Neverwinter Nights II

Games
1

So, the sequel to NWN has been announced. Sorry if there’s already a thread about it, I couldn’t find one. My biggest frustration with the original toolset is the coarseness of the terrain building, so I was intrigued to read this in the preview:

Even better, the pre-defined tile system has been completely removed from the outdoor construction tools. Instead, everything in the game is now an individual item that can be grouped into user-defined sets. That means a player can define three completely unique houses on a city block, and then define that block into its own tile set, creating customized paintbrushes to build a city with.

2

The tilesets may have looked a little coarse and a bit repetetive, but they sure made authoring extremely easy. Such is the trade-off I guess. Would have been nice to have kept the tile system in while at the same time allowing authors to make their own custom terrain if they desired.

3

My biggest problem with the NWN tool set was the limited selection of things you could make. Its like, ok you have a rural town, you have a dungeon, a caves area, a this and that. Now your out of stuff and the world now looks identical.

I mean Id use up the elementals, the goblins, the undead, etc… and was constantly out of new things to use. It was not even like you could easily take existing things and easily change them (asside from stats). You could not take a human model, scale it up 5x and apply some kind of fire effect on him to make some kind of giant fire humanoid. Nope, you could only change his clothes.

Unless you made a very small module, you ended just making stuff that seemed like you just saw it before. It is a shame that they also didn’t have transition geography where you could go from town to city without an instant change.

In this new one Id love it if they:

Got rid of zones. The world was smooth and continious.

Use real C/C++ and not thier half-assed almost C scripting language.

Vastly improved server performance.

Had a bunch of custom effects you could place on items and on areas. For example, take a forst and apply the snow effect and you now had a snowy forest. Take a log cabin and apply an vacency effect (adds spiderwebs and some trash and debris around), a old age effect (desaturates the items in the world to make them look old and faded), and finally beams of natural like to simulate holes in the celing. You can take a lot of ‘tiles’ and make them look very unique just by applying speical effects to them.

Have an in-game monster builder that lets you scale, skin, warp, and add effects to stock models.

Have a much better random loot system. I came up with my own which was totally awsome, but thier tool set took like an hour to load my level (not the game itself oddly) and maybe 2 hours to compile it.

Better random encounter system that did a disperse encounter and didnt place all the badguys at one place. ALso one that didn’t cause a shit-ton of lag when monsters were about to spawn.

Many, many more wizards. Also a wizard wizard so you could create your own quest templates and it would allow you to make 100s of quests from custom templates.

4

I hope this time they include a good game with their dungeon builders kit.

5

It’ll never happen. They want the toolset to be accessible (yeah, I know, haw haw, jokes on us), so it’ll never use a full blown programming language. It’s a scripting language for a reason.

6

I want a toolset that allows me to build a bridge over a road, so that a character can walk along the road, go under the bridge, climb up a ramp to the bridge, then walk along the bridge over the road.

In other words, a 3-dimensional world, not a 2-dimensional world that is dressed up pretty.

7

Not only do they need to NOT use real C/C++/C#/whatever, they need to make it so that players can add scripts to their module without writing any code at all, via either a robust scripting wizard, or a large and well-documented library of pre-made scripts. Scripting was where the game really fell short in terms of accessibility.

I thought the level-building tools were pretty good, but they needed more stuff–more tilesets, more placeables, more everything.

8

And far less modal dialogues. It would’ve been easier to learn the scripting system if you could cross reference against other stuff, but you never could, because every single little dialog was modal.

9

Lot’s of good info here:

http://nwn2forums.bioware.com/forums/viewforum.html?forum=95

Some screenshots, including the Toolset here:

http://ve3d.ign.com/articles/666/666655p1.html

10

Well they can’t very well make unlimited stuff. But you and the hordes of your kind have been heard, and the quote about everything being an individual item should alleviate some of this problem.

In this new one Id love it if they:

Got rid of zones. The world was smooth and continious.

Can’t happen. You build by making those “zones”, it’s the basis of the toolkit. Frankly, I’d feel very ristricted if I had to have everything connect together. I mean, there’s a reason Dungeon Siege felt so linear.

Use real C/C++ and not thier half-assed almost C scripting language.

It’s a scripting language, what would you do with real C? It’s not like you can interface with anything other than what the game engine allows you to.

Had a bunch of custom effects you could place on items and on areas. For example, take a forst and apply the snow effect and you now had a snowy forest.

Indications are that there will be some elements of this, though probably not quite to the extent you mention.

Have an in-game monster builder that lets you scale, skin, warp, and add effects to stock models.

There will be scaling of models, and what they call “tinting” of their textures.

Many, many more wizards. Also a wizard wizard so you could create your own quest templates and it would allow you to make 100s of quests from custom templates.

A quest wizard? Wouldn’t you want things to be more creative than The Adventure of a 100 Cookie-Cutter Quests? Wizards are handicaps. They can be great for learning or producing uncreative work, but I’d rather have more power to design myself thanks.

11

I once tried to make a (probably too ambitious) campaign for NWN. The preliminary planning went pretty well, but actually dealing with the editor had some problems. I tried to patch vanilla NWN up to current, and the editor got very crashy. I went out and bought Platinum, and installed the expansions, and then discovered that anything I made with that setup could only be run by people with both expansions. Way to split your customer base. I lost interest. Maybe someday I’ll resurrect what I had planned as a D&D game.

12

This, along with Prey, may be the big surprise of 2006.

I noted down a quote where they speak about trees:

Finally, base tree types can be planted around an environment and then altered using a seed value. Changing this value alters the structure of the tree including its slant, number of leaves, number of branches, thickness, and so on. Players can create an entire forest of the same trees and have a really hard time picking out any that are the same.

If they offered the possibility to bend the branches freely it would be just prefect.

This when the trend is to go with SpeedTree tools that make pretty trees (if near) but all looking exactly the same.

The actual fundamental trait of a tree is that it’s really, really hard to find two similar ones. The raw beauty of the trees is in their uniqueness.

And that’s also what a game should try to replicate.

13

A seamless world doesn’t imply that the experience cannot be directed.

It’s just a different technology.

14

It’s a vastly different technology, with far-ranging implications for just about every part of the game. Read this for starters.

You simply do not change a game engine from being partitioned to free-roaming without major, major changes.

15

Took the words right out of my mouth. It was so disappointing for both myself and my wife to play NWN after BG1/2. It paled in comparison.

16

You really are a little too obsessive over grandiose claims about what an engine can accomplish. Freely bending branches? In a D&D game? Who gives a shit.

Would that make it a ‘breathing’ game?

17

Took the words right out of my mouth. It was so disappointing for both myself and my wife to play NWN after BG1/2. It paled in comparison.[/quote]

Yeah there was that too.

I don’t mind admitting this: I pre-ordered NWN. I was so disappointed that after a week with it I returned it, got my money back, and got the warez. I didn’t buy a legal copy again until it came bundled with the first expansion for half the original price. At that point, the price was more or less fair for the entertainment value I got out of it - I’ve spent far more time going back and replaying the BG or IWD games (all of which I bought full price, and do not regret doing so) than I have put into NWN, even after adding in my time in player modules.

Different studio this time though. The right people are working on it. Fallout, Planescape, IWD … I probably will not pre-order but I will be an early adopter.

18

Who gives a shit about tweaking the number of leaves, number of branches, thinkness and so on?

Who gives a shit about having realistic looking trees? So who gives a shit about being able to customize the environment beside swapping tileset?

Someone does or they wouldn’t have put all that work to add all those possibilities.

The thread started quoting the possibility to finally break the environment into individual items. And it’s exactly the same idea that is applied to the trees. This is what we were discussing.

19

I’m a HUGE fanboi of the new Obsidan studio, their old stuff and KOTOR II. I absolutely can’t wait for NWN2 after reading the previews about the game and the engine.

20

Who gives a shit about tweaking the number of leaves, number of branches, thinkness and so on?

Who gives a shit about having realistic looking trees? So who gives a shit about being able to customize the environment beside swapping tileset?

Someone does or they wouldn’t have put all that work to add all those possibilities.

The thread started quoting the possibility to finally break the environment into individual items. And it’s exactly the same idea that is applied to the trees. This is what we were discussing.[/quote]

You weren’t even satisfied with that. You wanted “freely bending branches”, which as you know is more than just graphical difference and is a whole fuckton of physics work - for what good reason?