As someone who has been around PCs since I was knee-high to a kobold, I consider myself to be fairly experienced when it comes to how games and computers in general are supposed to work. The basic rule is this: as time goes on, the games get prettier and thus more computer intensive, and therefore I must keep upgrading said computer before it can be brought to its knees by still-more-intensive games, and so on. It’s a classic and time honoured system.
So why, oh why, did Obsidian have to change things up with Mask of the Betrayer? Despite being newer, looking better, and having a tonne of new content, this Neverwinter Nights 2 expansion runs at twice the framerate on my PC (which is due to be put out to pasture with the rothe soon) as the standard game, and with more bells and whistles turned on to boot. It doesn’t make a great deal of sense…
…Until, that is, you realise that Obsidian have the habit of releasing their games slightly less than completely finished (See Knights of the Old Republic 2, a game which had an amazing storyline and character progression, but which was so buggy I kept a can of Mortein next to the mouse). Neverwinter Nights 2 was no exception, running like a dog even on systems that easily met the recommended requirements, never mind the minimums. Despite the occasional lack of polish, however, NWN2 was still a very good game.
With all of this in mind then, it’s pretty obvious that Mask of the Betrayer is Obsidian’s chance to fix up the niggles and take NWN2 from being a very good game, and instead turn it into what it was meant to be: both the successor and the game which surpasses Bioware’s Neverwinter Nights. After a healthy dose of polish, things are looking good for Obsidian.
The official campaign begins with the player character (loaded from NWN2 or a new one bumped up to level 18) waking up in a far off nation, suffering from a splitting headache and the urge to eat the occasional soul or two. Setting off to find out just why all of this is happening to you, you meet companions and go on a merry adventure in true D&D style.
Actually the adventure itself is anything but merry really, having more in common with the dark, serious storyline of Planescape: Torment then other, more typical fantasy fare; in fact this game almost entirely lacks the humour which is so prevalent throughout most Bioware and Obsidian games, and is no worse off for it (not that I mind having such humour present, Deekin, Biff the Understudy, HK-47, et al were comic gold). Still, MotB offers a darker than usual storyline, and it makes sense that it has a darker than usual script.
I’m not going to go into character development or your companions (to avoid spoilers), beyond saying that they are few in number, but big on character; almost all of them are very (VERY) different to typical RPG staples, and are well fleshed out as characters in their own right. The main antagonists and supporting cast of the story are equally engaging, and setting the adventure in Rasheman and Thay has allowed the developer to throw quite a few situations at the player which haven’t really appeared in D&D-based RPGs before. The combat can also be devilishly hard; I had to reload quite a few fights due to underestimating the opposition, something that was almost unheard of in the original campaign.
More generally, the game has seen the rather large change of having the level limit increased to 30 (bringing it in line with the NWN1 expansion Shadows of Undrentide). New races have been added, with the Half-Drow (expect a multitude of characters on servers named Drizzt Norris) and the elemental Genasi added into the mix; the Genasi in particular are quite impressive, with various funky effects like flaming hair being the norm.
More basic and prestige classes have been added, epic spells and feats are in, and really there’s just a huge amount of new content ranging from minor skills to gigantic magical explosions. What I’m getting at here is that the faithful have not been hard done by feature-wise.
The game has had some new control styles introduced to it (including an RTS-style top-down interface which, in my opinion at least, adds nothing to the experience at all). The game plays in the typical ‘real time until you fight’ style of all of the D&D games; hitting space to pause abounds, and can be especially annoying if you are playing a spellcaster. By the same token, if you didn’t like the system in NWN2, you probably wouldn’t be reading a review of its expansion; suffice to say, if you like the way the previous NWN games play, nothing has really changed gameplay-wise.
The Toolset has also seen a myriad of improvements, with all the new content being includable in homemade modules, as well as a variety of simplifications and tweaks which make the whole experience much more user friendly; it’s still not as simple to make a quality mod as it was in NWN1, but it’s much closer than it used to be; this, combined with the release of some incredible community mods like Dark Waters by Adam Miller, should see NWN2 finally surpassing it’s daddy in the popularity stakes. Fingers crossed.
The graphics have been beefed up without making the requirements any steeper; however the game does still look worse than it should compared to RPGs of equal age, and has higher requirements than it should really have needed in the first place. The art itself is generally good quality, with many of the locations pretty while still looking authentic; the Plane of Shadow, in particular, looks highly impressive considering it’s just an almost-but-not-quite black and white version of the normal game world.
The audio experience is good, with a fair bit of the dialogue having voiceovers; your companions in particular are well-spoken and entertaining to listen to; this is helped by the fact that none of the characters fit the typical fantasy stereotypes that have been done to death. The music is your usual fantasy stuff, not really standing out, but not often getting in the way either; however, it will (rarely) overpower the spoken dialogue if it’s decided to hit a crescendo at an awkward time, which can be a pain in the bugbear.
Mask of the Betrayer, like all of the Neverwinter Nights branded games and expansions before it, should really be looked upon as more of an investment rather than an outright purchase. Sure you get a well put together campaign, with an enthralling storyline and some new content, but it’s all about the community experience with these games; jump online, download some modules, play on a persistent world server, DM a game for friends, or make a module yourself; this is what the series has always been about, and this is what has made them so revolutionary when compared to their brethren.
That’s not to say that Mask of the Betrayer is weak as a standalone expansion pack (contradiction of terms?); it in fact stands up as the most entertaining story yet in the series, and one which is executed very well. For 50 bucks this game is a steal without adding in any of the additional content you can get your hands on. But it is that additional content that has seen this series of games have such lasting appeal, and it is what the community can do with the toolset that makes the Neverwinter Nights games so amazing to play.
Graphics: 6.5/10 (An improvement over the original Neverwinter Nights 2 experience and runs much better besides; nonetheless, the game engine looked dated when it came out, and is still far too system intensive for something this…average.)
Sound: 7/10 (Very good voice acting, some decent sound effects, and some fairly stereotypical music. Does the job adequately, but most of the points are for the great voiceovers which somehow contain almost no ham at all.)
Gameplay: 8/10 (A fun, deep, and complex RPG for those who like the D&D gaming experience, complete with a great deal of pausing and pondering how many D6’s of damage Cone of Cold will cause when Maximised. If you didn’t understand that sentence and have no interest in trying to work it out, avoid this game like the plague and stick with the Sims.)
Longevity: 10/10 (The meat and potatoes of NWN has always been what you can do with it once the official campaign is over and done with. The MotB campaign is a highly respectable one, but the multitude of good modules, servers and campaigns on the net are where the real experience begins, and it is these that will keep NWN2 and its expansion on your hard drive.)
Overall: 8/10 (Mask of the Betrayer is a great continuation of the already good Neverwinter Nights 2 experience, outstripping it in almost every way. With an entertaining campaign, good gameplay, the incredibly powerful toolset for designing your own mods, and the limitless potential said toolset provides, Mask of the Betrayer is a good purchase that is far more valuable than the sum of its parts.)
-Tim Sweeney
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