NWN Multiplayer?

A lot of you from Evil Avatar site remember the flak given to NWN for having lackluster multiplayer content. It was spearheaded by the man himself and he risked the 100's of flame posts while sticking to his opinion.

Im hear to say, he was right. The functionality of coop NWN is attrocious! I'll let Pyro fill you in on the server horrors we just went through. Im going to talk about interface and game mechaincs.

No NWN does not need to be Diablo but Diablo has gameflow mechanics to assist in the enjoyment of coop. Simple things like xp split are tremendously complicated in NWN. It seems random who in the party gets what xp. If you die and are respawning you dont get xp for the important "boss" kills and i dont believe you get quest xp during respawn.

Monster difficulty doesnt seem any tougher other than you miss more and the rewards aren't more lucrative with more players.

When you die, they implemented a great feature that allows you to teleport back to the party leader for free. Well, it doesnt seem to work all the time. Also, if the party leader dies he has to transfer the leadership to another person so that the former leader can teleport to the new leader.

The level design is very mediocre, especially in regards to coop. All the levels are small rooms connected by small halways and small doors. Fighting in these tight areas are a chore especially if they are mages. How fun is it to let the enemy get sneak attacks or attacks of opportunity because 2 party members cant fit through the door so one pushes the other forward into an enemy swarm. And don't forget getting pushed aside while lock picking or disabling a trap to dire consequences.

They implemented a throw back to Everquest with level loss on death. The xp loss and gold loss is pretty severe considering the amounts earned for killing and quests.

Why are people playing this again?

Haven''t touched it since I finished SP. Correction, I went back with another charcter loaded to the nines with Charisma just to get the female characters excited. Alas, turns out I didn''t put enough points into stamina.

I actually agree with Fang mostly because I was there...

I think that, the problem with NWN coop its too story driven, I mean you have to talk and talk to get a quest, and then talk some more. Plus it does not assign the quest to a group, but only to the person who had the conversation, and that is why I think only some of us were getting the XP point on complition of the quest. I mean it was fine when I was going threw it solo, and I admit that I like the game allot, but for coop it''s utter hell. Also leveling up is weird... totally, I wasn''t getting any XP almost, I presume that it was divided among the group, but it turn out to be other wise. Plus there was a funny thing, I gained a level, and it was fine but because my character died I lost some XP, which took away my level. Which is bad because it take 100XP per death, and to get it back its 5-10 XP points per kill, and that ain''t good.

Now my question is, what happened in the end, first Pyro was down, then the server,... then nothing.

This makes me not want to play co-op. Hopefully when I try I will have a better time.

Pyro fell down and couldn''t get back up. I fired a bunch of heals at him and still nothing. He couldn''t respawn or save the game. Because he was hosting, he took the server with him.

While I agree with most of Fang''s points, there is one thing we should keep in mind: the official NWN campaign sucks, regardless of how many play. From what I''ve read, it was a showcase for Aurora, not a well-designed campaign. As a developer of a highly-customizable gov''t app, I can attest to how such a thing can happen.

I can''t guarantee any of the other mods (whether ""Witch''s Wake"" or ""Penultima"" or whatever) are better or worse for level design, XP split, encounter scaling or anything else that''s wrong with it. What I do know is that there are lots of other mods that may be more suited to our hack-n-slash style of play. (Wading thru quests in multiplayer is no fun.) Maybe we just need to be more selective...

That, and a dedicated server can''t hurt.

Yeah except for the XP sharing thing, most of these are gripes with the default single player campaign, which indeed sucks. I am hoping a good module will make this more fun. The XP sharing thing is a pretty big deal, but what happened to me last night was inexcuseable.

Basically, we got to the end of Chapter 1, and I was a wussy mage, so I died in the final battle. However, nobody could revive me, the game wouldnt let me respawn, and I only had two options. Exit or Load saved game. We hadn''t saved since about halfway through Chapter 1, so of course, I exited.

If we don''t find a good module to play coop with, Ill probably just have to give up on this game again, though at least this time it''s not because of technical concerns.