They're both good, but NWN2 is better in every reasonable measure. The first expansion, Mask of the Betrayer, is also incredible (I didn't care much for Westgate or Zehir though, personally.) Dragon Age is simple and generic and kind of feels like a console game, despite some folks' claims that it was developed first and foremost for the PC.

Dragon Age would be a good starter RPG and you may enjoy it more because I assume if you haven't gotten NWN2 by now you're probably new to PC RPGs (not intended as a jibe.)

[QUOTE="Qixote"]

Both make me yearn for the old days when pc games were more plentiful, longer, and original.

TerroRizing

Agree with Qixote. Guess it depends on the genre of interest, but I can't see how 2009 was a strong year for PC gaming. 2006 was a great year, and 2007 was good, but 2008 and 2009 are poor examples in my opinion - then again I like adventure and RPGs. 2006 and 2007 had awesome games in strategy, fps, adventure and RPG. But yeah, it was even better 10 years ago like Qixote's implying.

I enjoyed Deus Ex better than Half-life, but I liked em both. Pedro took the words from my mouth - Deus Ex because I'm not really into shooters and Xen was awful.

Never tried GuildWars, but I played Runes of Magic for about 6 months (max lvl of course, was an officer of one of the top three end-game guilds of my server - so I can say I gave the game a fair shake...) Runes has quite a small world, the PvP is god-awful (effectively removing it because nobody participates), customization is nigh non-existant and it is INCREDIBLY gear-dependent, in fact more so than any other MMO I've ever played - I know of many players who've spent thousands of dollars and one particularly egregious example of somebody who had spent over $10,000 - within 3 months of the games "retail" launch (though the game's cash shop had been open for the last 3 months or so of open beta.)

You will not be able to do any end-game instances (Treasure Trove/IDK50 and beyond) in RoM without spending a nice chunk of change (it's around $300 for the ability to full-mod a full set of armor - which you will ultimately do several times (and certainly again with each additional zone/level cap increase that's released) - and doesn't even begin to account for what you'll spend in time and treasure GETTING the mods you now have the "ability" to use... also doesn't account for weapons...)

Ultimately I quit because the things developers had promised were coming in the near future never materialized (I was most interested in better PvP and guild castle sieges) and without good PvP all the gameplay involved: do instance (dungeon) A to get enough mods (mods in the game are "enhancements you put on your gear that will give you, say, "+20 strength, +20 defense" and there are lots of different ones, to put it simply) that you're able to do instance B, farm instance B until you and your friends are good enough for instance C, etc, rinse repeat. Oh, and each piece of gear (15 pieces total on a character iirc) can hold 6 of those mods, but for all intents and purposes you have to pay real $ to get an item to put them on a piece... and that item is around $3 each... $3x6x15... basically per dungeon/instance you can do.

One of the days I'd like to check out Guild Wars, but that's my take on Runes of Magic.

The best adventure games released in the past year for me were Ceville and the new Secret Files (Secret Files: Puritas Cordis - English version was finally released few months back.) Puritas Cordis is probably better (it's serious, not humorous like Ceville) but neither are serious contenders for "best of all time lists."

If you want to go back to 2008, "So Blonde" was actually quite enjoyable - was written by the guy who wrote the first Broken Sword game, so nice pedigree. "A Vampyre Story" from 2008 was the other good one from that year.

"Dreamfall" was released way back in 2006, and is very good - dunno if you want to go back that far and if you'd consider it "recent" though.

adventuregamers.com is a site you may want to check out, because you may have noticed adventure games almost never get any attention on general gaming sites like this one (which is probably why one poster erroneously suggested the genre is dead.)

Hello , ladies and gentlemen , what is your opinion related to MMOG vs.SP - based games ?

In my opinion , the SP - based games , are useless , a thing of the past , because

1 . The MMOG offer , the single player and multiplayer experiences in the same package JackRongham

Can you expand on this, because I don't understand your meaning. I generally don't like to play online due to general jackassery of many players and the massive time committment required to compete. Plus, my preferred genres are RPG (story-driven), Adventure, and TBS - so for me personally MMOGs cannot offer too much.

I loved how back in the 90's even through early 2000s computer games were always $29.99 the first week they were released in at least one of the major local chain stores (then they'd usually go to the MSRP of $49.99 till price drop, which is still the standard price these days for just-released PC games, bar the occassional first-week $39.99 price.)

Problem is these days games are way shorter and have less content than they did back then, especially in the genre I prefer (RPG.) Though this is in part due to multi-platform releases and the insistence by many that absolutely every piece of text be voiced. Finishing what was considered a decent-length story-driven RPG in less than a week, for example, used to be nigh impossible, but these days it's pretty much always more than likely.

So basically we're paying the same dollar amount today for less content than we did before. Therefore, regardless of development costs we are paying inflation-adjusted prices per hour of content.

So, I'd love to pay double, or whatever inflation-adjusted price for the length and amount of content in old-school games -today-.

Great game! Pity what they did to the series with Dark Messiah :(

I disagree that you should start with the sequel. You'd be missing tons of backstory and appreciate the series much less. There are references to the original BG that go through the sequel and into NWN and even NWN2. I have no clue about Dark Alliance, I knew it was an action game like Diablo, but I thought it was console-only.

I know you didn't ask about Icewind Dale, but I definitely wouldn't reccomend it over the BG or NWN games. They're not bad games, but they're much more combat-oriented than story-based - and I always thought it was kind of lame that you have to make your entire party (the banter and personalities of your companions to me are one of the very most important parts of RPGs.)

For me, Morrowind was more enjoyable than Oblivion, and Oblivion was more enjoyable than Fallout 3. That said, I found both Morrowind and Oblivion to be vastly better than Fallout 3, which I found to be nothing special. Loved Fallout and Fallout 2, but Fallout 3 isn't something I forsee ever playing through again.

Depending on where you live, it could be worth it to check out a few local electronics stores or even Gamestop/Electronics Boutique.

I was in the exact same boat as you were when I picked up my copy of Planescape a few years ago (still quite a few years after it was released) and figured it'd be dirt cheap on eBay, half, etc... boy was I wrong. Was at my local CompUSA for something unrelated and actually saw it in the bargain bin - dunno if a bunch of stuff had just been lost/forgotten or what... This was in probably 2003 or 2004 and Flight Sim '98 was in amongst the other stuff haha!

In this day in age, can't imagine why it's not on the download services or such (d2d, steam, gog, gametap, etc... Note: I haven't checked) I can't imagine it'd hurt the value of the "boxed" versions because collectors want the sealed boxes/packaging, not the game. Best of luck!