Neverwinter Nights 2 Forum News (Apr. 23, 06)

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Here are today's Neverwinter Nights 2 forum highlights, collected by NWVault. Please take into account that these are only single parts of various threads and should not be taken out of context. Bear in mind also that the posts presented here are copied as-is, and that any bad spelling and grammar does not get corrected on our end.

J.E. Sawyer, NWN2 Lead Designer

Since you have 3 more months, can we get cleric domains?

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And about a dozen of those are major (human) deities, worshipped by all races, which could have easily been included had the developers not decided to do something forgettable instead, like the Arcane Trickster.

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Given the amount of complaining people had about the human only deities in IWD2 (which were not trivial to implement), I'm not sure that would have been a wise course.

Almost none of the NWN domain powers are like the book powers (3E or 3.5) and none of the NWN domains use spell lists like 3E or 3.5. Changing them to work "by the book" wouldn't have been a simple matter. That said, a lot of the domain powers that BioWare did give to domains are more useful than what's in the books.

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Sure, there was an odd complainer here and there when the game came out, but certainly not in the amount that you describe. What exactly was the issue? Was it the fact that all deities were human or the 'mere' two domain spells per level?

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The fact that all deities were human. It would be more of an issue in a game like NWN than it was in IWD2.

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Quote: I'm having trouble believing that it would be too difficult to do, had you chosen to leave one of the new PrC's out.

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Even if we were to make the fallacious assumption that a single domain in its entirety is the equivalent of a single prestige class ability, that math doesn't work. There were 18 domains in NWN of the 21 in core 3.5.

Also, I didn't decide on how many prestige classes to include.

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Actually, my biggest beef are not the domains, but the lack of deities. I would happily accept domains as they were in NWN if we had at least a few deities to choose from (and going from there you could group the existing domains depending on the deity, for example Talos clerics getting the Destruction and Evil domains).

A cleric without a deity is, well...a hollow class.

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Would you rather have us provide more robust domains, or implement specific deities for a game which allows people to make tons of non-FR-specific content?

Saying you're annoyed that others complained about the lack of demi-human deities is more than a little weird. It's the marginal complaining about the ultra-marginal.

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NWN2 is a different matter. Why? Because at the very start of development, if you had decided to improve upon what you already have (i.e. adding spell lists for existing PrCs, giving people the ability to equip items they're not proficient with, adding/improving deities & domains etc.) instead of adding a bunch of new stuff that isn't even that particularly earth-shattering, you would have been much better off. Now you're like 95% of Hollywood sequels out there: lots of new stuff to serve as eye candy and shallow satisfaction, while the old stuff is left behind like roadkill.

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Sorry that you're going to get the brunt of this, but I've spent a total of four months on this project, two as lead. I could not defend all of the previous design decisions even if I agreed with them. When I became lead, the design documentation included no plans to modify domains from the previous NWN games. The schedule simply will not allow for serious modification in any direction at this point.

EDIT: My preference would be to bolster the existing domains and support Law, Luck, and Chaos. I'd also love to allow modules/campaigns to force the selection of deities as specified by module/campaign writers. Seriously, though, my recent conversation with the game logic programmers about making changes to domains ended like this:

"So, is there something else we want to cut to get this done?"