Darkness over Daggerford is a module for Neverwinter Nights that started life as a premium module. When Atari ended the premium module program, the reaction of the module’s developers was (in essence) “Great! Now we don’t have a deadline!” Then they finished the module, giving it all sorts of polish, and released it for free.
The module itself is huge, in the 25-30 hour range. It’s fairly non-linear, with a Baldur’s Gate-style world map. (And how they managed to get that into the NWN engine, I don’t know.)
If you have NWN + expansions, go get it! It’s a blast.
Anyway, I saw that module too, and having just finished BG1+xp+BG2+xp, that got me playing through both NWN expansions, to be followed by all of the premium modules and of course daggerford. My dude is level 6 in SoU already.
Are there any NWN mods (as in modifications, not modules) that do something to improve the interface and maybe update the graphics? I really, really tried to get into that cyberpunk mod by I think Stefan Gagne, but I just couldn’t deal with the interface. It was ok at the time it was released, not anymore. Even though it hasn’t really been that long, I guess.
Is there something specific about the interface? That’s kind of a general question. Anyway there really aren’t any modifications of the NWN base code because it’s still being supported. Version 1.67 was released a little while ago and a version 1.68 is in the late beta stages.
As for graphics, those can be changed by the modules. Daggerford for instance features a new large tileset:
While other mods like Almraiven have extensive use of placeable items.
This sounds awesome. Can’t wait to give it a whirl, but I’m a bit wary to jump in right now because mods of this magnitude are often fairly riddled with bugs early on. Is that the case with this one, or is this one the exception to the rule?
Also, for those that are interested in other NWN mods made by gaming professionals, let me pimp Ken Demarest’s Foreboding in Sylvani, which is a very good module with about 30 hours of playtime. For those who don’t know who Ken is, he was the lead programmer of several notable games including Ultima VII.
There are bugs being reported but so far nothing that’s prevented people from playing the main quest. I myself have played a bit but I’m holding off and saving it for later. Lots of good mods have been released recently.
For another huge mod by a gaming professional check out the 150000 word 60 hour Tortured Hearts from last year, if you haven’t already.
I don’t honestly remember what turned me off, I just couldn’t get into it. I’m pretty sure we’re talking a couple of years ago, the module was The HeX Coda. Seemed clunky. Every time one of these threads comes up, though, I’m tempted to reinstall the whole shebang and try some mods.
I’m gonna go ahead and finish the mod before I post full thoughts here on it, just to be fair and give it a chance. My first reaction to the writing was “They were going to make people pay for the privledge of reading this?”
I haven’t even gotten to combat yet, so I can’t fairly judge it as a whole.
The problem with those pics is that at heart the graphics of NWN suffer from the same issues as when it was released. They’re so freaking ugly I want to scratch my bleeding eyes out.
I am by no means a graphics whore, but the transition from the Infinity engine games to NWN’s low-res textures slapped upon super-low poly models, all on maps that looked like they were made from freaking lego bricks just make me wonder what the hell Bioware was thinking.
While I am not a fan of the material in the second pic - I have to admit to being the Producer of the development team that created the exterior tileset depicted in the first shot under contract to BioWare. (Darkness over Daggerford is not our module, Ossian Studios licensed the use of our art from BioWare for use in DoD).
If you are not a fan - then you aren’t. But the textures on the models are certainly not low-res. They are 512x512 with relatively small areas mapped for each. We use some textures larger than that from time to time as well. You can’t really play a NWN module using our art without at least a 128 mb graphics card installed.
A lot of people compared NWN1 when it was released unfavorably to Dungeon Siege’s graphics. I found this was odd, considering Dungeon Siege 1 actually was a low-res texture game, done at 256x256, compared to the 512x512 standard in use throughout NWN1.
Perhaps what made the graphics show off poorly was segmented geometry on character models together with the lighting engine which was not NWN1’s strength.
I’ll admit to a lot of sins with the TNO tileset material we developed - but unattractive, given the technical limits of the Aurora engine (now over 4 years old) is not one of those sins. YMMV.
As for wht BioWare was thinking…I expect that a minimum hardware specification of a PII350 running a TNT2 16 graphics card in the original NWN1 development contract had a little to do with it :)
