Anyway, another video game, because I love video games.
Neverwinter Nights 2, the sequel to Neverwinter Nights.
The game begins with absolutely no relation to the hero of Neverwinter from Neverwinter Nights, nor to Deekin's friend, the hero of the expansion packs of Neverwinter Nights. Wierd.
So anyway, the game begins with you getting some instructions from your cold Elven foster father, telling you to do something he could quite easily do himself on his way to where he's going. But you have to do it anyway. He doesn't want to carry the furs or something. Well, not a minute into the game, and you have a mission already.
Go outside and meet your friends, and it won't be long at all until you get another mission. Alright! So now you have to sell some furs, buy a bow for Dad, and compete in the Harvest Cup. The Harvest Cup consists of four events, and if you win three, you win the cup. Supposedly, nobody has won all four since Cormick, whoever that was. However, unless you're a dolt, you should be able to win all four without too much trouble. For your efforts, you get a cup and a cape that makes you look good, but will be replaced by something better shortly afterwards. Your happiness is quickly crushed, however, when a bunch of evil critters come and slaughter half your town. So then you are given the task of gathering the half assed militia to fight wave after wave of the aforementioned evil critters. For farmers living in a swamp, they do surprisingly well, but still appreciate the help when Dad shows up with some archers.
After the carnage, Dad explains to you that it might kinda sorta be his fault that they came. So he sends you and your surviving friend into the dangerous swamp to take a shiny thing away from the lizardmen. Great parenting, right there. Most players will probably end up killing all the lizardmen, but if you're good, you can convince them to be friendly. So after you get that, Dad tells you to take it to his half brother in Neverwinter.
Well at least now we know why it's called Neverwinter Nights. The expansions to the first Neverwinter Nights didn't even involve the city of Neverwinter at all! Why were they expansions anyway? They didn't feature the city, they had new protagonists, they had unrelated plots...
But back to the game I'm actually reviewing. Neverwinter Nights 2 runs on the Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 Ruleset, an update from Neverwinter Nights, which ran on 3.0. Some of the feats and skills have changed slightly, but if you were familiar with how the system worked in NWN, you should be able to figure it out without much trouble.
There are new classes and races as well. The only new core class is Warlock, an arcane spellcaster who focuses more on blowing stuff up and less on actual spells, but is otherwise similar to a sorcerer. There are seven new prestige classes, two of which have prerequisites tied to story events.
New races include various subraces, such as Duergar and Drow, which are "dark" variants of Dwarves and Elves, respectively. You can also be a Tiefling or Aasimar, a human with hints of fiendish or celestial ancestry. Oddly enough, even if you play a tiefling with blatantly obvious horns, a tail, and yellow eyes, people will interact with you as if you were a perfectly normal person. However, a certain tiefling NPC you meet early in the game is constantly harassed and molested due to her fiendish ancestry. What the crap?
Several of your companions will frustrate you to no end, especially a certain Elven Druid who has a tendancy to shift into large animals and block doorways during fights.
As with previous installations of the series, the details of the game vary greatly depending on a multitude of choices made by the player, but the overall goal of the game generally remains the same most of the way through. I won't spoil the ending for ya, though.
The Bottom Line: If you like RPGs, Neverwinter Nights is an excellent series, well worth your time, and Neverwinter Nights 2 continues that tradition of excellence. Rock on Bioware.
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