Much like watching the proverbial lady exiting the car, sometime you see it, and sometimes you don’t, and clearly in this case you don’t. You didn’t like his review, I did and we’ll leave it at that, so as not to provoke the RPS gods further.

Trying to assess a game (or anything else creative) critically outside of it’s context is absurd. Everything exists within a frame.

And honestly, if you can cope with the combat and rules in Planescape or Baldur’s Gate, it’s 99% the same as NWN2. Cast spells, hit things and backstab.

And the original NWN Campaign is probably the worst RPG experience I’ve ever had. Every so often I think “Hey, I never finished it. I should go back and play it through.” And then I get a few chapters in, and then realize exactly how tedious it is.

The subsequent expansions were alright, if not particularly inspiring. Still, even with the official campaigns being mediocre (at best), and my relationship with DnD ambivalent (at best), I still really really like NWN. Why?

Because the DnD system, at it’s heart, is a facilitator for storytelling. The point of a roleplaying system is that it figures things out for you; instead of sitting down and trying to puzzle out if Batman could beat Superman or something, you’ve got two blocks of stats, and two sets of tools, which then play against each other until someone ends up with negative hit points. Yes, the things that it figures out are nearly entirely combat oriented, or progress oriented, or “shit you find in a dungeon” oriented, but that’s because human characters tend to be too complex to be flattened into a stat block. So the logic of emotion and motivation and such is left to the devices of the GM and the players.

Is DnD a labyrinthine, feature-bloated system that arguably gets in the way of storytelling? Arguably. Actually, on second thought, “yes.” It is. It totally is. There are far better systems to work with. But even then, NWN helps alleviate that somewhat by taking care of all that stuff for you. You don’t need to worry about whether or not you’ve applied your Dodge AC bonus this round, so you can worry about other things.

So, if DnD, and by extension, NWN is a facilitator for storytelling rather than a game in its own right, then what do you do? Well, you tell stories. And you share them, and play through other people’s. And NWN is one of the only games specifically designed to let you do that. It’s a game that revolves around user-created content. It’s a facilitator, as much as the DnD system is, taking care of the graphical representation of the world and the people, and the rules for how they can physically interact – it’s essentially doing all the hard bits for you, and letting you get on with making a game.

None of the player-made NWN modules I played changed my life. I don’t think there were any Torments in there. But there were several very decent bits there, and PLENTY that were better than the official campaign.

A lot of the criticisms about the rules system being labyrinthine are on-target. And I believe the bits about the campaign, even without seeing them firsthand. But I feel like the Game itself is more about providing people with storytelling tools than anything else, and that the Official Campaign is more like sample material. A “Here, look at what the engine can do!” thing, as opposed to a game in and of itself.

If he was writing a review for a D&D specific audience, you might vaguely have a point, but the guy was writing a review for a general PC gaming magazine, so he’s looking at it in the broadest context of computer gaming, not simply whether it’s better or worse in terms of how it implements D&D rules compared to Baldurs Gate or Icewind Dale. One accepts that with a game like Madden or Fifa, the rules applicable to the sports they represent are sacrosanct in terms of gaming mechanics, but that kind of rigour hardly needs to be applied to cRPGs. Planescape torment was D&D based, but it was all over the shop in terms of how it went vs D&D rules. Did anyone give a shit at the end of the day about that? No, because it had a great story driving it. The guy pretty much said, if you love the D&D rules you’ll love NWN2, however if your looking for something different, look elsewhere. I’d say that’s a pretty fair assessment tbh.

I think the re-review does this quite well (6/10 – Jeff Green). The game is a bunch of clichés, was horrendously buggy at release, horrible system requirements etc although it has some moments of charm which certainly put it above average – the second chapter that climaxes in the court room scene I thought was well done).

But, and this is the important part, when a more polished version of the game with a better story comes along (Mask of the Betrayer) then it becomes a good game. But for people that found the combat to overwhelm their ability to enjoy the game, then I don’t think anything is going to fix that.

After reading through Duncan Fyfe’s articles a few times, I find them a bit contradictory. I honestly wonder how he’d react if Planescape came out for the first time tomorrow.

Particularly insightful was his closing comment:-

“That five-of-10 is actually a hedge, by the way. For D&D fans who want to play an amazingly thorough PC translation of the system they’re carting around in book form, it’s probably closer an eight or nine. But if, like me, you want less “rules for rule’s sake” and more depth and beauty to your simulated game worlds, you can certainly find more exciting prospects. Part of the reason we call them “the good old days” and think fondly of games past is that it’s always easier to love what we don’t have to play anymore.”

One of the aspects of computer gaming I personally enjoy is how the medium is constantly evolving in terms of storytelling, environmental complexity and visual fidelity. Recently I played through all of GTA 3, then moved onto Vice City and am right now on the final stretch of San Andreas. It’s been quite fascinating to play them all back to back and experience the way in which albeit the core game elements are the same (Drive around, undertake missions, shoot guns), with each iteration the product has moved on. I look with envious eyes at Rockstars latest offering (cmon PC release announcement…weedle it out of them Kieron, you must know someone at R*NORTH), and I can’t help but think if there is such a thing as progressive PC role playing, it’s not found in NWN2 or it’s ilk these days but in sandbox games like GTA IV, where the statistics are secondary to the action/immersion.