NWN 2 Toolset Review (Pre-Order)

The toolset for Neverwinter Nights 2 is a powerful game editor which allows you to create your own adventures to exacting detail. The many features which came with the toolset are powerful, and allow you to do pretty much anything you want...

If you know how.

I'd say that in reviewing the pre-order toolset that would be my major gripe. While the documentation is excellent for building your average area, anything out-of-the-norm is a trial and error procedure with literally hundreds if not thousands of variations and no "pre-set" examples included.

Let's say for example, you wanted to create a lake of ice. While I'm sure that the module included will help with those examples, there are export tools that allow you to create importable versions of many settings. Why not create lava, ice, and a hundred other examples so you can just import the properties? It would go a long way to making the program user-friendly.

Also, while the general terrain tools are laid out, many "tricks of the trade" such as pressure and so forth are not covered, and you cannot see what pressure the brush was at when opening sample mods. So you're really left up to trial and error on this one. While graphical artists will be at easy home, those casual builders without skills with graphical programs may be lost for quite a while, or making areas which do not, frankly speaking, look anything near as good as sample areas.

The ease of use of the shaping tool for terrain grants tremendous ability to create any weird, bizarre, or standard landscape you wish. With resizing for placeables by editing a few numbers in the placeables property window, one can literally create fantastic variations from even the smallest placeables. Placeables also now have two settings: Environmental and Object. Object allows one to interact with the placeable, such as building doors or levers, and take additional resources. However, if you have buildings or objects which are not interacted with by the players, you can set them to "environmental", thereby handling problems with walkmesh or resource useage.

Creatures work much the same way. While some more variations and a greater number of base models would have been nice, with scaling and attaching special effects to the creature, you have literally an unlimited amount of creatures at your disposal. Within a few minutes, I attached some wings to an elven model, changed the skin colors to red, attached glowing eyes effect, and had a fey'ri (demonic elf) to play with, which was extremely convincing. Many of the creatures can be so modified. Making the "wolf" model double the size, for example, then attaching the "shadow" effect creates a convincing denizen from the plane of shadow in short order. The downside is that with the in-toolset creation process, you have to select every feat from a list of about 500 as they do not "auto-assign" feats based off of the level or class of the creature. This adds a ton of time to the creation process.

In fact, special effects can be attached to any object in the game, including PC models. You can get pretty outlandish with it, and it does have literally thousands of effects (about half of which will appear decent with anything). If you want your own custom effect, Obsidian has included a handy plugin for effect creation. Sadly, this was not documented that well in the manual, so unless you're familiar with special effects creation, you may be out of luck until the community provides documentation.
There's also the powerful script editor for you C++ fans, which allows you to import most of your Neverwinter Nights scripts into the new game and get them working quickly. Some changes may have to be made, but overall, you're dealing with a much more powerful version of the original editor. However, there is an ease of use factor which is not present in the current editor, for example, you cannot create a script from an event in a creature and have it automatically assign it to that event.

As an aside on the Plugin functionality, it is very powerful, and allows the community to make incredible tools in order to speed up building. I've already seen camera plugins, plugins which create whole forests, create whole landscapes, and create shops for you, all with simple commands. The included plugins for the toolset were not well-documented however, and while they look nice, your average Joe is not going to be able to figure out how they work with any ease.

Item editing takes a lot longer now. As with most of the abilities in the toolset, there are omitted wizards for creature creation, item creation, and many others which make building much harder overall. With items, for example, I found it much easier to just create a copy of an existing blueprint and edit the appearance and properties from that. Creating one from scratch takes a while longer, having to select icons (which you cannot see an image of) and not being able to preview armor on different races or female models. This adds a lot of time and effort into a wonderful bunch of options which might not have been necessary with some foresight. I do love that you can set pretty much any option in the properties. For example, if you want a belt to have to be equipped to use the spell "Cure Critical Wounds 3x/day" property, you can set it in the properties. There were also options to make a weapon cursed, only droppable through application of the "Remove Curse" spell, which was omitted in the original game. Also, you can set the type of material used in the creation of armor or weapons which allows it to have certain properties or bypass certain resistances. Missing was masterwork armor, which would have been easy to add properties for. However, pretty much anything else you can think of is included.

There's so much which cannot be covered in any amount of reviewing. Obsidian made a powerful set of tools for the community allowing one to edit pretty much anything or any property one wishes, create fantastic landscapes or creatures.

This all comes at a price, for it is nowhere as easy to use as the original toolset. Granted, there are a lot more options, but there are some downright user-unfriendly points which have nothing to do with the increase in quality.

As an example, in the original Aurora toolset, you could simply right-click a creature and assign a store to it. The conversation wizard even plugged in a generic store conversation to use, all within a few mouse clicks. That same process (there are no differences in how this happens in NWN2) now takes upward 20 or so mouse clicks to perform.

I clearly understood the increase in difficulty on using color palettes and the texturing, and all the other fun detailing which goes on in the areas, however, some of the "user-friendly" points which saved a lot of time were not ported over into the new toolset, making it much harder than was necessary to create things. This pretty much kills the "casual toolsetter" from making anything fantastic without investing a chunk of time learning everything, as opposed to Aurora.

Short and Dirty:

Options: 10/10
Useability: 4/10
Modability: 9/10
UI: 6/10
Looks: 8/10