I saw people going on about how great BG3 is on this site, so I thought I’d check out a let’s play to see what all the fuss was about. I immediately fell in love with the graphics and the mechanics, such as the classes, races, spells, dice etc, but I disliked the emphasis on gore/horror in the game, and I know I wouldn’t enjoy playing a game with that whole brain horror thing going on. Not to mention the price and storage requirements being excessive. (150GB!)
So, bearing in mind that, is there a game that would match my criteria, and if not, what do you think comes closest?
I recommend one of my favourite CRPGs of all time: Neverwinter Nights - for the modern hassle-free experience, get the Enhanced Edition. The first single-player campaign is pretty meh by Bioware standards, but the expansion packs (included in the NWNEE) are pretty great. Heard a lot of good about the premium modules (a few of the original premium modules come with NWNEE, the rest are available as DLC).
The official campaigns are set in Forgotten Realms, the same D&D setting as BG3, but you really don’t need to worry about diving headlong into horrors. More fantasy vibes and less visceral stuff. (the second expansion pack is a bit more in the direction of subterranean spooks, but not, like, excessively so.)
However, the real big strength of NWN was not the campaigns. It was deliberately designed for player-created adventure modules created with the included Aurora Toolset. There’s loads of them and some of them had really great production values and writing. They’re currently hosted at Neverwinter Vault and NWNEE also has a custom content browser (though the latter doesn’t have much stuff). Custom modules also have a whole bunch of genres and settings, as expected.
Oh and it’s a game from 2002 so it runs on any ol’ potato. (Well the EE needs a vaguely modernish machine, but not anything unreasonable.)