Hundreds of hours of gameplay wrapped up in annoying (Neverwinter Nights Legacy PC Pack (PC))

Member Name: Surprising_Ape

Product:	Neverwinter Nights Legacy PC Pack (PC)
Date:	13/06/09 (43 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Hundreds of hours of gameplay with community adventures. Very cheap these days.

Disadvantages: NWN1 graphics are very dated. The first campaign will bore you to death. NWN2 hates most PCs.

Neverwinter Nights was developed by Bioware, the company responsible for the bestselling Baldur's Gate series of PC roleplaying games. You control a party of adventurers while attempting to work out exactly what good a +1 dodge modifier to AC is.

Unlike the Baldur's Gate games, Bioware designed Neverwinter Nights to be heavily modified by its users - the game includes a friendly toolset to make your own adventures. In fact, Neverwinter Nights' original single-player campaign seems to be intended as a prototype to showcase what the toolset is capable of rather than being an engrossing gaming experience in its own right. Which is fortunate, because it isn't.

I would strongly recommend that anybody new to the Neverwinter Nights series starts straight in with the adventure contained in the first expansion pack, Shadows of Undrentide. Like the original campaign, this adventure starts the player at level one, and this time the story and gameplay are significantly better handled. The game also contains significantly more interaction with the companions you meet along the way, and more varied locations than the first campaign.

This trend continues in the third and final full expansion pack, Hordes of the Underdark, in which you can take your Original Campaign/Shadows of Undrentide character through another lengthly adventure reaching even higher levels of quality (though Bioware do seem to love puzzles involving brightly coloured levers, for some reason).

On Neverwinter Nights' release many fans of Bioware's previous games were horrified by what seemed to be a massive step back in terms of quality. Well. I was, at least, and I know quite literally several other people who agree with me - while Baldur's Gate 2 still holds up fairly well graphically, due to the hand-drawn backgrounds and carefully animated spell effects, Neverwinter Nights these days can seem hideously blocky and dated, and may be a struggle to play unless you are prepared to overlook this.

However, the great strength of Neverwinter Nights really does lie in its toolset. At present count there are several thousand player-created adventures ('modules') available on the Neverwinter Nights Vault (http://nwvault.ign.com), many of which far surpass the original adventures in quality, giving hundreds of hours of further adventuring. This extends to multiplayer, too, where there are still player-built persistent worlds active (essentially smaller scale, free MMORPGs, with perhaps dozens of players online at once).

I will say that while I do think Neverwinter Nights is worth it soley for the community-made adventures, do not forget to buy a package that includes both expansion packs - most of the best custom adventures require both.
I notice that the pack I'm reviewing (Neverwinter Nights Legends? Neverwinter Nights World?) seems to include Neverwinter Nights 2 as well, although I'm not sure how easy this particular collection is to get hold of - NWN1 including its expansion packs can currently be bought for £5-£10, so depending on price this might be a good deal if you can find it.

Now, onto Neverwinter Nights 2.

Neverwinter Nights 2 was not made by Bioware, but Obsidian Entertainment. Obsidian are a relatively young development studio founded by ex-members of Black Isle (the team who made the first two Fallout games, the cult classic Planescape: Torment, and the Icewind Dale series).

The official NWN2 campaign is a great deal better than NWN1's in terms of story and interaction, also allowing full-party control. If you are one of the people who was put off NWN1 because of the largely single character focused experience, NWN2 may be for you.

Unfortunately the game was marred at an early stage by numerous glitches and bugs. These bugs have largely been patched, but this and the relatively steep system requirements (if you don't have a dedicated graphics card or enjoy gaming on a laptop, you may be out of luck) has left the NWN2 modding community much smaller than NWN1's, so there are far fewer custom adventures available (though still some of quality).

I don't see any mention of the pack I'm reviewing including NWN2's two expansions (Mask of the Betrayer and Storm of Zehir), so if you think you might enjoy NWN2 it might be a good idea to wait until the inevitable collection of those games is released for a discount - Mask of the Betrayer's single-player campaign is particularly good, reminiscent of Planescape: Torment at times, while Storm of Zehir is an attempt at an old-school game of exploration and trade which, while not particularly gripping story-wise, makes a nice change.

Summary: High rating is based on the community modules. If you don't try those, you may not be impressed.