Well, it seems that Neverwinter Nights 2, Obsidian¹’s next kick-ass roll-playing game, is out in the USA. Unfortunately, it’s been delayed in Australia until November the 16th. Whaaaa? That’s… like… next year! Muaahaha, thankfully I’ve managed to wrangle some contacts and download the thing from Direct2Drive, so I’ve been gleefully playing it for the past few nights. Well, OK, make that the past few days, nights, and early mornings…

First impressions are good, although the game engine isn’t particularly medal-worthy: Obsidian could use some better game engines programmers, that’s for sure. It’s not in the same league as Oblivion, for instance. The user interface also isn’t quite up to NWN1 standards. However, the spell effects do look very pretty, and more importantly, the story looks quite promising, and possesses the same moral and ethical ambiguity that is the hallmark of Obsidian games. None of this bozo so-obvious black-and-white good-vs-evil crap. (Mind you, I’m playing a slightly evil character at the moment — slaughtering the Neverwinter City Watch might be somewhat evil… but it is so much fun. Besides, the Watch is weak and not doing its job, so I don’t see anything wrong with the Thieves’ Guild controlling the city streets since they actually have the resources to maintain peace and order better than the Watch. Just ensure the local shop keepers pay their taxes to the Guild and everyone’s happy… )

It also looks like an even more hackable game than the original NWN, although I’m unhappy with the toolset using the same dock-o-rama type of user interface that Visual Studio is famous for. Dockable windows are OK, but I still think it’s far inferior to using multiple windows and a decent window management tool such as Exposé. Still, it took me about 30 minutes to write some small chea… uhh, scripts, to help with some in-game things.

So far I’ve probably pumped about 20 to 30 hours into the game, and I think I’m about 3/4 of the way through Chapter One, with there being three chapters in total. If I don’t reply to any emails for the week or two, uhhh, I guess you know what I’ll be doing!

¹ Obsidian are makers of the best computer role-playing games in existence, end of story. (None of this World of Warcraft or Final Fantasy VII crap, thank you very much.) If you disagree with me on this, that’s OK, I’m not really into Pokemon anyway.