Customer Reviews

Neverwinter Nights 2 Expansion Pack: Mask of the Betrayer

5 star:		(20)
4 star:		(18)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

...An Epic Adventure with Sneak Attacks

UPDATED: 28 Jan 2008

As buggy as it was, initially, *Neverwinter Nights 2* brought together some of the best elements of the first series into an involved adventure. Now Obsidian Entertainment brings us *Mask of the Betrayer*, which extends both the story and the life of player characters. Though it does suffer from some balance issues.

Unlike the expansions in the first series, *Mask* is an actual sequel. After the climactic events of NWN2, your character awakes deep within a haunted barrow. Your inventory has been stripped of everything other than the armor and jewelry you wore. And the wizard in red isn't forthcoming with answers, as she approaches your stricken form...

Otherwise, MOTB feels a lot like those older expansions, particularly *Hordes of the Underdark*. It's a moodier, more mystical journey than NWN2. And no wonder--your character talks to gods, deals with witches, and exorcises ghosts. The undead play a much bigger role, as do spell casters, and players should invest in silver and adamantine weapons immediately. Paladins and clerics will perform well here.

The engine performs better too; with the 1.10 series patches, the memory leaks and frame-rate issues have been resolved on my power rig. However, it might be necessary to reinstall NWN2 before loading up MOTB--otherwise the Official Campaign (OC) might suffer some quest bugs.

The expansion enjoys more graphical options. Characters trip through monochromatic Planes, dank dungeons, and fuzzy dreams. Spot lighting also sees more use, and objects appear to cast stronger, more impressive shadows.

These colors cast upon new tile sets, including: a richly textured estate and a sewer-like underwater city. But the main setting is the cold, gray nation of Rashomen, styled on a combination of Native American and Scandinavian culture. It's not glacial like the lands in the original series expansions, but the landscape is not for those who suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder!

Nor is the soundtrack. Obsidian introduces a ton of dreamy, often somber scores, both for Areas and for Battles. As far as sound effects go, MOTB reuses the files of NWN1 and 2, but it also uses a few custom creepy tracks.

Ultimately, however, the effects rest upon the story. And *Mask* is an odd one. The character falls into a maelstrom of curses and conspiracies culminating into a confrontation with Death itself. Along the way it questions both religion and nature, while the player puzzles together a mystery to the bitter end. To this end, the story entwines in themes of masks, costumes and theater. By afflicting the player with a curse, which affects a much wider conflict, the expansion also expresses a dramatic urgency in place of NWN2's casual journey.

But in achieving that drama, MOTB is also more linear than the OC. To navigate it, I was able to call upon a much smaller band of companions, and the four-member limit is rigidly enforced. At 25 hours in length, I beat it in about three days.

This can assure customers worried about the curse. Because the expansion is so straight-forward, there's not much to explore. Also, companions and items retard the curse anyways. Thus, only an incompetent player is going to have difficulty managing it.

Managing character itself is another matter. Prior to the latest patch, *Mask of the Betrayer* forced characters towards Lawful Good or Chaotic Evil alignments. Whenever the character acted upon the curse, it assigned a minimum two-point shift in lawfulness--shifts which rapidly add up. Bonuses come with these extremes, including uber weapons or stat-boosting feats.

Otherwise, this conflicts with most alignment-restricted classes.Thus the 1.11 patch removed the alignement shift entirely.

Another balance issue--the expansion is too short to justify its rewards. Nearly every chest bulges with thousands of gold pieces. While nearly every quest awards thousands of xp. This is out of scale with the OC, and causes characters to become too powerful too quickly.

Speaking of power, I come at last to the revised item enchanting system for *Mask*. Gone are the need for recipe books, ingredients, and even magician benches. With a few exceptions, every "recipe" is found in the item description for three new classes of essence: Volatile, Brilliant, and Pristine. The multitudes of undead drop these by the bucket load--no distillation required. There are also a handful of superduper essences that boost your weapons to absurd levels of elemental damage.

The enchantments focus heavily on elemental damage and stat-boosting. So you can forget about making Holy Avengers or Fortified Armor. You can boost weapons, armor, gloves, and shields up to +10 if you've acquired the right stuff from the Evil game path. And epic casters increase the maximum number of enchantments to four. But for some reason you can't enchant bracers, and there are no ingredients for bomb flasks or traps. While I appreciate the big boosts overall, I don't appreciate the limited selection of recipes.

But apart from these funky balance issues, I enjoyed playing this epic in a small package. Bioware never published a follow-up for veteran characters of the first NWN, so I'm glad Obsidian took on an actual sequel. A lot of performance issues are resolved and the enchanting system is simple and powerful. Obsidian also gave me a powerful character, and I hope another expansion comes along which can put it to the test.

-* for play balance problems.

I was late getting Neverwinter Nights 2, and I was very happy with it. I'm running Vista with an NVIDIA 8500 graphics card, and it's super smooth. The look and feel and play of the game is great. I have to say that I haven't played any other games since I loaded this on my computer about a month ago.

For the expansion, there are some new races, new classes, new feats, new spells, and new areas to explore. These are all top notch. I love most of the game. My only real beef with the game is that they did not really stick to the 3.5 D&D rules, but came up with a different rule set where the player is cursed with a spirit energy addiction that requires feeding on the energy of spirits and undead. It forces the player to either suppress the addiction, making your character more LG, or indulge in the addiction and eventually need to kill everything that moves to live and feed your addiction. It doesn't really support LE, CG or TN alignments very well, since there is not much middle ground due to this spirit eating addiction. If you normally like to play as LG or CE, then you will love this game. I prefer more middle ground, frankly, but I still give it 4 stars. There are plenty of mods and other things available with the gaming community. After you have finished the official campaign, if you want you can download modules created by other players. Many of them are very good.

As one of the many who were somewhat disappointed with NWN 2, I approached this expansion with a little hesitation. Deciding to let this be the make-or-break game for me in regards to Obsidian Entertainment (the developers of this game), I went ahead and bought it. And boy, am I glad I did.

This expansion tremendously improves the original NWN 2. I loved the story of the campaign - it's more mature, the writing is better, the pacing is better, and the characters are all more enjoyable. I wasn't sure how they were going to incorporate the story of the first campaign into this one, but they managed it quite well. If you miss some of the dialog it may not seem to mesh, but trust me, there are explanations in-game.

The environments are absolutely great. Some of the new tilesets and placeables should add a lot to those that are making modules. The music is fantastic as well; each piece suits its location perfectly, and really helps add to the atmosphere.

The additions are both good and bad. As the other reviewer noted, the Genasi race are pretty crummy, and the half-drow are basically half-elves with darkvision instead of low-light vision. The new base classes are interesting, but the prestige classes are where the new additions really shine. Sacred Fist, Stormlord, and the Arcane Scholar of Candlekeep really add options to some base characters in regards to builds. There are some others as well, but I'm typing this review too early in the morning to remember 'em. :-p There are also new feats (epic, mostly) and a lot of new spells, some of which come in really handy during the tougher fights.

As for performance and mechanics, it's much improved. The gameplay is smoother, the graphics are better, and overall it's got all of the polish that NWN 2 should have had. The new camera takes getting used to, but once you do it actually comes in quite handy.

Before this gets too long (Amazon recommends between 75-300 words...hah), let me close up by saying that if you thought the original NWN 2 was even halfway decent but were annoyed due to its feeling rushed and the myriad bugs and issues, you really should get this. It's a fantastic RPG, and it's one of the best new RPGs I've played in years.

Overall, I really like this game. The writing has improved from the OC and I was very glad to see that because I felt the OC had potential that wasn't fully realized. I don't know if I'd say that it's fully realized with this expansion either but it's stronger than before and leaves me anticipating the next expansion. I just really liked the overall story and how it looped back to the OC. I also really enjoyed my companions and found them all very interesting. It was nice for my character to have a friend in Safiya and I give a big thumbs up to the Influence-based feats--what a great idea!

The music was really nice in this game. It contributes a great deal to the ambiance and I actually enjoyed listening to it. This was an extremely pleasant change from my usual habit of turning the background music down so that it will annoy me less.

I give the voice acting high marks. All of the characters had nice voices and I really liked the rumbling tone to Okku's voice. The characters sounded more natural in this expansion, as if they were real people talking and that's definitely a plus. The lack of hysteria and grating voices was most welcome.

I do have some gripes, though. For one, I ran into a very major bug in the Academy of Shapers and Binders, one that would have ruined my game if not for the console cheats. Frankly, I think this is unforgivable. All games have bugs but it's unacceptable for there to be one that would result in a player reaching a total impasse in the game. Because I could not get one of the conversation options, I ended up having to cheat an item into my inventory in order to progress in the game. There's no way this should have been allowed to happen and if the story wasn't so strong I would have been very angry about spending the money on a game that is basically rendered useless by this bug.

The romance in the game was okay but could definitely use some work. If there's one thing that most developers could learn it is how to dole such plot points out over time. Instead, I spent the whole game building Gann's trust up in my character to finally have the whole romance played out over two dialogs at the end of the game. That's less than impressive. I would have liked for there to have been at least a hint of romantic tension there. On the plus side, though, was the romance feat. I thought this was a very nice touch. Still, in the epilogue it basically becomes apparent that despite all the passionate vows of happiness and love the romance doesn't work out at all in the end. My impression is that this is a stock ending so regardless of which sex you play as a PC you get the same ending. Why couldn't Obsidian have created separate endings? It would only have required changing a few lines of text and having the voice actor read some additional lines. What's the point of even having this plot point if there won't be any continuity to it?

Last but not least, I really hate the way the camera works in this game. I'm not sure which mode is which but both had major downfalls that I found extremely annoying. I hated how the one view did not allow you to turn the screen by scrolling to the corners and I hated how the other forced you to be so zoomed in that you could barely make your way through the dungeons.

All in all, though, I had fun and feel that the expansion was worth the money I paid for it. I'm certainly interested in another expansion.

If you are lucky enough to play this game without any technical issues and you like games like Fallout, Baldur's Gate 2, Planescape: Torment, Knights of the Old Republic and so on, you probably won't be disappointed. It has a good story and is quite non-linear. That is, your choices actually matter (not always, but far more often than in any game I can remember). There are many instances with multiple paths and there are multiple endings for your character and all of the companions. There weren't many companions (5 total + some temporary), but I really liked the ones I found (didn't get the Evil one). They're very much integrated into the story and often have things to say. Also, if you make friends with them, you get some very useful bonuses. The difficulty is reasonable as long as you pay attention, though unlike many other games, it is possible to play yourself into a corner.

In short, it is an excellent game; my favorite since BG2... or it would be if not for the bugs and technical issues. First, if you're buying it for a laptop, be warned: they simply do not officially support laptop video cards (Mobility Radeons and GeForce Gos). The box says one thing and once you've bought the game, the Readme says quite another (you can find the real requirements on the Tech Support forum at Bioware's site). That said, after creating a custom driver for my machine with extremely helpful third party tools, I was able to play it on my laptop and it ran quite well. Neither Obsidian nor Atari were of any help (beyond saying "Update your driver") with this or any other issue I encountered (and there were quite a few) -- all tech support I received was from fellow players.

Ultimately, I do recommend people who are into Western single-player CRPGs to try this game -- there are precious few that reach this level of sophistication. Hopefully, they'll eventually patch the majority of the bugs and I'll be able to recommend it unconditionally.

Firstly, I played this on a dual-core 2.13ghz pentium, 2gb ram with a Nvidia 8600 GTS on Vista 32-bit.

Okay, I loved the vanilla Neverwinter Nights 2 and the expansion is great in terms of storylines and the involvement with your new buddies is superb. Rather than have a variety of NPCs that travel with you following traditional race/class lines you will gain very distinct and original companions, I'd say more but I wouldn't want to spoil anything!

One of the bad things mentioned countless places is the Soul-Eater "feature" that rears its ugly head at the end of ACT I. I have mixed feelings, in that it makes the game more challenging but really detracts from your ability to explore freely, talk to NPCs because you are constantly watching your soul meter. Also, if you deviate from any extreme alignment like Chaotic Evil or Lawful Good, you are going to have a heck of a time.

The gameplay overall is fun and challenging, with a big increase in difficulty level for the fights you will have. Unless you are a melee fighter type its going to be pretty rough for you initially, especially if you don't import your 20ish level character from the original Neverwinter Nights 2 as you only start at level 18. Granted that's not a huge leap, but its enough to feel it at the beginning especially if you are a caster type character.

There isn't much of a frivolous atmosphere in Mask of the Betrayer, from the areas you visit, the NPCs you encounter and the story you traverse...everything has a sinister and dark nature to it. There are some good fights and action in this, but expect lots of dialogue, reading and choices in terms of Good and Evil.

Pros:
- Everything that was good about NWN2 and removed some of the bad!
- Great Music
- Good storyline
- Wide variety of class/race combinations

Cons:
- Spirit Eater Meter sucks
- Might be annoyingly challenging for non-imported characters/casters.

Let me start off by saying that I was... am a big fan of Neverwinter Nights 2. Great storyline, cliffhanger ending. I looked forward to this expansion.

The storyline here continues on where the NWN2 left off. You wake up in a strange land on the other side of the continent from where you ended NWN2. There is no trace of your allies from that game, and you have a gaping wound in your chest...

The story takes off from there.

The allies/friends you gain in this new realm are intriguing. Each has their own reason for wanting to help you as well as some pretty strong powers. It's up to you to figure out how to get them to trust you enough to help them. And when they do begin to trust you, they'll share their power with you.

OK, pros and cons of the game, the stuff everyone wants to know about:

Pros - Story. Graphics.

Cons - Camera angles. They've changed the camera controls from the original NWN2. In this game there are only two camera controls that equate to "chasing camera" and "free camera" in the original NWN2. Personally, I can't really stand either. I wish they had kept the camera styles/choices from the original game.

Another con is the "plot device" that they've added. Yes, I get it. This game is for characters 18+ levels, so things are needed to balance gameplay so that you're not a god among mortals. But this... affliction they've chosen to add to the character is annoying. I know character development/stories are best when the main character is twisting on the horns of a dilemma, but this just seems contrived, as if it was added at the 11th hour. The affliction is not unlike a drug addiction. The story unfolds as you figure out what's happened to you and why.

But, all things aside, I'm enjoying this game. The story slowly unfolds where you find out little snippets of what happened to your past allies (who survived, who didn't...) as you deal with you affliction. You help your new allies with their problems and receiving their help with yours.

Much like the first game, this one starts off slowly, allowing you to get a feel for the game before things take off.

If only they'd fix the camera controls...

21st century hasn't been a particularly good era for RPGs. Despite its fast start (Baldur's Gate 2 and Arcanum) a downhill trend as far as RPG quality is concerned soon became apparent. With Vampire: Bloodlines (2004) being the last quality RPG and still failing to achieve commercial success, followed by demise of Troika games, RPG market became dominated by generic RPGs, exploring generic setting, with generic protagonist and generic NPCs, generic plots and generic dialogues suitable for cerebrally challenged audience. Paragons of RPG dumbification were Morrowind and especially Oblivion, where the essence of RPG, choice and consequence, was utterly lost and dialogues were, to say it mildly, retarded (so they can match Radiant AI). Unfortunately, since both mentioned games were appealing to a wider, less demanding audience, other developers followed suit and quality on the RPG market was nowhere to be found.

Unlike its predecessor (the original NWN 2 campaign), which was a huge disappointment, Mask of the Betrayer excells in almost every RPG aspect. A very interesting plot takes place in a rarely explored setting of Rashemen, with its unique connection to the world of spirits and the main theme. NPCs and the main characters are well developed through dialogues and plot advancement, with NPCs motives and personalities exposed clearly and in an intriguing manner. I haven't encountered such well written dialogue, interesting plot and compelling characters since Planescape: Torment (1999). Main theme represents a refreshing addition to the game mechanics as well. There are plenty of choices, both those regarding the main theme and those not directly connected to it, and naturally, most of those choices entail distinct consequences for the game world and the player.

So, this game has managed to capture the essence of RPG gaming on PC and hopefully it will help reverse the trend of simplification of RPGs. I consider it among the top 10 games I've ever played.

Its a LOT harder than any of the previous games, its a good game but I had to switch from normal to easy play to be able to complete it for my cleric, but the game did arrive as scheduled and I have no problems with the shipper/seller.

I played Advanced D&D through my teen years, but stopped getting together with other players in late-night dice-rolling sessions when I "grew up". The NWN series (going back to the oringinal NWN on AOL) rekindled my interest in the game. The computer acts as the DM, which is fine with me. Anytime I want to play the game and just engage my imagination, I can hop onto my computer. The online NWN2 world is getting better all the time, as more people write better mods, but it has yet to catch up to NWN1 in the variety of mods you can download and play. On the other hand, it hasn't been around as long.
Anyway, NWN2 and its expansion, Mask of the Betrayer, are a lot of fun. You need a good video card, though!