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Neverwinter Nights: Hordes of the Underdark Review December 10, 2003 |
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Summary: Neverwinter Nights was a great, revolutionary game with a rather bland singleplayer experience. Hordes of the Underdark is here to rectify all that, but does it succeed? And how can it compare with the latest crop of RPGs? Is Neverwinter too tired, or is there something to be said about going to level 40?
 Overview | Page:: ( 1 / 5 ) |
Hordes
Neverwinter Nights was a fabulously promising game that, despite good reviews, had many questions to answer. Firstly, there was concern about its lasting appeal and the ability to deliver the multiplayer experience and grow a community to create the modules. A more direct concern for BioWare was being able to convince gamers that NWN was capable of a truly epic singleplayer experience, like past BioWare games.
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Shadows of Undrentide took the first tentative steps forward, though it seemed to stumble in places. However, Hordes of the Underdark is a fully BioWare-developed expansion, unlike SoU. The extra content provided is quite staggering, there’s a whole new selection of music, tilesets and monsters.
In fact, the very name Hordes of the Underdark hardly does justice to the expansion, since the Underdark is but the middle third of the game. Undermountain is the first and, by the last chapter, the player is advanced enough to warrant some planar travel, if you get my drift.
Additions
Better than the new tiles and monsters are the wonderful new features given to player characters. The level limit has been raised to 40, though the player will be hard-pressed to reach level 27 by the end of the campaign. There is a veritable deluge of new prestige classes like the Pale Master and Red Dragon Disciple. These aren’t just your run-of-the-mill modifications to the base class, either.
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The Blackguards and Arcane Archers of Shadows of Undrentide have nothing on the new prestige classes, which are truly inspired. Anyone choosing a Pale Master or Red Dragon Disciple will be facing a complete change of playing style after putting in just a few levels into those classes. There’s really no proper comparison or description that would do justice to these, but suffice it to say they’re quite unique, powerful and enjoyable.
BioWare also threw in a few pleasant surprises into the later acts. The weapons, which are already interesting enough (at least one is intelligent and speaks), can be upgraded in chapters 2 and 3. On top of that, the player gets to conduct a defense against a siege at one point in the game. That all sounds impressive, but does it work?
SIDEBAR: Brett wrote a pretty good review of Victoria on GameSpot, though odds are that fans of the genre will be more forgiving.
| Gameplay | Page:: ( 2 / 5 ) |
Pros
Every single aspect of Hordes of the Underdark is better than the original campaign. The story is tighter, more gripping with more believable twists (not to mention dialogue.) In many ways, Hordes of the Underdark reflects Knights of the Old Republic. Veterans of BioWare games will be able to pick up a familiar vibe that goes deep beneath the obvious stylistic similarities. The NWN team’s writing and design have clearly matured and taken a page from the crew behind KotOR.
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Even though NPCs are not nearly as important in NWN as they are in KotOR, they are fleshed out in a similar manner, always revealing a little bit of themselves at a time. They go through their own struggles and always resolve them (based on the player’s input) just in time to get through the toughest parts of the quest. The NWN team has grown skilled at masking the “fetch this” aspect of quests, so skilled, in fact, that even though you still are constantly the FedEx boy, you rarely feel like it.
The combat is improved with the addition of a second NPC, though it still lacks the tactical appeal that Baldur’s Gate and Baldur’s Gate II had. The additional NPC has more memorable benefits by the occasional interesting conversations that two NPCs have together. There are fewer characters than in NWN or BG2, but they are quite well-developed by Neverwinter standards.
The greatest achievement for BioWare is a believable epic-level experience. With characters going beyond level 20, it becomes difficult to make them feel suitably powerful, while keeping the challenge believable – and yet that is precisely what NWN offers. Epic feats and prestige classes take characters into uber-realms, but it’s not as if the designers threw a token dragon or two along the way to make things interested. The challenges are truly creative, without being abusive. Best of all, the plot supports the epic feel without giving into the ludicrous extremes one might assume.
Cons
The combat, despite the addition of a second NPC, still isn’t comparable to the kind of experience available with a 6-character party. The major problem is that NWN is that NWN deals with such small battle scenarios, but there’s more to it. The bigger fights, or scenes with a lot of special effects, bring even the fastest computer systems to their knees. Monsters and characters warp around, making any sort of real-time control difficult. Pausing helps, but if you’re going to hit the spacebar to pause every 6 seconds, you might as well make the game turn-based only.
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Also, the siege, while impressive and a great way to do something out of the ordinary, isn’t as impressive as it might be. It’s clearly a jury-rigged scene, a hack, if you will. It works well enough as an effect, but it’s actually a difficult battle to lose and the effects of the commands you give on the actual outcome of the battle are rather unclear.
Finally, the main campaign can’t be played in multiplayer, but we don’t really see how it could, given some of the plot and gameplay decisions. Besides, there are a half dozen good modules included with the game that do work online.
SIDEBAR: Tom Ohle, BioWare PR man extraordinaire, is the person least likely to use the words ‘Hitler’ or ‘war’ on a forum we frequent, this despite being German. Methinks it’s because he’s got a thing for ‘Hasslehoff’.
| Graphics & Sound | Page:: ( 3 / 5 ) |
Graphics
NWN is clearly getting on in years, we’re a bit surprised to see how clearly it has aged. The most glaring weaknesses are texturing on characters and the utter lack of any sort of facial expressions. Consider – three years ago, Daikatana was criticized for not having moving lips to go with the speech. To see that problem in 2003 is shameful.
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In terms of special effects and lighting, Neverwinter is still quite impressive. As always, spells make the strongest impression here, with their streaking magic missiles and exploding fireballs. Weapons and armor have their own effects, but none are new from NWN. Swords will glow various colors, drip acid/venom as they always did, and armor still has the shiny luster effect. There may be some new armor and weapons designs, but if there are, it's not something we could notice.
The new tilesets are really quite nice and round out the NWN collection; gamers should be able to recreate almost any setting now. The various new dungeon tiles are especially nice, since so many modules take the player into underground areas. Hordes of the Underdark has Beholder caverns, a Drow city, the Underdark of course and other new zones.
Sound
Hordes of the Underdark comes with a whole new musical score, 30 minutes according to the BioWare PR folk. It’s relatively good music too, though the standard NWN themes seem to cycle in all too often, especially during loading screens and other such standard menus. Fortunately, the songs are relatively identifiable by filename and the offending ones can be removed. On the other hand, they are stored in an odd .bmu format which likely means that you can’t simply replace them with your favorite MP3s.
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Speech, however, is the big difference. NWN had a fair bit of it, Hordes of the Underdark is overflowing. While everyone is accustomed to the occasional comments of your party members, though perhaps not the savage cries of your talking sword, it was the number of in-game cutscenes and the quantity of speech that took us by surprise. This surprise is elevated because there are no new CGI scenes of any sort, not even an intro movie! Maybe we’ve just been playing too many user-made modules.
SIDEBAR: Song of the moment – Pearl Jam’s Better Man. Too bad the CD’s skipping… so old. Worse, it makes me feel so young again. Depressing.
| Ballistics Report | Page:: ( 4 / 5 ) |
Pros
Campaign.
The singleplayer campaign is superior in every conceivable fashion to the original. In fact, despite the few remaining faults of the NWN engine, it manages to pull off one of the best epic experiences. It’s no Planescape: Torment, but then again, few games are.
Gameplay features.
We absolutely love the epic-level skills, the new prestige classes and the powerful new critters you go up against.
Content
In addition to the official campaign, there are a few other modules packed in on the CD.
Community support
The community has really grown around the game and all the new goodies will surely make their way into modules; modules which will lead players up to level 40!
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Cons
Performance
We’re at a loss to explain why Neverwinter Nights would continue to chug a computer so powerful, it wasn’t even available at NWN’s launch.
Graphics
The character graphics are really rather disappointing.
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SIDEBAR: I’m really surprised to see the Canadian Unitarian Council oppose Bill C-38 (the decriminalization of marijuana), not because they want it to be criminal, but because they find the fines to be too high.
| Final Verdict | Page:: ( 5 / 5 ) |