With the recent disasters of storytelling from BioWare called Dragon Age II and Mass Effect 3, I felt it was time I returned to the older RPGs they did where the stories made sense, even if they were cliche and not terribly imaginative. I have never finished the second expansion to Neverwinter Nights: Hordes of the Underdark. I got to the drow city once and started running around there, but like I often do, found another shiny game to play and quit playing NWN partway through. I still have the discs and I bought the diamond edition from GOG, so I figured why not go back and finish that. I would get to hang out with my old buddy Deekin, could create my own character (character building in DND is an obsession of mine), and could have a good time overall.

Crash on start up. A bad start of course. That was weird. I was able to play the game before, although I do not believe I have tried since I changed my graphics card. I thought that maybe it was GOG or the diamond edition, so I dug out my discs and installed things from there. I tried it out after each installation was done. My hopes soared when version 1.10 launched without crashing. In hindsight I should have checked the frame rate but I did not. Then I installed Shadows of Undrentide, the first expansion, which updated the game to version 1.30. It would no longer launch without crashing. When I updated to the final version of the game, I ran into the same problems I had with the GOG download version.

I hit google and started combing through threads at GOG and the BW social site reading about all of the problems people are having with NWN. Apparently, it does not play well with newer hardware and/or drivers. Many people have no problem, but many also cannot get it to run or run well. I followed directions for all sorts of potential solutions:

• Played with graphical settings one by one
• Played with sound settings one by one
• Played with the .ini files
• Starting the game from the .exe instead of the launcher
• Tried turning on compatibility options (limited since I'm on XP)
• Tried turning off advanced features of my graphics card
• Tried updating the drivers
• Changing the installation directory to the default old game instead of the GOG one

I found two solutions to make the game start up at least. Putting an old OpenGL dll in the folder and/or turning off all hardware acceleration will allow it to start. It was trial and error to get the first to work. Some versions gave me a blue screen of death when I started the game. I got it to work, but sadly I ran into another problem: the game runs at 4 frames per second at most. The main menu was running reasonably fast so I assumed it was something to do with the background animation when I clicked "new game" but that turned out to be wrong. Everything after that point ran that slowly.

This led to a whole new array of trying things. In addition to the above being done all over again, I tried

• Downgrading drivers to ones people claimed work (disaster)
• Turning off hardware acceleration did nothing to the frame rate
• A user-made work around for nvidia, even though I have an amd card
• Using a "fix" that involved just turning on the toolset and running a module
• Updating the game to version 1.68 instead of the final 1.69

None of it worked. No matter what I did, I had between 2 and 4 fps. To this point in time I have spent probably 8-10 hours researching and trying things to get this game to work. Sadly, it just doesn't seem possible. From my reading, it's a combination of several factors. My computer hardware is a problem; in particular, my graphics card. The card is newer and runs new drivers that probably are not compliant with whatever OpenGL code NWN is using. It's doing its best to make do, but it's not enough. I also have an older multicore processor, which NWN doesn't like, and, like I said, am still on windows xp. These aren't THE problem, but they could be exacerbating it. If I had a newer cpu and upgraded to windows 7, one of the fixes might work. Then again, they might not. Seems that amd/ati cards have the most problems, but nvidia uses haven't escaped some of the trouble.

So now I am left with being unable to play NWN in any appreciable form until new drivers come out, at which point I can try again, or I upgrade computer parts in the hope that some combination will at least give me double digit frame rates. In the meantime, I have to look elsewhere for my non-sucky story-based RPGs. Maybe I will go back and install version 1.0 and see if that works. Then I'd at least have the OC, even if it is not terribly interesting. It's a world to explore and stuff to do. I am afraid my hopes will be dashed once again though. The funny thing is that I can run Baldur's Gate, an older infinity engine game, with very few issues and can run NWN2. It's just this one game that seems to be giving me grief.

UPDATE: Version 1.10 of the game works. I get 150-170 fps and it doesn't crash at start up. Updating beyond that causes the problems, so something in the future updates changed how the game works and that is the problem. Only wish I knew what. Of course, this leaves me without a lot of features, such as the expansion packs, but I'll take playing only the OC over not playing it at all.