Neverwinter Nights 2: Storm of Zehir Preview
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Unfortunately, the early version of the game we were playing does illustrate the reason why most RPG gamers hate wandering monsters: They can be impossible to evade, something that probably needs to be tweaked before release. The annoyance of the wandering monsters is more than made up for with an interesting mini-game based on the overland map, in which the players can set up a trading empire by sending out trade caravans, guarding them from wandering monsters, and searching for monster parts for the buffed-up crafting system.
The only real open question we have about Storm of Zehir concerns the aforementioned decision to make character death permanent without a spell, a "life coin" available at Waukeen temples, or trekking back to town a cleric. While the idea is clearly to make combat more interesting by making players care about consequences, as in previous D&D games we just ended up back on the save-and-restore roller coaster. Like the "Spirit Eater" system in Mask of the Betrayer, this may be an effort to fix what's not really broken. We'll see how the whole thing shakes out when the final game releases on November 18th.
