Why Storms of Zehir is a poor game

Since I always assumed the entirity of my life was leading up to the point where I'm randomly bestowed with superpowers and thus need not your petty 'life skills' I never really made an enormous effort to do something with myself. This leaves me now at 22 with the beginnings of a life of alcohol fueled remorse ahead of me, and completely useless skills such as "dissecting the flaws of a computer game so complex I wouldn't even be able to guess how it was made." Neverwinter Nights 2: Storms of Zehir is one such complex game. The part that was probably most complex in its design process is probably how they managed to make it through the entire game missing the entire point of what a Roleplaying Campaign should be.

Neverwinter Nights 2: Storms of Zehir (henceforth NNSOZ, phonetically Nsuz) is the 6th game in the Neverwinter Night series, if you count all the expansions, and the third one made by Obsidian entertainment, a company I have slagged out so much in my blog that should I meet someone who works there in person I will proudly proclaim I don't know what an RPG is, and suggest they've got the wrong guy. After this many games using the Dungeons and Dragons license and ruleset, surely they would have worked out one of the main parts of the game are the aforementioned 'Dungeons'. Granted, the definition of Dungeon in DnD is as stretched as 'Tomb' in Tomb Raider, but the point remains that the normal Dungeons and Dragons campaign will, at some point, involve entering an enclosed location surrounded by the hordes of the evil villain, engaging them in mortal combat in an effort to get to the final boss fight.

In Storms of Zehir I'm currently approximately halfway through the game and I just came to a realisation while loading up an area it randomly booted me out of (more on that later). The group of adventurers I proudly lead aren't "adventurers", we're just glorified Caravan guards who occasionally take time off to thwart some obscure plot against our boss and occasionally beat up Kobolds.

Don't get me wrong, there are some things I love about the game. The fact the four main characters are all user made means you get to create a party to your suiting, and since the game can't work on the basis of certain annoying characters being in your party, it can't subject you to pointlessly annoying NPC sideplots like Obsidian are want to do. But this doesn't change the fact that my glorious warrior band are just caravan guards.

Part of the appeal of being an adventurer is going into the unknown, saving the local populace from a grave threat of the monster menace we're vanquishing, and making oodles of cash in the process which you spend on shiney bling that gives +4 to armour class.

In Storms of Zehir you're not even running the merchant company (although with all the work you're doing, it feels like you are). You work for someone else in establishing their merchant company, and are given part of the profits. Upon receiving my first paycheck I instantly turned around and said "wait a minute, this can't be right". I made more in an honest job then I had from looting the rapidly cooling corpses of a group of Orcs I'd come across while they slept, who presumably were up to some no-good or other. Were this the case, I had to wonder, why the hell did anyone adventure at all?

Alright, so I wasn't making any real money in killing monsters (unless they were attacking my trade caravans), so obviously I was doing it to help the surrounding countryside, right? Er, well, not really. Aside from some roaming monster groups which would be homing in on my group like a missile (except my leader was a slippery bastard who could hide like an elite SAS soldier afraid of the bogeyman in a blanket factory), the only monsters I ever found were in their own homes. Occasionally a quest would spring up talking about how they were causing trouble, but most of the time I saw the place on the map, barged in and killed everyone before they could say "No, stop, we're not bad guys".

So I was making no money in adventuring, and randomly killing dudes who'd done no harm just because they looked different from the races in my party. Two strikes against Storms of Zehir. Surely it would deliver in the third, the arching plot.

Er, again, not really. Like I said I'm halfway through the game and basically it just seems to be "sneaky snake people are sneaky, trying to infiltrate the surface world". I'm sure there's some big plot twist coming up (there always is) like you've been working for a Snake person the whole way through or something, but as far as arching plots go "go here, starting trading empire, make enough money to buy god status and make your portfolio 'Breasts'" doesn't really strike me as inspired.

Maybe I'm just being picky, surely if the gameplay is fun there should be plenty to forgive in the story arc department, right? And sure your noble warriors of justice and good turn out to just be rather shiney home invaders and muggers running innocent traders out of business by undercutting prices on everything, but if the combat is entertaining that's all the matters.

Err, about that...

Having enemies NOT scale to the abilities of your troupe sounds like a great idea, giving a greater sense of immersion (the alternative being that every county in the world is colour coded for difficulty for YOUR convenience and you're deliberately visiting them all in order), but it does make things a little less fun when you're run down by a band of enormous ogres so large their puny cousin would be able to beat up your entire party. Generally non-scaling encounters can be fun, but only if it is relatively easy to avoid the enormous pains in the arse, which is difficult when you're attempting to escort a trade caravan that moves with all the quickness of me trying to decide what pizza topping I want.

Even in the fights you're forced to have, sometimes you cruise through the encounter so rapidly you wonder why you even bothered to bring a sword, when surely a rolled up newspaper would have sufficed. Other times you have no choice but to smile politely as the enemy beat you up and steal your maths homework, with the only variable in the fight being "do I reload now or wait to see if I can take out one of these seven bastards?"

Storms of Zehir had all the promise of a good roleplaying game. There was genuine potential when I first heard the announcement that you could cut out annoying NPCs by creating your own party, but then they went and made it solely about creating a trading empire. Adventurer's aren't there to create trading empires, they're there to get paid by a local authority/wizard to walk into monsters homes and beat the crap out of them, in the process finding out the beginnings of a major plot to destroy civilisation by cancelling lunch.

Oh, and if a game's so buggy that opening a treasure chest has a random chance to boot you to the world map, something's gone horribly wrong.


And now, since I just realised I've written over one thousand words about a computer game based on Dungeons and Dragons, in order to restablish my manliness I'm going to discuss sports.

...

Bugger. I don't know anything about sports.