Morrowind diary introduction

I started playing Morrowind only just recently, here in the spring of 2009, and I like to talk about my experiences, but rarely know anyone who is as interested in these things as I am. The forums are nice for some kinds of discussion, but (aside from being rather dead for this older title) they're a little too volatile and disorderly for the kind of in-depth coverage I like to do, so I decided to start a blog instead.

Perhaps if I share my experiences with the larger world, it might lead to some interesting discussions. (hint, hint)

I changed my mind about making this post always on top, because it may create the illusion that I'm not writing anything new, as long as it remains there. So I've placed it back in the normal chronology. As this is a blog, the postings show in reverse order, which isn't the most logical way to read a linear diary, but I'm sure most blog readers are familiar with it. Aside from the date posted, I'll also be sure to put numbers in my post titles so you know which order to read in.

This blog won't be entirely about Morrowind, of course, since I do play other games. But all Morrowind posts will be tagged as such, as any other games will be tagged with their names, so you can just click on the appropriate tag to see posts about the game of your choice. (Some, however, contain tags of other games because I happen to mention these other games to compare them with Morrowind.)

My gaming history

So, a little background on what led me to this place and time. My gaming history goes back quite a long time, so I'll just name off a few games first. LucasArts adventure games like Monkey Island. The Thief series for stealth and atmosphere. The Silent Hill series for story and atmosphere. Racing games. Action FPS like Half-Life II. Hybrid games like Bioshock and its predecessor System Shock II. Turn based Strategy games like Galactic Civilizations II. Etc. The first game I believe I played which used the open-ended, relatively non-linear "quest" style of gameplay was Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (and later San Andreas). I liked this freedom, different from the linear games, since I could go anywhere, and there were all kinds of things that I could do, in any order I chose, at my leisure, instead of being stuck in a level with only one way to go, or tiresome tasks between me and the place I wanted to be.

World of Warcraft was the first major RPG I played for any length of time (as warlock, druid, and mage). I have very few complaints about that game. Aside from chunky polygons, low resolution textures, too much grinding, legions of assholes, unnecessarily long flight paths, a monthly fee, inability to drop items (on the ground or on a countertop), and no player housing, it's nevertheless a very fun game, that even now I'm tempted to return to, if only I had the time.

After I quit WoW, I decided to look for a single-player RPG that I could play without a monthly fee. Oblivion was the game I chose, the fourth installment in the Elder Scrolls series, of which I had no previous experience. I had heard of Morrowind here and there, but that was all I knew.

Oblivion was great. I spent a lot of time playing it (as a mage/thief), though I avoided the main quest as long as possible, because I didn't want those pesky Oblivion gates opening up all over the land and wrecking the scenery. I was familiar with mods from many other games I've played, so I delved deeply into the world of Oblivion mods, to the point where my Oblivion folder was about 20GB in size. Eventually, I ventured into the TES Construction Set to edit some of the mods to better suit me (lighting, furniture placement, etc.) and ultimately started making my own mods. I started with some simple retextures, and moved on to creating some companion NPCs, and a couple of house mods which became my main homes. Alas, eventually I ran out of things to do, things had gotten a bit boring, and even quest mods couldn't keep my eye from straying, and Fallout 3 had just been released, so out of curiosity I took a look.

Fallout 3 held my interest for a while, even though in many ways it was a large step backwards from Oblivion. The construction set for it (called GECK) eventually was released, after a month or two of pessimism from the community, and I proceeded to mod the hell out of Fallout 3. Ultimately I made a couple of mods of my own for it, most notably another house mod.

Alas, it held my interest for much less time than Oblivion did. Compared to Oblivion, Fallout 3 falls short in many areas. But this isn't the time or place to get into that. The result was that I wanted another open-ended fantasy game with plenty to do and explore, variety in play style, and a healthy mod community. I looked at Fable 2, and The Witcher, and some others, but ultimately I was swayed to give Morrowind a try despite its inferior graphics.

My approach to Morrowind

Now, I've played and enjoyed my fair share of older games with inferior graphics. WoW, System Shock 2, Thief 1 and 2, and others. But a large appeal of games like this is getting to explore unique and beautiful landscapes, and "beautiful" isn't the word for what I had seen of Morrowind. However, some videos I saw on Youtube showed me what it could look like with mods like MGE (Morrowind Graphic Extender), as well as some city expansions, NPC makeovers and addittions, and texture replacers. It changed my mind! Also, being an older game, it was very cheap.

Some people have recommended Morroblivion instead. Morrowind's models imported into the Oblivion engine, with NPCs, creatures, items, and presumably quests recreated. But now, writing from having played Morrowind for a few days, I think there are some fundamental aspects of Morrowind that would be lost in porting it to the Oblivion engine. For instance the very extensive dialogue trees. And is it complete? I got the impression that it isn't. And what about the thousands of mods there are for Morrowind? They wouldn't work in Oblivion. No, I think it's better to play Morrowind with the Morrowind engine, improving what can be improved from there.

So, I think that's enough introduction. On to my first impressions of the game!

Day 1: Setting up

Morrowind arrived, and it's the Game of the Year edition, with Tribunal and Bloodmoon. I'm not sure if it also includes the free official plugins, which I already downloaded. I saw a mod to "delay Tribunal assassins", which stated that assassins start showing up even if you're a new character, if you install Tribunal, but I did it anyway because so many nice-looking mods require it. I can always use the "delay" mod if it's a problem. [Edit: it will not be a problem, because the assassins don't show up until level 5 or 6.]

So, I've got it working, with a number of basic graphic improvement mods. Better bodies, vanilla clothes pack for BB, various custom clothes for BB, and "THE" Facepack Compilation, along with its companion THE Morrowind NPC Makeover. The improvement is huge. Next I need to try to find an animation replacer to fix those silly walks.

I also installed the Morrowind Code Patch, for various fixes, and the Unofficial Morrowind Patch, though I see there's a newer one that succeeds that one that I should probably replace it with, Morrowind Patch Project.

MGE works great, and adds animated clumps of grass like in Oblivion if you follow these directions.

However, MGE seems to make the gamma dark, and the in-game gamma control doesn't affect it anymore. At least, it's dark in windowed mode, how I prefer to play it (for easy switching between game and other things).

I got ENBseries running with it, too, just for the ambient occlusion effect (I didn't try the bloom, but I hear that re-lightens up the place), but I had to disable it because it made the character selection screen black. I'll try it again now that I have a nice character done and saved (I played through that beginning area many times trying out mods before I got to the part that lets you save!) [Edit: Nope, ENB slows things down to a crawl, makes things so dark I can't see, and the ambient occlusion is visible through walls. Will wait for improvements on that.]

One thing I can't seem to find is an interface mod to make the inventory easier to deal with. I want to be able to sort my items by weight (so I know what to drop when I'm encumbered) or value (choose what to drop or sell first), etc. And not have to hover the mouse over each item to see that. It's the same kind of icon-based inventory interface I had to deal with in WoW, except at least in Morrowind I don't need to place things in "inventory slots" like WoW and System Shock 2. I want a list instead, with columns for weight, value, etc., like Oblivion had. And a bigger font, please! This font is tiny at this resolution.

For my character, I went with a Breton mage. No surprise, given my history. I would have probably picked an elf if I could find a custom race like the mystic elves for Oblivion. This is Milly, with THE Facepack Compilation, and Hurdy Gurdy's robe replacer.

Anyway, just getting everything installed and working properly took all my time on the first day, so I wasn't able to start playing until Day 2.

List of mod lists

So here's a list of sites that I have bookmarked, that have made an effort to spotlight various useful mods in different categories:

• Yacoby's ES Meta-Search: Very useful. I use it all the time. This searches 4 or 5 big mod sites all at once.
• UESP: Morrowind Map: Map of locations in Morrowind, using the Google Maps API.
• kwshipman's List of House Mods: Sorted by size, with marks on their contents
• Morrowind Mythic Mods: I use the sub-lists sorted by theme, such as the one for mages.
• Settlement Expansion Mods: Another subcategory of the Mythic site, but I think it's worth highlighting.
• Connary's texture replacers: Not a list like these others, but something I refer to often as my overall favourite texture replacers.
• List of Clothing for Better Bodies: A list of mods which add BB clothing to the game.
• Drow Mod List: I haven't tried any of these, but I saved it in case I wanted to try adding some D&D drow to the game later, probably after I've completed most of the vanilla quests.
• Morrowind Mod List: I believe I started out my mod installations with selections from this site.
• Princess Stomper's Mods: Vvardenfell: Lots of buildings and city renovations here.
• Telesphoros' List o'Mods: Pretty extensive.
• Third Party Programs and Mods for Morrowind: I bookmarked this for its extensive coverage of extras for MGE.
• Yacoby's Morrowind - List of Heads and Hairs: No screenshots, but plenty of mods.

Day 5: Morroblivion, Enchanting

Looks like I was right about Morroblivion (the fan-made conversion of Morrowind into the Oblivion engine). According to their FAQ:

"Morroblivion is currently in beta and quests and dialogue do not work yet. As of now, you can't do much more than explore the land and cities, and kill creatures and stuff. Quests are scheduled to be added eventually somehow."

Sounds pretty indefinite. It may look beautiful, and is clearly a faithful visual reproduction, but the reason I stopped playing Oblivion was that I had run out of quests! So there's really no point in me dealing with it unless (or until) they add them all. I see there is (or was) an effort to add some of the quests, which is nice, but it's very few of them, and I need a fully functional game. Morroblivion would only be good for me if I had already played the original, and just wanted to explore the place with better graphics, for nostalgia's sake.

Another thing is that there are a lot of gameplay mechanics that are different between the games, and others that exist in Morrowind, but not in Oblivion. In short, Morroblivion is not a game at all right now, and even if they add all the quests and dialogue topics, it won't be the same game without a lot more work on the gameplay mechanics. So, I'm sticking with the genuine Morrowind.

Enchanting

One of the gameplay mechanics I'm still trying to get used to is the much more extensive enchanting system in Morrowind. Mainly that unlike Oblivion, almost any item can be either constant effect, cast when used, or (for weapons) cast on strike, rather than weapons always being cast on strike and clothing always being constant effect. Also, that unlike Oblivion, these items essentially have their own mana pools that slowly regenerate on their own, without the need to recharge them. One thing not mentioned in the Morrowind Guide for Oblivion Players is found on the page for Enchanting. Namely, that paper and notes can be enchanted as well, creating one-use spell scrolls like you find throughout the game. The use for these being that while normal spellcasting can fail depending on your skill or fatigue, enchanted items (including scrolls) are instant-cast and never fail. Though I think rings would be more useful to enchant, since they don't disappear. Perhaps I'll try enchanting a pair of rings with "restore health" and "fortify magicka" spells, so I can keep myself healed and full of mana when I run out during a fight... Might work!

Oblivion retrospective

As explained in my introduction, Oblivion was the first of the Elder Scrolls series that I played. As much as I enjoyed it, I now consider Morrowind to be superior in every way except graphically, and even then only in a technical sense, as Morrowind's graphics have much more variety and imagination.

The state of Elder Scrolls modding

Nevertheless, during my time playing it, I produced a number of mods, and I'll list a few of them here. In the event that TES Nexus ever permanently goes offline, and assuming Blogspot survives longer (or whichever blog I may migrate this to in such an event), I should still be able to be contacted here to re-upload my mods elsewhere, should anyone desire them by then. I imagine it's quite possible, considering how many Morrowind mods have become hard to find or lost entirely in the six years since the game debuted (at the time of this writing).

Moreover, although when I came into the modding scene there was already in place a standardised Readme template (thanks to LHammonds), most Morrowind mods I've downloaded have no such standard. The most noticeable absence from many of these old Readme files is a statement of permissions. Being a largely well-mannered community, most Elder Scrolls modders are loath to re-upload lost mods, without being able to ask the author for permission first (and in fact, it's against the rules to do so on TES Nexus). The reason I only use one site to archive my mods is that user comments and responses are my reward for releasing these mods to the public. I'm not doing it to earn any kind of fame or name-recognition; I'm doing it for the sake of hearing from people and occasionally prompting conversation. Thus, I want all my work in one place where I can keep track of it, and read and respond to people's comments.

Lavish Mage Tower of Alchemy Power

I'll begin with my favourite home, my Lavish Mage Tower of Alchemy Power. Knowing this, you can see why I chose the Magus Realm Tower mod for my home in Morrowind. :) My design philosophy was to have a home that was roomy but conveniently arranged, easy to navigate (hence the floor map), aesthetically pleasing, and with an atmosphere I considered appropriate for my kind of character.

A full description, including more background on what I meant to accomplish is available on the Nexus (and in its readme file), so I won't repeat it here. (People seem to hate the name I chose for it, but with all the other mage towers out there, I didn't want anyone to confuse mine for any of the others, and you have to admit, at least the name is memorable!)

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I Wanna Bayou A House!

This, my first house mod, was much humbler than the later tower, though it was tastefully decorated with custom interior textures, and with more of a focus on the house's exterior location. Here, the star of the show was really the location.

During my explorations of the landscape, this swampy area of Blackwood struck me as very pretty and atmospheric, and rather different from most of the forested landscape of Cyrodiil. So, much like one might do in real life, I picked what I thought was the most picturesque area, and built a house there. (And it sank into the swamp.)

Day 7: Alchemy lab

Well, now that I've gotten a chance to play again, I spent most of my time redecorating. Before I found out how profitable filled soul gems were, I thought I was going to have to settle for the mid-range alchemy set, but it turns out I can afford the grandmaster set! Here, then is my new alchemy lab, which I set up in the aforementioned Magus Realm tower, after removing the existing shelves and apparatus in the construction set. With this purchasable alchemy lab, you get four crates full of shelving and jars, an alchemy formulary with its own optional lectern, and all four pieces of alchemical apparatus. Once you unpack the crates, you can move them to wherever you want through movement scripts, and as you can see, I placed them two abreast on two tables.

It also comes with an in-game user's manual, which is nice. This explains how to do some things that may not be obvious, such as moving the alchemical apparatus. The shelves and other items give you an action menu when you activate them, but the menu of the apparati does not include an option to reposition them. As found in the manual, you move them by activating them while your inventory is open. Otherwise, they remain where you put them while you mix your potions, which is something I like about them. (Logically, an alchemist should not have to juggle his or her equipment while brewing potions.)

Of course, with the formulary tome, you don't even need to touch the apparatus. Though I haven't tried it yet, the book's menu includes putting away ingredients, retrieving ingredients, and even retrieving applicable ingredients for specific potions.

The only trouble with this set was getting it home. The four crates are heavy. Once I bought them, I was overencumbered, and I don't yet have any feather or fortify strength spells or potions. I dropped one crate and the alembic to lighten my load, which is where I found the temporary problem of how to pick it up again.

Anyway, now that my lab is nicely outfitted, it's time to start practising! First potions I want to have a supply of: Fortify strength/feather, invisibility, fortify intellect, fortify speed, and of course, restore mana. I need to start looking for a mod that'll allow me to apply poisons to a weapon or to throw them at an enemy. Very strange that the only action you can perform with poisons in Morrowind is to drink them. I used poisons a lot in Oblivion.

Bigger font

In one of my earlier posts, I expressed a desire for a bigger font in Morrowind, because I run it at 1280x960, and it was straining my eyes. In searches, advise was mixed, but this is a built-in solution that worked for me. In the Morrowind.ini file, under the header [Fonts], just change the first line to:

Font 0=century_gothic_big

Much more readable. Text in books is a little too big now, but I'm more concerned with readability than with aesthetics. But, for the sake of aesthetics, I might try Make MW Fonts later, which allows you to make a Morrowind font out of whatever fonts you have installed on your system.

The Wailing Wench

While looking around at Morrowind videos on Youtube, I came across a video of a mod called Clothiers of Vvardenfell, which adds a great, fun-looking tavern to the game, with a live band, dancing and drunk NPCs, and an overall fun atmosphere. I want more places like this!

Arx Fatalis

I finished one of my holiday gifts recently (well, finished enough -- more on that later). Arx Fatalis (Fatal Fortress or Fortress of Fate in Latin) is a game which was inspired by the Ultima Underworld series, and was the predecessor to Arkane Studios' more recent Dark Messiah of Might and Magic -- which is a better-looking, but severely stripped down spiritual successor (aren't they all?)

Arx Fatalis is a rather linear RPG-like game. You play as a single predefined character -- a voiced, male-only "chosen one" figure (with a choice of 4 possible faces) who was sent to save the world from an ancient evil (the story isn't one of its strong points). The RPG elements include the ability to put stat points into various attributes upon gaining new levels, optional side-quests, inventory management with buying and selling at vendors, crafting, character specialisations, and a good amount of freedom in your approach to solving various problems. Although you don't get any choices of dialogue during conversations, you do get to make various decisions through your actions, and there are usually multiple choice paths with different advantages.

There are numerous puzzle challenges throughout the game, which I consider one of the strengths of the game. These were almost all enjoyable and challenging, with just the right amount of clues to keep you from getting stuck, but difficult enough to make you think for a while.

Buggy as hell

Of all of my GOG games, this was the only one that gave me significant trouble in getting it to run properly. I was plagued by crashes, bugs, and graphical glitches that made the game unplayable, but eventually, through stubborn perseverance and experimentation with various settings and patches, I got it into a playable state. I wish I could report exactly what combination fixed all the problems, but I tried so many things I can't say for sure.

First, there was the rendering problem. This was noticeable immediately on starting the game, from the first cutscene to the game itself. The frames flickered and stuttered, and although camera freelook view and the movement of my character seemed unaffected, all animated textures stuttered as well, and jumping and crouching were jerky and strange as well. The last official patch from Arkane Studios itself, posted around the time they released the source code (around the holidays of 2010) has an option to "enable rendering fix" which for some reason didn't solve this problem for me at first, but it's working now, and I'm not sure which tweaks did it.

Then, there was the crashing problem. This happened mostly during the transitions from the interior of the king's castle to the city of Arx. Why, I don't know, but the fix was to lower the texture resolution to "low".

Finally, the running speed problem. This one was identified by user Nuky on the GOG forum as being related to the amount of time your computer has been running since startup. Apparently, the speed starts out fairly normal if you're playing the game after recently having reset your computer, but for those of us who keep their computers running for long periods of time without resets, the running speed increases until you shoot down the corridors like The Flash. Thanks to the source code for the game having been released, Nuky posted a fix for this problem, which solved it for me. His fix also improved the speed of the unnecessarily sliding menus (personally, I don't see why they kept that sliding in there when it performed so poorly) at the expense of the font's antialiasing.

In case it had anything to do with the overall fixes, here are my nVidia card settings that I tweaked during the troubleshooting process (items that are set to "application-controlled" are not listed here):

• Antialiasing - Gamma correction: Off
• Antialiasing - Transparency: Off
• CUDA - GPUs: All
• Maximim pre-rendered frames: 3
• Multi-display/mied-GPU acceleration: Multiple display performance mode
• Texture filtering - Negative LOD bias: Allow
• Texture filtering - Quality: Quality
• Texture filtering - Trilinear optimisation: On
• Threaded optimisation: Auto
• Triple-buffering: Off

After I got all this taken care of, it became a relatively smooth playing experience, with only occasional hiccups.

Overall impressions

This game includes hunger, but no need to sleep, despite the wide availability of beds, and the fact that you obtain your own bedroom early in the game. I thought I would find hunger an annoying feature, but it turns out it just made cooking more enjoyable. Cooking is one of the two crafting disciplines you can practise (three if you count enchanting), the other being alchemy. The difference is that there are no skill requirements for cooking. All you need are the tools, ingredients, and a fire. Most food doesn't even need the tools. Just set some raw fish or rat ribs by a fire, and in a few seconds you have cooked food that'll satisfy your hunger. The fact that rats are the only creatures that regularly drop meat (sentient creatures like goblins or trolls might happen to be carrying some food, but you'll never get goblin meat) makes the many rat encounters in the game slightly less annoying (I daresay at least 50% of the combat in this game is against rats).

But once you've gotten your hands on some flour, water, apples, wine, and a rolling pin, you can make yourself probably the best food in the game: gourmet apple pie. It satisfies your hunger for longer than almost anything else, and it takes up the minimum space in your inventory, unlike the similarly satisfying large ribs.

Alchemy isn't as fun. There are only a few potions you can make (health, mana, poison, antidote, and invisibility), and your object knowledge skill only affects whether you can make them. You need bottles, a mortar and pestle (to powder your herbs), and access to a still to brew the potions. Empty bottles are fillable with water or wine, and drinking or using those items will leave you an empty bottle to use in alchemy, but if you drink a potion, the bottle seems to disappear.

You can also carve wood into wooden stakes (useful for zombies), enchant your weapons with a few possible reagents (and poison them as well), craft and repair weapons at a blacksmith's place (or just repair them at any anvil), go fishing, and mine gems and precious metals from the walls with a pick. These are all less developed than the previous crafts, and money isn't really a problem in this game, either, so you could just skip the mining.

Unfortunately, the world is hardly populated at all. The "city" of Arx has perhaps 20 people living in it, which includes the king, his servants, and the guards. There are 3 merchants (one for gems and jewelry, one for weapons and armour, and one for misc supplies), plus another merchant down in the lower caverns. It makes the slaughter of all the people at the first human outpost you find seem like a terrible loss, since they pretty much cut the human population in half. Not that it seems to matter to the people in the nearby tavern, who never seem to notice or care that there's a body-strewn battleground next door, even though they'd have to pass by it to leave the tavern.

Nearby that same tavern is a small alcove containing the wreckage of a teleporter, which I presume was destroyed by the Ylsides during their offscreen attack on the human outpost. This is the first such teleporter you're likely to find in the game, and it is explained at some point during the main quest how you can use them. "Let me show you how we travel", one of the naga/lamia women told me at that point, and she took me to one of the intact teleporters near the market area of the city of Arx, and showed me a spell to cast to activate the device. Each device must be activated in person before you can teleport there, much like meeting the flight masters in WoW in person before you can fly to their flight points.

I'll be generous and assume that by "activating" them, you're doing some kind of magical attunement to your body so that you can travel through them, and not that they've just all been sitting dormant all this time. But there's one thing I noticed about the teleporters. First of all, once you activate a portal, it'll show up on one of the sides of the device for the rest of the game, and there are a limited number of sides. I had assumed throughout most of the game that one of them would always be broken, because of that wreckage down by the tavern, until I actually did come across one final teleporter. Once I activated it, the final panel of the teleporter opened, with no space left for the broken teleporter. Either this is some kind of oversight on the developers' part, or else we're meant to assume that the wreckage was not the result of the recent attack, but had actually been there for a long time, and one of the teleporters that I had already activated had been its replacement.

The look and feel

It's a somewhat strange ambience in Arx Fatalis, with its goofy, cartoonish goblins and trolls, with quests to get a birthday present for the lonely troll and to sneak into a goblin's room by secretly giving him diarrhea, while on the other end of the spectrum there are copious dismembered bodies, scattered heads, arms, and torsoes, torture rooms, hanged prisoners, and human sacrifice (a woman and a child, who it's possible to rescue), with more sacrifices being referred to in the past.

Aside from the violence, there's also the unexpected but not unwelcome possibility for sex in the game, though it's handled in a very strange and bizarre way. If you return the magic rings to Alia after destroying the meteor, she's so pleased that she invites you to stay with her for a while. After a black screen, there's a very strange after-bed sequence that could be interpreted as a nightmare.

There is no followup or comment to the monster-face "premonition" either in conversation or in the quest log. My thought is that it might have been from a dropped alternate resolution to that part of the story, depending on how you may have handled things before. There are a couple of scenes in other places that play out slightly differently depending on your actions, after all. This might have originally led to a fight with a monster Alia. If there was such a plan that had to be dropped, they may have decided the scene was too good to waste, and so they put it in as a kind of fake-out "dream sequence" just before the "real" conversation.

Compared to Ultima Underworld

As written in game histories, Arx Fatalis was planned to be a third game in the Ultima Underworld series, but Arkane Studios couldn't get the license for it, and thus they retooled it into a similar but original setting. Since I have not yet played UU, I base what I write here on my readings of developer interviews and of gameplay videos.

Since Arx was based directly on it, I won't go into the similarity in setting, or the "chosen one" back story, which was a staple of the Ultima story anyway, in the form of the Avatar. Visually, there's little to compare, since UU was 2.5D like Doom, with 2D sprites moving in a 3D space, and Arx is fully 3D.

But in terms of content, for instance, Arx includes somewhere between 6-9 types of enemy, not counting 1-time bosses or humans, which is a fraction of the creatures in UU, whether or not I use UU1 or UU2 as a representative sample. Arx initiates dialogue only when it wants to, in the form of non-interactive cutscenes, while UU has proper branching dialogue with NPCs, with multiple response options. My only complaint there is that UU uses faux Elizabethan English, as it seems all Ultima games do.

Hunger is in both games, but UU also requires sleep, which I suspect (from the presence of the aforementioned beds and bedroom) was originally planned for Arx as well, but never implemented.

In UU2, not only can you make your own notes on your map, but you can enter your own text in character dialogue in some places, which is perhaps useful in cases where you know the answer to something that your character hasn't actually discovered. This does break the RPG elements, but the game already does that by having you do realtime, manual combat (which Arx also does).

I can't tell how the two games compare in terms of the number of NPCs and locations from what I've seen, unfortunately.

I'm not sure how many of the good UU elements would not have been cut out if Arkane had been able to call it Ultima Underworld 3 instead of making it a "spiritual successor", but the more cynical side of me suspects those things would have been cut for time and money reasons anyway.

Compared to the Elder Scrolls

Both Arx Fatalis and Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind came out in 2002, and are graphically very similar, so if you're familiar with the more popular Morrowind, you know what to expect graphically -- Good environmental structure and texturing (for the time), and rather ugly character models. Arx beats Morrowind in terms of character animation, though.

Having seen what I've seen of Ultima Underworld, I'm leaning toward the conclusion that Morrowind and Arx were both aiming for the same things, and went about it in similar, but not identical, ways. The first two Elder Scrolls games look a lot like the Ultima Underworld games, the first of which was released 2 years before the first Elder Scrolls game. Of course, Daggerfall deserves a post all on its own, and I'll get to that eventually. But the point for now is that the first two Elder Scrolls games owe much of their look and gameplay to UU, and Morrowind represents their move to full-blown 3D after the Doom-like 2.5D of the first two. That's why it's valid to compare Morrowind and Arx Fatalis, as both of them are basically 3D reimaginings of Ultima Underworld.

Arx Fatalis did not have an intermediate step as the Elder Scrolls did, and jumped directly from Ultima Underworld to full 3D, and I find it interesting that they arrived at such a similar destination as did Morrowind. A natural convergent evolution, or did the two studios influence each other during the design process?

At any rate, the biggest difference between the two is that Arx abandoned the character dialogue options that Morrowind retained, and chopped the character appearance customisation down to 1 race, 1 sex, and 4 faces (down from 10 possible face choices in UU, with 5 for each sex), where Morrowind continued the trend it had established in its previous games where it had expanded the character customisation to several races, with numerous faces for each race and sex. The second most striking difference is the linearity and lack of replayability, due to a much smaller game world with so few side quests.

Compared to Dark Messiah

From reading the TTLG forum, in the Arx forum that I never visited (I was always there for the Thief series), I see that people were anxiously expecting an Arx Fatalis 2 for years after the first one, but eventually it was revealed that Arkane Studios was instead working on Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, which was released in 2006. I actually went and purchased that game while I was playing Arx, though I already knew from the forum posts and from the gameplay videos on Youtube that it was even more stripped down from Arx than Arx was from UU. From the gameplay videos, I could tell that it would be a pure FPS action game, and bought it with that in mind. It's a departure from the rest of the Might and Magic line, but I have no experience with those, and the fact that it is such a departure is what makes it worth comparing to Arx Fatalis.

It was, in fact, essentially an FPS compared to Arx, much like the difference between System Shock 2 and Bioshock. I was pleasantly surprised to see that there was actually still an inventory and several trees of stats and abilities we could invest points in, but those things are not enough to call Dark Messiah an RPG. It's at best an FPS with a few RPG elements, and it's even more linear than Arx Fatalis. You can't even select an appearance, but it hardly matters since you never see your character.

I did notice quite a few elements from Arx returned in Dark Messiah, though. I'm strongly tempted to believe that this game actually began its life as Arx Fatalis 2, but was repurposed at some point during development when they got rights to a well-known title. Right on the title screen, in fact, one of the game's necromancers is staring menacingly at you, and he bears a resemblance to the Ylsides from Arx. Also making a return appearance are certain kinds of food, certain props, and a functional forge. But once in your inventory, every type of food magically turns into identical "food rations". And since there's no hunger in this game, the only thing food does is restore a tiny amount of health. As a wizard/thief, it takes more than a full stack of food to restore my health bar completely, and I would expect a warrior would get far less benefit from it. In addition, there are arbitrary item-type limits. "You can carry no more than 20 mana potions" (or anything else) no matter how many inventory slots you have free.

Speaking of inventory, I had been finding myself running out of room and getting impatient for the night to end so I could go to the nearest shop and sell off some junk, only to find that there are no shops in Dark Messiah! At one point we went to a tavern, and I thought that was going to be a shop of some kind (and my demon companion said "I think they sell more than just food here,") but the barmaid just walked off into the kitchen and stayed there, not responding to my attempts to speak to her except to yell at me for coming into the kitchen and threatening to call the guards if I didn't leave. No one in that tavern, in fact, appeared to do anything. So don't bother picking up anything you can't actually use, unless you want to be sure to have something on hand to throw at enemies.

The game also commits the exact same kind of offense as Arx did -- namely, introducing a boss fight weighted heavily against magic users. Here, an orc boss challenges me to single combat with the rules specifically prohibiting the use of magic. I'm a wizard with no points in mêlée combat at all, and he can kill me in 1 hit. If I even switch to casting mode, his half-dozen bodyguards immediately attack as well. I found that out by accidentally hitting a key nearby the "kick" key which put me in casting mode. I spent maybe 15-20 minutes reloading over and over, quick-saving as soon as I'd scored a couple of hits and was still in decent health. I have no idea how long it'll take to wear his hit points down, but I'm very sick of it by now. I was also sick of replaying his long speech before he attacked, until I realised you can save during cutscenes.

Dark Messiah is actually a change from my most recent trend of starting with the latest game in a series (even a series as loose as a thread of "spiritual successors"), and working my way backward to the earlier games, which traded graphics for better and more complex content. It is very pretty, with some nice characters, and even includes rope arrows like in the Thief series, but it lacks in depth.

End of Arx Fatalis

This is what I was talking about when I said I had "finished enough." As it turns out, I couldn't finish the game, and I don't plan to. The final boss fight appears to be unwinnable for me, as a non-warrior type, with the final boss' apparently huge health reserve and a tractor beam that forces you into close combat. And since this fight ends the game, I don't feel the need to keep trying. I watched the ending on Youtube for closure.

I tried numerous strategies that I read about, but nothing worked for me. The boss either just stood there and did nothing (after his transformation) while I kept hitting him over and over until giving up, or he wiped the floor with me despite me constantly chugging health potions, or he stood there confused when I levitated or climbed a pillar, but again simply refused to die no matter how many times I hit him with the special sword or threw fireballs at him. I played a combination thief-mage, with high casting skill that could kill an Ylside with 2 fireballs and a lich with 3, but nothing worked against this boss.

Since casters are heavily crippled in this game due to the gesture-recognition system they used, where you have to draw 3 or 4 runes in the air with your finger to cast a spell, and can only pre-cast and store up to 3 of them, it essentially amounts to a 3-spell-per-fight limit, since fumbling around in the inventory for scrolls with no ability to pause while doing so, and trying to draw runes with a mouse (and have them be recognised) are too clumsy for me to want to keep beating my head against that wall.

Nevertheless, despite the buggy beginning, small world, linear story, lack of freedom, anticlimactic ending, and reduced content from its predecessors, I consider Arx to have been fun and enjoyable. Though small in scope, Arkane did take care to make each area visually different and interesting. If you spend as little time in the city of Arx as possible, and spend most of your time exploring the different levels, the illusion of a larger world may persist (though you may end up backtracking a good deal due to getting lost, which is easy to do). On the other hand, what it really makes me want to do is try out its predecessor Ultima Underworld, which I suspect I'll enjoy all the more for what was left out of this one.

Day 12: ENBSeries, textures, dwarves

ENBSeries

While browsing the Bethsoft forums, I saw some screenshots and some videos, especially by Vality, which reminded me of what had lured me to Morrowind in the first place. While MGE was indeed an improvement over the vanilla look of Morrowind, after having played for a while, I can see now that my settings were definitely not getting the same results that Vality was displaying.

So after some reading, I determined that it was time to give ENBSeries another try. It's a third-party addon (like MGE) that works for a wide range of games, and adds various post-processing effects to Morrowind, such as bloom and colour-correction via user-made palettes. I had given up on it before, because the ambient occlusion had too many problems for me, and it slowed things down too much. But on the recommendations and settings of forum posters like Vtastek, Vality, and Mr. Domino, I tried a few specific settings for ENBSeries and shaders for MGE, and achieved some results that I think are an improvement. They may still be a bit too much on the dark side (a little gamma raising would help, I'm sure. Will have to look into that), and the contrast may be a little harsh, but this is much closer to the kind of results I was seeing in these nice screenshots. Vality is using a palette in ENBSeries to give the Bitter Coast's lighting a green tint, making it feel like a tropical rainforest, and also offers very nice tree replacers to increase the lushness of the foliage. He's also given the same treatment to Balmora, though there are some trees that are placed on top of structures added by Balmora Expansion, and I had to change the date of Vality's mod to allow Balmora expansion to load after it, to reduce landscape conflicts. I'll just be moving or removing a few trees from Vality's mod in the construction set to make them play more nicely together, because it really makes a great difference, and I also want to keep the expanded Balmora. At any rate, the Bitter Coast mod doesn't touch Balmora, so if you're going to try one out, I'd try that one first. There's also one that improves the foliage of the Ascadian Isles, including the town of Pelegiad. There are some nice before-and-after screenshots on that page.

I ended up using the settings of Vtastek from his post here, with the GIMP HDR Bloom custom filter for MGE that he recommended, with Mr Domino's personally tweaked download of ENBSeries. I also downloaded Vality's palette, but I don't use that all the time, because not every environment should be green. I should make separate, more subtle palettes to use for different areas, like in WoW, where for instance Ashenvale has a pink palette, and Feralas has a green one.

Other graphical improvements

I also installed several more texture replacers. I started with Darknut's Creature Textures for Morrowind, which preserve the same look as the original creatures, but with higher resolution and more fine details. Then I overwrote some of those with some of Connary's creature textures, which sometimes depart from the original design (for one, I chose not to install the zombie textures, as I found them a little lacking in character compared to Darknut's). I do, however, like his pack guar textures better! Also installed most of the rest of his region-specific texture replacers, such as the West Gash (which replaces that ugly cobblestone I was complaining about before), the Grazelands, and House Telvanni. Others, as well. Also installed Slof's Better Beasts to improve the Khajiit and Argonian races.

Dwarven spelunking

Today, I finally explored that dwemer ruin that was so interesting to me before. And coincidentally, before I did so, I followed up with Caius Cosades first, to get my first "orders" from him, due to a nagging feeling that perhaps I should start something of the main quest. As it turned out, the first thing I had to do was investigate those very ruins, which are called Arkngthand, to retrieve a particular item inside. I'll keep this limited to a general overview.

The place was lightly populated with a small number of low-level bandits, which were no trouble, but the loot was excellent -- mainly items to furnish my home with! Lots of pretty ornate dwarven bowls, pitchers, and goblets! There were also a lot of rusty dwarven cogs, which were worth 100 drakes, but weigh 50 pounds each, and I don't recommend bothering with them unless you've made one of those strength-enhancing spells I mentioned before.

The ruins were very interesting and mysterious. The dwarves obviously had a rather advanced industrial-age technology in the works, with lots of brass or copper metalworking, and probably chose the location for this building due to the heavy volcanic activity in the region, to harness its geothermal power (I saw many steam pipes around), and it was lit with buzzing gas-discharge lamps (probably sodium vapour).

It was very strangely laid out, but that's pretty common for a dungeon-crawl, where the intent is usually to lead a player on a particular path. There was separate section of it that was sealed behind a locked door that was probably meant to keep out any players who were following the main quest immediately, and wouldn't have been able to unlock it. I used Ondusi's Open Door, which worked fine. But I don't recommend going in there unless you're ready for a fight, because there are ghosts and three kinds of dwarven robots back there, some of which were very tough and killed me several times. I managed to lock one behind a door (using Fenrick's Doorjam -- I thought that would have to come in handy some time!), and the other I killed after using all my mana, several potions, many of my rings (for offense and for healing) and my Hellfire scroll. Big problem with robots -- my health-damaging and health-draining spells have no effect on them, and those are my most powerful spells. I suspect they're a bit resistant to fire, which comprise my second most powerful spells. I need to make a new level of shock spell, I think.

I was tempted to keep the special quest item for decoration purposes, but alas, I think I'll have to continue on with the main quest. Maybe I can find a duplicate of it somewhere, or get it back later.

Live Writer

On a slightly different note, I noticed that in the latest Windows Update, Microsoft was pushing their Live Essentials package, which included a number of things that already came with Vista, such as Calendar, Photo Gallery, Mail, and Messenger, so I never bothered with it. But I had read somewhere that the Live versions now included some new additional features that the bundled Vista versions didn't have, so I took a little look, and noticed that it included something called "Writer". I was a little curious what that was, even though I use OpenOffice for my writing needs, so I looked it up, and found that it's a writing program specifically aimed at bloggers. Well, I'm a blogger, and I saw it supported Blogspot posts, which is what I'm using here, so I decided to give it a try. Blogger's post composition window leaves a lot to be desired. It's tiny, can't be resized, and its buttons don't include header formatting, and when you insert a picture, it always inserts it at the top of the post, and you have to move it manually. This Writer promises better WYSIWYG post editing, using the format of the blog itself.

So I tried it out, though I was put off by it asking for my Blogspot user name and password, a bit of research failed to come up with any security issues or concerns, so I went ahead and did it. My impression isn't that great. It formats the text too small, and I can't find any options to increase the zoom factor. It restricts the text to a column meant to represent the main content area of my blog, but doesn't include the CSS wrapper or the menu bar on the side, so it's just wasted space, and without the wrapper, the text is too close to the edge, making it ugly. I was expecting a bit more. I'm already using an external application (FCKeditor) to compose my blog posts, full-screen, with full WYSIWYG buttons, and it's serving my purposes perfectly well, aside from the picture uploads, which I still do through the Blogger interface. I may play around with Writer a little more, but for now I doubt I'll be switching.

Neverwinter Nights 1

The last thing I expected to happen after playing Neverwinter Nights 2 was that I might also get into Neverwinter Nights 1 after my initial lackluster impression of it.

I had tried NWN1 briefly a few years ago, and I was not inspired to continue. I played the original campaign from the beginning up until escaping from the besieged Academy, and it was an incredibly boring experience (not at all like the delightful starting experience of its sequel), with a headstrong companion who I couldn't control and who kept engaging with far-off enemies when I needed a break. It had a radial menu (good for gamepad, pointless for PC) with monochromatic abstract icons that didn't even tell you what the options were until you moused over them. Icons are for buttons. Menus want text. And monochrome icons are another offense to UI design. The priority for UI design is function, ease of use, and clear differentiation between options, not a unification where everything looks like everything else.

The graphics, as I've mentioned before, were from that transitional period when publishers stopped accepting 2D-based games, and so every game had to be 3D, even though the hardware of the time required them to use a frighteningly low number of polygons and extremely low-rez texture maps to support a wide enough customer base, regardless of whether or not there were enough skilled artists out there who could make good-looking art under such restrictions. If there were, most games' budgets weren't being used to hire them.

All these things kept me from getting into it at the time. But I couldn't help noticing that it remains a very popular game, and has a very large number of free campaign/quest mods to download (around 6000?) -- far more than NWN2. I found many interesting-sounding and good-looking NWN1 mods by accident while searching for mods for NWN2.

Also, when I first tried the game, I was tending to play it with the camera pretty close to the action, and with the characters clearly in view, where all their flaws were most evident, but in my recent playing of NWN2, I'd been generally playing with the camera zoomed far out and above, in the kind of pseudo-isometric perspective to which I've grown accustomed in the Infinity Engine games, which I hadn't experienced until after my first brush with NWN1. So if I tried playing NWN1 with a zoomed-out camera like that, I reasoned it would make the blocky meshes and low-rez textures irrelevant.

So, when GOG had a sale recently that included Neverwinter Nights (diamond edition), I succumbed to the temptation and bought it, because it was a pretty good gamble that there would be enough enjoyable content to warrant the cost at that price. I ended up pleasantly surprised.

Mods

Happily, I also found numerous mods to improve various aspects. First I should state here (in case there's any confusion) that there are two different meanings for the word "mod" in the context of gaming that I use here (not counting a third meaning, which refers to forum moderators). The kind of mod I'm about to talk about here, which is short for "modification", which modifies or changes aspects of a game, and then there's the kind of mod that's short for "module", which comes from the old modular adventure packs (originally called "modules") that were sold for D&D, which were designed to be modularly added to fit into anyone's already-running gaming campaign. I'll be talking about both here, and I'll try to reserve my use of the shortened "mod" to only mean "modification", and try to remember to use the word "module" to refer to anything that adds new adventures or quests to the game.

Amethyst Dragon has several mods that improve the UI by colourising the icons (including scroll icons), as well as making many parts of the UI transparent. I need to figure out which files do what on that last one, though, so I can disable some bits of the transparency. I like the transparent quickbar and the no-background compass, but some of the UI shouldn't be transparent (such as text boxes).

There were also a few head packs that improved the character design, a shader mod that adds some better lighting effects, bloom, and better colour saturation, and an environment mod that improves some of the geometry and textures. However, managing all these mods and dealing with conflicts arising from everything going into a single "override" folder promised to quickly become a headache, so I looked for a mod manager like I used for Oblivion, Morrowind, Dragon Age, and even the Infinity Engine games via WeiDU. Surprisingly, I couldn't find any. There were a couple of override managers I found, but they seemed to work by making backups of entire different sets of the override folder, instead of keeping track of which files are associated with which mod and tracking conflicts and such.

I ended up repurposing the Morrowind Plugin Manager for use in NWN. I needed to have a dummy "morrowind.exe" file in my NWN folder to get it to set up its directory structure, but after that it worked without complaint. This allows me to install and uninstall any override mod without having to remember which files it installed. The only inconvenience is that I need to temporarily rename the override folder to "data files" any time I want to install or uninstall something, and then rename it back to "override", because that's where Morrowind Plugin Manager installs things, and I couldn't find any way to change that, or fool it with a shortcut to the override folder. This also means that I still have to install certain mods manually, if they include files that need to go somewhere other than in the override folder.

I also needed to "prepare" the mods I wanted to install, by having each mod in a single ZIP or RAR file, with any extra folders removed, and any readme files renamed to something unique to that mod so that they didn't get overwritten.

For some reason, mod pages on the Neverwinter Vault are often full of multiple revisions of each mod, in multiple parts (for patches or optional components, or other reasons), sometimes with the same files duplicated in multiple archive formats, and rarely any explanation as to which files are actually necessary to get it running. If the Vault doesn't allow revising file descriptions, I suppose I can understand it, but if they insist on keeping old versions on the page for the sake of maintaining download counts, there should be some kind of clear separation between the latest and the older ones.

After dealing with all that mess, though, it's a convenient install and uninstall. I could get around the folder renaming and override-only issue if I placed my entire NWN folder inside another folder called "data files", and then included the "override" folder in the directory structure in the RAR files, but I'm not going to go that far.

Content

The GOG bundle came with the original campaign (of course), the toolset, the expansions Shadows of Undrentide and Hordes of the Underdark (two names that can be easily confused for new players), as well as premium modules Kingmaker, Shadowguard, and Witch's Wake. (All of the screenshots in this post are from the Kingmaker module, with various improvement mods applied.) There were also some nice wallpaper images included. Most of them I'd seen on the web already, but these are in resolutions higher than I've seen elsewhere.

"Premium modules" appear to be what we would today call "DLC", and it also appears to have been an early experiment on Bioware's part, because several of them were made with sequels in mind, and had cliffhanger endings that were never resolved. More of these premium modules were in the works, but Bioware apparently changed its mind about publishing them, and canceled the rest of the projects for reasons unknown to me. Even stranger is that there are three premium modules that were published, but were not included in the pack and are no longer being sold anywhere.

I've heard it said that I should look at the NWN original campaign as if it were an afterthought; just a kind of large demo module for what they were really selling, which was the toolset for making your own modules, combined with the multiplayer component for conducting DM-led D&D sessions as you would in a pen and paper session, except with a group of people online in a shared 3D world.

I'm more interested in single-player modules, myself, since playing this kind of game in realtime without the ability to pause or take turns is not at all the kind of experience I enjoy (such as missing a turn because I was trying to find a scroll in my inventory to cast). But with that perspective on the OC in mind, I figured the premium single-player modules would be a good choice to try for a more enjoyable experience than the OC had been. I started with the one called Kingmaker.

Kingmaker

The word "kingmaker", which I think I first heard in the movie Being There, describes an individual with considerable influence who remains backstage while pulling strings in order to get a personally chosen and groomed candidate into a position of power, possibly with the intent of controlling things from the shadows.

I tend to think of Merlin of Arthurian legend this way. Though it might not be how it was intended, I imagine that when Merlin embedded a sword into a stone and declared that only the one who could pull the sword out of the stone would become king, he must have been in full control of whether that sword would budge at all, and for whom. The people would surely never accept a wizard for a king, but why not a man chosen through a feat of strength? It would probably have been easier to get popular support for the idea that way, since history is full of kings who became king through brute force. But he tricked them all by allowing the sword to be pulled out of the stone by the child Arthur, a boy that he could influence and shape to rule as he wanted him to, while he sat in the background as court wizard. That's the kind of "kingmaker" that appears in this premium module.

As a player, you find yourself raised from the dead by a shaft of light who tells you that he wants you to gather up some allies and win an election to become Lady or Lord of a local fortified town. Mr Shaft then manifests himself as a magic talking weapon to help guide you along this chosen path. You then have to choose only two of your former four companions to be resurrected alongside you, which is a choice made more difficult than simply choosing them based on their classes due to the fact that some of them are more eager to live than others. I ended up choosing Kaidala the nymph druid even though she had fully embraced her death, because there was a monster waiting for her spirit to be released so it could torture and devour her. Calibast was an easier choice, since he was very friendly, clearly wanted to live, and I needed a tank.

This module takes the abstraction of buildings to an extreme when it comes to the dungeons, or at least that's one possible interpretation of why almost all dungeons outside of town are represented by small shacks. It's possible that I'm meant to understand that all of these shacks are simply protective structures around staircases that lead underground, where the actual dungeons are located. But some of them don't lend themselves well to that explanation. For instance, a ranger's dwelling inside the trunk of a large tree turns out to be a standard-looking (and very large) house on the inside, like a TARDIS. [Note: the windows pictured here are not part of the original tileset.]

The companions generally behaved nicely with the basic management commands "attack nearest", "guard me", and "stand your ground." They had a good amount of interaction and personality, too, with some nice lighthearted dialogue, some joke conversations, and even a romance option, which was a pleasant surprise.

In fact, there was quite a bit of personality all over this module, from most of the NPCs. I especially liked the personality and voice of Alias, which prevented me from hating her for the issues surrounding her. One was that if I took her offer to escort me to a quest location, and had her stand by to escort me back when I was finished, it made it extremely difficult to move around the surrounding area, because the game kept automatically targeting her and making me run to her and initiate her "Are you ready to go back to the keep?" dialogue. I was able to override it by repeatedly clicking on the spot where I wanted to go, and I could have sent her back to the keep without me, but that would have aggravated one of the other issues.

The other issue is one of design. You can't complete all of the quests in the module without some very careful planning and workarounds, because there's a vote to be had, and you can only delay it 3 times, after which the election has to take place, and all other quests are closed off for good. Walking around town, which is necessary for some quests, leads you past certain spawn points where Alias appears to tell you about the vote. It's possible to avoid those spawn points except when you go to the area of the keep where the guild hall is located, because there's a spawn point there that you can't avoid when you try to leave. I hated having to game the system in that way, but I really didn't want to have to play through the module 2 or 3 times just to finish those quests.

There were numerous dungeons to crawl through, some of which had some puzzles or unique features. The manticore room was a notable instance. You have to lure a manticore into a gas chamber and lock it inside, to kill it without damaging its pelt. It was a bit difficult, though, because most of the times I ran in to get its attention, it stood stock still without pursuing me, and just shot darts at me, which tended to kill me in one strike. I can't tell what it was that I may have done differently that got it to chase me, but once it did, it all went smoothly.

Those were the only bugs I recall, and the rest of the module was great fun, and a very positive experience. I enjoyed dealing with all the traps in the dungeons (which can be recovered as well as simply disarmed, giving you a free trap!), and experiencing the variety of creatures and architecture. A couple of the dungeons had riddles and puzzles as well, with secret doors and environmental hazards to either disable or attempt to use against my enemies. There were some interesting, non-dungeon-oriented side quests as well, that could be solved through character skills like persuasion (there were many skill check opportunities throughout the module), and an interesting mystery in which you can get involved if you decide to purchase a haunted house. Some of the quest text didn't quite match up with the locations, such as referring to an unseen power of the ghost on a nonexistent second floor of the house, but that's a tiny niggle in an excellent questline, which is nice and lengthy, involves many NPCs, and can be solved in at least 3 or 4 significantly different ways.

This module proved to me that NWN1 can be just as much fun as NWN2. Next I'll have to talk about the Wyvern Crown of Cormyr.

A few more screenshots