Neverwinter Nights is bad

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

I miss Instruction Manuals

A lot has changed in the gaming scene since I was a wee lad, some for the better and some for the worse.  However the one thing I miss more than fucking anything is proper instruction manuals.

Back in the day, when you'd buy a game I always thought the manual was something to look forward to.  A lot of the manuals for games I bought had things like backstory or character profiles in them as well as instructions on how to play the game.  When I was a kid, I had to take a bus into the city center to go to my closest game store to pick up a title and after my purchase I'd read that shit on the way home.  There was something really satisfying about opening a new game case and flicking through that nice glossy manual.  Even the smell of the damn thing as incredible as weird as that sounds.

Hell, I've even bought games based on the quality of their manual.  I remember discovering The Elder Scrolls for the first time at a friends house.  Yeah, the game looked cool as fuck and all but the manual was just full of all sorts of information that really drew me into the idea of playing the game and then on top of that it came with a sick as fuck glossy map of the world.  I had that Morrowind map on the wall next to my computer pretty much up to the day I moved out of that house.  Neverwinter Nights was another example of a game I purchased purely based on the manual.  I was at the same friends house when he got it as a gift from his dad. He opened that box and there was a fucking thick tome that you could kill someone with inside there with instructions on how to play.  I didn't even have to read the fucking thing to know that I wanted that damn game.

Nowadays, getting a new game is a bit of a disappointing experience.  A lot of my purchases, especially for PC are digital so there's no way in fuck I'm getting a nice manual there.  Even if I purchase of Good Old Games or something where they have the manuals, it's just not the same when it's in PDF, I wanna hold the fucking thing.  For other systems it's probably even worse than nothing at all.  Usually when I open a box there's usually just some legal information, an insert for the controls and a card advertising some DLC or some shit.  Even if the game is amazing, opening the box upon purchase brings nothing but sadness.

I wish they'd bring back proper manuals but I guess that's a practice that's long dead and will never return.  If a company put a big proper manual in a game now I'd probably buy it regardless of what the game was just to support the practice.

Pen and Paper

So I know this isn't strictly "video" games but pen and paper RPGs are awesome and I wanted to spend a little bit of time talking about them since I started playing again recently.

My relationship with pen and paper games started in a weird way.  I enjoyed playing video games like Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights on the PC when I was younger but the idea of sitting around a table with a bunch of people role playing sounded really fucking stupid to me.  Unfortunately I was one of those people who would look at this people and think they were a bit sad and pathetic, playing with dice and pretending to be elves.

So, fast forward from my early teens to 2010 when I first came to Japan.  I got a text message from another exchange student asking me to come and play Dungeons and Dragons.  Well at the time I didn't really have fuck all else to do and if I remember right a lot of students had gone home at that point to visit family for the holiday, so I decided to join.  I go down to the room, roll up a character and start playing Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition (lol)

My opinion of role playing was IMMEDIATELY changed.  There was a degree of seriousness to the role play but everything was tongue in cheek.  Combat was also insanely fun and considering that we were using nothing more than bits of paper and coins it was pretty intense.  We had a really good group that were willing to mix a bit of humor into a serious plot and eventually we got to a point where we were playing every day because it was so damn fun.

I played a few more DnD sessions after this but it just wasn't as fun, the groups were too serious and there was no room to be even a little bit silly, I yearned for those days with my old group and despite us trying our best to do it online, time difference meant our schedules didn't really match up.

Recently though I started playing Pathfinder with a group of guys here in Japan.  FINALLY I've found another group that are willing to strike a balance between a semi serious and interesting plot with a bit of humor.  The dynamic we have reminds me of those old days during my first exchange year and I'm at that point again where I'm getting stupidly excited for the next session.  What's even funnier is that the DM has set the games story within the Discworld universe and I was introduced to this group just as I started uploading Discworld onto YouTube, it's almost like some weird fate.

So, if you have never tried a pen and paper game and you're the kind of person who thinks its too nerdy even for you, I'd implore you to give it a go.  Find a decent group of people who aren't overly stupid but also not "my robe and wizard hat" kind either and you'll have an absolute blast.  Get your dice, get some beers and have a grand old time.  The freedom that this kind of game allows is INSANE and it's almost impossible not to have a good time.