Neverwinter Nights 2: Storm of Zehir

"Crossroad keep revisited"

Neverwinter Nights 2: Storm of Zehir is the second expansion to the NeverWinter Nights 2 game, and the latest video game title based on the roleplaying page D&D and the setting of Forgotten Realms. Like the other NeverWinter Nights titles, it is based on a simplified version of D20 system and comes with an adventure design toolkit and support for a Dungeon Master in multiplayer games.

The ability to make your own content and the ability to play a multiplayer game with a live DM is one of the defining qualities of Neverwinter Nights line. With these options many would consider Neverwinter Nights games as an evolutionary step in history of PC-RPG genre mostly because of the new multiplayer options.

It is hard to review a Neverwinter Nights title without speaking about Multiplayer. Yet, when Neverwinter Nights 2 came out we had questions: If we would play the official campaign with a few friends (multiplayer), who will be the special "knight captain", how to handle scenes where only a single character should be present? What should we do with the side quests from the various NPCs we would recruit in a single player game?

Somehow we would say: Atari forgot about the multiplayer. And when we seen the toolset we could say: It can be more powerful, but it isn't that easy to use. A lot of players lost their chance at content creation. And lack of native linux support was one more key change that wasn't welcomed by Neverwinter Nights community.

Thanks to these issues there is still a huge community for Neverwinter Nights 1, and we see more and more content released for it everyday. Any new D&D related titles face strong competition from these custom modules, and from the premium modules released by Bioware.

Atari sees a difficult scenario: from a long time ally, Bioware can become a competitor and a strong one at that. And in this market the key question is: with the new expansion to it, is Neverwinter Nights 2 better than its prequel? Is it a strong game now?

Sadly, it would be hard to make the toolset easy to use, and it would be hard to attract some of the community that developed and still develop content for Neverwinter Nights. Most of the new ideas that came with other Neverwinter Nights 2 titles, like your very own keep, weren't enough to make Neverwinter Nights 2 the ultimate D&D experience.

Bugs, problems with optimization, camera movement, etc. was a major limiting factor, and with the new expansion we can see some of the bugs fixed. Sadly we have some new bugs, and sadly some of them are game breaking bugs.

The moment you see the resources sent back to your merchant HQ vanish and there is no good way to find a replacement for them, so if you would want to do some quests you should reload an old save that isn't good. And if you don't use too many save slots, and your saves have this problem already, so bad: You are welcome to start over.

Since this bug appears on all hardware configurations and many players can run into it, I have to say beta testers and Quality Assurance teams at Atari shown a clearly inferior performance here. Mind you: Most of the people who see: They either start over, or lose their chance to upgrade portals and see more and more repetitive encounters where they are supposed to teleport, many would stop playing.

In my standards it is quite hard to find an excuse to such bugs. And if it isn't an MMORPG, I don't like when I have to repeat the same thing over and over. And the bounty system, the repeated random encounters with same time of monsters, etc are such repetitive tasks. They are here to provide more playing time without adding more content and more fun.

While for a game where you should be able to spend a lot of time, meet a lot of people and advancement should take time measured in months I could accept such things, but in a few hours campaign having too much of such filler content isn't a good sign.

But we can safely say: It is the first game where we can wander around on a huge overland map. And I would be willing to accept this excuse if the same overland map wouldn't show us problems. And if we wouldn't see more issues.

But overland map isn't that great if you think about multiplayer. And the moment you open it you see why: What would the other players do while you control how your party moves on an overland map?

Excuse me: But haven't beta testers and QA teams tried to play the game in Multiplayer? And we speak about a title that had its strength in multiplayer in the past!

Carrying materials back and forth between villages when your party is represented by a single icon and doing the same kinds of random encounters on the same encounter maps over and over speaks about a problem: the developers failed to invest money and time in the game to make it fun.

It isn't surprising that our cohorts are devoid of life. It isn't surprising that while in Baldur's Gate series we had an option to recruit NPCs and had an option to build our own party, in this title it isn't present. Party building vs recruiting NPCs can be a matter of individual preferences. But no work put into existing cohorts and yet forcing them on the people who prefer party building is bad.

People who loved to see Forgotten Realms should be warned: Most settlements are turned into a dialog, and inn and a trading post and something small on the overland map, a lot of detail we loved in other Forgotten Realms titles simply vanished.

Of course if you like wandering out on a map and playing Hack, Slash, Bash with seemingly endless waves of random monsters to collect random treasure, you can have that kind of fun there. But for that case Diablo II was better. Ohh, and in that case I could list countless titles. And of course a premium module for Neverwinter Nights.

We can speak a game that lost a lot of multiplayer potential, lost the depth that can make some single player games interesting.

If I would see the story, somehow I have mixed feelings. This time you don't start "where you grew up", this time you don't discover something realy realy weired about your character. Something you wouldn't ever imagine. And something a DM wouldn't allow in an RPG. This time the adventure starts on a ship. And soon you will "discover" that your party should work for a merchant company.

And since even in the first few dialogs they mention yuan-ti you can guess they are behind the problems you face. Of course if you know them, you can understand they are dangerous, but yet the story starts like the story of a sane D&D adventure.

I think the new art for overland map isn't that nice, we seen better before. And since most of the graphics isn't new to say the least, we have to say: We seen better graphics before. Developers claim they optimized the engine further, but sadly I was unable to test it, but somehow I find it strange.

I find it strange to see: When an engine doesn't get new features, we don't get better graphics but the developer speaks about optimization, the minimum requirements and the recommended system configuration mentions much stronger GPU, much stronger CPU and much more RAM.

How long the game is? It depends a lot on how do you play the game. If you would enjoy wandering aimlessly to hope to meet random encounters and collect bounties that way, and don't get bored to fight the same monsters on same terrain repeatedly and want to get to high level and yet, you don't want to start at high level? It can be quite long. If you think after beating the game you should try it again with 4 clerics? Noone stops that. And as you see if you like doing repetitive tasks for ages, you can justify your addiction with having to try a new party.

But in other cases, I don't see much potential for replayability, and the time you spend with the game depends on how quickly you get bored and tired of it. And if you ask, if you should buy it? I would recommend downloading a good module for Neverwinter Nights instead. Of course if you want to have even more fun? Fire up the toolset and make an adventure for your friends, and let them make another one for you.

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 11/29/08

Game Release: Neverwinter Nights 2: Storm of Zehir (EU, 11/21/08)