Neverwinter... that legendary city of Faerun, acting as a haven for adventurers on the edge of the Savage Frontier. A new would-be hero approached the palace of Lord Nasher, a former adventurer himself. This young half-elf had dubbed himself the "Knight of Neverwinter", but only time would tell if he could live up to his self appointed title.
The young man, standing tall with pride, his hand on the hilt of his short sword, entered the palace. The regal Nasher, being constantly approached by adventurers, would not be bothered to rise from his seat. "I am Lord Nasher. Welcome to Neverwinter my friend."
Our hero took a long, deep breath, then shouted "I am the Knight of Neverwinter, and I shall liberate this great city!"
Lord Nasher's eyes grew wide momentarily, but his response calm,"Uh, ok... go forth and explore new lands. Good bye." Nasher then turned away to resume a conversation with one of his assistants.
Satisfied with his entrance, our hero nodded, then ventured forth, to adventure!
Note: To hopefully avoid confusion, I'll refer to the versions of Neverwinter Nights as Original Neverwinter Nights (oNWN), FRUA: Neverwinter Nights (F:NWN), and Forgotten World (FW).
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| This is not the Neverwinter Nights I'm playing, sorry if I got your hopes up. |
While I was playing Final Fantasy 13, it was definitely in the back of my mind that I wanted to continue to intermix Gold Box game posts in with the FF stuff. It's been a while since I'd played any of these games, which always takes a second to reintegrate. I ended up having some technical difficulties with Forgotten World that will probably get ironed out, I'll talk about that in my next post on that game.
While I play Forgotten World, and F:NWN, whenever I encounter something frustrating, I often think, "Was the original game really like this?" The only thing stopping me from playing the original is that the only version I've seen does not allow the player to save, necessitating a restart every time they open up the game. This "offline" version is available at what is probably the most comprehensive oNWN archive site, at Bladekeep.
Something I realized a little while back is that this offline version assumes the player is a GM, and thus contains debug powers, allowing you to teleport, edit your character, skip combat and all that jazz. It occurred to me that one might be able to "save" by screencapping their character than editing it on the next load. Turns out that is totally possible! (DOSBox save states would probably be even easier, but I'm comfortable with the version I'm using now.) So here I am, now playing no less than THREE iterations of Neverwinter Nights at one time! Given the nature of these games, that is "open world" and with relatively slow character progression, they are going to be games that I play for a long time, playing and posting periodically among my other stuff. I mean, I've put in 20-30 hours each on FW and F:NWN, and have barely scratched the surface of exploring the available areas. That sounds like a compliment, but really it's because at the lower levels you can barely survive anywhere. Obviously I still have hope for them though, because I'm still playing.
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| Here we go again! |
After trying out a Ranger/Mage build in FW I've decided to go back to my original idea, the Cleric/Fighter/Mage. The Ranger overall survived much better, however, the lack of spells made it very hard to win tougher combats without the disabling abilities of the mage. This would all be fine once the build is complete, however, that means building a Ranger to level 10 and a mage to level 11 before your character is all that viable. I'm not willing to wait that long. The issues with the C/F/M are slow progression (Exp. is divided by 3) and low Hit Points (Also divided by three). However, the character is more "viable" as a solo while you're still building levels, in my opinion. As far as I know FW was gracious enough to throw out the humano-centric AD&D level limits, but being an official product, oNWN of course has them. That means my Half-Elf C/F/M will max out at levels 5/8/8 instead of 11/12/11. Bummer, but I weighed the options and decided it was still worth it.
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| You'll pay 20 gold for my spetum? Gross, man. I hope it's for science and not something sexual. |
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| Oh! You mean this thing. |
Not surprisingly since this is the official release of the game, I find it plays the smoothest, and seems the most balanced from an encounter and treasure standpoint. Each of the versions has their benefit though: oNWN has pro-polish, FW has online play, and F:NWN allows one person to control a whole party.
So far I've played this version for about 6 hours, I've only gotten my character's feet wet in the wharves. One good thing about these games is that, I'm not sure exactly why, but exploring and grinding in the same 16x16 square area for 6 hours doesn't get all that boring. It's a testament to the Gold Box games that this is true. With a game like this, it's also quite viable to watch let's plays or catch up on Netflix at the same time you're playing, which helps too.
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| Poor Bill, human trafficking is wrong. |
There are a few things I've noticed so far about this version of the game. First off, turning undead causes them to flee. Some Gold Box games make them simply disappear, but the disadvantage to that is that you don't get experience for them. I prefer the disappearing for the high level games where the exp. isn't all that important, and the fleeing for the low level games. The "timer" from the original game is also intact. That is, if you take too long to make your move in combat a timer starts ticking down, and you "pass" when it reaches 0. This was in there to keep the game from bogging down during multiplayer, and it's presence here isn't a big deal. The game clock is also similarly not based on the player's moves and resting, which is different than most Gold Box games. FW uses a server clock based on actual time. Since oNWN is "offline" I'm not sure if it uses the player's computer's time, or simply it's own internal timer.
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| Guisarme, Bill's grandfather. That's all the pole-arm jokes I have... for now! |
As I've been exploring the wharves, I noticed after certain encounters I would get a "complete (number)" message after winning certain combats. I assume this is related to getting a reward from Lord Nasher for "clearing" a block, ala Pool of Radiance. I've found five of these combats, but have yet to get any new messages from Nasher. After trying a few things, such as not leaving the area until I'd won all the combats, and doing them in order, I hadn't made any progress. If you've read my posts on FF13, you know how much I love "trial and error" gameplay, so I decided to look for an FAQ or walkthrough. (For those of you who think that's cheating, I've come to terms with it like this: If I'm stuck on one thing for 1 or 2 hours and can't think of anything else to try, I'll look it up. Life's too short to fiddle too long with suspect game design.) I couldn't find anything specific to this quest unfortunately, but I did find a decent FAQ in an archive!
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| I made a joke about encountering these guys in F:NWN. They're not nearly as funny as a solo character. |
For a while now I've been trying to figure out how encounters respawn in FW, which applies here as well. I figured some were keyed to the day/night cycle, and that they respawned by stepping on those squares. However, my science couldn't yield conclusive results. The FAQ spelled it out for me succinctly, different encounters have different requirements to respawn... Derr... why didn't I think of that? So, I figured out that while I'm going to be grinding anyway, I might as well figure out how each encounter works. That being said, I've just started this, and once again... nothing conclusive yet!
Sweat dripping from his brow, and his breath heavy, the Knight of Neverwinter grunted as he removed his trident from the neck of the now dead crocodile. This adventuring thing was a little tougher than he had at first imagined he though, but the challenge only strengthened his resolve to live up to his title. For more of our hero's adventures, come back soon... for This Bard's Tales!
Total Game Time: 5.5 hours
(Oddly enough, I missed keeping track of my play time. By using decimals instead of minutes, I've made the bookkeeping more manageable, so it's back.)
