NWN2 is special for me, too. I spent countless of hours online and replaying OC and MotB. Expect more content to come. This game is far too underappreciated and I intend to rectify the situation. ;-)
1. I think it's still a classic nonetheless :P 2. I'm surprised no-one made some "restored content" mod, like it happened for KOTOR, if those "removed" quests/dialogs and possibly locations are still included in the campaign
1. NWN2 is not widely considered a classic. If anything, more people just say "bad camera" and "bugs" at the mere mention of it. But if you spent many hours replaying the campaigns and countless of hours online, then you can definitely feel like it is a classic. I sort of do consider it my personal classic, but I can also see why a lot of people didn't like the game. It is difficult to like sometimes. 2. Well, NWN2 doesn't have a fan support like NWN1, and the fact that the toolset is crappy is also a major factor probably. Also, you would likely have to recreate most things from scratch and making it all work could also be a bitch. Remember, the game is still buggy AF as of the final patch. I don't think it would have been that easy to get everything working without breaking other stuff.
@@Bottomless_Inventory I'm not so sure about the whole "no fan support" and "toolset is too bad", considering people re-created things like Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale in NWN2 as custom campaigns (not to mention lots of very high quality custom campaigns). But I agree that it could be a pain to make it all tie together with OC without breaking stuff.
But that's the thing: they recreated them from scratch. Working on whatever mess Obsidian left behind would certainly be more tricky. As for those remakes, I think people at the time thought that superior graphics of NWN2 would probably draw more people in. I mean, Baldur's Gate 2 Reloaded is in the works today so that may draw some people to give NWN2 a chance again.
@@Bottomless_Inventory Currently planning a run of BG1 Reloaded, would love to see BG2 Reloaded released soon. BTW, great content, literally every game you cover is considered a classic by me.
I lost it at 18:24! Amazing video man! I've played NWN2 more times than I can count during my childhood. I'm really glad there was more to Ammon Jerro in the cut content sections. He was already my favorite before and this just makes him better. Keep up the great work!
@@ArhonOkvals Ammon is great as it is but he surely had even more potential. He is such a badass and yet tragic character. And thanks for the kind words! There is definitely more content like this coming in the future!
@Bottomless_Inventory Yeah the Jerro's Remorse section on Shandra's farm is amazing and still sticks in my mind after all this time. Ammon deserves his own video one day.
Not sure about his own video, but I could definitely include him in some video about ambiguously evil characters or some such. Thanks for the idea! Anyway, I think Ammon's remorse at Shandra's farm was mostly fine. I think the best scene of his, the very best, is when he confronts Mephasm right after killing Shandra. You can hear regret right then and there. When Ammon yells "You lie!", you can hear the denial in his voice, even though he clearly realizes what he just did. This is certainly one of the best moments in the OC, and Murphy Guyer did a fantastic job voicing Ammon!
@@Bottomless_Inventory Yeah Murphy Guyer is a legend for his work with Ammon. If you can bring up Ammon in the future that would be great. He deserves the praise.
After watching videos about cut content in NWN2 for almost 20 years now, I'm quite convinced there is more content cut out from it than there is present in the game. -.-
It's a valid point of view. I have a strange love-hate relationship with the game, too. I mean, the OC is painfully butchered and buggy and clunky despite 2,5 years of patching. But other than that, I have great memories of playing NWN2 online. And, of course, Mask of the Betrayer is the next best thing to Planescape: Torment. No contest here at the moment. ;-)
It just doesn't have as much fan support as NWN1. That's one thing. Another thing is that I don't think there is that much content left in the game files. It's not a matter of just ticking some boxes. You would have to recreate a lot of stuff from scratch and change other things within the campaign to get it to work. I wouldn't be surprised if getting it to work would be extra hard because everything is already a mess.
@@Bottomless_Inventory I think a large part of it is also how little support it got from the community of PLAYERS. That was a big bugbear of mod developers--they're often ready to go through kludgy tools and misery if they think there's an audience, but NWN2 really lacked an audience for modules. It's tailed off as NWN 1 has become as dormant as NWN2 was initially, but back on release the difference was much more stark. I do think Obsidian messed up by trying to turn the toolkit into just a generic dev toolkit instead of keeping the focus on ease of use. NWN2's toolkit in some ways is really cool in that it initially had way more flexibility than NWN1 (terrain sculpting, UI modding was easier, adding classes was way easier, etc). But the ease of use vanished entirely. It's buggy and difficult enough to use that you might as well just open Unity and make your own game at that point. A real shame. I think they could have had a much more successful game if they were more iterative than revolutionary in approach. They ended up in the worst of all worlds: trying to do something drastically different, then not succeeding at that and ending up with a thrown-together project that didn't manage to really create anything remarkably new for all the effort, nor retain the merits of the old platform.
@@zeriel9148 I guess making it accessible to the players was an afterthought. I mean, they already had a game that was too big for them to handle. It just needed time and resources and Obsidian had neither.
@@Bottomless_Inventory I think that was likely a decision made early on in the dev cycle. It's a fundamental choice and I figure later choices flowed from that rather than the other way around. I'm sure the thought process was something like, "We need to do it this way to make the game stand out and look modern, if we make it too cookie-cutter then no one will play it." And then the devkit was just released as-is. Ish. What seems undeniable is that they focused on the campaign/single-player experience over everything else. Which... kind of makes sense I suppose when you look at Obsidian's core DNA as a studio.
@@zeriel9148 "As-is" nails is. Maybe if they had provided proper support for the toolset, things would have been different. Thing is, I don't think they could afford it even if they wanted to do it. It really looks like they lived on a shoestring before Microsoft bought them. They almost went out of business at least once, too.
If you ever want to give any modules for NWN2 a try, I highly recommend Crimmor! It’s a super fleshed out stealth based thief simulator, and it’s so much fun. The world of Crimmor is one of the most well put together I’ve seen for any module in the Neverwinter community, and I’ve always wanted to see a video on it.
Some cuts might be more obvious to you when you replay the OC. And this video still doesn't cover 100% of what I dug up and likely there I things I haven't discovered yet. But I'm sure there will be a part II. Not sure how soon, though. Depends on how well this video does and how other things work out.
Damn… I love that you found all of this content, but I just can’t convince myself to agree with your assessment that whether NWN2 is a good game is “solely subjective”. It is a good game, even if you know it is unfinished. There’s a lot of love for the world of DND in this game and it has a charm very few games have.
@@gabrielcaro Well, there are people who hated it. And it never replicated the success of the original. It is subjective to me and I don"t have a problem woth either view. I'm on the fence myself. Replaying the OC is painful at times.
@@Bottomless_Inventory there’s no shame in looking up guides. To use the words of the great Noah Gervais, it’s a game where you really just gotta get into the mood of it, try to take it seriously even if the game doesn’t always earn it.
@@Bottomless_Inventory thank you again for your cut content retrospective. Regardless of how you feel about the game, I’m sure you wouldn’t have made if you didn’t care. As this is my favorite game, I appreciate it a lot!
NWN2 could not have become a classic... It IS a classic already. I'll die on that hill. That said I loved your video, there was quite a lot I wasn't aware of even tho I knew a lot had been cut out like romances stuff and quests. I'd pay to see all this content restored or remade.
For you and I, it is a classic. For the mainstream audience? I don't think so. You'll see lots of other titles before anyone mentions NWN2. Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, Torment, Fallout, NWN1, Dragon Age, hell even games like Mass Effect (lovely games but not really RPGs). The good news is: there is even more cut content then I talked about here. It was just too much to pack it into one video, especially that I'm still digging. There will be more content on NWN2 for sure. As for the cut content restoration, I don't think it will ever happen. I'm pretty sure that Neverwinter Nights 2 Enhanced Edition can't happen because of, well, reasons. But that's the word around the internets. Maybe the source code is gone in addition to being shit? That was the case with Icewind Dale II. And besides, if Beamdog, or anyone for that matter, were to remaster NWN2, I'm pretty sure it would be just a bugfix, 4K support, integrating existing mods, and some other extra eye candy. That will be 60 bucks.
Great video. Got me interested in returning to NWN2 for a bit. One thing I would suggest is that you add stuff about all the cut content from the Companions. Seriously there was so much stuff from Mr Old Owl Well and I believe Grobnar was meant to be met in the Neverwinter Woods etc...
@@sarethuskami5082 It's all cooming soon! Although I do skip things that aren't that interesting in one way or another. Still, the next part will be focused on companions and there is quite a lot of cool stuff in it.
@@Bottomless_Inventory it does it's still one of my favorite games out there, I replayed it many times. Last time I played with all the characters at the same time, but my PC was a swashbuckler!
I've been reviewing the NWN1 cut content (hit me up if you want some info) - there's certainly bitss there but nowhere near as much as Obsidians stuff since it was redesigned (into a rather naff OC tbh, but it's reasonably easy to follow) relatively early on. In compairson Obsidian kept their main design doc plans but just cut chunks from it which makes the result a lot less coherant in places.
I heard the OC of NWN1 was created to demonstrate the capabilities of the Aurora Engine and Toolset rather than anything else. With NWN2, I think the goal was to make a much better OC and offer something to single player-only crowd. Ultimately, Obsidian failed because they tried to do something impossible within the budget and time they had.
@@Bottomless_Inventory As far as I know, that's the result of WoTC meddling. They were sold on the project for the multiplayer aspect and were not too interested in a single player campaign. On top of that, they wanted to vet any idea to put in the game; the result was that, given how hard and time consuming was getting stuff approved, bioware settled on a chapter template (go fetch X amount of McGuffins in the X connected areas from this main hub) and then later reused many ideas WoTC rejected to make Dragon Age Origins.
Divine GUI. It's the the WQHD version, though, with minor adjustments and DPI settings. But I needed higher resolution for the video, so stick to the Divine GUI and 1080p.
Interesting, I never knew that there was so much cut content. The original campaign has massive flaws (the "city" of Neverwinter is laughable compared to many other RPG cities, for example), but also some really great ideas: the trial with the protagonist. Or the implied romantic potential with Shandra, who then tragically dies. Or the way the game misleads you into thinking Ammon Jerro is the King of Shadows. I even love Torio and all the political scheming. A pity that the game as a whole isn't that great. Partly also because of the stupid camera and slow start - the combination of those two doesn't make for a good first impression. It could have been as great as Baldur's Gate. Well, at least we got an expansion as great as Planescape: Torment.
@@DebilniPoirot The potential was definitely there. Although, to be honest, the trial is great until you realize it doesn't matter what you do anyway. The trial of combat ruins everything. What a stupid law, by the way. 😅
Nice info. Thanks. I was excited to play this in 2006 and it barely ran even on good hardware of the time. Replaying it again now having mostly forgotten about the story. Still runs somewhat poor.
@@icqme8586 Yeah, the game runs shitty even on modern hardware. Espescially so on persistent worlds with more elaborate level design. It was just poorly programmed from day one.
Man, despite their flaws, I really miss these sorts of games. No one has made a proper party based RPG in a LONG time. Pillars of Eternity and its sequel had some noteworthy effort, but they just contained way too much nonsense to be truly satisfying, and Tyranny was just a bad game mechanically with utterly uninspiring character progression. All of these could've been magnificent but were held back by some really bizarre design decisions.
I loved Tyranny because of the setting and the fact that it's one of very few games that nails being evil. In most other games it's about being a deranged loony. As for party-based cRPGs, I think Baldur's Gate 3 is magnificent. Although... you can tell in Act 3 that they ran out of resources and it is BUTCHERED. Other than that, Wasteland 3 was also a very pleasant surprise to me! Unless you mean real-time with active pause. I, for one, learned to appreciate and love good turn-based combat. Like in D:OS, W3, or BG3.
I'd say it's just bad management. It's not lack of experience, it's just bad management. They weren't rookies even whey they founded Obsidian. They just overshoot with scope and then it turns out they don't have the time and resources to finish and polish their product. How they've managed to get away with that for over 20 years... Well, I suppose they tell good stories. But the amount of potential they've wasted is astonishing. Mask of the Betrayer is arguably the only game they did the way they should have done all games: smaller scope but with great writing. A great story doesn't have to be long.
I was involved in the NWN community years ago, and was very enthusiastic about NWN2 when it was announced. All kinds of features were talked about by Obsidian, mostly graphics, and when the first disappointingly ugly screenshots were released they claimed they were just early prototypes, but of course that wasn't true. NWN had so many refinements that were completely lacking in NWN2. For example, Obsidian couldn't replicate NWN's "dance of death" so as an excuse they just said everyone hated it and made characters just stand static and boring as they fought. I was also a part of early testing, and I think we were brought on too late. Obsidian had already gone off in the wrong direction. For one, they originally planned on requiring all of a distributed module's area maps to be included in the players' local files, meaning that Persistent World players could just open the PW module in the toolset and find every object, location, etc themselves, basically cheating. Any player could have told them it was a bad idea from day one. The changes to UI customizability were the only real improvements. Even the heightmap based areas just made building a module a big pain for most and severely reduced the number of modules made by players. I like Obsidian, and I still have my signed copy of NWN2, but the game was a disappointment for me.
With "dance of death", I heard it had something to do with the height of character models. I don't know if there is any truth to it, though. As for community content: agreed. The only people saying anything positive about the toolset were Obsidian back in the day. Everyone I knew that worked with it, and I've met quite a bit of PW designers over the years, absolutely hate the toolset. I think Obsidian just aren't good programmers. They get away with shitty programming because they generally tell good storie, but even those good stories suffer because of Obsidian's bad management. So, I'd say Obsidian is just overrated. They just have the benefit of being thought of as Black Isle Studios Continued. As for Aurora Engine, just a year later The Witcher 1 launched and it was lightyears ahead of NWN2. The graphics and the level design were lightyears ahead of NWN2. TW1 was pretty buggy, too, and the loading times were a nightmare, but I daresay the game was nowhere near as bad as NWN2 at launch. And then, CDPR pretty much ironed everything out within a year and added some QoL improvements on top of that. Obsidian still left a crapload of bugs as of patch 1.23 which came out two and a half years after launch. What's funny is that there is no real community patch for NWN2, which shows that the community support of the game is really lightyears behind NWN1 which still gets community patches. I mean, there is this GitHub project that provides fixes for NWN2 but it's not even documented so it's difficult to tell what you're getting exactly. And I'm not sure how big of an improvement it really is.
@@Bottomless_Inventory All good points. I would say that, while TW1 did have a "toolset," CDPR didn't really need to focus on its useability. Obsidian, on the other hand, didn't go far enough in providing the kind of usability we were expecting from an NWN successor. I think we wouldn't care about their OC (like no one cared much for NWN's) if we could have worked with their toolset as easily as Aurora. But unfortunately, everything was a big pain, and the results weren't sufficiently improved over NWN to warrant the amount of work needed to wring anything worthwhile out of it. I was still posting custom NWN content on the Vault many years after the game came out, long after NWN2 was virtually abandoned. MotB, a play-once-and-your-done adventure, is touted as NWN2's greatest achievement, while NWN's legacy is its still-active community and the many developers who got their start with it.
I wouldn't say MotB is a play-once adventure. The evil path in MotB is actually one of those few games that nails being evil. As in not being a deranged loony. In fact, I think MotB has one of the evilest thing you can do in any cRPG which also feels... strangely good. Generally, to have a full experience in MotB, I'd say you have to play it at least twice and there is enough content in it to justify those two playthroughs. A really amazing adventure. So amazing that I couldn't care less that it's based on a crappy base game.
I am probably in the minority, but I HATE Obsidian. Every single RPG they have made, was unfinished, cut and bug ridden. EVERY. SINGLE. ONE. And so many years later, I became even more certain that the only person who had a talent there, was Chris Avellone.
I hear you. I also think they are overrated and their games are broken beyond belief. Mask of the Betrayer is arguably the best thing they've produced, and it is really underappreciated, and then there is Tyranny, which is basically the same case. I gave up on them after they gave up on Tyranny, actually. Pillars of Eternity was a disappointment, I tried Deadfire but it just don't do anything for me. I liked Alpha Protocol way back when, but even more than a decade ago I felt this game is horrible in technical terms. I can't say anything about Outer Worlds and I don't think I'll be trying Avowed anytime soon.
It's very reductive to assume Chris was carrying everything single handedly when he's not even contributed to many games all that much, like Mask of Betrayal and FNV
In what sense, though? NWN2, despite its flaws, does have a better OC. And Mask of the Betrayer is absolutely brilliant. Also, I've played NWN2 countless of hours online and I just can't go back to NWN1. I guess it's just a matter of preference and what matters to you most. NWN1 surely was a hell of a platform for online play and user-created content.
Fascinating video. Glad to see continuing coverage of this game, my all time nostalgia game
NWN2 is special for me, too. I spent countless of hours online and replaying OC and MotB. Expect more content to come. This game is far too underappreciated and I intend to rectify the situation. ;-)
1. I think it's still a classic nonetheless :P
2. I'm surprised no-one made some "restored content" mod, like it happened for KOTOR, if those "removed" quests/dialogs and possibly locations are still included in the campaign
1. NWN2 is not widely considered a classic. If anything, more people just say "bad camera" and "bugs" at the mere mention of it. But if you spent many hours replaying the campaigns and countless of hours online, then you can definitely feel like it is a classic. I sort of do consider it my personal classic, but I can also see why a lot of people didn't like the game. It is difficult to like sometimes.
2. Well, NWN2 doesn't have a fan support like NWN1, and the fact that the toolset is crappy is also a major factor probably. Also, you would likely have to recreate most things from scratch and making it all work could also be a bitch. Remember, the game is still buggy AF as of the final patch. I don't think it would have been that easy to get everything working without breaking other stuff.
@@Bottomless_Inventory I'm not so sure about the whole "no fan support" and "toolset is too bad", considering people re-created things like Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale in NWN2 as custom campaigns (not to mention lots of very high quality custom campaigns). But I agree that it could be a pain to make it all tie together with OC without breaking stuff.
But that's the thing: they recreated them from scratch. Working on whatever mess Obsidian left behind would certainly be more tricky. As for those remakes, I think people at the time thought that superior graphics of NWN2 would probably draw more people in. I mean, Baldur's Gate 2 Reloaded is in the works today so that may draw some people to give NWN2 a chance again.
@@Pharisaeus I guess he means as compared to NWN1. But I personaly also always liked NWN2 more.
@@Bottomless_Inventory Currently planning a run of BG1 Reloaded, would love to see BG2 Reloaded released soon. BTW, great content, literally every game you cover is considered a classic by me.
I lost it at 18:24! Amazing video man! I've played NWN2 more times than I can count during my childhood. I'm really glad there was more to Ammon Jerro in the cut content sections. He was already my favorite before and this just makes him better. Keep up the great work!
@@ArhonOkvals Ammon is great as it is but he surely had even more potential. He is such a badass and yet tragic character. And thanks for the kind words! There is definitely more content like this coming in the future!
@Bottomless_Inventory Yeah the Jerro's Remorse section on Shandra's farm is amazing and still sticks in my mind after all this time. Ammon deserves his own video one day.
Not sure about his own video, but I could definitely include him in some video about ambiguously evil characters or some such. Thanks for the idea!
Anyway, I think Ammon's remorse at Shandra's farm was mostly fine. I think the best scene of his, the very best, is when he confronts Mephasm right after killing Shandra. You can hear regret right then and there. When Ammon yells "You lie!", you can hear the denial in his voice, even though he clearly realizes what he just did. This is certainly one of the best moments in the OC, and Murphy Guyer did a fantastic job voicing Ammon!
@@Bottomless_Inventory Yeah Murphy Guyer is a legend for his work with Ammon.
If you can bring up Ammon in the future that would be great. He deserves the praise.
After watching videos about cut content in NWN2 for almost 20 years now, I'm quite convinced there is more content cut out from it than there is present in the game. -.-
I know, right? I mean, I see traces of things that are removed altogether. Like entire modules. This is crazy!
pretty much the dark souls 2 of dungeons and dragons lol both horribly butchered and just haphazardly put togheter trying to fit things togheter
Now that's some quality research! Thank you!
In my eyes, Neverwinter Nights 2 is a classic. Maybe not in the same way as Baldur’s Gate 3, but still a cult classic none the less 😌
It's a valid point of view. I have a strange love-hate relationship with the game, too. I mean, the OC is painfully butchered and buggy and clunky despite 2,5 years of patching. But other than that, I have great memories of playing NWN2 online. And, of course, Mask of the Betrayer is the next best thing to Planescape: Torment. No contest here at the moment. ;-)
It's sad that NWN2 never got a lost content mod of some sort.
It just doesn't have as much fan support as NWN1. That's one thing. Another thing is that I don't think there is that much content left in the game files. It's not a matter of just ticking some boxes. You would have to recreate a lot of stuff from scratch and change other things within the campaign to get it to work. I wouldn't be surprised if getting it to work would be extra hard because everything is already a mess.
@@Bottomless_Inventory I think a large part of it is also how little support it got from the community of PLAYERS. That was a big bugbear of mod developers--they're often ready to go through kludgy tools and misery if they think there's an audience, but NWN2 really lacked an audience for modules. It's tailed off as NWN 1 has become as dormant as NWN2 was initially, but back on release the difference was much more stark.
I do think Obsidian messed up by trying to turn the toolkit into just a generic dev toolkit instead of keeping the focus on ease of use. NWN2's toolkit in some ways is really cool in that it initially had way more flexibility than NWN1 (terrain sculpting, UI modding was easier, adding classes was way easier, etc). But the ease of use vanished entirely. It's buggy and difficult enough to use that you might as well just open Unity and make your own game at that point. A real shame. I think they could have had a much more successful game if they were more iterative than revolutionary in approach. They ended up in the worst of all worlds: trying to do something drastically different, then not succeeding at that and ending up with a thrown-together project that didn't manage to really create anything remarkably new for all the effort, nor retain the merits of the old platform.
@@zeriel9148 I guess making it accessible to the players was an afterthought. I mean, they already had a game that was too big for them to handle. It just needed time and resources and Obsidian had neither.
@@Bottomless_Inventory I think that was likely a decision made early on in the dev cycle. It's a fundamental choice and I figure later choices flowed from that rather than the other way around. I'm sure the thought process was something like, "We need to do it this way to make the game stand out and look modern, if we make it too cookie-cutter then no one will play it." And then the devkit was just released as-is. Ish. What seems undeniable is that they focused on the campaign/single-player experience over everything else. Which... kind of makes sense I suppose when you look at Obsidian's core DNA as a studio.
@@zeriel9148 "As-is" nails is. Maybe if they had provided proper support for the toolset, things would have been different. Thing is, I don't think they could afford it even if they wanted to do it. It really looks like they lived on a shoestring before Microsoft bought them. They almost went out of business at least once, too.
If you ever want to give any modules for NWN2 a try, I highly recommend Crimmor! It’s a super fleshed out stealth based thief simulator, and it’s so much fun. The world of Crimmor is one of the most well put together I’ve seen for any module in the Neverwinter community, and I’ve always wanted to see a video on it.
The original campaign of NWN2 might've been meh, but Mask of the Betrayer was a god-tier expansion.
@@fatweeb1545 Yep. It's just too bad it suffered because it was an expansion pack.
Thanks for this video. NWN2 may have a lot of flaws, but it will always be one of my favourite RPGs.
Did not expect this video to come out a day before a reinstalled nwn2, but it's a welcome suprise
Some cuts might be more obvious to you when you replay the OC. And this video still doesn't cover 100% of what I dug up and likely there I things I haven't discovered yet. But I'm sure there will be a part II. Not sure how soon, though. Depends on how well this video does and how other things work out.
Damn… I love that you found all of this content, but I just can’t convince myself to agree with your assessment that whether NWN2 is a good game is “solely subjective”. It is a good game, even if you know it is unfinished. There’s a lot of love for the world of DND in this game and it has a charm very few games have.
@@gabrielcaro Well, there are people who hated it. And it never replicated the success of the original. It is subjective to me and I don"t have a problem woth either view. I'm on the fence myself. Replaying the OC is painful at times.
@@Bottomless_Inventory there’s no shame in looking up guides. To use the words of the great Noah Gervais, it’s a game where you really just gotta get into the mood of it, try to take it seriously even if the game doesn’t always earn it.
@@Bottomless_Inventory thank you again for your cut content retrospective. Regardless of how you feel about the game, I’m sure you wouldn’t have made if you didn’t care. As this is my favorite game, I appreciate it a lot!
NWN2 could not have become a classic... It IS a classic already. I'll die on that hill.
That said I loved your video, there was quite a lot I wasn't aware of even tho I knew a lot had been cut out like romances stuff and quests.
I'd pay to see all this content restored or remade.
For you and I, it is a classic. For the mainstream audience? I don't think so. You'll see lots of other titles before anyone mentions NWN2. Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, Torment, Fallout, NWN1, Dragon Age, hell even games like Mass Effect (lovely games but not really RPGs).
The good news is: there is even more cut content then I talked about here. It was just too much to pack it into one video, especially that I'm still digging. There will be more content on NWN2 for sure.
As for the cut content restoration, I don't think it will ever happen. I'm pretty sure that Neverwinter Nights 2 Enhanced Edition can't happen because of, well, reasons. But that's the word around the internets. Maybe the source code is gone in addition to being shit? That was the case with Icewind Dale II.
And besides, if Beamdog, or anyone for that matter, were to remaster NWN2, I'm pretty sure it would be just a bugfix, 4K support, integrating existing mods, and some other extra eye candy. That will be 60 bucks.
I'm looking forward to your next video to see that.
Maybe some crazy dudes will do it someday, who know ?
@@Dayard I'm not that crazy yet but who knows. It's an insane world we live in. 😅
Is any of this possible to restore? I enjoyed the OCs of both Neverwinter Nights games.
@@CrystalTikal I doubt it. Recreate? Maybe. Will some do it? Doubtful.
Great video. Got me interested in returning to NWN2 for a bit. One thing I would suggest is that you add stuff about all the cut content from the Companions. Seriously there was so much stuff from Mr Old Owl Well and I believe Grobnar was meant to be met in the Neverwinter Woods etc...
@@sarethuskami5082 It's all cooming soon! Although I do skip things that aren't that interesting in one way or another. Still, the next part will be focused on companions and there is quite a lot of cool stuff in it.
Is there a mod that adds this cut content?
@@DreamMarko Nope.
@@Bottomless_Inventory Sad.
@@DreamMarko Such is life. I thought NWN2 at least deserves some videos. 😉
@@Bottomless_Inventory it does it's still one of my favorite games out there, I replayed it many times. Last time I played with all the characters at the same time, but my PC was a swashbuckler!
I've been reviewing the NWN1 cut content (hit me up if you want some info) - there's certainly bitss there but nowhere near as much as Obsidians stuff since it was redesigned (into a rather naff OC tbh, but it's reasonably easy to follow) relatively early on. In compairson Obsidian kept their main design doc plans but just cut chunks from it which makes the result a lot less coherant in places.
I heard the OC of NWN1 was created to demonstrate the capabilities of the Aurora Engine and Toolset rather than anything else. With NWN2, I think the goal was to make a much better OC and offer something to single player-only crowd. Ultimately, Obsidian failed because they tried to do something impossible within the budget and time they had.
@@Bottomless_Inventory As far as I know, that's the result of WoTC meddling. They were sold on the project for the multiplayer aspect and were not too interested in a single player campaign. On top of that, they wanted to vet any idea to put in the game; the result was that, given how hard and time consuming was getting stuff approved, bioware settled on a chapter template (go fetch X amount of McGuffins in the X connected areas from this main hub) and then later reused many ideas WoTC rejected to make Dragon Age Origins.
What is the UI in the video?
Divine GUI. It's the the WQHD version, though, with minor adjustments and DPI settings. But I needed higher resolution for the video, so stick to the Divine GUI and 1080p.
Interesting, I never knew that there was so much cut content. The original campaign has massive flaws (the "city" of Neverwinter is laughable compared to many other RPG cities, for example), but also some really great ideas: the trial with the protagonist. Or the implied romantic potential with Shandra, who then tragically dies. Or the way the game misleads you into thinking Ammon Jerro is the King of Shadows. I even love Torio and all the political scheming. A pity that the game as a whole isn't that great. Partly also because of the stupid camera and slow start - the combination of those two doesn't make for a good first impression.
It could have been as great as Baldur's Gate. Well, at least we got an expansion as great as Planescape: Torment.
@@DebilniPoirot The potential was definitely there. Although, to be honest, the trial is great until you realize it doesn't matter what you do anyway. The trial of combat ruins everything. What a stupid law, by the way. 😅
Nice info. Thanks. I was excited to play this in 2006 and it barely ran even on good hardware of the time. Replaying it again now having mostly forgotten about the story. Still runs somewhat poor.
@@icqme8586 Yeah, the game runs shitty even on modern hardware. Espescially so on persistent worlds with more elaborate level design. It was just poorly programmed from day one.
loved nwn 2 its sad it was pretty much done dirty like ds2
Meaning?
Man, despite their flaws, I really miss these sorts of games. No one has made a proper party based RPG in a LONG time. Pillars of Eternity and its sequel had some noteworthy effort, but they just contained way too much nonsense to be truly satisfying, and Tyranny was just a bad game mechanically with utterly uninspiring character progression. All of these could've been magnificent but were held back by some really bizarre design decisions.
There's the two Pathfinder games from Owlcat. BG3 is also cool in that regard.
I loved Tyranny because of the setting and the fact that it's one of very few games that nails being evil. In most other games it's about being a deranged loony. As for party-based cRPGs, I think Baldur's Gate 3 is magnificent. Although... you can tell in Act 3 that they ran out of resources and it is BUTCHERED. Other than that, Wasteland 3 was also a very pleasant surprise to me! Unless you mean real-time with active pause. I, for one, learned to appreciate and love good turn-based combat. Like in D:OS, W3, or BG3.
Obsidian has always had the problem of way too much ambition and too little capability to deliver.
I'd say it's just bad management. It's not lack of experience, it's just bad management. They weren't rookies even whey they founded Obsidian. They just overshoot with scope and then it turns out they don't have the time and resources to finish and polish their product. How they've managed to get away with that for over 20 years... Well, I suppose they tell good stories. But the amount of potential they've wasted is astonishing. Mask of the Betrayer is arguably the only game they did the way they should have done all games: smaller scope but with great writing. A great story doesn't have to be long.
I was involved in the NWN community years ago, and was very enthusiastic about NWN2 when it was announced. All kinds of features were talked about by Obsidian, mostly graphics, and when the first disappointingly ugly screenshots were released they claimed they were just early prototypes, but of course that wasn't true. NWN had so many refinements that were completely lacking in NWN2. For example, Obsidian couldn't replicate NWN's "dance of death" so as an excuse they just said everyone hated it and made characters just stand static and boring as they fought. I was also a part of early testing, and I think we were brought on too late. Obsidian had already gone off in the wrong direction. For one, they originally planned on requiring all of a distributed module's area maps to be included in the players' local files, meaning that Persistent World players could just open the PW module in the toolset and find every object, location, etc themselves, basically cheating. Any player could have told them it was a bad idea from day one. The changes to UI customizability were the only real improvements. Even the heightmap based areas just made building a module a big pain for most and severely reduced the number of modules made by players. I like Obsidian, and I still have my signed copy of NWN2, but the game was a disappointment for me.
With "dance of death", I heard it had something to do with the height of character models. I don't know if there is any truth to it, though.
As for community content: agreed. The only people saying anything positive about the toolset were Obsidian back in the day. Everyone I knew that worked with it, and I've met quite a bit of PW designers over the years, absolutely hate the toolset.
I think Obsidian just aren't good programmers. They get away with shitty programming because they generally tell good storie, but even those good stories suffer because of Obsidian's bad management. So, I'd say Obsidian is just overrated. They just have the benefit of being thought of as Black Isle Studios Continued.
As for Aurora Engine, just a year later The Witcher 1 launched and it was lightyears ahead of NWN2. The graphics and the level design were lightyears ahead of NWN2. TW1 was pretty buggy, too, and the loading times were a nightmare, but I daresay the game was nowhere near as bad as NWN2 at launch. And then, CDPR pretty much ironed everything out within a year and added some QoL improvements on top of that. Obsidian still left a crapload of bugs as of patch 1.23 which came out two and a half years after launch.
What's funny is that there is no real community patch for NWN2, which shows that the community support of the game is really lightyears behind NWN1 which still gets community patches. I mean, there is this GitHub project that provides fixes for NWN2 but it's not even documented so it's difficult to tell what you're getting exactly. And I'm not sure how big of an improvement it really is.
@@Bottomless_Inventory All good points. I would say that, while TW1 did have a "toolset," CDPR didn't really need to focus on its useability. Obsidian, on the other hand, didn't go far enough in providing the kind of usability we were expecting from an NWN successor. I think we wouldn't care about their OC (like no one cared much for NWN's) if we could have worked with their toolset as easily as Aurora. But unfortunately, everything was a big pain, and the results weren't sufficiently improved over NWN to warrant the amount of work needed to wring anything worthwhile out of it. I was still posting custom NWN content on the Vault many years after the game came out, long after NWN2 was virtually abandoned.
MotB, a play-once-and-your-done adventure, is touted as NWN2's greatest achievement, while NWN's legacy is its still-active community and the many developers who got their start with it.
I wouldn't say MotB is a play-once adventure. The evil path in MotB is actually one of those few games that nails being evil. As in not being a deranged loony. In fact, I think MotB has one of the evilest thing you can do in any cRPG which also feels... strangely good. Generally, to have a full experience in MotB, I'd say you have to play it at least twice and there is enough content in it to justify those two playthroughs. A really amazing adventure. So amazing that I couldn't care less that it's based on a crappy base game.
I am probably in the minority, but I HATE Obsidian. Every single RPG they have made, was unfinished, cut and bug ridden. EVERY. SINGLE. ONE. And so many years later, I became even more certain that the only person who had a talent there, was Chris Avellone.
I hear you. I also think they are overrated and their games are broken beyond belief. Mask of the Betrayer is arguably the best thing they've produced, and it is really underappreciated, and then there is Tyranny, which is basically the same case. I gave up on them after they gave up on Tyranny, actually. Pillars of Eternity was a disappointment, I tried Deadfire but it just don't do anything for me. I liked Alpha Protocol way back when, but even more than a decade ago I felt this game is horrible in technical terms. I can't say anything about Outer Worlds and I don't think I'll be trying Avowed anytime soon.
Imagine hating a studio for making games that nobody forces you to buy lol
It's very reductive to assume Chris was carrying everything single handedly when he's not even contributed to many games all that much, like Mask of Betrayal and FNV
NWN1 was much better 🤔
In what sense, though? NWN2, despite its flaws, does have a better OC. And Mask of the Betrayer is absolutely brilliant. Also, I've played NWN2 countless of hours online and I just can't go back to NWN1. I guess it's just a matter of preference and what matters to you most. NWN1 surely was a hell of a platform for online play and user-created content.