Now Playing: Neverwinter Nights 2

God I’m excited for this game. The first one was good, the construction kit was great, and from what I hear the editor for NWN 2 won’t be an inch worse than what the first game offered. And that’s really what it’s all about, you know: the construction kit. I spent a good part of my highschool life making D&D modules for Unlimited Adventures, and…well, making stuff for “other” games (even though I barely finish, let alone release, much anymore) is plain fun. I’m hoping for a fun built-in single-player campaign, but tapping into NWN 2′s seemingly limitless potential is what it’s all about.

Too bad this game is such a resource hog. My 7800GTX can decently render the interiors at 1280×1024 (which is a crooked resolution for my natively 1600×1200 LCD ), but as soon as I leave the house and get into that first campaign fight the game chugs majorly for reasons entirely unknown. It all looks decent, but not very complex and like it should warrant such high system requirements. And the toolset doesn’t even load on my Dell, it crashes on startup. Probably some laptop ATI driver issue, my desktop machine works fine. But still annoying as hell when said toolset is such a major selling point.

I’ll dig in deeper over the weekend to evaluate the gameplay. First impressions were okay, but I haven’t played far enough yet. I hear the story and conversations are really good, so that’ll be fun to explore. And of course I want to see how painless it currently is to author custom content. I already downloaded the .obj converter, but it’s 3rd part and I don’t know yet how well it performs.