on-topic, i also don't understand Kaftan's earlier comment that 'everyone said Witcher was rubbish'.

 

really? who the frak said that?

 

 

Everyone on my side of the atlantic more or less. All my friends, everyone at uni, the press... the consensus was that Wicther was another somewhat interesting but inherently crippled euro rpg.

[Gorgon]

My bother with NWN2 started with the non kickable companions, this feature made me loathe the starter NPCs intensely. I had a lot more gripes than that, I must have written a whole thesis on the inadequacies of the camera.

 

It sure as hell wasn't retrospective after MotB, I bought that in spite of NWN2, not because of it. Despite being in a bustling city, the most you could expect from exploration was one door in each area that wasn't quest related and conditioned on doing something in 'the right order' first. The load times on area transition would have made it impossible to have a proper city map anyway. This was not only a hardware issue.

Edited October 1, 2008 by Gorgon

[Tigranes]

Heh, opinions, opinions. See, I hated Bloodlines combat. That, and the bugs meant I never really got to play it properly. The CD's burning a hole in my closet and I've got to go back to it once I have a better computer. I suspect this one couldn't quite handle a badly optimised Source.

 

Also enjoyed NWN2 combat - certainly wasn't worse than NWN1's. It's not IE engine but despite its response lag and all, it's alright. Er, for me. Shandra was really the only thing that nearly broke the game for me, I hated that.

 

And finally, I still don't get what's so great about HOTU. I played some of SOU and all of NWN1OC (I wanted to see how bad it would get) and HOTU, and well... HOTU was certainly hte best of the bunch, but elsewhere it wouldn't get a pip for me. MOTB would.

[Gorgon]

No doubt bloodlines combat was poorly worked out, but it did work very well once you had around 4 points or more in ranged combat, granted that meant you were better off playing the first half of the game using knives. It also shipped with a terminal bug. It wins top marks on atmosphere and dialogue, I think it was one of the first CRPGs to have that much animated talking heads stuff.

Edited October 1, 2008 by Gorgon

[Moatilliatta]

@Tigranes

NWN2 combat being comparable to NWN1 combat isn't a good thing for NWN2.

 

I think the only reason I ever got through the NWN OC (if I actually did I can't remember) was that I was young and more tolerating of crappy things.

 

@Gorgon

Fists, not knives. Fists are incredibly overpowered in Bloodlines and is what I use in the first half of the game even if I don't specialise in them.

Edited October 1, 2008 by Moatilliatta

[Kaftan Barlast]

 

 

bonus material

[Tigranes]

Oh, hot.

[Gorgon]

Is that a joke. I mean, pedophilia, whats next, humping the drowners instead of gutting them.

[Deadly_Nightshade]

Is that a joke.

 

Yes.

[Gfted1]

What are you guys talking about? I read the passage and it concludes with him killing the bandits and saving the boy. Where does it say anything about pedophelia?

[Deadly_Nightshade]

The little heart means that you slept with that person.

[taks]

so far i'm liking this game. how long does it take start to finish, btw?

 

taks

[Gfted1]

The little heart means that you slept with that person.

 

 

Oooooooh, I see. Well...er....

[Spider]

Its prettier, its runs better, it doesnt crash all the time

 

It certainly didn't at release. It crashed a bit and had some areas with performance a lot worse than NWN2. After a few patches NWN2 ran a lot better on my computer (haven't tried the enhanced version though). Especially the loading times were horrible.

[Tigranes]

taks: About as much as a regular run of NWN2OC, or a bit less.

[taks]

ok, thanks... that's not too bad. that can easily be upwards of 30 hours or so depending upon play style. i'm going through on "easy" controls right now because this is one of them thar "playaz skillz" games to an extent (though not as bad as the gothics), and don't want to get bogged down with mouse clicking nonsense. i may replay on the harder ones later.

 

taks

[Pop]

30 hours? Is that a speed run or something? At the point I stopped playing I had logged 25 hours or so into the game, and I was in the... second chapter, I think. Out of however many there are. Most of that was due to endless map-running. The box promised 80 hours, and I believed it.

Edited October 3, 2008 by Pop

[Meshugger]

so far i'm liking this game. how long does it take start to finish, btw?

 

taks

 

I did most of the sidequests, took me about 55hs. You might cram down to 30 if you don't read any material, doing no alchemy and by skipping most of the se...dialogue.

Edited October 4, 2008 by Meshugger