On Neverwinter Nights, Part 2

Part 1 Here

We're assembled. Despite busy schedules and copious distractions, Harry, Tim and I have managed the not inconsiderable feat of all being online at the same time. A probable trio of classes have been decided upon (Fighter, Sorcerer, Cleric), builds examined, stats pored over, arcane D&D nonsense chuckled at.

Zhaine: I need to prologue

The norm is to zip through the tutorial/prologue section of the game solo, which boosts you to level three, before joining up for the main campaign.

I boot up the game. And it happens: I crash.

Zhaine: Er. . .
Zhaine: I don't want to alarm anyone
Zhaine: BUT IT'S NOT FUCKING WORKING

-

Sometimes we think silly, stupid, naive thoughts and make idiotic assumptions. For instance, when I was in primary school I used to think that girls weed from their bums. Equal to this childish notion in naivety (and subsequent shock and disappointment), was the ignorant belief I foolishly held that a fully patched and re-released download copy of Neverwinter Nights, which had appeared to work perfectly a week ago, would load without crashing on my perfectly standard, stable Windows 7 PC. Oh the innocence of youth.

Yes, despite working fine when testing character builds at an earlier date, for some reason Neverwinter wouldn't load that evening. Then it loaded but the mouse jerked around the screen unusably. Then it loaded by was strangely jerky in game, sometimes crashing after five to ten minutes. Then it wouldn't load again.

Reinstalling the game, to my SSD and then hard drive, reinstalling all my drivers, installing the critical rebuild patch, all seemed to do nothing to make the game stable. This was the one aspect of our teenage NWN experience I had hoped not to return to: the aspect where it's a buggy, unstable, illogical piece of shit that refuses to work. Eventually I had to tell the others to stop wasting their evenings waiting for my computer and Neverwinter install to make friends.

I believe it's a sound issue, as the pattern of jerkiness in game seems to differ depending on the sound mode in the game options. More recently I've acquired and installed a new sound card, but have yet to work up the courage to see if the problems are solved.

Partly this is because we haven't had time to push on with our play through anyway: Harry has a busy new job and Tim has been moving house, while I've had something of a disrupted April as well, so apart from the time we set aside for our regular Monday coop group (with more people than just the three of us), we haven't had a great deal of opportunity to press on.

Therefore we're on hold for now. Tim has moved but still has to settle in and get internet access, at which point Diablo 3 looms menacingly over all of our free time. But once the time is right, we plan to return, hopefully soon and hopefully triumphantly, to Neverwinter's streets and dungeons. Just not quite yet.