by Jody - September 27, 2003

Faerun is an enduring fantasy world, loved by fans ever-hungry for more novels and games set amid its borders. While writers like R.A. Salvatore gave us memorable characters such as scimitar-wielding Drizzt Do'Urden, it wasn't until Bioware gave us Baldur's Gate that gamers got a top-quality invitation to the lands he calls home. After three outings in that series, last year's Neverwinter Nights arrived with a new game engine to massive critical and commercial success. After completely changing our D&D world, Atari releases an expansion to NWN � entitled Neverwinter Nights: Shadows of Undrentide.

Great additional storyline!

During the twelve months that NWN was around, we saw thousands of player-made additions generated using the title�s bundled aurora toolkit. We saw some of the greatest modules created, as well as characters role-playing in them. We also saw thousands of characters entering in dueling tournaments as well as the single player game�s breathtaking storyline. Neverwinter Nights certainly changed the world of Dungeons of Dragons for us, but how does NWN: Shadows of Undrentide rank upon this great feat? It adds onto the excitement! Shadows of Undrentide features an entire new single-player quest, four new classes, a stockpile of unseen spells, and a legion of fresh villains to meet in battle! Not enough to satisfy your expansion pack taste? How about three new locations illustrated by snow, deserts, and ruin city tile-sets. (Also available in the construction kit or quest designers to mess with.) Still not enough? What about high-level weapons, bug fixes, and tweaks to the game system? For $30, this game is well worth it.

Now it�s time to detail this game. Undrentide is designed to be embarked upon by beginner characters, set as it is in a place distant from the original game's action. The Silver Marches are a wild place, far from the shadows of Neverwinter's spires, but they are home to Master Drognan, a retired dwarf lacking his former drive for riches and adventure. A master magician, Drognan has no interest in slipping away, but instead serves as mentor to the Forbidden Realm's finest students. Cast as his eldest prot�g�e, you'll begin the game as a young wannabe with a long way to go before matching the master's exploits. As is usually the case in these things, however, villains arrive to rough up Drognan and leave him near death. Worse, four magical artifacts are whisked away, and it's up to you to reunite them with their proper owner. You'll venture through the pastoral wastelands of the march, whose harsh climate and equally harsh beauty only leads to greater dangers beyond, such as the city of Hilltop, founded by unemployed soldiers from a much-reduced nearby empire who struggle to keep control of their anarchic new home. At least this place is natural - the immense Anauroch desert being the result of a magical battle that left the hitherto grassy plains as dry as bone, as well as a great excuse to deploy the attractive new "sandy" tile-set.

Of course, as with any D&D style RPG, and any RPG in general, you will find people that come along with you in your journeys. In Undrentide, you�ll be assisted by Xanos, a spell-slinging wizard with greasy hair, green skin, and long fangs. Next up is Deekin Scaleslinger � whom is a good kobold and a bard. Also accompanying Drognan in this story is Dorna Trapspringer, a female dwarf. With Deekin and Xanos, the game seems easier. With Dorna, it just doesn�t seem like she can do much but turn the game into a spectator sport.

As I mentioned earlier, Undrentide is full of new beasties to fight. These include miniature dragons, Medusas, and Basilisks. Besides these, we have a new version of the gorgon � which looks like a hybrid armadillo and a bull. Sphinxes are on hand to deliver puzzles and affect enigmatic facial expressions, while scuttling arachnid-men huddle in tight-knit tribal societies.

In keeping with the third-edition Advanced Dungeons and Dragons rulebook, characters are no longer forced to follow the disciplinary confines of their chosen professions -- as they level up, characters can select from vast pools of power-up skills, even if "out of character" choices come at a higher price. This system is refined by the manner in which the new "prestige" classes of Undrentide are acquired - inaccessible to new characters; they become available only when certain sets of skills have been cultivated by players as their characters progress.

Arcane archers, like Henry V's finest, mow down even the heavily armored with their unsurpassed skill with the yew stick. But unlike the victors of Agincourt, they can access sorcerer�s powers to steady their aim and empower their shots. Not only useful to Rangers, this new class can give teeth to weakling mages; in concert with weapons like the nasty Crossbow of Murder, even scholars can be scrappers. Caveats include the elf or half elf racial requirement, but the benefits -- including heat seeking, fireball, scattershot and instant-kill arrows -- make it a must for the archery-inclined.

Assassins fulfill the need for characters both stealthy and combat effective, with paralyzing attacks and low-level spells that keep the class effective after the element of surprise is lost. For Paladins who just couldn't keep on the straight and narrow, the Blackguard provides a challenging career opportunity - any gaming occupation that includes the special skill "smite goodness" being of self-evident worth. At high levels, you'll gain the ability to summon varieties of undead fiends.

Harper Scouts couldn't be less different, being goodly Rangers and Bards devoted to maintenance of the natural balance - a kind of medieval Sierra Club. Though some of the skills are culled from other classes, like the Ranger's favored enemy and the Bard's lore bonuses, unique supernatural abilities include Deneir's Eye, a resistance to traps, and Lliira's Eye, which renders the character resistant to sleep and domination spells.

Finally, Shadow Dancers gain skills similar to the Assassin, without the sinister overtones - their ability to hide in the open being perhaps the most useful. Also able to confuse and evade enemies up to several times a day - and without saving rolls - the unusual and interesting skills can complement those already cultivated by characters with plenty of normal-class development. You'll also notice the absence of Neverwinter Nights' trusty Stone of Recall, which allowed quick escapes from sticky situations. Though you'll have an alternative in the Mistra's Hand artifact, it requires crystals to operate, rather like the starship Enterprise's warp drives.

Even for those who eschew the new classes, there are plenty of new skills, feats and spells available to most; if not all, of Undrentide's occupations -- or even for saved characters imported from Neverwinter Nights adventures. Warriors can fight dirty; monks can chain martial artistry with successive hits. The charismatic can channel personal charm into weapon damage or armor class, while wizards gain ultra-powerful versions of existing spells with great spell focus and penetration abilities. Archers can rapid reload, while everyone can tunnel level-ups into general combat bonuses by selecting resistances to specific types of attack.

The good news is that the "rulebook" extras make it more fun than ever to get into battles, with the 3rd Edition AD&D rules as well interpreted as before and enhanced by the new prestige classes, skills and spells. The classes in particular give meaning to advancement, as you'll have career goals instead of mere statistical bonuses to aim for. That's it's wedded to the sound fundamentals provided by the latest iteration of AD&D helps make combat particularly rewarding. Put bluntly, it's games like this that make complicated mathematical RPGs playable at all: too many of us grew up struggling against the loathsome logistical challenge of getting the whole mess of dice, paper and eraser scraps in order. It's better living through computers, as they say.

Unfortunately, the new campaign is an unhurried stroll into the commonplace and mediocre. It takes entirely the wrong approach, highlighting the game engine's flaws and expecting its virtues to speak for themselves. Aurora does not emote or illustrate as well as the otherwise technically-inferior Infinity Engine used in Bioware's releases of yore: in fact, it's comparatively shallow, sterile and inexplicably devoid of personality. Perhaps it's the way everything is tiled, physically blocked together in a way that does nothing to conceal the construction grid beneath it. Maybe it's the vacant appearance of most everyone you'll meet. Given the attention paid to the fighting elements, it's a shame that so little effort was made to overcome these other shortcomings through story, dialogue or pacing. As it is, we have a fetch-the-gizmo plot that becomes a kill-foozle plot, with countless half-baked side quests thrown in to make it take a while. One example is a mission where a ghost sends you to get something in a room that's within easy reach - especially, one presumes, for the corporeally-challenged.

Group play overcomes this, to a degree, as the unobtrusive interface and hassle-free party system make cooperative tactics a pleasure to indulge. There's always something to do in gangs, even if it's just strategically splitting up to explore and converging on isolated battles as they break out - and that's the key to having fun in Undrentide. When there's combat, you'll be so involved in the sheer pleasure of gameplay you'll forgive all other faults. But in the quiet moments, clicking mindlessly through dialogue options, entrapping chests and spinning the quasi-isometric world to see where the exits are, you'll hanker desperately for the "count-the-leaves" detail and "embark-on-romances" depth of other titles. The silver lining to all this is the simplicity and effectiveness of the Aurora toolset, which makes user-created content a snap.

Nothing new

The new tilesets make for a pleasing change of scenery, and dutiful attention is paid to the multiplicity of spells that Undrentide adds. In other respects, however, there are few refinements to the visuals we saw in the original Neverwinter Nights. Certain elements of the Aurora Engine looked slightly old-fashioned a year ago - its simplistic models and landscapes made the jump from Baldur's Gate II's finely textured 2D all the more abrupt. The surroundings are repetitive; one is reminded of Britain's postwar love affair with urban prefabrication. Faces have a blurred, blank look to them and with a 32MB video card listed as a system requirement, that's even more disappointing now than it was then.

Hack and Slash noises...

The sound of feet punching through crusted snow is the kind of light touch that reminds us of the spit and polish that goes into releases like Undrentide. Unfortunately, they're also light in number, with most of Neverwinter Nights' content recycled in Undrentide. As an expansion pack, that's fine and what is new, is very well done: new voices having the same over-the-top character as those from the original release. Jeremy Soule's classical accompaniment to Neverwinter Nights is repeated in the expansion pack, with variations for the snow and desert levels. Recycled or not, the original score was well rendered and as doom-laden as befitted the scenario. Soule's talent is undeniable, so it's perhaps a shame that Undrentide comes with nothing distinctively fresh.

$20 for new items... okay!

The main thing, besides the storyline, that makes this game a lot of fun is the new items. Even since I got the expansion, I've had a lot more armor selections for my Ranger to choose from. Now, instead of wearing ugly old brown and blue clothing, I have nice new glowing black and green armor! Also, instead of my ugly ass swords. I have two glowing swords. (They glow green, of course).

Give it a try, it's only an expansion.

Shadows of Undrentide is a decent expansion to Neverwinter Nights, providing enough new material to justify the price tag for fans, but not for dilettantes who haven't played Neverwinter Nights since completing it the first time around. It's designed for group play, either online or over a LAN, and it pays to be under no illusions regarding this - Undrentide lacks depth everywhere beyond its excellent combat system. The new campaign is aggressively generic, which will make solo play testing for those used to having boxfuls of world-building thrown at them. To wrap up, play it with friends before making a decision, and don't expect Undrentide to be a return to Baldur's Gate-like complexity or depth.