Neverwinter Nights

"Not as fun or revolutionary as I'd hoped. An honest look."

I really wanted to like this game. I really did. I know a lot of people have been waiting for this game for a long time, I was one of them. If you continue reading, I think you'll see that I didn't set my expectations too high, but I simply don't feel I'm getting my money's worth.
I guess I'll begin with the incredibly disappointing single-player campaign. Well, first I'll go ahead and say that if you're purchasing this game without planning to play it online, please do yourself a favor and don't bother. If you're expecting any type of meaningful character interaction, stay away. Planescape this is not. Neverwinter is basically Baldur's Gate with more Diablo-style hack-n-slash action, but the game engine just doesn't lend itself well to this style of play. For a game that basically throws endless armadas of weak enemies at you, the game is just plain clunky. There's none of the streamlined panache of the Diablo games or even Dungeon Siege. Just click once and your character will jog slowly toward your foe and then auto-attack until something dies. Not that I'm saying having to click multiple times to kill something would solve all of the game's problems, but at least Diablo had interesting spells and abilities to make things interesting. Neverwinter has the same old D&D spells we've been seeing since the beginning of role-playing.
All of the single-player quests revolve around bashing things repeatedly for the most part. And the lack of any real character interaction means there's really no way to make your character unique. All you really do is drill townspeople for information, which leads to more quests, which leads to more boring non-strategic combat. No matter what you choose you'll still end up playing the same game. It's just too linear.
I was hoping I'd have more fun playing the game online, but that didn't seem to be the case. While it's true that people are attempting to make their own modules, most players are just playing the single-player campaign online (which doesn't appear to alter itself to fit more than one player). The few original modules that are out there right now mostly involve single rooms with Dungeon Masters hurling monsters at you. While the player's actions really aren't the fault of the game, it would have been nice if the game would have shipped with a few original modules in addition to the main game. As of right now, the only way I can see multiplayer being fun is if you're part of a clan or something or you have a few friends who bought the game the same time you did. So if you're a lonely loser like me, don't bother. If you want multiplayer, wait a few months for the price to drop and there's a good possibility there will be a few good modules out there, too. One thing about multiplayer I totally don't understand is Server Vaults and Local Vaults. Games that use Local Vaults allow you to import your character from your single-player game and keep using that player across different games, while Server Vaults require you to create a new character to use only on that specific server. So far, most of the games I've encountered are Server Vault games. WHYYYY!!?!??! I've heard people say it's so that higher-level players don't unbalance the game for lower-level players and vice versa, but that makes absolutely no sense. It would be just as easy to exclude players of specific levels. Going through the character creation process every time you want to play online simply isn't fun.
The graphics are also pretty lame. While the lighting is superb, everything has a ridiculoulsly low polygon count. Characters in the game look incredibly boxy, and most of the areas look flat and dull despite the lighting. I don't know about you, but I would rather have seen more attention to the details in the models (especially the helmets, most of those just look plain silly, but they could have been cool!) rather than having my dude cast three shadows on the ground. I understand that the graphics are simplified to compensate for the fact that the game is supposed to be played online, but there's been other online games that didn't have such a low poly count and still ran decently. I suppose you could argue that you'll spend so much of the time zoomed out that you won't notice, but you do. Speaking of zooming, the fact that the camera doesn't pan down enough really irks me. Developers, you've created a fully 3D world, why not utilize it? There's also a good lack of character customization options, which is something you'd think would be pretty high on the priority list for an online game. All of the portraits look awesome, but since you can really only choose whether you're fat or skinny and what kinds of clothes you wear you're pretty limited as to deciding how your character is portrayed on-screen. Just being able to decide your hairstyle would have given twice as many options, but hairstyles are attached to the head you choose. The animation is decent, though, and clothes and hair have neat way of swaying around when you move. The voice-acting is very good, too, but your character tends to repeat battlecries and the like a lot (like in Baldur's Gate). The music is just kind of there, very nondescript.
Neverwinter is full of numerous tiny little annoyances that really make playing the game a real pain, too. First and foremost is your inventory. It uses a system a lot Diablo's (little squares that represent the size of items) except it's bigger. The game just plops things into any available spot there is, and sorting things the way you'd like to is unnecessarily difficult because to move something you have to find a collection of empty squares that's as big as the item you want to move. This can get frustrating at times since your inventory can cover many pages, so you generally end up resigning yourself to the fact that you'll just have to sit for five minutes while you wade through your inventory if you ever need to find something. An auto-sort button would have been really helpful. While there are quick buttons, this really doesn't help keep your inventory organized unless you want to have a quick button for every item (which technically you could). Also, making the interface click-throughable would have helped a lot since you tend to spend a lot your time in windows. In multiplayer, having separate boxes for NPC chat and Player chat would have helped, too, since the measly little window you're provided with tends to get cluttered quickly in areas like the City Core. Although, the ability to your own notes to maps and your journals is really helpful and is something I wish more games would do.
Well, in closing, I'll just say that I haven't enjoyed this game very much. But some people are, and I just don't understand it. Maybe a few months from now when a few more independent mods have sprung up the game will be more fun. Until then, you might as well keep playing Dungeon Siege or Diablo.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 06/30/02, Updated 06/30/02