NWN2: Mask of the Betrayer - Installation Tips & Hotfix

We mentioned the Mask of the Betrayer hotfix in passing in the nearby newsbit about NWN2 but Sei Daneic wrote in to point out this thread on the official forums and it's probably worth highlighting:

When installing MoTB, please use the following instructions:

1. Install NWN2
2. Patch NWN2 to the latest version (1.10 as of Sept. 29, 2007)
3. Install Mask of The Betrayer
4. Download and apply the hot fix for your language, listed below.

Italian: Click Here
French: Click Here
German: Click Here
English: Click Here
Spanish: Click Here

If you do not apply the hot fixes, when you attempt to play the game you will see sections of missing text and the Campaign name will say it is undefined.

More information.

Gonna add my 2 cent here:

Actually, instead of patching to 1.10, patch to the 1.06 and then proceed to install MoTB is the best way to go. No need for the hot fix either.

It worked for me and looks like it worked for people at QT3 too.

So far the game is running great, the stories and dialogs so far are great. Visually MoTB looked better than the OC to me for some reason, and performance is definitely better than the OC. I think my only disappointment right now is that gensai have rather crappy stats for a wis or cha based class And the camera control takes a little bit getting used too.

For those struggling with the camera, I found that in the Character mode, max out the camera rotation delay when you turn, and use the "hold LMB and drag" to turn the character and the camera worked best.

I don't have MotB yet but the new patch certainly makes the game run a lot smoother.

That's odd, all I have read so far says this is wrong.
Patching to 1.10 before installing MotB is what is giving everyone the error ("CAMPAIGN NAME NOT SET"), even reported in Watch forums, iirc.

I dunno … I just installed with whatever patch I had on the game, which I had last touched in ~June. Everything seems to work fine.

To get the strategy mode camera working like in vanilla NWN2, just set it to always center on active character. It'll rotate normally.

My understanding was that MotB has all the patch content up to and including 1.10 and should install straight over a vanilla NWN2 installation. Still, I guess they stickied this for a reason. *shrug*

That's odd, all I have read so far says this is wrong.
Patching to 1.10 before installing MotB is what is giving everyone the error ("CAMPAIGN NAME NOT SET"), even reported in Watch forums

As I understand it Patching to 1.10 before installing MoTB gets you all the fixes to the original campaign, but mucks up MoTB. Whilst not patching leaves you with a potentially borked original campaign — triggers not firing when you get the first shard and things — but a working MoTB, as least in the 'didn't patch at all' case.

I think the worry on Obsidians part if you have patched to somewhere before 1.10, installed MoTB and seem to have a working game, is that the version number has now become the expansion version number, but you won't *necessarily* have the version of all the files that they'll expect for that version number when you apply future patches going forward. Therefore they'd would prefer everybody to have everything that MotB didn't change at 1.10.

I believe the way they screwed up the 1.10 patch was by not backdating at least one of the essential files to before the datestamp on the expansion version, so the MoTB installer looks at that file , says 'oh, that's newer than the one I'm trying to replace it with, I don't need to bother' because 1.10 datestamp is after the expansion went gold, even tho' actually it really does.

The Hotfix sorts out those specific files. That's guesswork on my part tho'.

Making the whole patching system for NWN2 that they inherited from NWN1 work seems to have generally been giving Obsidian fits.

NOTE TO DEVS WRITING GAME AUTO-PATCHING SYSTEMS: I suggest a system where patch diffs are always taken from the original release game rather than incrementally, and are retained after patching on the users machine. When a new patch is received, the autopatcher first reverts the users installation to the original by reversing out the changes using these retained diffs before appling the new patch. It would then delete the old patch diffs, and retain the new patch diffs ready for the next patch.

Originally Posted by SKapusniak

NOTE TO DEVS WRITING GAME AUTO-PATCHING SYSTEMS: I suggest a system where patch diffs are always taken from the original release game rather than incrementally, and are retained after patching on the users machine. When a new patch is received, the autopatcher first reverts the users installation to the original by reversing out the changes using these retained diffs before appling the new patch. It would then delete the old patch diffs, and retain the new patch diffs ready for the next patch.

I can understand the sentiment SKap but the problem with constantly reverting is that the patches end up being huge.

In NWN1 Bioware always posted a Critical Rebuild type of patch which essentially did this and they are quite large now. This isn't always practical on the Auto-Updater system.

I simply installed MotB over NWN2 1.06, worked like a charm.