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Neverwinter Nights: Shadows of Undrentide

It’s one thing to introduce a ground-breaking RPG. It’s another to follow up with great expansion packs.

While Atari and BioWare have introduced one of the most playable and compelling RPGs in years in the form of Neverwinter Nights, the first expansion pack, Shadows of Undrentide was a mildly disappointing follow-up title. The main reason for this is the short-and-skimpy approach Atari and BioWare took the first time out.

Arguably the best recent example of great expansion packs came in the recent follow-ups to Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind series. Tribunal and Bloodmoon offered large, lengthy expansions or an already-generous game world and never made the consumer feel short-changed. Even in the Baldur’s Gate PC series, the expansions were lengthy enough to make you feel you were getting your money’s worth.

That’s harder to say about Shadows of Undrentide. While the new solo campaign is enjoyable, it rates as a “20-hour” adventure, about one-third the length of the original Neverwinter Nights solo campaign, which rated as a “60-hour” adventure. That’s short and there’s good reason to believe many rush-rush NN-vets are able to beat Shadows in 14 hours or less. While Neverwinter Nights offers an online mode to extend play, many games still expect “their money’s worth” out of a $30 expansion pack and compared to other franchises, Shadows of Undrentide is stingy in length.

The story to the Shadows of Undrentide campaign is strong, except that it still casts you in the role of an initiate to adventuring, a pupil just starting out. If you play Shadows with a newly-rolled character, that’s not much of a problem, but assuming you played through the Neverwinter Nights campaign before the Shadows campaign, you may have a character as high as Level 20, so the “just starting out” storyline can feel out of place if you decide to continue on with your existing character.

As for what the game puts in your hands beyond the single-player experience, Shadows is still a bit less than one would expect. For the amateur game designers among us, Shadows only offers up three new tilesets to play with. Only three! The game also adds new character classes, including five prestige classes, that do add variety to gameplay but still feels somewhat limited.

Part of the problem here could also spring from the game’s greatest strength; it is an officially-licensed Dungeons and Dragons product. As such, there’s only so much material to portion out in follow-up games, only so many character classes and monsters and so forth in the official D&D universe. While the Elder Scrolls series can “make it up as they go along,” in effect, Atari and BioWare must stick with the existing D&D canon.

Given that natural limitation, it’s hard to fault Shadows of Undrentide for not offering more classes to play with. It is, however, still no excuse for such a short solo adventure or the stinginess of offering only three new tilesets to play with in the Aurora Toolset.

Speaking of the Aurora Toolset, my review of Neverwinter Nights tended to lead one to the impression that creating a gameworld was a snap with Aurora. That’s not quite true. While there is more documentation and tutorials and wizards available for the amateur game designer within the Aurora Toolset, making the basic tasks easier, you still need to become something of a rookie programmer to accomplish much in Aurora.

One welcome expansion aspect of Shadows of Undrentide is the addition of several more wizard-based programming shortcuts into the Aurora Toolset. But don’t get the impression that it’s easy. All Aurora wizards do is put some of the basic programming in place; the rest is still up to you in terms of customization. If you have a programming background, the Aurora Toolset will be a timesaver and speed your ability to create something special. But if you’ve never sat through Computer Programming 101, you’ll probably still feel pretty lost in Aurora and it could take a long time to learn how to accomplish even the most basic game world, despite the friendliness of the tools provided.

Turning to the online play aspect, as with many computer games, finding folks to play with is accomplished through the GameSpy network. This is a strong and weak point. When GameSpy is working well, hooking up with some players is relatively easy. But GameSpy can be kind of buggy. In my attempts to adventure online, my batting average of successfully joining a game is still below .500.

One night when I signed on, GameSpy’s master server was down and no one could do anything online. Another night, I signed on an successfully joined a party of two others and enjoyed a 90-minute campaign. But just as we defeated the big, undefeatable boss, the network freaked out, rolled credits, disconnected us and I lost all that experience.

Other times, I’ve tried joining a campaign and, even with a low ping rating, have waited for five minutes or more without ever getting past the black screen to a “module loading” screen. It’s an often frustrating system that could run much smoother than it does. That said, when GameSpy is smooth, the online mode does add a lot to the fun of Neverwinter Nights and my only complaint is the need to ALWAYS mouse-click in the dialog window in order to chat, EVERY TIME. Even if you’ve just typed one message, you need to mouse-click again for the next message, which is a bit cumbersome; forget to do that and if you start typing, your screen will go crazy because you’re calling up Inventory every time you hit “I,” for example, and the list goes on. It would be nicer if the cursor focus would stay in the dialog window until you click outside of it. But that’s just a personal convenience preference.

In the end, Shadows of Undrentide is still a must-have extension to the Neverwinter Nights experience, but leaves a lot to be desired in terms of delivering as much of an expansion as most consumers will feel they deserve for their $30. Did Atari and BioWare fix this impression with their latest expansion pack, Hoards of the Underdark? Look for our review, coming very soon!

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Posted by Craig "American Idle" Hansen on Jan 19th, 2004 and is filed under PC Reviews, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can post a comment, or trackback from your own site.

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