Neverwinter Nights 2 Expansion Pack: Mask of the Betrayer
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Video Game Reviews of Neverwinter Nights 2 Expansion Pack: Mask of the Betrayer
Customer Review: F@#$
Summary: 4 Stars
With this expansion, the curse you get is lame, and makes the game almost annoying instead of fun. I feel rushed. I don't recommend playing any class that requires resting to cast spells. I learned this after investing 4 hours of time with an Eldritch knight. Rest = die. It will likely piss you off. Other than that, mostly fun.Customer Review: Stab the Betrayer...
Summary: 4 Stars
...An Epic Adventure with Sneak Attacks
UPDATED: 28 Jan 2008
As buggy as it was, initially, *Neverwinter Nights 2* brought together some of the best elements of the first series into an involved adventure. Now Obsidian Entertainment brings us *Mask of the Betrayer*, which extends both the story and the life of player characters. Though it does suffer from some balance issues.
Unlike the expansions in the first series, *Mask* is an actual sequel. After the climactic events of NWN2, your character awakes deep within a haunted barrow. Your inventory has been stripped of everything other than the armor and jewelry you wore. And the wizard in red isn't forthcoming with answers, as she approaches your stricken form...
Otherwise, MOTB feels a lot like those older expansions, particularly *Hordes of the Underdark*. It's a moodier, more mystical journey than NWN2. And no wonder--your character talks to gods, deals with witches, and exorcises ghosts. The undead play a much bigger role, as do spell casters, and players should invest in silver and adamantine weapons immediately. Paladins and clerics will perform well here.
The engine performs better too; with the 1.10 series patches, the memory leaks and frame-rate issues have been resolved on my power rig. However, it might be necessary to reinstall NWN2 before loading up MOTB--otherwise the Official Campaign (OC) might suffer some quest bugs.
The expansion enjoys more graphical options. Characters trip through monochromatic Planes, dank dungeons, and fuzzy dreams. Spot lighting also sees more use, and objects appear to cast stronger, more impressive shadows.
These colors cast upon new tile sets, including: a richly textured estate and a sewer-like underwater city. But the main setting is the cold, gray nation of Rashomen, styled on a combination of Native American and Scandinavian culture. It's not glacial like the lands in the original series expansions, but the landscape is not for those who suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder!
Nor is the soundtrack. Obsidian introduces a ton of dreamy, often somber scores, both for Areas and for Battles. As far as sound effects go, MOTB reuses the files of NWN1 and 2, but it also uses a few custom creepy tracks.
Ultimately, however, the effects rest upon the story. And *Mask* is an odd one. The character falls into a maelstrom of curses and conspiracies culminating into a confrontation with Death itself. Along the way it questions both religion and nature, while the player puzzles together a mystery to the bitter end. To this end, the story entwines in themes of masks, costumes and theater. By afflicting the player with a curse, which affects a much wider conflict, the expansion also expresses a dramatic urgency in place of NWN2's casual journey.
But in achieving that drama, MOTB is also more linear than the OC. To navigate it, I was able to call upon a much smaller band of companions, and the four-member limit is rigidly enforced. At 25 hours in length, I beat it in about three days.
This can assure customers worried about the curse. Because the expansion is so straight-forward, there's not much to explore. Also, companions and items retard the curse anyways. Thus, only an incompetent player is going to have difficulty managing it.
Managing character itself is another matter. Prior to the latest patch, *Mask of the Betrayer* forced characters towards Lawful Good or Chaotic Evil alignments. Whenever the character acted upon the curse, it assigned a minimum two-point shift in lawfulness--shifts which rapidly add up. Bonuses come with these extremes, including uber weapons or stat-boosting feats.
Otherwise, this conflicts with most alignment-restricted classes.Thus the 1.11 patch removed the alignement shift entirely.
Another balance issue--the expansion is too short to justify its rewards. Nearly every chest bulges with thousands of gold pieces. While nearly every quest awards thousands of xp. This is out of scale with the OC, and causes characters to become too powerful too quickly.
Speaking of power, I come at last to the revised item enchanting system for *Mask*. Gone are the need for recipe books, ingredients, and even magician benches. With a few exceptions, every "recipe" is found in the item description for three new classes of essence: Volatile, Brilliant, and Pristine. The multitudes of undead drop these by the bucket load--no distillation required. There are also a handful of superduper essences that boost your weapons to absurd levels of elemental damage.
The enchantments focus heavily on elemental damage and stat-boosting. So you can forget about making Holy Avengers or Fortified Armor. You can boost weapons, armor, gloves, and shields up to +10 if you've acquired the right stuff from the Evil game path. And epic casters increase the maximum number of enchantments to four. But for some reason you can't enchant bracers, and there are no ingredients for bomb flasks or traps. While I appreciate the big boosts overall, I don't appreciate the limited selection of recipes.
But apart from these funky balance issues, I enjoyed playing this epic in a small package. Bioware never published a follow-up for veteran characters of the first NWN, so I'm glad Obsidian took on an actual sequel. A lot of performance issues are resolved and the enchanting system is simple and powerful. Obsidian also gave me a powerful character, and I hope another expansion comes along which can put it to the test.
-* for play balance problems.
Customer Review: Good but not perfect
Summary: 4 Stars
Overall, I really like this game. The writing has improved from the OC and I was very glad to see that because I felt the OC had potential that wasn't fully realized. I don't know if I'd say that it's fully realized with this expansion either but it's stronger than before and leaves me anticipating the next expansion. I just really liked the overall story and how it looped back to the OC. I also really enjoyed my companions and found them all very interesting. It was nice for my character to have a friend in Safiya and I give a big thumbs up to the Influence-based feats--what a great idea!
The music was really nice in this game. It contributes a great deal to the ambiance and I actually enjoyed listening to it. This was an extremely pleasant change from my usual habit of turning the background music down so that it will annoy me less.
I give the voice acting high marks. All of the characters had nice voices and I really liked the rumbling tone to Okku's voice. The characters sounded more natural in this expansion, as if they were real people talking and that's definitely a plus. The lack of hysteria and grating voices was most welcome.
I do have some gripes, though. For one, I ran into a very major bug in the Academy of Shapers and Binders, one that would have ruined my game if not for the console cheats. Frankly, I think this is unforgivable. All games have bugs but it's unacceptable for there to be one that would result in a player reaching a total impasse in the game. Because I could not get one of the conversation options, I ended up having to cheat an item into my inventory in order to progress in the game. There's no way this should have been allowed to happen and if the story wasn't so strong I would have been very angry about spending the money on a game that is basically rendered useless by this bug.
The romance in the game was okay but could definitely use some work. If there's one thing that most developers could learn it is how to dole such plot points out over time. Instead, I spent the whole game building Gann's trust up in my character to finally have the whole romance played out over two dialogs at the end of the game. That's less than impressive. I would have liked for there to have been at least a hint of romantic tension there. On the plus side, though, was the romance feat. I thought this was a very nice touch. Still, in the epilogue it basically becomes apparent that despite all the passionate vows of happiness and love the romance doesn't work out at all in the end. My impression is that this is a stock ending so regardless of which sex you play as a PC you get the same ending. Why couldn't Obsidian have created separate endings? It would only have required changing a few lines of text and having the voice actor read some additional lines. What's the point of even having this plot point if there won't be any continuity to it?
Last but not least, I really hate the way the camera works in this game. I'm not sure which mode is which but both had major downfalls that I found extremely annoying. I hated how the one view did not allow you to turn the screen by scrolling to the corners and I hated how the other forced you to be so zoomed in that you could barely make your way through the dungeons.
All in all, though, I had fun and feel that the expansion was worth the money I paid for it. I'm certainly interested in another expansion.
Customer Review: Should be Rashaman Nights, not Neverwinter Nights
Summary: 4 Stars
Its a LOT harder than any of the previous games, its a good game but I had to switch from normal to easy play to be able to complete it for my cleric, but the game did arrive as scheduled and I have no problems with the shipper/seller.Customer Review: NWN 2 - fun for old-time D&Ders
Summary: 5 Stars
I played Advanced D&D through my teen years, but stopped getting together with other players in late-night dice-rolling sessions when I "grew up". The NWN series (going back to the oringinal NWN on AOL) rekindled my interest in the game. The computer acts as the DM, which is fine with me. Anytime I want to play the game and just engage my imagination, I can hop onto my computer. The online NWN2 world is getting better all the time, as more people write better mods, but it has yet to catch up to NWN1 in the variety of mods you can download and play. On the other hand, it hasn't been around as long.
Anyway, NWN2 and its expansion, Mask of the Betrayer, are a lot of fun. You need a good video card, though!