I love this game.
However,
I have a list of grievances I want to share with the world AKA a list of things I would Change (even if sometimes I don't know how exactly I'd change them). Some are because of the engine. Others are issues with the official campaigns. All are things I wish were different.
Skills
Discipline is an atrocious skill point sink for martial classes who are skill point straved. Just make it an AB opposed roll or something. Anything but this crap.
I kinda like the idea of Parry even though it doesn't exist in d&d. Opens up the possibility of a duelist character or defensive melee character. Implementation sucks unfortunately and I wouldn't bother trying to fix it. It's also buggy. I also think that it doesn't work during the riposte animation so it's not as good against groups of enemies. I've only found a use for it in the horrible bloated dire spider encounters of the OC. More on that later. It's probably best to do away with both.
Appraise I'm ambivalent about. If it has to exist, I'd probably just remove the die roll and make it the same for every merchant. Like even if you don't savescum, it's still optimal for you to compare every merchant and I'm against game design choices that make the optimal way to play a slog. Not only would you have to manually compare merchant prices because the game chooses to be opaque about the appraise rolls for some reason, if the merchant is not at a convenient location you'd have to walk there every time. I can see some people disagreeing with making it the same for all merchants. My reasoning is the following: yes it doesn't make sense that every merchant has the same prices but it also doesn't make sense that Aribeth gives you 2000gp for saving the entire city which is about the cost of one (1) suit of full plate armour. She also keeps ripping you off. Thank you Aribeth. None of it makes sense, so might as well make it convenient.
Pickpocket... should do something. At all. Also, hot take here, I don't think that skills like this one should work the same in a video game as they do for pen and paper. Skills like that work better when there's a dm who can react to your elaborate pickpocket plans and improvise the fallout of a failed check to be something better and more interesting than "and now this npc and all its plot critical faction are hostile to you forever". Pickpocket can have very dramatic consequences if you get caught and the game is not ready to handle it. What I would do: No rolls, no savescumming incentive, just a dc. If your skill is higher you pickpocket. If not, you get a message that you can't do it. Add a few scripted encounters where you might have to distract someone with dialogue to pickpocket (gothic 2 style!) or stuff like that. For encounters like that where the consequences of failure are more defined we can have rolls too!
I'm not a big fan of the persuade/intimidate/bluff split. Stuff like that is fine for P&P but in a videogame it just means you get a couple of each of these checks per campaign instead of many checks of a generalised social skill. Skills should not get so granular for a barely used mechanic.
Generally I wish skills mattered more. I love F:NV's way of adding skill checks to dialogue choices. It would suit a game like NWN a lot I think.
Encounter design
Do away with damage sponges in general. The OC especially has a pattern of throwing mini-bosses at you with incredibly inflated HP numbers. I don't see the point. It's either boring, or if you're a newby with a suboptimal build you'll do fine for most of the game up to the point where you find your first bloated dire spider (100xp!) where you'll hit a brick wall. This damage sponge philosophy of difficulty also affects caster encounters where difficulty is seen as "sorc nukes you with damage spells and facetanks a few greatsword power attacks" instead of "fragile mage who buffs allies and strategically disables enemies".
I think I know what they're thinking. "We can't have our cool boss/miniboss just get one shot by a lucky crit!" All I have to say to that is "welcome to d&d". Besides, if you're a caster focused on save-or-die/save-or-suck spells, you still one shot everything, including the final boss who is not at all ready for the timestop & horrid wilting scroll combo and dies before the music starts, so once again, all this design choice managed to do is make martial classes suck. More.
Outside the OC, J'nah is particularly egregious. The thingy Tymofarrar gives you is just not good enough if you're a melee martial character (unless you're a paladin in which case you can mop the floor with anyone who looks at you the wrong way). This sucks because she's the required boss of chapter 1 and Tymofarrar is the optional boss, but you get an I-win-button for the optional dragon and for her you just get moderately-damaging-dust. Seriously, my fighter just couldn't win without cheese. Even when the gnolls bother to show up (sometimes they just don't) they can't kill her! Ugh! J'nah! Just the very mention of the name fills me with bile!
Boss cutscenes
I know devs want to have a cool cutscene before boss fights. What I want is to be buffed during the boss fights. Please don't force a cutscene before the fight that wastes buff time. If you make it mandatory at least make the buff timer stop counting during the cutscene. OC and NWN1 in general doesn't really do that but NWN2 does it sooo much that I couldn't resist mentioning it even though the list is about NWN1.
General unresponsiveness
I've selected a target and my character just waits and wastes a round stuck like an idiot. Especially annoying with enemy sorcerers where I know that if I'd just hit them on time they'd lose their spell. Instead, they blast me twice before my char decides to respond. Worse for ranged chars. Sometimes they decide that they just don't feel like attacking at all. These problems are probably baked in the engine so deep that it would require a rewrite to fix but I can dream.
Party xp penalty
Less xp for summons is bad. Class features shouldn't cost xp. I'd get rid of henchman penalty too. Let people do solo play for bragging rights, no need to incentivise it. The henchman penalty is more reasonable I guess, since encounters can change depending on party size. In that case only henchmen should count, not summons. Summons are class features, they should not be penaltised, or change encounter size. Or should they? hmm.
Party size
Dear god OC, let me have more henchmen. Why just one at a time. Give me at least two! I mean druids can have a small army with them from level one. Why not just let me hire as many henchmen too? Scratch what I said before, if you want to impose arbitrary party limits I don't see why summons don't count. As it stands I only ever take Tomi with me for every class except rogue. Here comes halfling death! Which brings us to
More follower commands
Ok since for some reason I can't control a party at all, at least give me more commands. My top picks would be to choose attack target and a retreat command. No Tomi I don't want you to fucking tank. No, just go away, step back. No don't provoke 8 AoO while running around to hit a random guy on the other side of the enemy blob we're fighting. NO! You stupid dead motherfucker.
Attacks of Opportunity
AoO implementation needs to change in many ways. For one I hate it when I position my melee next to a caster to threaten them only for a random 1HD skeleton to run around, provoke an AoO, which results in the mage spell not provoking a AoO and my char getting blasted in the face. So it should somehow be player choice to execute an AoO probably by having the option to disable them or lock on an enemy and only allow AoO against them for example. Secondly the AoO that are results of running just break the game. Sometimes they just trigger randomly when you run to attack an enemy, other times your character is sitting still in the wrong spot and enemies get AoOs against them. It's just a mess. IMO if the AI can't handle it, and it can't, it's already a dealbreaker, but it seems the engine doesn't have that tight a grip on them either, so I guess I'd just disable movement based AoO. Come to think of it, the AI can't handle ranged attack or casting AoO as well so maybe that stuff should be toggleable for single player campaigns.
Better caster follower control
Caster followers are so completely useless. They just start casting a spell and give up in the middle of it. Boddyknock just looks at me uselessly, does half a casting animation and stops, until he dies. Why does he die? Because when he decides to finally cast he makes sure to do it in the middle of 8 angry orcs who are trying to kill him and given 8 simultaneous AoO they do. I don't know if this happens just on my machine but I reinstalled and it persists. Would be great if they cast on command.
Skill allocation
Wouldn't it be great if that useless "recommended" button actually raised the skills you have already chosen to raise instead of sticking with the initial package bullcrap? It would also be great if the raised skills were sorted by ranks so you can find them fast when you level up.
Dance of Death
While I prefer this to NWN2 where they just sit still and pummel each other it has some minor annoyances. Sometimes my char insists on trying to sidestep in an unwanted direction. A more major annoyance is how the bigger weapon/person retreats from the smaller one. In a way it makes sense; A halfling with a dagger needs to get close before striking. But IMHO, said halfling should also take a step back from the greatsword too when not attacking. In fact they should take more steps back than forward. A halforc with a greatsword should threaten a bigger area, and enemires should generally retreat from that instead of just getting closer. It creates weird situations where my barbarian keeps retreating from small enemies and my favourite: Tomi just pushing far into the enemy lines with his little knife and getting surrounded while my tank keeps retreating. Tomi then, of course, dies.
Arcane spell failure
I'd love no arcane spell failure out of combat. I think it would make for a great quality of life change. I wanna buff myself without the goofiness of stripping naked (or wearing clothes ok) and taking up quickslots for armour and shields. Even worse for HotU where you can't buy cheap clothes to wear so you literally have to be wandering about the streets naked. We can't have that. Most affected by this is the
Bard
I wanna love bard but the aforementioned lack of arcane spell failure out of combat makes some of my favourite self buffing warrior bard builds annoying to play. Also, if only they had a few more skill points. Also also, if only they had rogue weapons. It's weird that I have to spend a feat to have a rapier bard, but no feat for a tower shield + morning star bard. Not that I don't thnik the latter is cool. It just feels it's not the vibe the devs intended. For example if you go for the morning star self buffing warrior build, you'll discover that a pretty good 3rd level spell, keen edge, is worthless for you, because it's for slashing weapons. Pure bard only gets sickles! Feels somehow inappropriate idk. I suppose it's because when I think red mage I think rapier. Bard would be my fav class but those minor things bother me. Not the fault of NWN, this is all on 3E.
Ranged combat
Non arcane archer ranged combat is a pain. It's almost unviable. Slings should have strength bonus applied. I mean thrown weapons do and a sling is supposed to amplify that, so maybe for slings it should be applied like two handed weapons! Tbh all non mechanical ranged weapons should be mighty, with the amount being dependent on their quality. It might also be reasonable to enable power attack for these too. I guess maybe crossbows should have some dex bonus applied in order to make them viable? Not sure about that one. This, again, is on 3E.
Inventory management
I like keeping my inventory tidy. It would be great if I could designate areas for items so they can get auto sorted to an extent. The lack of this feature makes swapping items with quickslots a pretty messy afair. I'd also love for a DA2 type junk system. Please let me mark my crap as junk and the go to a merchant press the sell all junk button and be done with it. This whole click and drag or double click or right click and pull to the right system just makes my hand hurt. There's just so many junk. I guess I can't hold this against NWN either. Inventory ui is hard and this game is old.
Remaaaaains
You know how when you kill an enemy you have to wait for it to slooowly fade out and the wait for the remains to sloooooowly fade it? Yeah that sucks.
Moonwalking
Sometimes when you click at a location behind yor char, they don't bother changing direction to move there. Ok maybe this one should stay. It wouldn't be NWN without it.
HotU undermountain entrance switch
That damned switch has wasted a lot of my time. I'm tired of wanting to try a new build, rush through the beginning only to get pushed out of bounds when trying to flip the switch! After that the only options are either Relic of the Reaper or Ragequit!
Sound balancing
Best seen at J'nah's introductory cutscene. It's so shitty! There's that obnoxious sound effect that keeps playing in the background (SoU does that a lot) and the voices are so quiet I can barely hear them. Yes, I changed the volume balances where voices are 1.0 and everything else 0.1. It changed very little.
Loot
I guess this one has to be mentioned in a list like this. You know how it goes. You open one of those chests that are near impossible to break after removing or facetanking a deadly trap on it, only to find that it contains 2 arrows inside. It should objectively be changed but that would feel like losing an old friend.
I still remember that chest in the peninsula district. Tomi couldn't open it. I marked it on my map with a marker. Came back a few levels later. There was a bullet inside.
