Dungeons and Dragons is a game I have a fairly limited amount of experience with. I first played it in 2010 with some people at the university I was at in Nagoya on my exchange year and then again in a basement gaming bar a few years later. The experience was mostly a negative one, with the exception of the game bar basements early days but rolling dice around insufferable nerds was not an experience I would be willing to sign up for again in a hurry. Maybe if a tight knit group of buddies got together like in my one decent group I’d be willing to make a character but otherwise no thanks.
But the problem here is not the game itself, it’s just the people. The game itself is a deeply interestingly made thing that allows for insane freedom for both story teller (the DM) and the players. This freedom has been regularly scuppered in my experience by aforementioned insufferable nerds but that’s not the games fault. The solution, in theory, should be to remove the people from the equation and that solution is available to me in the form of video games based on Dungeons and Dragons. We sacrifice some of the freedom of the tabletop in exchange for the ability to engage with the core mechanics without the need to be around people who don’t pay their water bills.
So when I got a double game request on my stream for Neverwinter Nights 1 and 2 I was sort of excited. I had played a little bit of the first game in my younger days and thought it was cool and maybe these games will be the titles that get me to respect western made high fantasy RPGs. I was wrong. What I got was overly long, buggy, badly written unfun bullshit where every cutscene put me to sleep and every encounter made me want to smash my keyboard
Of the two games, Neverwinter Nights 1 was the worst one by a wide margin. Starting with an investigation into a plague and then expanding out into a larger conflict, the details of which I barely cared about as I was playing and I have mostly forgotten less than 6 months after seeing the credits roll. The game suffers from 2 major issues that make it feel awful to play. The first is the wild difficulty swings that can happen in the blink of an eye. My Monk, 90% of the time, would have no issue punching his way through whatever monsters of the day were being presented in the current quest and then I’d wander into a room and there would be an enemy that would just one shot me. The worst part of this is that because everything is based on invisible dice rolls, the solution to the combat was not to go level up or change strategies but instead to just save/load until the game gave me a win. The roll playing game reduced to a slot machine.
The second issue is the fact that you can only have one companion. When I played table top, the groups had to be AT LEAST 3 so Neverwinter Nights only having the player character and a single AI partner is underwhelming to say the least. On top of that you can’t customize the other party member AT ALL. Gear is pre set, level ups are done automatically. The whole thing of building a character and messing with the character sheet as you level up is completely removed. What compounds this issue is that most of the partners you have access to are trash. The guy I picked for the majority of the game seems to be the guy that most people pick. Maybe if we could ROLE PLAY in the ROLE PLAYING GAME with our party we’d see some variance. Even the old Baldurs Gate games, released way before this piece of shit let you kit your dudes out and interact with them in some actual meaningful ways. Somehow things got worse as the tech got better
Speaking of, Neverwinter Nights 2, despite being a considerably better game in every way, addressing a lot of the gripes I had with the first one is still kind of a piece of shit. In 2, the difficultly swings aren’t a huge issue and I have a party I can customize and interact with but holy shit the bugs really bog down the whole thing. From the jump, the game barely worked AT ALL until I installed a community patch and even then it was still a little fucked. The camera going crazy and characters rubber banding was highly annoying. Cutscenes not playing properly often pulled me out of the experience and made certain events hard to follow. The worst bug I got happened in the final dungeon where all my party members had a stroke and would not listen to commands. The second worst being the story specific legendary sword de-spawning from my inventory upon entry to the final area that nearly caused a massive time loss. A better game that’s just absolutely miserable to play
The other thing that sucked about the sequel is the ending. Without hyperbole one of the worst endings I’ve ever seen in any game I’ve ever played. A black screen with the text “You Win” written in 12 point Ariel would have been more acceptable. The whole game revolves around a conflict with the King of Shadows. You go on this big quest, uncover ancient secrets, forge a legendary sword, kill immortal skeletons by reading a school register at them and then when you finish all that and win the day, the dungeon collapses and you all die. There’s a 10 minute cutscene of an intern reading Tolkien fan fiction at you but the core of it is “you win but you died also the end”. I’m not saying that all stories have to have a happy ending but this was so trash out of nowhere that I had to google if I got a bad ending or not. I found out through that search that even fans of this horrible pile of filth think it sucks so at least we’re united on that front.
I never ever want to play Neverwinter Nights again. I think I would have had more fun playing the table top game by myself as a one man party where I DM my own game. If you played and enjoyed Baldurs Gate 3 and thought you might plumb the depths of older DnD based games, avoid these two sacks of garbage. Just play BG 1+2 and call it a day because if you play Neverwinter you may never want to play a CRPG ever again
