phungus's Full Review: Neverwinter Nights (PC) for Windows
Buggy games like Neverwinter Nights are the reason why I stopped playing computer games and switched to consoles. This is the first computer game I’ve bought since last Christmas, and I am reminded why. This game is so buggy and slow that I cannot stand to play it anymore, and will wait until some more patches come out.
In short, Neverwinter Nights is a Dungeons and Dragons based game where you can create your own modules for adventures to play online or over a network. It also includes a single player mode for trying out how the game works. The idea is that you can create endless maps and adventures and play this game forever.
First, let me tell you about my system. It has far more than what the recommended system requirements are for this game. I have an Athlon 950 with 384 megs of RAM, a Sound Blaster Live X-Gamer 5.1, and a Radeon 7000 AGP video card with 64 megs of video memory. According to the Neverwinter Nights box, all I need is a Pentium III 800mhz system with 128 megs and a TNT or Radeon card. I’ve more than got that. But when I run the game, it is choppy and slow even with every detail set at its lowest possible setting.
I know what you’re thinking – I should just upgrade my computer and be done with it. Yeah, putting together a new system with a fast processor might help, but why should I do that when the box itself says I have more than what the recommended requirements are? Hell, the minimum requirements are in the 400 mhz range, but I don’t see how that could even be possible.
When walking around, the game is so choppy that people disappear and reappear as they are moving. For example, I am being charged by an enemy, so I rush forward to attack him. Then he disappears and suddenly reappears behind me, giving him a chance to attack me from behind. This is not an enemy with any kind of invisibility ability either, it just happens.
Another really annoying thing is your henchmen. You can only control one player in the game, but you can pick up a single henchman to aid you in your quests. The problem is that you have no control over them at all. There have been several occasions where I was trying to disable a trap with some enemies nearby, and my henchman will charge past me to attack them, thus setting off the trap and injuring both of us. There is no option for making them stop.
Here is a short list of bugs that I’ve found so far, in the short time that I’ve played the game:
In a refugee building on the first map, if you go into one room and turn around, you’ll get stuck on top of a wall, with no way to move out. You better hope you had saved your game before doing this.
On several occasions the game would crash while loading new areas or while exiting the game.
In one dungeon a guy will ask you for a healing potion. If you don’t help him, you’ll get points towards making your character evil, which is not good for the game. If you do help him, you will lose more than one healing potion. The game’s inventory system lets you stack 10 potions in one slot, but when you give the guy a potion, it gives him the entire slot’s worth of potions, instead of just one. So when I gave the guy a potion, I ended up losing 10 Cure Moderate Wounds potions, which cost me 99 gold each. That’s almost 1,000 gold lost, and you don’t even get any experience for helping the guy out.
In regard to the above bug, I decided to try and kill the guy so I wouldn’t lose my potions. I did and it said I was turning evil, no big whoop. Now, when I teleport back to the home base, I am immediately attached by one of the main characters in the game, and I don’t know why. As soon as I enter the room, I get jumped. Because he is a key player, you cannot kill him no matter what you do, so you are stuck there.
Although it’s more of a result of lazy programming than a bug, this one is quite annoying. The health status of your enemies do not refresh unless you move the mouse off of someone, then move it back on. While the mouse is over an enemy, it will tell you if they are injured, badly wounded, or near death. If you keep your mouse on one target while fighting, you won’t know how he’s holding up until you move the mouse off and back on him again.
I’ve also noticed problems where characters don’t react properly to conversations. Like when you complete a quest for someone, you can still go back to them and they’ll talk to you like the quest isn’t done yet. A lot of the dialog you get into is not fully interactive in that you can’t get back to the original set of choices without ending the conversation, then reinitiating another one. This takes extra time.
All in all, I have found Neverwinter Nights to be frustrating, buggy, slow, and pretty unplayable. It has been long delayed in its release, and still should never have been released due to the high amount of problems that exist in the game. Its like they tried to do too much at once, and did most of it half-assed, leaving you with a game on par with the stability of Windows 95.
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