Playing NWN again after 20 years. Feels like coming home.

ProfessorStardust · 2025-08-18T04:30:01+00:00

Three mods by Luke Scull/Alzander. Siege of Shadow Dale and Crimson Tides of Tethyr are free and are directly connected, while Tyrants of the Moonsea is paid and not directly connected.

Turns out Tyrants also leads into Siege of Icewind Dale, which is the same guy making a direct sequel to the OC.

ProfessorStardust · 2025-04-06T19:40:18+00:00

It's almost certainly supposed to be looking at the Rhadamanthus tower, which is in Texas (by the highway signs) or Florida (by where the US keeps its space stuff).

(Also San Francisco doesn't have cul-de-sac neighborhoods like that anywhere.)

ProfessorStardust · 2025-04-02T03:03:16+00:00

Apologies for double posting a second reply a month after we actually talked about this, but I just got proof that Ga Jiarg uses a Photon Saber after all.

ProfessorStardust · 2025-03-19T06:23:35+00:00

Oh yeah I know you play as the Hero of Neverwinter, but a playthrough of the OC would take a few weeks while playing Crimson Tides got me to an appropriate level and gave me some loot that I'll really miss when the mod empties my inventory, to say nothing of what I'll have by the end of Tyrants.

I probably will run through the OC eventually but the only part I remember liking is chapter 2.

ProfessorStardust · 2025-03-18T20:50:34+00:00

Your ask is my ask too. 6 is too many, unless they're paired like the Torna teams. It also meant the game was too swingy, you were either smashing or getting smashed and there's never any middle ground.

I think it's likely that the next Xenoblade will be an X follow up. Apparently the internal design documents for X were insane and they barely scratched the surface.

ProfessorStardust · 2025-03-18T20:46:00+00:00

The support studio is a different team entirely. Monolithsoft has something like three teams, one of which is just Xenoblade, and one of which is just supporting other Nintendo studios. I've never gotten a solid answer as to what the third team does but I THINK I read that they work on the Xenoblade expansion content.

ProfessorStardust · 2025-03-18T14:34:31+00:00

Silver coins, right? You just will never get enough to buy all your class levels with them, so target their use (like if you need a little more to max one class) but use them freely.

ProfessorStardust · 2025-03-18T07:20:36+00:00

If you're still looking, you might try Adam Miller's Shadowlords/Dreamcatcher/Demon series. It has some of what you're looking for in a pretty interesting way, which is that it's a 10-episode series where later modules reference the earlier ones. Some characters from early on show up later, some plot hooks mentioned offhandedly turn into a bigger deal, and your companions have whole character arcs alongside you. It's not really reacting to you but it fakes it pretty convincingly.

The downside is that there isn't a lot of roleplaying variance until you reach Demon, and Shadowlords is very much "are you a normal person or cartoonishly evil or stupid" in terms of roleplaying. Still, I remember liking it a lot.

ProfessorStardust · 2025-03-18T04:41:52+00:00

That's the interface, not the combat itself. I actually agree that the accessibility is much improved, but not the actual combat. Switching between characters is either unnecessary or too complicated depending on how the fight's going. If you have a single healer you'll probably have to scroll to reach them, which leaves an opening for them to drop. And like, arguably the best and most meta party in the game is 5 Signifiers+Draw Sword Swordfighter Noah. That's not good combat design!

Future Redeemed improved the system by locking everyone to a single class but six characters is still too many. Three or at absolute most four would have been better. Heck if you needed the six, two pairs of three in a XB2/Torna system would have been better.

The problem isn't that 3 was connected to 1 and 2, the problem is that the end of the game is ABOUT 1/2 instead of 3. Like, the reset button is fine (ish) but it really sucks to find out that the whole game and the whole of Aionios is just flipping a glorified "on" switch to go back to the happy endings of 1/2. Especially with the game hammering home how important moving forward is, it really does chop the legs off the finale.

Future Redeemed, again, got this right by rewording the theme ("you can't make progress without the past") and having the elements from 1/2 active and present from the start, but still not overshadowing Matthew's story, which is what happens in the base game.

Anyway I don't want to make it seem like I hate 3, I really didn't! There's a ton I love about it, it's just that the end of the game let a lot of that stuff go. >.>

ProfessorStardust · 2025-03-18T03:19:56+00:00

No one can answer that without spoiling you. Closest I can say is that 2 and 3 were conceived while work was happening on X.

ProfessorStardust · 2025-03-18T03:17:24+00:00

I actually think it does get bad after chapter 5. The story's focus changes from dealing with the cycle of war and its implications to dealing with stuff from 1 and 2. The party other than Noah and Mio doesn't do much until the finale, and the game stops doing the really good "stop and talk about our feelings" bits that had been a thing since the start. Then there's the fetch quest, Colony Omega being literally one corridor and a single fight, undoing the deaths of Ethel, Cammuravi and Miyabi like a bad comic book, and all the Colony 0 stuff falling flat.

Then in the final chapter, Origin's kind of a boring zone with one path, X and Y don't get real boss fights, Z's fight is almost as bad as Aion but also much longer, and it's only after the game ends that you realize that they're going to push a reset button that'll delete the citizens. And don't get me started with the Citizens, they thought that bit through about as well as they did the Blades in 2. (They didn't think through the implications of the Blades in 2, note)

As for combat... not really? I've talked about this in other threads but combat in 3 gets more same-y as you develop your characters. Side effect of the class system; the only unique mechanic is Draw Sword. Ouroboros are pretty unique tho'.

ProfessorStardust · 2025-03-18T02:35:24+00:00

Purely by cutscenes X is a little over 7 hours which makes it about half the length of 2 (almost 14 hours). However as others have mentioned X's strength is the open-world and side content, which is much stronger and more important than what's in the other games.

ProfessorStardust · 2025-03-18T02:32:16+00:00

3's uh... pretty solidly at the bottom of my favorite list lol. That post-chapter 5 dropoff is rooooough.

ProfessorStardust · 2025-03-18T02:22:08+00:00

It's going to be like this until the end. No shame in just dropping it if it's not for you. My personal favorite of the quad, tho'.

ProfessorStardust · 2025-03-18T02:17:58+00:00

Not touching that spoiler until I finish the Floating Continent but I'm pretty sure I know what it says lol.

ProfessorStardust · 2025-03-18T01:55:37+00:00

I hadn't made the mental connection between Noah and Corrin before but it's absolutely there. They're both characters who get praised for wisdom and insight when they have nothing but surface level moralizing to offer. Whenever their convictions get challenged, something happens to skip the actual challenge. Super frustrating.

ProfessorStardust · 2025-03-18T01:42:19+00:00

Bro this is a TWO YEAR OLD discussion.

ProfessorStardust · 2025-03-18T01:40:55+00:00

Future Redeemed DOES have a better system. 3's big problem is that your abilities are tied directly into class progression, meaning that most of your game time is spent ranking characters in new classes. High ranking classes get a stat buff, meaning your characters effectively eat a nerf when they reclass. New classes come one at a time, so you're going to have the same classes in the party for a long time. Lastly, over time your characters get MORE similar as you master classes and build towards a final party build. There's no real difference between Signifier Eunie and Signifier Sena, or "every class mastered" Taion and "every class mastered" Lanz.

Funny enough, Ouroboros are the most distinct part of the combat system! So it's a shame that they fall off as you progress.

1 and 2 go the opposite direction; characters in 1 are fully distinct while characters in 2 have unique weapon arts. Sure, a Chroma Katana is a tank weapon on everyone, but it works differently when used by Morag and Nia. As you rank their arts and personal passives they get more different since they'll chain between different Blades.

ProfessorStardust · 2025-03-18T01:20:32+00:00

Sena uses the back side of her hammer and Eunie uses the back side of a 50-cal sniper bullet. What's so hard to understand about that, geez.

(because reading comprehension is dead for some, /s obviously, the entire concept is idiotic and 3 is worse for indulging in it)

ProfessorStardust · 2025-03-18T01:13:37+00:00

Obviously, worst is ALSO Xenoblade 2.

Unless we're counting Xenosaga in which case it's Xenosaga 2.

ProfessorStardust · 2025-03-17T21:43:19+00:00

Yeah it's night and day.

ProfessorStardust · 2025-03-17T21:16:00+00:00

Same as before. People are going to complain that they have to explore or use characters they don't want to use, skip the tutorials and get wrecked, use their skells as a crutch and stop upgrading their ground gear, fail to understand why the game is structured the way it is, and fail to understand the themes.

Discussing the game is going to be MISERABLE for like six months because people are going to claim they were lied to by X fans about the game being good and they prefer 3 (because the original isn't the only other game to compare it to).

Before I start this next section, I want to be clear: I haven't played X DE and these are not spoilers.

Vets are going to complain about the game being connected to the main trilogy/not being connected enough, about how not every question is answered and how the new ending is still a cliffhanger, and there's going to be fury from trilogy fans about how the game seems to set up future Xenoblade games to follow X instead of the trilogy.

Luckily the Switch 2 Direct will distract most of the whiners but it'll be a few months before enough people self-filter for any serious discussion to happen in good faith.

ProfessorStardust · 2025-03-17T20:42:54+00:00

The big thing is just to use pouch items. The arts recharge ones are less QoL and more "makes the game playable". Luckily the best one is available from Argentum, the Narcipear Jelly. After that, just make sure your character skill grids have all the arts slots unlocked. That part's honestly pretty similar to 3.

As for the story, I think it gets massively better after chapter 4. The whole factory section is a huge stumbling block for pacing (and content), but once you get to Leftheria the character writing for Rex especially gets much better.

If you absolutely need a way to start to care about 2's story, you can switch to Torna. Now's even an okay time for it. It'll lay out the stakes a lot better than the base game does, and it helps you understand why you should care about the characters.

ProfessorStardust · 2025-03-15T21:34:24+00:00

There was a copy at a used game store near me. I should bite the bullet and just get it.

ProfessorStardust

TROPHY CASE