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The Prophet series starting with this Prologue[neverwintervault.org] offers a well-written story that I found as gripping as a page turner novel, not your average fantasy plot, but a complex, thought-provoking, somewhat philosophical dilemma, told through surprising turns and with a good dose of action, too. Its story takes you to places of beauty and horror - if I recall correctly in a mostly linear way but with quite a bit of room for exploration as well. At the time when I played it, a decade ago or so, I thought it was the best story in an RPG (or videogame, even) since Planescape: Torment. My memories of it are fading a bit now, but I plan to play through the whole series again soon, and I usually don't like replaying games at all.
The area design and battles are excellent, with a solid backplot.
However, the interludes that meander through allegorical dreamscapes (to no great purpose) can be a bit dull after a while.
I don't have any bad memories about it but it's a long time ago that I played it, and I never player the last chapter. I've read some players criticize that there's too much combat, and I don't remember much about the dreamscapes, just that I really, really liked the plot and use of some tilesets I hadn't seen before at the time. It will be interesting for me to play it again and see how it holds up, whether it's just as good as I remember it or whether I will find faults with it now, too. In any case it was always one of my favorites back then.
An intricate story of tangled rivalry for the crown in a very large city. The gameworld is original, sustained and credible - truly medieval.
For the best experience, look for work & follow the quests - little benefit in searching everywhere systematically in this case.
A faithful adaptation of an original D&D Pen-and-Paper module by Gary Gygax (1982) about a mountain expedition, with lots of memorable encounters and dungeon crawling. It's heavy on combat and exploration, and while it's single player, you get to have a big party of unique companions and even a pack mule to carry all the treasure for you!
Unfortunately, the Enhanced Edition has broken backwards compatibility with regard to .bik files, so the custom intro movie won't play unless you convert it to a .wbm format (supposedly, I haven't tried it myself). The module will give out an error message but continue all the same, without the intro.
EDIT: I tried ShadowM's Bink / .bik converter to WBM[neverwintervault.org] batch file using the command-line program ffmpeg, and it worked fine. Just unzip the folder to a location of your choosing, open the "bin" folder, put all .bik movies you need to convert in the "IN" folder, then start ConvertBik.bat. It might take a couple of minutes, you can just leave the CMD window running in the background until it's done, and then move the finished .wbm movies from the "OUT" folder to your NWN movies folder.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1313033493
Actually, I was going to do Dark Energy, but seeing that Enigma Island was a previous module by the same author and in the same world, I thought I'd play the older one first and have a bit more background in the newer.
Well, no regrets. It's a great campaign with a pretty neat progression. The modest start feels right, and as you go up the levels, so does your social standing due to the events taking place. The world may feel a bit overwhelming at first, with a few lore dumps by some NPCs or books, but it does start making sense by itself as you go. The middle ages flavour is nice, with laws, taxes, inheritances, successions, all playing their bit in the campaign, and it was nice to see that well known legends do not necessarily play as expected.
There's a fair bit of moving around, but each area has its point and none is big just for the sake of it (mayyyybe one exception being the snowy area just before the I*** P***** but then you go across it quickly enough). And the modules include a great player aid tool which includes fast travel including across districts of the main city maps or directly to specific indoor buildings. That's a fantastic quality of life. So are the automated mount/dismount options, and Part 3 goes even further with the flag tool to get a companion to help with whatever was flagged.
Speaking of companions, I'm generally not a fan of them but here I actually enjoyed them. Never encountered Fantina in Part 1 though, which made the start of Part 2 even more amusing.
For a minor critic, the final bit in Part 3 wasn't all that imho, and the ending afterwards a bit underwhelming. Was expecting more of a Part 2 style ending, but ah. Don't want to spoil anything in here anyhow.
Combat-wise, it's very much on the easy side. As usual, level 1-2 may have a couple reloads required, but you quickly power through. I went in with a pure Cleric (which, lore-wise, fitted fantastically), and was ridiculously overpowered for the entire Part 3. A section in particular had 2 sneaky options to choose from because a frontal assault was, apparently, suicide. I showed them, I guess! :D
There are too many modules to play so I can't imagine I'll be revisiting this series anytime soon, but I'd be curious to have a go at it as a proper evil bastard. There are definitely some options that I'd have wanted to explore.
Oh, and lovely homage with the cabin by the lake. :)
Compared to EI, it's clearly a step above in terms of assets and mechanics, lots of nice little stuff all around, and great variety in environments. Ship cannons, although seeing very little use, felt *awesome* when you suddenly remember them at some point later in game. And kudos for making all the efforts into getting horses entertaining. Your helper goes a long way to make them useable.
Yet... I did prefer EI in the end. Dark Energy doesn't quite feel as epic, being more compressed and throwing you too early into the overarching quest. And while it starts off on a great premise, Sandeni felt a bit rushed. I was expecting more intrigue and court action there, but there's very little of it, and you end up with more combat than anything, making the Courtier class a bit underwhelming (not the best at combat, and class skills barely used in the module). On the other end, I guess it made the combat more challenging, forcing me to look seriously into what tools I had available.
Still, good fun, and like in EI, the NPC companions are neat (with the exception of Babayuri who felt a bit bland). Their AI is still a pain but that's NWN for you... The narrow ledges in the Lab were an absolute pain to fight on with those companions! :D
Clothing/weapon control in urban environment is great, and I liked the mechanics of stashing the big stuff away, being restricted to a small selection. Elegance/Finesse was a nice touch, and the pistol felt so good I ended up using it mostly, picking up my feats around it. On combat stuff, I almost never used black powder in Enigma Island but oh boy, does it pack some punch! I ended up stashing a couple for the final stretch and was glad I did.
Final verdict: found it enjoyable, but feel EI has better pace and more options for replayability. Feels like an expanded Sandeni court could have been an EI-style Part 1, with the Feywood storyline only kicking later in a Part 2. But of course, it's easy to say from here as I'm not the one toiling for hours with the Aurora tools! :D
If a part 2 is coming up at some point in the future, I'm more than looking forward to it, the exported character is waiting. Thanks for all the work. o/
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1907623445
Fair comment on Dark Energy. My original intention was to flesh out Sandeni, rather than make a series. Unfortunately, I don't get much time for building these days, as the toolset isn't available on mobile.
And as I said in the post above, I'm fully conscious of the effort that goes in all those modules, so fair play for getting all that done in the first place!
Oh and a couple things I forgot to mention: opening *that* door at the Silent Morris hideout, lol... And mad respect for the western orc tribes and their love of bbq. :)
On Android, the path is Android > Data > com.beamdog.nwnandroid > files > user > logs.
Do you mean to say you're already familiar with everything mentioned so far?
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I'm currently playing Madness and Magic[neverwintervault.org] by Sphynxette and it's magically original and mad fun.
The premise allows the module to explore all kinds of different environments and worlds, you can talk to almost everyone, including animals and your special companion, and you can freely teleport back to the wizard's dimension, which can be 'exploited' for various quest solutions as well. It's rather light on the combat so far, you can resolve most situations by talking, if you have the required social skills. But it's not without challenge, there are assaults and battle arenas, too. I like that it has the potential to surprise you at every step, because it makes very creative use of all the assets, it's often humourous, as well as a bit mysterious, and the areas are nicely designed, without wasting space.