2 replies to this topic

[Darpaek]

For as long as I've followed the BWP, NeJ has always been Expert so in my many playthrus of BG megamods, I've never played it before.  Needless to say, I was excited to see that it was now considered Standard in the most recent BWS.

 

Nearly EVERY bug I've enountered in my current install has been related to NeJ hamfisting itself into my dialogue files and overwriting stuff it has no business overwriting.  NeJ has broken, at least, the Imoen Romance and the Romantic Encounters, and who knows how many other quests I've never seen because NeJ frikkin broke them.  If you don't want to drag an overpowered NeJ NPC around the entire game, then NeJ will spontaneously kill your main character immediately after an Autosave - probably ruining your entire game and forcing you to start over.

 

Even if the NeJ install WADs and doesn't break all the other mods you've installed, it inserts itself into the vanilla main quest making it impossible for you to decide as a player that you've encountered this poorly written, boring, engrish mod and don't want to play it.  NeJ kills you if you don't want to drag along a NeJ NPC for the rest of the game.  If you start the NeJ mod you are unable to leave until you've completed it.  There are bugs within the mod itself that make the mod unplayable with certain party combinations.  The walkmeshes are horrible, making combat a tedious chore of clicking your little green circles to try and line up next to a little red circle.  The encounters are bipolar and the treasure is Monty Haul.  Despite the virtual bookshelf of stat books dumped on you by the mod, the greatest reward comes at the end: WHEN IT'S FINALLY OVER and you're allowed the joy of actually playing BG2 instead of a buggy, imba, and nonsensical rehash of IWD.

 

God bless the BWP and all the hard work the folks here have put into it.  I love the vision of the BWP to cram as many mods as possible into a working install.  NeJ needs to be moved back to Expert where it belongs.  Even if y'all get it working without breaking anything else, the nature of NeJ forcing you to play the way NeJ wants you to play is uniquely different from the spirit of BG2 modding and it just doesn't belong in a Standard megamod.

[i30817]

Yer-ye

[Ulb]

I kind of agree with Darpaek.

 

I gave NeJ a try for the same reasons he did and while I discovered only a moderate amount of bugs (at least in the first part, since that is the only part I played) some of them were definitely game breaking for someone who can't use NearInfinity or something similar to check/set dialogues and variables..

 

As for my opinion on the mod itself:

 

For someone who never played IWD before, the mod starts out quite nice. Easthaven and most of the following stuff (which I assume comes directly from IWD) is beautiful and pretty interesting.

Some parts however are either rather unbalanced by themselves or at least get out of hand if you use them in combination with some tactical or spell-altering mods. I usually play on insane with lots of tactic stuff but had a really hard time to beat the undead in the Shadow Valley crypts, even on easy. (Though the “original” overpowered protection from undead scroll would probably have solved that problem.)

 

Now to the real issue I had with this mod, the one that made me abandon my current play-through:

 

Spoiler

From the point on after you've killed the marilith and and returned to Kuldahar, the mod turns into "Uber l33t Time-Travel-Agent Hrothgar and his super cool and mega powerful friends …... and his stupid little sidekick <charname>".

   The mod's dialogues became very „narrow“ and didn't really offer any options that would have reflected my current <charname> (or for that matter any <charname> that isn't either a total moron or a##hole).

 

That’s when I stopped and decided to never again touch that mod.

Edited by Ulb, 09 March 2013 - 03:15 PM.