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34 of 36 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Stab the Betrayer..., November 15, 2007
Fun:5.0 out of 5 stars
...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.
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27 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
I like it, except..., October 18, 2007
Fun:4.0 out of 5 stars
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.
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19 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Improves the Original by Leaps and Bounds, October 14, 2007
Fun:4.0 out of 5 stars
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.
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