Neverwinter Nights games have shitty graphics, but there is some melancholic, dark athmosphere quality to them that I haven't encountered in any other 3D game. It might be one of the only games that managed to translate the dark fantasy vibe from isometric RPGs to 3D. Is it even possible to recapture that feeling again with newer engines?
>>3694458>Is it even possible to recapture that feeling again with newer engines?We used to have the technology, but now it’s lost, and we can’t go back.
Any cool mods for NVWNTR
>>3694470A Dance With Rogues
>>3694458thats not base nwn
>>3694476I know that one actually. Any other..?
>>3694458OP I have had the same exact feeling about NWN. It felt "Medieval" to me. The devs did a good job of not going way too hard into the fantastical or dark fantasy elements, and basically none of that overly stylization crap. It felt authentic and they nailed it perfectly.>Is it even possible to recapture that feeling again with newer engines?It isn't an engine problem. You can rewrite the shaders in any modern engine. Its entirely an art direction problem. Plus I suspect the OST, writing and voice acting did a lot of heavy lifting too.
I only managed to kill Aribeth what happens after that?
>>3694492It's been around 20 years since I last played, but I believe you can kill Aribeth only shortly before the final boss (the lizard woman), so you were minutes from beating the game?However, Aribeth's story doesn't end there, the 2nd expansion pack takes place in one of the hells and you find her there as a potential party member and even a love interest.
>>3694504>However, Aribeth's story doesn't end there, the 2nd expansion pack takes place in one of the hells and you find her there as a potential party member and even a love interest.nta, but I could never get past chapter 3 when I played this growing up because I would never talk to NPCs in the town. I replayed the game at least 10 times, so I was really familiar with the first 3 chapters. I managed to get through HotU and when I saw Aribeth in hell it was kind of a mindfuck.
I want to give NWN a try, can I skip the main campaign? Which modules do you recommend?
>>3694513>I want to give NWN a try, can I skip the main campaign?Yeah, but the first chapter is pretty cool. It goes downhill after that.
>>3694513Honestly, I'd play through the original campaign first. Maybe I'm biased by childhood memories but I enjoyed it.
>>3694513>I want to give NWN a try, can I skip the main campaign?Only if you want to, literally, not beat the game.
>>3694539and that's a good thing.
>>3694513There are some good moments in the OC, like Aribeth's whole arc, plus that village lost in time, but a lot of it is just generic goblin dungeons filled with very easy enemies. And you can only recruit 1 companion (out of 4 or so), so it's not very fun. The expansions have proper parties.
>>3694560>plus that village lost in timecharwood village was kino
The 00s were a time when old school sword & sorcery aesthetics were being gradually phased out in favor of sanitized digital art styles and Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings aesthetics. Sometimes this resulted in hybrid art styles mixing old and new sensibilities in a way that looked good and atmospheric, but eventually it gave way to the generic stylized ren faire look that has dominated all fantasy media from the early 2010s to the present.
>>3694458I kinda like the aesthetic direction of NWN2. Armor designs, weapon designs, environments, spell and ability icons, etc. It's not refined in the game itself, but I'd love to see the game that attempts it. It's kinda grounded, but not really, and with a touch of exotic and fairy-tale (Especially MOTB). Spell effects are a mixed bag though, a lot of time I can't tell whats going on when there are many casters. And the faces are atrocious, but character facelift mod fixes that. Default UI is also terrible, but there are mods to that as well. NWN2 is absolutely unplayable without mods to me.>>3694600Yeah, NWN1 is the last true example and kind of a relic of this old school S&S style. It is strange to me that with all the nostalgia and new wave of CRPGs, no one really tried to recreate this aesthetic ever again.
>>3694618>And the faces are atrocious, but character facelift mod fixes thatIt fucks up actually charming faces of most companions. Neeshka in particular goes from a cute girl to an el creatura.
>>3694513If you intend to play OC, pick a monk class. It will trivialize traps and pretty much every fight. Moreover, it will allow you time to learn the system without bricking your build. Also increases your running speed which is also very nice.
Sooop any cool mods to play? Beside of dance with rogues
>>3694480It's NWN 2
>>3694618What's S&S?
>>3694748sword & sorcery
>NWN 3 never because modern devs can't make a functional engine, let alone an accessible toolset
>>3694775>NWN 3 never because modern devs wouldn’t just give you a toolkit and player-hosted servers so you could play the game forever, they want to sell you a series of overpriced DLC and then shut down the company-hosted servers/matchmaking when it’s time to buy NWN4 for next ChristmasFTFY
>>3694513>I want to give NWN a try, can I skip the main campaign?No.Play it, its an okay campaign but a bit hack&slash-y.Playing through it with a monk as MC is one of the most fun I had with unmodded NWN.
>>3694792What would stop them from releasing premium modules though? If you have a robust toolset you can pop these modules so fast and sell them like hot cakes.No, I think the devs just can't make it. Everyone is switching to UE5 because everyone forgot how to make tools
>>3694835Other anon is right. Its easier to make engines today than it has ever been. The debugging tools are so much better. All the hard problems like world partitioning have been pretty much solved and you can just copy them. There isn't a need to do assembly level instructions because compilers are better. Things like physics can be outsourced to 3rd party libraries like Havok. It's just extremely time consuming.>Everyone is switching to UE5 because everyone forgot how to make toolsUnreal supports custom content. VRChat is entirely built on it.
>>3694872People are also dumber than ever, I think IQ falls by 10 points every decade.
>>3694887All the gamedevs I know are building engines in their free time, because they are forced to make slop at their day job.
>>3694887>I think IQ falls by 10 points every decade.The mean IQ of Western nations is falling because they’re getting (((browned))). Europeans still have a mean IQ of 100.
I played through the OC again recently and honestly the biggest problem I had with the OC is the loot tablesThere are hardly any junk items just to make the world feel more believable, and most chests from chapter 1 to 4 only have like 50 gold in them, a potion if you're lucky. Boss chests also use the same damn loot table from chapter 1 to chapter 4 so all the gear you get is different flavors of mediocre, I don't think there is a single piece of genuinely unique loot from a specific dungeon or quest in the entire game (like the cloak you get in the elven burial site in SotU)The dialogue is also very dry; there's very few opportunities to roleplay or just fuck around like there are in the expacs, it's just "give me quest" "give me details" "no thanks bro" and when you're done with the quest "Thanks for the reward" "(persuade) give me more" "(evil) give me more". That aspect really stood out to me when I went to SotU. For example you can aggressively hit on a bunch of the women around Hilltop and if you press the blacksmith in Hilltop for a reward after saving her brother she'll essentially tell you to blow her, it's great. You can tell the writers were having fun with itHaving now played it as an adult I can see what some Anons meant when they said it feels like a tech demo for the toolset rather than a complete campaign, having said that, it does try to have fun with it to show off what you can really do. The Creator's temple with the time travel and the village lost in time are standouts in that regardAlso whose fucking bright idea was it to give the rogue companion an item he can give you that only really benefits rogues? Were you supposed to swap out henchmen? If you were that just seems so meta-gamey rather than a proper role playing experience.If you're really pressed for things to play, play it. but the expacts and user content is much better. The OC is unrelentingly dull.Sorry if this was disjointed. Linu best girl.
>>3694975My biggest problem with the vanilla NWN is the tilesets, every single area looks like an ugly square. Bioware did an incredibly lazy job there, especially after Baldur's Gate 2.What's worse, there're genuinely good looking modules that are using custom tilesets - like Prophet or Saleron's Gambit.
>>3694975>chests also use the same damn loot table from chapter 1 to chapter 4That's straight up not true. Each chapter has different level of gear you can potentially get and if you're persistent enough you can quicksave quickload until you go thru the entire list and pick what you like.
>>3694987Is that an EE thing? I'm on DiamondI swear I was seeing the exact same loot from beginning to end, and yes I was quickload cheesingFucking Staff of Curing
>>3694975>The OC is unrelentingly dull.>Linu best girl.The OC isnt even half as dull as your choice of women.
>>3694989It was a release version thing, afaik they changed it in EE>mfw 20 minutes reloading for optimal chapter longsword
>>3694975>the same damn loot table from chapter 1 to chapter 4 so all the gear you get is different flavors of mediocreAs if that wasn't the case with SoU.>inb4 some loot was predetermined!Yeah, these fucking Netherese orbs that allow you to cast a level 2 spell once a day. Truly, epic relics of a magical empire. Fucking great game design.
>>3694463And unlike the moon missions, this game's development actually happened.
>>3694975>>3695008Did you guys fuck with some mods or something?I never had this issue.
>>3694744Obsidian should have gone bankrupt before they ever created that abominable disgrace of a game
The biggest issue I noticed with loot was that HotU puts a hard cap on the amount of money you can get for selling an individual item, then fills the dungeons with items that have a selling price above that threshold. The threshold increases by around 50k gold every chapter, so you are left trying to figure out how to haul a bunch of useless crap around the whole game so you can sell it all in one go in act 3 for enough gold to buy the big bad's true name.
>>3695158But then we wouldn't get Mask of the Betrayer
>>3695207Good riddance. MotB is overrated slop.
>>3694485Swordflight. You get cucked by the designer into babysitting some nobleman's spoiled daughter.
>>3695209Yeah ok buddy
>>3695212He's not wrong
One thing that I love about this game is that you can literally play as an incel. Early in the game everyone is extremely disrespectful to you, and even moreso if you have low charisma. My 8 cha wizard did that quest for the prostitute who calls you ugly, and she proceeds to give me no reward and still refuses to let me use her services and continues to call me ugly, so I killed her with my +2 club then and there. I wish there were more RPGs where you get to play as an incel
>>3694975A anti-mind effects circlet is still the one piece of equipment I will never let go of. So good I basically sacrificed my armor values to keep it.
>>3695209>overrated slopThis is called not having an argument.
>>3695227tying charisma to appearance is dumb, especially if 8 is considered "ugly". bioware=hacks.
>>3695290considering 10 is average, 8 would be a 4/10 male which would absolutely be considered ugly by hypergamous foid standards
>>3695303being 5% less charismatic isn't going to scare a whore off from your money, dork.
>sub 10 int gives you retard dialogue>none of the NPCs treat you like you're special>it's quietly dropped in the expansion pakswasted opportunity Do any of the custom wads let you go full retard a'la arcanum?
>>3695334>wadsThis is not Doom lmao
NVN1 or 2, what do you prefer? >>3694600Does NVN1 has the same artstyle as 2, or .. ??
>>3695335Sorry, force of habit
>>3694513Honestly, despite it's shortcomings, if we're talking about official content only I'd recommend NWN 2 over the first game. The first game literally only has one expansion worth playing, aside from that it's more of a set of mod tools for fanmade content than a game by itself. If that's a scene you're looking to get into then NWN 1 is unmatched, but if you just want to play main game + official add ons then NWN 2 is the better game.
>>3694618>I kinda like the aesthetic direction of NWN2.It may have lost some of the charm from NWN1 but some of those environments were just beautiful. I used to just stare at the starry sky in the Neverwinter docks at night while listening to the bgm.
>>3695227>whores shitting on ugloid neckbeard low CHA magesbased Bioware. High CHA sorcerers win again.
>>3694488The dialogue with Valen about growing up in the slums of Sigil, which was a massive city where all sorts of realities and planes come together, made me extremely hyped to play Planescape Torment since it was supposed to take place in that city, and I was expecting the equivalent of going through some sort of surrealist fantasy Arabian Nights middle eastern bazaar or some sort of crowded sketchy coastal city like early 20th century Shanghai with merchants, pickpockets, urchins, etc, but instead I just went around exploring abandoned dungeons. The sad part is that now that we have the technology to portray such a setting, instead of it being based and dark fantasy like the portions of HOTU that took place in Cania and in the plans of the Reaper/Knower of Places etc it will probably be goofy and cartoony and Marvel quippy like the extremely fucking lame and gay Raphael's domain from BG3, which did not make me feel like I was in some sort of fantastical and horrifying and incomrehensible supernatural plane at all but rather some disney villain lair.
>>3694458>>3694470>>3694600>>3694979For me, its lowpoly neverwinterwaifs and monsters, and the early 2000s dungeonpunk environs. They don't look half bad, with a couple facelifts and haks from the neverwintervault tbdesu. Also with the PRC 5.0 mod, you get multiclassing up to 8 classes, lots of races, classes, spells, feats, psionics, and item crafting options to choose from. Infinite donjoncrawling with OC donutsteel fiendish elven wizardwaifu has bever been so comfy.
>>3694513we all know NWN1 is about the PW servers and romance roleplaying with hot paladin babes.
>>3695209fag
>>3695679>I was expecting the equivalent of going through some sort of surrealist fantasy Arabian Nights middle eastern bazaar or some sort of crowded sketchy coastal city like early 20th century Shanghai with merchants, pickpockets, urchins, etcSigil in P:T is about as close as you can get to that within the limitations of the Infinity Engine. Obviously portraying it in 3d for a first person game would be more immersive, but I don't think there's a studio in existence that wouldn't turn it into mo-capped photorealistic unreal engine slop.
>>3695987Fuck UE slop, I just want it to be more dense and colorful. I guess some sort of a oldschhol jrpg look might work
>>3694458Agree, I also like nwn1 and it's atmosphere.Can be recapture, no one bothers though.
>>3695338NWN1 all the way. NWN2 is mediocre, even the xpacs. Pure obsidian slop.
>>3695953>They don't look half bad, with a couple facelifts and haks from the neverwintervault tbdesu.post some links
>>3696440Here are some links, you can follow instructions for override/patch hak installation, or do what I did and extract all the loose files from zip/hak to the "Development" folder in your PC/Android NWNEE directory. This overrides all the graphics across all your modules, but you can simply rename the Development folder to something else to disable everything.NWN Faceliftshttps://neverwintervault.org/project/nwn1/hakpak/neverwinter-nights-faceliftsNWN CQ Projecthttps://neverwintervault.org/project/nwn1/hakpak/tileset/nwncq-projectDafena's Fancymapped Tiles 1 & 2https://neverwintervault.org/project/nwnee/hakpak/tileset/dafenas-fancy-mapped-tilesetshttps://neverwintervault.org/project/nwnee/hakpak/tileset/dafenas-fancy-mapped-tilesets-part-2Creature Override Compilationhttps://neverwintervault.org/project/nwn1/hakpak/combined/creature-override-compilationUndead Reduxhttps://neverwintervault.org/project/nwn1/prefab/creature/undead-reduxProject Q IVhttps://neverwintervault.org/project/nwnee/hakpak/combined/project-q-ivCustomise Character Override Hak Extendedhttps://neverwintervault.org/project/nwnee/hakpak/original-hakpak/customize-character-override-hak-extended-edition-ccoheePhilos' Enhancing Players System (requires opting in on latest NWN EE dev build on Steam/GOG)https://neverwintervault.org/project/nwnee/script/philos-enhancing-player-system-peps
>>3696440>>3696566Also grab Dafena's heads from their Discord herehttps://discord.gg/HGfceH6UI've also stolen a whole bunch of nice creature and character assets from PWs like Aenea, Sinfar, and TDN for my own use with this handy tool. Might upload them all somewhere someday.https://neverwintervault.org/project/nwnee/other/tool/nwsync-client-manifest-unwrapper
>>3696440I always wanted Zelata Reva
>>3696438What are good official campaigns? There seems to be a lot of them in the game, and Im somewhat disoriented because of it.
>>3696579what kind of abortion is this?
>>3696566wtf is wrong with the nwn community? Half of the mods have description how you install the mod, credits, etc. but no description what the mod is doing besides some crude screenshots.
>>3696713I see its ported from Dragons Age head, Alistar is right there, right after yours.
>>3696713Most of these are head rips. Dafena has a bunch of final fantasy, bayonetta, witcher and baldurs gate 3 ones if japanese male escort doesnt tickle your fancy.>>3696716Those are likely either graphical facelifts or made for module builders, not for (You), or the average casual who doesn't into mods.
>>3696438JFC is nvn2 bad. Camera feels like shit, even basic combat animations feels like shit. How is it, that the older game feels so much better to play?
>tfw friend invites me to a Neverwinter Nights RP server>get the game and join the server>tfw can't join the city that my friend is in>have to join the starting town on the other side of the world>led into doing quests for NPCs>have no idea how to play this gameHow exactly does RP work in this game?When I imagined RP in NWN, I imagined RPing with players and doing events/dungeons ran by DM's, not doing the NPC questlines from (what I assume is) the main game.I feel like I'm way over my head, not only learning how to play the game, but also doing it in an RP setting. Do I play through the main campaign first? (I heard that the campaign isn't that good though, and the appeal of the game comes from the community-made content).
>>3696876only complete losers would RP in a 20+ year old game, anon. abandon ship.
>>3696895>only loserswhere do you think you are, anon? we're anonymously posting on a mongolian basket weaving forum, i think that already makes us losers.
>>3696901i know where i am, there's always a scale relative to the group.
>>3696907is the community there that bad? the friend that recommended it to me is a borderline normie and isn't exactly a loser, though the games that we have played together have had some of the most mentally ill losers i've met.
>>3696914Possibly but you shouldn't take words of some anonymous cocksucker with an obvious grudge at face value
>>3696876> I imagined RPing with players and doing events/dungeons ran by DM'sIt is a thing on a lot of servers. The game has an inbuilt DM module that allows any of them to log in, home in on the players and start interacting with them on the fly. Thing is, you will always have a handful of DM's for a lot of players, so the more popular the server gets the less attention they can give players. >tfw can't join the city that my friend is inIf your friend weren't a faggot he would create a new character to show you around.>not doing the NPC questlines from (what I assume is) the main game.Every server has its own scripts, NPC's and sometimes quests done for EXP, these aren't from the main game. Can't expect anything more than fetch quests and standard MMO fare. Most RP servers also give you experience for player interaction, so you can focus on doing that, some of them will be helpful.
>>3694792They just sold expansions, which you had to buy, because they also came with all the new assets and character options. You couldn't play a pw without having the same version, so, you had to buy the expansions. They also used gamespy for matchmaking, which shut down, and they did nothing to support it after that. For years the community came up with solutions to restore/replace the server list, and other patches to the game. Beamdog pretty much stole that work and then handed the dev keys to an Arelith/PotM clique, both servers dramatically rising in popularity after, but that's totally unrelated.Having a dev team abandon a hypothetical successor would probably be for the best.
>>3696844 >Camera feels like shit, even basic combat animations feels like shit. I've said it in other threads, I'll say it here as well. I'm impressed (for all the wrong reasons) that they managed to make a point & click game with floaty controls.
