Also, the reason the tiles are repetitive is ease of use to make mods, I think that's basically what it was designed as, a user end game toolset.
That's a great goal, and NWN is just fine as a concept. But no matter many mods there are and with or without a live DM, the hills still have funky ramps and the corridors all meet at nice right angles, and the environments are still largely noninteractive and uninteresting.
The map editor is tile-based because the engine is tile-based. It's all a 2D grid. They could have supported .X or .3ds files directly, or at least have included an importer in the toolset. Textures could have been standard dx or even bmp. We'd have seen cool modules set in the Underdark swarming with Beholders in about 2 days.
As it is, it's a great toolset for developing really generic, boring modules and playing with a live DM who can come up with really creative ways to make an NPC tell you to go kill a boring generic monster in either the gray cavern tileset or the crypt tileset which is right up that hill-ramp and through the hole in the treeline that make a perfect rectangle around the generic village with the generic tavern you "woke up" in.
Which is a start; it's more than we had three years ago. I'll buy the sequel.
DD, come to think of it, is the same. But NWN feels very sterile. There's no charm to it. It reeks of "game engine", if that makes sense.
