Thursday 11 January, 2007

Neverwinter Nights: Hordes of the Underdark. On a Mac.


This is my second time playing through HotU. I haven't played this game for a couple of years now, so I was a bit rusty when I first began. I would have used an older saved character (I had spent hours creating custom characters before), but I erased the game and all of my saved games from my computer (about 6GB). When creating my new character I had forgotten what a lot of the different skills and attributes did and for which character type they were good for. Because of the difficulty of this expansion, a level 15 character is required to begin play. Even at that level I was having a hard time and frequently died. I think this is because I didn't build my character very well. I wanted to have the Dragon Disciple epic class, mostly because I wanted my character to grow dragon wings. However, this class requires that the character be a sorcerer, which is not an easy character class to play, especially for someone as rusty as I am.
To make the game a bit more enjoyable, I decided to cheat. I have found that cheating in moderation can enhance gameplay. I gave my character a slight boost in experience so I could get to about level 20. This allowed me to gain some melee skills, which is what I should have done to begin with. Usually I like to be a ranger/archer. They are a middle of the road character with some magic ability and some skill at fighting.
At this point I am more than an hour into the game and already deep with in the first dungeon area

Where's your second entry?

While I'll admit cheating in moderation can enhance gameplay in many situations, I tend to think it also indicates flaws in game design. Often something major. For example, if a game is more fun with an infinite money cheat...should they have included an economic model at all? Or in this case perhaps the characters weren't balanced so that you can start a character without thinking way to hard about all the things you pick. Now, that might be inherent in the D&D system, but thats sort of beside the point.

From your story I would argue that it might be a better game if it started you off at level 20, or maybe offered more variety in gameplay difficulty levels. Also, if you like to be an archer, does it bug you at all that a fair melee proficiency is neccesary? Would you argue that if a player want to be an archer they should be able to pwn up as an archer without all that stabbing business, even initially? Do you like the game enforcing a certain degree of well-rounding the characters?