Neverwinter Nights 2 review: Storm of Zehir is an RPG filled with excellent ideas, unfortunately...

There are many ways to view Neverwinter Nights 2, I am only a single person with a singular perspective. I played NWN from black box until today, I modded Neverwinter Nights, I had my meager submissions on IGN, I was on the closed beta for NWN2 specifically as a modder. I loathed NWN2; no horses, still 2.5D, still no jumping, no climbing, no physics, the mandatory buffer zone of map edges, outrageous system requirements (for the time), it was a disappointment to say the least. That is my perspective. I started playing WoW.

You could be Hasbro, that is another perspective. They saw the MMO event horizon approaching, sensing a new cash cow, they basically abandoned NWN2 and focused on Dungeons and Dragons Online. Too little, too late. They missed the MMO gravy train AND missed the opportunity to make NWN2 as great as its superior predecessor.

Another perspective is as a new player of an old game. They play the game in a void with no preconceptions. I suppose that perspective is best.

What song is played in your intro?

It has been a long time since I played a RPG with a great story, Arcanum was solid, but it was mostly the world and lore, the story left me alone. A "good story" often seems to take me away from what I want to do and puts me on a path of what the devs want me to do. I did not like NWN2 because the story got in the way and often gave me too limited of options, pathfinder kingmaker did the same. Pillars of Eternity I never made it through as the character classes were so weak, and the stats were odd, where a fighter and wizard both used might to hit hard, it was just so foreign of an idea for me to get that into it. And I did not play Pillars 2 because the original game was not my favorite, and it built off the last. If it was a new story like IWD 2 that would be good, but it was more like BG2 where you missed a lot by skipping much of the first.

I might have to try this one just to see what does, I played the original campaign but not any expansions, maybe I can try this with 4 good character ideas and then import the one that plays the best into Mask of the Betrayer and see if that story is really good. I have played great stories in adventure games, and read great books, but for a game I want to make my own stories, and the ones with the biggest stories seem to limit my ability to make my own story. I also love the idea of make my own party. I give each one different personalities, goals, and I often can do as well as the follower systems of most RPG games. Often a game will give me one or two good concepts, but I can often make my own that mean much more to me.

This almost looks like Low Magic Age, but in a more finished state, I also played a lot of Kingmaker's endless dungeon. It leveled too fast and had lots of odd mobs with crazy status effects, but I was left alone to dive into a dungeon with a party for their own reasons to be there, and the game did nothing to try to tell me my way was wrong that I should only follow their story.

i don't like this expansion, when i import my character there from campaign they are looking for hero of Neverwinter? i am hero of Neverwinter, or they are blind?😠

great video and commentary :) Keep it up Brother

SOZ is the best murder-hobo simulator ever made.

Storm of Zehir is basically Neverwinter Nights main campaign redux. The main point of the SoZ expansion was Obsidian showing off their new assets, for us to then put into our PWs or our own little adventure scenarios. That's why it kinda sucks as an expansion to play with.

Mask of the Betrayer had challenging combat? Its certainly got one of the best CRPG stories ever written, but the mechanical balance of the game is a mess. This is partly just the nature of high level d&d, but any halfway competent melee character could breeze through the game. Yes, you could die to encounters if you fought them severely underlevelled (vault of the dead god was probably the most likely place to do this), but if you fought the battles at the intended level, it was very seldom a meaningful challenge.

Storm of Zehir's party dialogue system isn't just a gimmick, it's a brilliant feature that I think could improve all RPG's dialogue system and should be adopted and adapted by other game studios.

From the last couple decades or so, RPG dialogue are basically stuck with the same format:
>Opposition says something
>Players get pre-determined dialogue choices
>Most of them boils down to Yes, No, and Question further
>Alternatively to Good, Evil, and Funny
>Repeat ad nauseum

This airs off a visual novel feeling where choices are just gateways to content rather than an actual system to interact with.

This feels too limiting especially in party based games. In group conversation, you don't just let 1 person in your group do the talking. Every member talks. Each giving their own insight to the discussion. How a burly man with a war ravaged past talks is different from a village girl who've never seen blood. The system benefits aspects of both role play and roll play. The former lets players choose the tone of the conversation, steering the interaction into conflict or peace. The latter provides a sort of social puzzle with different characters having different levels of success when espousing a certain talking point.

The current system may lead to miscommunication between the intentions of the player and the developers. The meme of choosing a mundane dialogue choice and have the PC flip out aggressively highlights its weakness. Providing a full sentence to a choice can only inform so much for an interactive audio visual medium. This new system can also benefit solo RPGs by substituting party choices with tone or emotion. You want to tell the scared conscript and hardened soldier to surrender, but you would approach both with differing tones.

What bothered me the most about SoZ was no multiplayer. The campaign was perfect for coop. Easy to jump in and out. mostly gameplay focused

I don't normally watch reviews of games I worked on years ago, but I'm glad I saw yours. I really appreciate your fair and comprehensive critique of the game. I think the only things you didn't cover are the soundtrack and the modding features introduced in SoZ.

Really superb review, but the background music is so distracting and stressful. When reviewing a game you don't need to use music only found in game and can chose whatever music that is fitting for the text. You could even use music from another game, whatever works. Just don't use loud and bombastic music as a background and your future videos will be better.

I agree with you that the game gets very grindy, even though it's likable in the beginning, I find it hard to finish the game by the latter half. It's really meandering.

I actually like Storm Of Zehir, its nothing great, but it's really not trying to be.

On a general level NWN2 is more fun and consistent than NWN1. Even being generic high fantasy NWN2's main campaign is a lot more fun than NWN1's (which is basically a sample scenario for the inbuilt creator engine).

I play this game almost every week and am surprised its still get some attention today.

I don't know why but i enjoyed neverwinter nights 1 alot, played it like 3 times start to finish, but i couldn't get into neverwinter nights 2.
I tried a few times, but i end up barely doing chapter 1 and then losing interest.

That's a fine, top of the line review. Well argumented points, each time you bring something up, you flavour it by exploring the topic just a bit further, but not too far as to not sound fanatical. It's fairly comprehensive as well. Peerless video and sound editing. Especially the sound editing needed work.
In some of your previous entries the sound from the game clips got in the way of your voice which mixed together terribly and created a jumbled mess. It's good you fixed that.

Fantastic job, Alex. So happy I stumbled upon your channel a way back. If you keep on with the quality content, whatever should it be, I'll be happy to watch and like it in turn.

Morrowind also started on a ship... I can see a pattern

Well done. How come you skipped Neverwinter nights and its awesome expansions? Hordes of the underdark is a masterpiece.

I tried 4 playthroughs but I've only finished it once, I was interested at first but the more time went on the less invested I became.

By the time I unlocked the final area I just wanted it to be done.

You were far more generous than i would be. It took me two years to finish this expansion because i found it so fucking boring. It has all the terrible aspects of NWN OC with a story that held no interest and I found the so many of the mechanics like the exploration map and the ability to choose a party member to interact with a person or object as who the frak cares. I'm not saying they were bad mechanics, in fact they are great but with a shit story they are soulless. They are undead mindless husks, they add nothing to the game because there isn't a story to impact with the mechanics. I never cared that i could trade, never cared that i could pick the ranger to examine some object in the woods because it never mattered. i could have done none of those things and it would have been pretty much the same story. The expansion is just a husk it has pieces tagged on to it but nothing is alive nothing has a soul. I Recall a sense of relief when i finished and felt the only good think about the expansion where the expanded character creation options. Now this isn't true there were other good and great things added but because the story was shite they pretty much all fell short but the character creation options could be used for the OC & MotB, so you could actually use these option again as i am pretty sure only a masochists would play SoZ more than once. Hell I felt like a masochist forcing myself to finish the game the first time.

I give this expansion a 3/10 because it was such a huge letdown after MotB. But games are subjective so there is no right or wrong answer. I just feel that a lot of people are going to come straight off MotB from your reviews and feel like they got punched in the gut when they play SoZ and feel like it was an utter waste of time. They wont likely feel like it was a 7/10 title but far worse.

Yeah, Storm of Zehir definitely has its faults, and scouring every inch of the world map is something I only did once, but the little gems in it are worth the time once in a while. I come back to it sometimes, but not as much as I do the OC and Mask of the Betrayer.

Hey I have just subscribed. You deserve it because of your great videos about rpgs. I can not watch this particular video about NWN2 expansion because I have to play this series first, I currently play NWN1 and I love it.

But did you find the Wendersnaven yet !?

Another fantastic review! Hats off for the fantastic work you've been doing in this genre!

Will you do Mysteries of Westgate as well? :)

As I mentioned in a comment on a previous video, I love Storm of Zehir. Maybe it's because of my age, but I love a good old fashioned dungeon crawl and that's exactly what SoZ is. As a result, the lack of depth to the companions or NPCs doesn't bother me in the slightest. In fact, if you do want to play SoZ, there is a simple way to change the number of characters you can create on the ship. My advice is to change that from 4 to 6, ignore the pre-made companions and just make the party of your dreams. A couple of mods wouldn't hurt, either.

You were very impressed with mask of the betrayer, I did play it all the way through once as a Cleric/ domguide of kelemvor. It was good but I do not remember it well. If it was as good as you suggest I would surely remember it better than I have. For some reason I remember it as dark souls type game which I hate. Meaning a lot of big fights. Maybe I should give it another go after all this time.

First off, the editing in this video is just incredible. Secondly, perfect review. Properly covering the story, setting, and mechanics that are specifically unique to this expansion as a stand-alone. You explain what was great, the potential it had, and what it could have done better. I just played this as mindless as can be, being a completionist playing through the entirety of NWN2, but this was perfectly stated.
For me, I would have wanted storm of zehir as part of the main game, with its mechanics and all integrated into it. The one thing I can say I thought at the time was that it felt like Obsidian came up with some great ideas after finishing the game, and felt they might as well put them in somewhere.