OMFG This is so freaking hype! I love Neverwinter Nights 2 but could never get past a certain point because the crashes came in hot, fast, and ready to disrupt my gameplay. The fact they are bringing it to Xbox Series X|S makes me super happy, as while it is Steam Deck Verified…I don’t know if I could wait until the ProtonDB reports of performance on Desktop Linux. ROFL This Enhanced Edition is the perfect treat!
This will probably make me finally get around to playing it. I had a lot of fun with NWN back in the day, but that was more the multiplayer custom servers. The single player campaign was pretty mediocre.
I never actually played the sequel, but I remember hearing very good things about the Mask of the Betrayer expansion to NWN2. Hope it lives up to the reputation.
The base campaign… it is better than NWN’s base campaign but not by much. And it is peak Obsidian “We ran out of money about 70% in”.
But yeah. Mask of the Betrayer is legitimately amazing. It isn’t Planescape level (no matter what people claimed) but it is easily on par with BG2 and you can see a LOT of Pillars DNA in there.
That’s good to know. Are the expansions independent or do you have to get through the base game first? Would you recommend just doing Mask of the Betrayer and calling it a day there?
MOTB directly follows the ending of Core… to the point it actually made things awkward for Obsidian because of how they frantically ended Core. Same player character
(Matt Rorie’s) Storm of Zehir is a standalone game set some time after Core/Mask and includes some of the same characters but has a new player character.
Mysteries of Westgate is a standalone from Ossian but, people say you are much better off starting off with a stronger character. My memory is crap so I’ll assume that is true.
Thank you! I guess the question is, is sitting through 100 hours of mediocre main campaign worth it to get to Mask? My guess is probably yes, but that knowledge will likely end up de-prioritizing the game on my backlog.
Thanks a lot for the rundown! Are the other two expansions any good?
If you were to ask me… sweet Eothas, 15 years ago? Yes
Now? … Probably not? We had a solid decade or so of a CRPG resurgence and now have studios like Owlcat that just hit it out of the park near constantly. Like… for as half baked as Kingmaker was… eating around the raw spots is some damned good food and the penultimate dungeon (and then the endgame if you don’t dialogue out) is the violent illness that follows eating the “cooked bits” around raw food. And Wrath and Rogue Trader are “no notes” games as far as I am concerned. And Obsidian’s Pillars 1 and 2 touch on many of the same concepts as Mask but are both very solid games all the way through. Same with Larian for DOS2 (less so 1) and BG3.
But if you’ve played through most of those? Core is apparently 60 hours (I don’t believe that but this was also 20-ish years ago). And the good moments are really good. They are just surrounded by endless monotony, mediocre encounter design, and broken mechnaics because… Obsidian. Whereas Mask is a REALLY solid 15 hour experience that is only kinda broken.
Storm… I wouldn’t bother. Even if you asked me when it was new. And I actually love Ossian (mostly because they collaborate with Luke Scull who is a deeply underrated author and whose AL series of modules were awesome) but all I remember is that Westgate was weaker than Daggerford.
PSA: If you play ANY of the Pathfinder CRPGs? Get blind fight ASAP. And make sure every arcane caster has a few charges of Glitterdust at any moment.
Good to know again, thank you! I played through Kingmaker last winter and your description is pretty spot on. There were parts of it that were great, parts of which that were not, and parts of it that were downright awful. And particularly the latter parts really soured me on it, and made me super reluctant to play Wrath of the Righteous. If that is Owlcat’s idea of high level play I don’t really want an epic adventure from them.
I’ve played Divinity 1&2 and BG3, but I’m less high on Larian than everyone else these days. They’re fine games and fun to play but Larian’s style of writing isn’t my jam and I also think BG3 has a lot of problems that get kind of glossed over.
I missed Pillars 1, so I guess that is on some sort of to-do list. I played about half of Pillars 2 but got bored and never picked it back up.
PSA: If you play ANY of the Pathfinder CRPGs? Get blind fight ASAP. And make sure every arcane caster has a few charges of Glitterdust at any moment.
I had Blind Fight on every single party member and that final bit of the game was still a hellish slog that made actively detest Owlcat.
Wrath is better in basically every possible way.
Some of that has to do with being incredibly open from the first 30 seconds that the main enemies are demons/devils (rather than teasing out it is the fae) and that demons/devils are much more straightforward enemies.
Part of it is also that you get a… kind of really unfair power boost early on. Mythic Levels are not Epic Levels from 3e and you actually get them really early on (your first around character level 5 or 6) and they are kind of ridiculous. Stuff like getting a ridiculous number of extra spells per day, having all killing blows and crits with ranged weapons do AOE damage, doing AOE damage on the first melee miss of any round, etc. It gets REAL stupid and that is even before you start getting the really fun stuff like turning into a Lich or Dragon. Which helps a lot since a LOT of encounters are the “you do one of these per tabletop session” kind. And your entire party get the “only kind of ridonkulous” version, not just the PC. A lot of CRPGs will give the PC some massive power booster (that often is tied to morality/alignment because No Fun Allowed) to balance the nature of a TTRPG and what is basically an ARPG with dialogue. Wrath gives your entire party that boost so that you feel like The Fellowship fighting through an army of Uruk-Hai… at level 6. Of 20.
And the encounter design in general is a lot better. I find that enemies care a lot less about AOOs and will just sprint past your frontline to beat on your archers. But there are also far fewer “Cool. You need to push through twenty endless respawning midboss enemies to get the summoner” fights. I totally don’t fucking hate that house at the end of time at all.
It is also worth remembering that Kingmaker is in rights hell and Owlcat and that publisher are not on good terms in the slightest. So they couldn’t even really go back and patch Kingmaker (whereas they did a LOT to improve Wrath post release). Which kind of shows with some of the Wrath tooltips bordering on apologizing for Kingmaker (stuff like getting rid of supplies for resting).
Kingmaker is one of those games that are “if you ever think you MIGHT play it, just play it first… but turn off fail states for kingdom management and read a guide”. Whereas Wrath is a genuinely amazing CRPG and has an argument for being the all time best.
I’ve tried playing this game multiple times, but just got bored too quickly. The characters are all unlikeable in their own way and the game often goes out of its way to create conflict between them so you have to pick a side and gain/lose relationship points with the respective party member.
