About 5:30 yesterday morning I did it. I beat Neverwinter Nights 2. The last few areas are full of frenzied, high level battling against swarms of nasty undead, culminating in an epic multi-stage boss fight. Very awesome. Better yet, if playing an evil character (I was), the big bad will offer you a chance to switch sides and join it. This has ostensibly been a choice once or twice before, but never previously has it actually been possible. But Neverwinter Nights 2 makes it a very real option. You trade several stages of boss fight against it for a solo battle against the entire rest of your still living henchmen. (I say solo, but if you set things up right it's possible to have a particular one of them join you.) Which is pretty damn hard even as a 20th level wizard with area effect spells of total destruction and several layers of buffs, *and* having known beforehand and stripped my henchmen of all their gear, cleared their memorized spells, and heavily encumbered those of them without obscene amounts of strength. But oh, it's a beautiful moment when you succeed, and the ending sequence you get is absolutely worth it. It almost makes up for the lack of real evil up until that point.
Afterwards I exported my character (in preparation for the expansion, since beating the official campaign does not automatically do so for you.) and then cleared it off my hard drive, since it's huge. I discovered that the savegames weigh in between 60-140 megs each. So do *not* save often in new slots like I did. Bad idea.
And then I moved on to the recently released sequel to Disaster Report. For those of you who haven't played Disaster Report, it's a brilliant budget game for PS2. You play a reporter heading for his new job in an artificial city. You're on the bridge leading in when a massive earthquake strikes, wreaking utter havoc. You have to navigate to some sort of escape from the city while avoiding all sorts of perils caused by the earthquake and its aftershock. Hopefully you'll emerge with the true story behind what's going on and a hell of an exclusive, also. It's kind of like a survival horror game where nature itself is your enemy. Lots of dramatic shifts in the environment, barely stable configurations of wreckage, fires, collapsing/collapsed buildings, and so on and so forth. They really manage to get a sense of near constant danger of an enormous scope. Caveats: the story, what there is of it, is nothing special. There are a *lot* of instant death situations, but you're not likely to find minor injury especially troubling. For what it's worth, the instant deaths all make perfect sense, and the respawn checkpoints come frequently and sensibly placed. And the graphics are serviceable but not up to the scale of your big budget extravaganzas like Final Fantasy.
The sequel, Raw Danger, puts you again in a big, specially engineered city (people don't seem to know when to quit with these things), this time after several days of rain provoke catastrophic flooding. It's got a lot of the same sort of spectacular setpieces and very similar mechanics. So far I think it's roughly on par with the sequel, despite having received worse reviews from a number of publications (most of which didn't have that much love for the original, so meh.). The opening, with you starting out as a young college student working as a waiter at a gala celebrating some mayoral accomplishment, lacks the immediate punch of Disaster Report's collapsing bridge opener, as you spend some time listening in on partygoers and doing mundane fetch tasks consistent with being a waiter before the flooding starts to fuck things up.
On the other hand, the basic mechanisms of danger seem much more solidly designed and challenging. As I said, in Disaster Report you weren't really in a great deal of danger unless you were at risk of instadeath. Your health recovered automatically and didn't get damaged often. You did have a thirst meter, which meant you had to keep moving and finding new sources of water (ironic, considering the primary challenge of Raw Danger is to avoid finding new sources of water), but the water sources are also save points and liberally dispersed across the map. And if that weren't enough, you could find and carry multiple sizes of water bottles that could be filled as much as you like at the sources and would completely refill your thirst meter as many as three times per bottle. So you were really never at much risk of expiring of thirst. Raw Danger swaps out life and thirst for a unified "thermal points" system. Get wet, and you start losing heat, more so the wetter you get. Once the meter dips below a certain poiint you move progressively more sluggishly and show visible signs of deteriorating condition. Eventually, if left unchecked, you'll simply collapse into a comatose state and die shortly thereafter, hypothermic. So now you're looking for sources of heat. Kerosene heaters, stoves, etc, which tend your thermal points up just standing near them, and will fully refresh them and dry you in a single command if need be. They are also, of course, your save points. You do still have portable sources of heat, but they can't be filled at the heat points and they don't necessarily refresh your meter the way that the water bottles did. They simply stop the loss for a period of time. (They're heating pads.) There *are* healing items, but I've only seen one thus far. So they've gone from auto-refreshing health and a degrading meter that can probably be refreshed several times over between save points, to auto-degrading health based on the hazards you've encountered, and only stopgap measures to keep you from outright keeling over and dying before the next save point. It's quite the paradigm shift, and it gives a much more real sense of urgency. (And you really want to stay out of the water as much as you can. Not that you wouldn't anyway because it can surge strongly enough to knock you off your feet and possibly over precipices. And if your head is submerged, you only have a few seconds to get it back out before you drown.)
The other big change is that you'll be playing multiple characters. Joshua the waiter is the first, but there are several others, each with their own part of the story and special talent. (Joshua's is to hug. Heh.)
Afterwards I exported my character (in preparation for the expansion, since beating the official campaign does not automatically do so for you.) and then cleared it off my hard drive, since it's huge. I discovered that the savegames weigh in between 60-140 megs each. So do *not* save often in new slots like I did. Bad idea.
And then I moved on to the recently released sequel to Disaster Report. For those of you who haven't played Disaster Report, it's a brilliant budget game for PS2. You play a reporter heading for his new job in an artificial city. You're on the bridge leading in when a massive earthquake strikes, wreaking utter havoc. You have to navigate to some sort of escape from the city while avoiding all sorts of perils caused by the earthquake and its aftershock. Hopefully you'll emerge with the true story behind what's going on and a hell of an exclusive, also. It's kind of like a survival horror game where nature itself is your enemy. Lots of dramatic shifts in the environment, barely stable configurations of wreckage, fires, collapsing/collapsed buildings, and so on and so forth. They really manage to get a sense of near constant danger of an enormous scope. Caveats: the story, what there is of it, is nothing special. There are a *lot* of instant death situations, but you're not likely to find minor injury especially troubling. For what it's worth, the instant deaths all make perfect sense, and the respawn checkpoints come frequently and sensibly placed. And the graphics are serviceable but not up to the scale of your big budget extravaganzas like Final Fantasy.
The sequel, Raw Danger, puts you again in a big, specially engineered city (people don't seem to know when to quit with these things), this time after several days of rain provoke catastrophic flooding. It's got a lot of the same sort of spectacular setpieces and very similar mechanics. So far I think it's roughly on par with the sequel, despite having received worse reviews from a number of publications (most of which didn't have that much love for the original, so meh.). The opening, with you starting out as a young college student working as a waiter at a gala celebrating some mayoral accomplishment, lacks the immediate punch of Disaster Report's collapsing bridge opener, as you spend some time listening in on partygoers and doing mundane fetch tasks consistent with being a waiter before the flooding starts to fuck things up.
On the other hand, the basic mechanisms of danger seem much more solidly designed and challenging. As I said, in Disaster Report you weren't really in a great deal of danger unless you were at risk of instadeath. Your health recovered automatically and didn't get damaged often. You did have a thirst meter, which meant you had to keep moving and finding new sources of water (ironic, considering the primary challenge of Raw Danger is to avoid finding new sources of water), but the water sources are also save points and liberally dispersed across the map. And if that weren't enough, you could find and carry multiple sizes of water bottles that could be filled as much as you like at the sources and would completely refill your thirst meter as many as three times per bottle. So you were really never at much risk of expiring of thirst. Raw Danger swaps out life and thirst for a unified "thermal points" system. Get wet, and you start losing heat, more so the wetter you get. Once the meter dips below a certain poiint you move progressively more sluggishly and show visible signs of deteriorating condition. Eventually, if left unchecked, you'll simply collapse into a comatose state and die shortly thereafter, hypothermic. So now you're looking for sources of heat. Kerosene heaters, stoves, etc, which tend your thermal points up just standing near them, and will fully refresh them and dry you in a single command if need be. They are also, of course, your save points. You do still have portable sources of heat, but they can't be filled at the heat points and they don't necessarily refresh your meter the way that the water bottles did. They simply stop the loss for a period of time. (They're heating pads.) There *are* healing items, but I've only seen one thus far. So they've gone from auto-refreshing health and a degrading meter that can probably be refreshed several times over between save points, to auto-degrading health based on the hazards you've encountered, and only stopgap measures to keep you from outright keeling over and dying before the next save point. It's quite the paradigm shift, and it gives a much more real sense of urgency. (And you really want to stay out of the water as much as you can. Not that you wouldn't anyway because it can surge strongly enough to knock you off your feet and possibly over precipices. And if your head is submerged, you only have a few seconds to get it back out before you drown.)
The other big change is that you'll be playing multiple characters. Joshua the waiter is the first, but there are several others, each with their own part of the story and special talent. (Joshua's is to hug. Heh.)