bruce wrote:You need to put down the crack pipe.
Oh, it's fucking on now, sommbeeyatch.
NwN is just fine. The developers understand exactly what D&D is all about.
Let me first modify my statement -- NWN is possibly an all right game under the correct circumstances. Certainly, the fact that rags like PC Gamer and the like give out 97% for it, like they did Myst, Black and White and System Shock and Civ III and, basically, every other shitty game out there damns is in a way that I could never do. But my understanding is that the shit that's in the NWN is garbage, but some of the mods are OK-to-excellent. I personally would love to play the Tomb of Horrors mod, but more on why that can never happen in a bit.
D&D is about playing *a* character and slaying orcs and shit. *A* character. *ONE*.
I disagree. I can maybe buy the argument that D&D is about five people playing one character, but *a* person playing *a* character and that's it? Come on now, Maynard! When have you ever played a D&D game one-on-one, just you and the DM? Look, even if you
have done so in the past, it's fantastically gay.
Live games where you play multiple characters aren't nearly as much fun, and you only ever do it when you want to play and there just aren't enough people.
That's my entire problem with NWN. Every other computer game that's come before has managed to put a decent single-player game inside the box, because one can handle playing six characters in a D&D video game where one cannot so easily do so in "real life." Shit, if I wanted to play D&D in real life I'd find a gaming group, get some nose plugs, and have at it. NWN completely ignores thirty years of advantages that the computer gives you. The dumb motherfuckers who came up with the game don't even give you the
option of playing it both ways! What kind of retarded shit is that, Bruce?! How the hell do they justify this?
Actually, I know how they justify it. The Bioware guys are all hanging out on the forum at
www.quartertothree.com. They will tell you all day long that NWN "is not Baldur's Gate." They will also get extremely snotty about this factoid, as if that is something to fucking be proud of or something.
I am going to go make an RPG in the next couple of months. I'll do one better than NWN, because in it you will be controlling
no characters. You'll just be hitting the spacebar to initiate dice "rolling" procedures for things like still countrysides (if I get a 15 or above, the wind is going to thrust that bottle into a ditch!!!). Furthermore, when people tell me that the thing would be improved by simply having a play mode where you can control, say, one guy, I'll roll my eyes and condescendingly tell them that, look, this game is
not Neverwinter Nights. It's not INTENDED to be. Pfffragh!
Defining yourself or your game or your record or whatever by what you are not is a sure sign that you've fucked up somewhere.
I think you're a little fuzzy on the distinction between "CRPG" and "D&D". The CRPG is all about the tactical decisions you make on behalf of the whole party. In D&D you make your own tactical decisions, and everyone else makes his own too.
This is great, except for the fact that it's incredibly unrealistic for someone in their late 20s or mid thirties to really play the game, then. Let's ignore the fact that the game DEMANDS that you play a multiclassed character, because otherwise you're essentially choosing between being able to cast a healing spell on yourself or pick a lock. A good D&D session has five or six people in it. To get going with NWN, you need to find, then, five other people that:
1) Bought into the highly flawed concept of the game.
2) Have decent computers, computers able to run the game.
3) Have decent CD-ROMs that can get past the SecuROM protection that the dumb fuckers at Interplay slapped on all of the disks
4) Each have the same patched version of the game.
5) Each have the same mods installed that everyone wants to play, and each have the same version of the mods, where applicable
6) Everyone's in roughly the same time zone with the same responsibilities. If you've got three guys who don't work for a living and three that do and some of them are in the Eastern Time Zone and some are on the Pacific rim, well, that's just bedlam.
I can see maybe those things happening if you require that three people team up. Three, yeah, I can see that. I played through much of the first BG game with two other pals. Course, it wouldn't fucking work in a piece of utter, total shit like NWN because, har har har, a game which is based entirely on the fact that different people fight, heal, steal and cast magic means that we've got to go pick three out of the four. Hope the healing guy has plenty of "disarm traps" spells kicking about.
I am intentionally ignoring the whole Gamespy thing. I absolutely refuse to play video games with idiot 10 year olds over the Internet. I don't even consider them people. For Bioware to think that's an option and that people will gladly do it -- which they do -- well, that just means that their idiocy didn't stop when they drew up the design doc.
I hear that multi-player is actually very much like playing real D&D. From the toolset it seems like it really should be....
That's just it. Maybe you can get six people to join in with you for a night or something, but regularly? I have been trying for two months to nail down a fantasy football draft date for my friends, and it gets more difficult every year as people get married, go on trips with their wives or, in other cases, common-law wives. There were literally two weekend days that didn't have shit going on with someone, and if I had been able to attend the Milker's wedding, even that day would be gone. It really gets ridiculous the older we all get. If Bioware is content on making games for bored teenagers who have nothing to do until middle school starts up again, well, power to them. "gg," I believe the kids like to say.
It just pisses me off because there's only a certain number of official D&D games that we are likely to see, and the non D&D games like Morrowind and Arx Fatalis and shit are all first-person, single-d00d RPGs which I am not always in the mood for.