Neverwinter Nights 2 Forum News (Oct. 26, 04)

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Here are today's Neverwinter Nights 2 forum highlights, collected by NWVault from Obsidian Forums. 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.

Jason Keeney, Programmer

Physics
I'm with you about the ragdoll stuff StormHammer... a lot of implementations of that kind of thing end up just looking, literally, like a ragdoll... which of course is *not* the real goal (that is, unless you're making a Raggedy Ann and Andy game). Realistic procedural physics is one more of those things (like motion captured animation) that seems like a really great idea but can often end up falling short of what a good artist can do by hand.

But that said, I think you're being a little short sighted by declaring that if the physics isnt a part of the gameplay then there is no point. Procedural physics is just one of the lastest tools to help us make better looking, better feeling games. Its all about immersion... and real physics can help with that. Should we not bother with particle systems either because they dont have any impact on the gameplay? There's nothing wrong with eye candy for its own sake.

Ferret, Developer

Rolling Stats
There are some interesting points brought up here and there. And really some of you already brought up the points I was going to make. I personally love point-buy because I was increasingly agitated in PnP games that one wildly bad or good set of rolls could completely and irrevocably change the flavor of your entire game. I was tired of situations where one player could roll like a minor god in character creation and become the dominant force in a multi-year campaign, primarily based off no merit on his part - just rolling great once.

So point-buy came onto the scene and evened the scales, making it so that all characters are created equally. Something I favor and something that's essential for PW and other forms of MP. For single-player, as has already been discussed, within days of release I'm sure NWN2's cheat codes will be out (if they even change from NWN1) and users can edit their stats to their heart's content. If we support random rolls, we also have a wider range of balance problems for the single-player campaign because we should theoretically make the game playable for the poor sod who rolled all 3s as well as the majority of people who re-rolled a bajillion times and have mostly 18s. So Frank's magic 8-ball doesn't have hopeful things to say about randomly rolling attributes making into the game.

P.S. I read somewhere that someone was wondering if it's even worth discussing some of these things. Some discussions have an impact on the game - not all of them... but some. So keep the faith.

Erik Novales, Programmer

Backward Compatibility
The plan is to have some limited compatibility. (Since certain features are changing quite drastically, such as the graphics engine, it doesn't make sense for the new game to be compatible with the old model formats and such.) This is in the FAQ, BTW.