werk said:I feel obligated to retort.
Packaging is merely the first in a series of things that were not updated in the new NWN. They had a good idea, and now they are milking it...consider AoE3. AoE1, great, AoE2, awesome, AoE3, sadly disappointing. In an effort to improve they lost direction.
They didn't make a new game, they just rehashed the original, in the process, losing a lot of the appeal that the first game had.
That said, packaging is very important, for many reasons. Don't judge a book by it's cover, but a lot of work goes into book covers...
I guess everyone looks at it differently. Glass half full vs. half empty. I see a *tonne* of things that were updated. And I don't see voices (and music) getting reused as a negative. It's like Star Wars....they didn't completely change the themes from one movie to another. The music built on itself, and some of the same songs, or rhythms were used from one to another. Same with BG 1 and 2, same with NWN 1 and 2.
They changed the interfaces, the graphics engine, the implementation of the D&D rules, made it work better in single-player mode, changed the GUI's. I mean, really, it's a very different game. Is it perfect? No. But I haven't seen a perfect game. I think my favourite has been BGII....and I never finished that one. I think I ended up in Chapter 6. Storywise, PS:T all the way.
It's never had anything to do with the art on the box. I simply feel that NWN2 is getting a disproportionate amount of flak compared against the quality of the game. I think that a lot of people set their expectations so high that there was no way they could ever have satisfied everyone.
Banshee