Neverwinter Nights: Shadows of Undrentide

Neverwinter Nights: Shadows of Undrentide is the first expansion pack for Neverwinter Nights, one of the best RPGs ever made. Unlike the original game, Shadows of Undrentide was co-developed by BioWare and FloodGate Entertainment, a studio comprised of former Looking Glass Studios employees.For your information, FloodGate's Rick Ernst, the lead designer on Shadows of Undrentide, was a senior designer on Deep Cover, a first-person sneaker espionage game set in the cold war that was under development when Looking Glass closed down, Doug Wike, senior artist on Shadows of Undrentide, was an artist on the Ultima Underworld series and Kemal Amarasingham did much of the audio production for the Thief series and System Shock 2. There's no doubt they are pretty experienced team.

The story starts in a little frontier town called Hilltop in the icy wilderness of the Silver Marches. You begin the game as the student of Drogan, an elderly dwarven magic-user that's a member of the Harpers. One day, a group of kobolds attacks the makeshift school, incapacitating Drogan and stealing a mystical artifact. As you pursue the attackers, you unravel a larger story which is divided into two chapters and an interlude. That takes you from Hilltop to the Anouroch Desert to a magical floating city.

In terms of basic gameplay, the expansion pack is pretty much the same as the original. You can expect a point-and-click role-playing game that has you running from location to location, killing lots of monsters along the way. The Prestige classes are perhaps the biggest change in character development. There's the Black Guard, who is of course essentially the anti-paladin - the evil dark knight, the Arcane Archer, an archer (almost like Legolas from the Two Towers) who uses magic to infuse his arrows, the Blackguard (fallen Aribeth), the Harper Scout - special wizard/archer mix, the Assassin who is the master of dealing quick, lethal blows, and also excel at infiltration and disguise, and the Shadowdancer who is master in disguising themselves, Rogues, Bards and Monks make excellent Shadow dancers.

Overall Shadows of Undrentide features three new tilesets (Desert, Ruins, Snowy Rural), five new Prestige classes (Arcane Archer, Assassin, Blackguard, Harper Scout, Shadowdancer), 14 new monsters including Basilisk, Cockatrice, Female Ice Giant, Female Fire Giant, Gorgon, Formian (giant ant-people), Medusa, Sphinx, Stinger (xenophobic scorpion-people), Wormling, and four others, over 50 new spells including Acid Splash, Amplify, Aura of Glory, Balagorn's Iron Horn, Blood Frenzy, Displacement, Drown, Inflict Minor Wounds, Inflict Critical Wounds, Magic Fang, Mass Camouflage, One with the Land, Quillfire, Shield, True Strike, Wounding Whispers and five Bigby's Hand Spells, over 30 new Feats (Bullheaded, Improved Initiative, Luck of Heroes, Silver Palm, Snake Blood, Thug, Blind Fighting, Circle Kick, Divine Might, Great Cleave, Rapid Reload, Spring Attack, Archery, Arcane Defense, Extra Music, Lingering Song, Greater Spell Focus and Greater Spell Penetration), two new skills including Tumble and Appraise, new Companions including Fairy Dragon Familiar for Sorcerers, Wizards and also new Animal Companion for Druids and Rangers, Grenade-like weapons (Holy Water Flasks, Choking Powder, Caltrops, and Projectile Traps), 11 new voice pack to pick from, 6 male and 5 female, and finally tons of new scripting abilities in the toolset (including a completely new treasure generation system customizable by area, monster, or monster type or commands to do some fancy camera work).

Although I like this expansion, the additions made in the Shadows of Undrentide are not as many as I was hoping for. Firstly, the new adventure is not integrated into the original, secondly the 20 level experience cap was not raised (it looks like the level cap is going to be raised in the next expansion), also to some, it may come as a disappointment that the game hasn't changed visually. Well, at least there are new Prestige classes, new monsters, new weapons, new spells, new feats, and new skills. Also your henchmen options (you're still limited to direct control over just one character) are more interesting this time out. You can finally access your henchmen's inventories, so you can transfer items in and out of their pack. Not so bad after all.

It took me around 32 hours to complete the campaign (thanks Ivanek for help), that's fairly amount for an expansion. In my opinion, anyone who was a fan of Neverwinter Nights, and is still interested in playing the same type of adventure again will enjoy this new expansion. The various added features definitely add to the game's replay value. However, if you were unsatisfied with Neverwinter Nights, then the additions made in this expansion will probably not change your opinion.

System Requirements Minimum: Pentium II 450 MHz or AMD K6- 450 MHz, 128 MB RAM, 1.2GB HDD space, CD-ROM Drive 8x, TNT32meg class OpenGL 1.2 compliant video card, any Windows 98/2000/ME/XP compliant soundcard, 56k Modem for Multiplayer
Recommended: Pentium III 800 MHz or Athlon 800 MHz, 256MB RAM, 2GB HDD space, CD-ROM Drive 8x, NVIDIA GeForce 2/ATI Radeon, Windows 98/2000/ME/XP DirectX certified sound card, Broadband Connection for multiplayer