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| | Publisher: MacSoft  Genre: Adventure & RPG Expansion For: Neverwinter Nights | | | Min OS X: Any Version CPU: G4 @ 450 MHz RAM: 256 MB Graphics: 32 MB VRAM |
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Neverwinter Nights: Hordes of the Underdark
September 14, 2004 | Dustin Smith | |
Plethoras. Multitudes. A Whole Truckload of New Stuff! For those of you that were expecting the D&D 3.5 rules are going to be disappointed. The new rules are not there yet, but I have a sneaking suspicion that in NWN 2 it will receive that enhancement. Fortunately the things that are introduced in these next two installments will have you excitedly playing this game, oblivious to the many hours passing you by. From the 11 new prestige classes from Arcane Archer to Blackguard to Champion of Torm to the Dwarven Defender, there is no limit of customizable possibilities; especially with the 80+ new feats, epic feats, and skills combined. Not even mentioning the enormous pot of brand new spells, I just refuse to count that many. You have plenty of time to multiclass your character because in HotU the level cap is increased to the godly level of 40. You will never reach that high in the single player adventures, so online play is highly encouraged. HotU lets you have two henchmen along with your character, but unfortunately you cannot have two while wandering through SoU. Although being a hardy Fighter/Dwarven Defender really helps to keep those battles in my favor. Speaking of battles, the new enemies you will fight are much more evil and vile ranging from medusas to driders to illithids to the evil gelatinous cubes you will have the blood of many stained upon your weapon, as you emerge victorious; which raises the question, do gelatinous cubes have blood? Anyway…Ah, but how does the story fare? At the beginning of SoU you are an apprentice of a mighty dwarven cleric named Drogan who lives in the Silver Marches, along with three others. Before you received your final quest Drogan is attacked by kobolds and you have to go out and find the artifacts that they stole and why. Thus beginning the epic tale of SoU and, hopefully if you picked it up as well, HotU. I did enjoy HotU much better because as soon as you start playing it you feel the story quickly becoming much more epic and adventurous than SoU. Though I do advise picking up SoU and HotU at the same time and playing them back-to-back. The way the expansions are designed are almost like one continuous storyline and some elements of SoU are very evident in HotU. The way that Bioware incorporates both stories is fun, inventive, and at times very surprising. For instance Deekin, a kobold bard introduced in SoU, is also one of the henchmen in HotU and if you have him in your small band of heroes he will sometimes make strong references to SoU. SPOILER Also in HotU when you have to quell a civil war in a golem filled laboratory in the Underdark the power source for the mechanical golems is what powered the floating city of Undrentide! END OF SPOILER. Both stories are linear in the way the main quests are laid out, and although the amount of sidequests is lacking, taking them will never deter you away from the main quest so much that you forget where you were. But that is what the journal is for as well!
Something I noticed almost immediately that is fixed in the expansion packs that I found incredibly annoying was the fact that my rouge henchman, or in the case of SoU rouge henchwoman, would sometimes not picklocks or disarm traps if I was in a wrong spot in front of the door. It was very annoying to have to click the locked object and then move out of the way a little bit so he could pick the lock, but if I moved to far he would just follow me around. Then I would have to do it again! Fortunately, this didn’t happen in the expansions. The rouge automatically goes to the door to pick the lock or disarm the trap without you needing to click on it, and another fabulous thing is that you don’t have the henchmen leashed! You can go a fair distance away while they are doing something before they start following you again. You can always hit the “follow” button on their dial if you want them to follow you again. The final new gameplay element that I want to mention is the Ring of the Reaper in HotU. If you die you don’t have to pay experience points to respawn, you just have to pay a “rogue stone”. You then end up beside the reaper, a rather shady looking fellow, that can teleport you back to where you last died. Another benefit of the realm of the reaper is that in this new area you can create waypoints back to areas where you have visited before, kind of like Diablo II’s way point system works. You can create a door anywhere you want, but you do have a limit of the amount of waypoints you can create at one time. I didn’t find it too special though because I opted for saving the game as often as possible and then just loading it up again when something went wrong.
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