Install Steam
login
|
language
简体中文 (Simplified Chinese)
繁體中文 (Traditional Chinese)
日本語 (Japanese)
한국어 (Korean)
ไทย (Thai)
Български (Bulgarian)
Čeština (Czech)
Dansk (Danish)
Deutsch (German)
Español - España (Spanish - Spain)
Español - Latinoamérica (Spanish - Latin America)
Ελληνικά (Greek)
Français (French)
Italiano (Italian)
Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian)
Magyar (Hungarian)
Nederlands (Dutch)
Norsk (Norwegian)
Polski (Polish)
Português (Portuguese - Portugal)
Português - Brasil (Portuguese - Brazil)
Română (Romanian)
Русский (Russian)
Suomi (Finnish)
Svenska (Swedish)
Türkçe (Turkish)
Tiếng Việt (Vietnamese)
Українська (Ukrainian)
Report a translation problem
Discussions Rules and Guidelines
Report this post
(I write EE just to distinguish it more clearly from NWN 2, but everything I wrote is also true for the original NWN or NWN Diamond, not exclusive to the Enhanced Edition.)
How do you measure it though? You can't know how many active players NWN 2 has because it's not on Steam, and comparing it with GOG Galaxy, if that's even possible, would be inaccurate too, because many GOG users ignore the optional client. And if you're comparing online players on PWs that only tells you which game has the more popular multiplayer component (and I'm not surprised NWN wins over NWN2 there), but nothing about single player or modding, which are important parts, too.
That being said, the facts alone that only NWN is on Steam and that only NWN recently got an Enhanced Edition probably causes it to have more players at the moment, regardless of the general, hard-to-measure popularity.
Well NWN2 was the better single player game hands down. The official campaigns for it from Obsidian far outstripped the Bioware campaigns. They had better adventures, better characters, better stories.
So... what made NWN1 so great?
The answer was never Bioware. It was the players and modded realms that it turned into. THIS is what they talk about when they say the "community".
Few people liked the actual game. But a LOT of people liked the modded Modules made by players and the MMO variants that came out from people running their own servers and basically creating their own adventures.
THAT is what they mean by that.
As to which is a better game to play? Well unfortunately Obsidian really kinda kicked Bioware's butt with NWN2. But since you can't get NWN2 on Steam anymore due to a contract dispute between Hasbro and Atari, some will never get to play it.
but if a game of this type comes out and has moddingtools/workshop.then its going to be around for some time.
Any moron could just slap down a bunch of tiles, then arrange them and slap down placeables. What took know how in NWN1 as the coding, and even then they had utilities people made, to allow even a beginner to script. Those who knew coding well, could create some pretty fantastic stuff.
The flipped side of NWN1 was that it also could look very generic after a while because all the tiles and tileset combinations had limits to the amount of things you could create.
NWN2 changed that,
The Toolset in NWN2 was harder to use, you could still easily pick it up if you used the NWN1 Toolset originally... but it was more complicated and tilesets were only for indoors. The outdoor environments you molded and shaped into terrain, then painted the textures down to make them look like actual realistic environments... which was actually a HUGE improvement in visuals.
However it required one thing... Artistic talent.
A lot of NWN1 people didn't have any, so anything they made looked like absolute crap. They were coders who had relied on NWN1's tilesets to be creative for them.
So many were unable to make the transition to a more complicated toolset capable of creating beautiful environments of any kind they wanted to make.
Hence why NWN2s modding community was never as strong as NWN1's. You needed a WIDE range of skills to create in NWN2. Not just some coding knowledge.
NWN2 really was the better overall game... but when it came to modding... It was just too difficult for the average joe to be able to create anything with if he didn't have any actual skill or artistic talent.
Last 30 Days 778.2 -5.8 -0.75% 1,421
February 2021 784.1 -21.8 -2.70% 1,421
January 2021 805.8 +88.7 +12.37% 1,468
December 2020 717.1 -36.3 -4.81% 1,325
November 2020 753.3 +55.0 +7.87% 1,397
October 2020 698.4 +11.5 +1.68% 1,245
Neverwinter Nights 2: Platinum
Last 30 Days 28.3 -0.2 -0.64% 53
February 2021 28.5 +1.1 +4.06% 53
January 2021 27.4 +3.6 +15.28% 58
December 2020 23.7 -1.6 -6.38% 54
November 2020 25.4 +0.6 +2.51% 56
October 2020 24.7 +1.9 +8.10% 50
It is just steam but damn that is massive difference :)
NWN2 has been unavailable for purchase for years on Steam, so it's not even close to a fair comparison. Only those who bought it years ago, back when it was still on the Steam store, can play it.
No its not,
As people have told you multiple times at this point, no one can buy NWN2 anymore. So no one has been able to buy and play it for years. Unlike NWN1.
EDIT:
Here... let me give you a better comparison. After the rise and fall of the NWN1 wave the module I put out had about 1.2 million downloads from its release.
After the rise and fall of NWN2 wave, marking both from release date of the games and the same Hall of Fame module recreated in the new toolset netted about 500k downloads.
That was the difference in the size of the modding and module communities from their release to fall off of the Neverwinter Vault. So yeah NWN2 was no slouch either, despite it being a sequel and a harder toolset that required more skill.
Oh, you guys were comparing the numbers of active *Steam* users for both? That explains everything (and proves nothing). ;)
That's mostly due to the multiplayer stuff, which wasn't as popular or actively a part of NWN2. However, in terms of story it sure is behind NWN1. Can only speak for the main campaign, though. Never played the NWN expansions, still on my bucket list at some point.
Oh, and it had Khelgar. So, it automatically wins.