The first hurdle I had to cross came in the form of my wife, who greeted my unexpected purchase with one of those “Oh, I suppose you won’t be helping get the kids to bed tonight, are you?” sort of stares.
She softened considerably once I loaded the game and invited her to help with the character creation. The wide variety of appearances, portraits, and voice sets were very appealing to her. I let her design a character of her dreams, from clothing choice, haircut, tattoos, and accent. For example, she quickly narrowed down the portraits to the two she thought were best looking, and then opted for the one that most resembled a hero from one of her romance novels rather than the one that looked like a guy from one of her old soap operas. (Her choice is my new avatar) I really know nothing about Third Edition Rules, and all the Skills and Feats had me a little worried. I was also sad to see the demise of kits. However, the character generation and level-up screens are very intuitive, and all have a handy-dandy “Recommended” button that makes skill point or stat assignments for you. I can see that I will have to play a bit to learn the system, but at least I don’t have to learn the system first before being able to play my Druid.
Character creation does offer to assign skills for you along named parameters (such as Grey Druid), which replicates the kit idea to a certain extent. However, since all characters are so completely modifiable, there is almost no reason to have classes at all. But I do like my Panther animal companion! Its fun to pet him and throw sticks for him…
The 3-D interface isn’t quite what I expected, given my roots in Baldur’s Gate. Its really much more like Tomb Raider, only without the jumping, back flips, and climbing. My character also lacks certain attributes that the character in Tomb Raider had…
(though I notice that Aribeth has at least a couple of Ms. Croft’s more prominent features….) After being used to the richly-detailed graphics in the isometric view of BG, I’m finding the graphics of NWN to be very ‘modular’. That is, here is a wall, here is a floor, here is a standard box… don’t get me wrong, the textures are very detailed, but everything has a sort of standardized feel about it. Not like the amorphous caves of BG. Of course, I haven’t progressed very far yet, and the designers may have intentionally kept the Prelude very simple to keep from confusing us poor newbies.
Battle is interesting, especially for a 3rd edition initiate like me. What the heck is an ‘attack of opportunity’? My druid has some very impressive moves with his spear, and the animation is wonderful.
I really like the transparent windows for the inventory screens - they will be very good in non-pause-ible modules. Changing the camera view will take some getting used to. I have to keep doing 360° rotates in every room to make sure there isn’t a chest I’ve overlooked. I have to use two hands at all times, keeping me from my usual slumped-back-in-my-chair-with-one-hand-on-the-mouse posture I perfected for BG.
All in all, I have enjoyed my brief taste of the game, though I can see where multi-player may be really where the true joy comes in. If I end up having problems due to my slow modem connection, I will probably end up re-playing the BG and IWD games again, once I've played the single-player NWN through a few dozen times.
