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Neverwinter Nights Forum News (Nov. 2, 04)

Discussion in 'Game/SP News & Comments' started by chevalier, Nov 2, 2004.

  1. chevalier

    chevalier Knight of Everfull Chalice ★ SPS Account Holder Veteran

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    Remove all ads!
    Here are today's Neverwinter Nights 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.

    Rob Bartel, Senior Designer Live Team

    Refund on Product?
    Back to the original question regarding our return policy for these premium modules, we're going to be the 'good guy' on this issue while at the same time not breaking the bank and running ourselves out of business. Here's the deal, as I currently understand it:

    We will try to treat these premium modules as a physical box of software. If you return it to us unopened, you get your money back, no questions asked. Once the box has been opened, however, there's no going back (though you can still re-download it from our website as many times as you want). So how do we determine whether or not you've 'opened' this imaginary box? Well, this is where our online authentication comes in: if you've attempted to play the module (and thereby pinged our master server with an authentication request), then we consider the box to be opened and we'll be unable to offer a refund. If you've gone as far as installing the module but have not yet attempted to play it, then the box is still closed and we'll happily offer you a refund.

    Box closed (module has not been launched) = Refund!
    Box open (module has been launched) = No Refund!

    Make sense?

    Witches' Wake
    Like the original, Witch's Wake: Remastered will strip entering players of their items and experience on entering the module, causing them to start the module as a level 1 character wearing a tattered suit of the king's armor. The Remastered version of the module takes full advantage of the new crafting system introduced in the Hordes of the Underdark expansion, however, and there are plenty of raw crafting components to be scavenged in the opening area, for those who like to dabble in that skill.

    Epic Modules
    There's an obvious demand for epic level premium modules and we have a variety of plans in place to meet that demand as the BioWare Online Store and the concept of Premium Modules develop. We definitely hope that the current crop of premium modules will grow into entire series, providing an epic level experience at some point in the future. More importantly, we also have plans for additional premium modules catering specifically to epic level characters. All of this is a little ways down the road, still, but if these first few modules prove successful, I'm sure we'll get there. Wish us luck,

    Problems with WW
    Also, make sure you update your installation with the latest patches to NWN (we're currently at 1.64). I have heard of people experiencing similar issues to yours due to having an outdated version of the game.

    Georg Zoeller, Designer

    Hour of Gameplay.
    You can track the hours people in your company / qa / focus testers need for the first playthrough and then average this. But there is no well defined scientific process for determining gameplay hours.
    What about at BioWare for NWN/SoU/HotU? It seems like gameplay hours are more about marketing these days--kind of like CPI, FLOPS, or clock-speed for a processor (all of which only give part of the picture). Not to be overly cynical regarding BioWare's stated playtimes (I don't even know what they are off the top of my head) but I would suspect that, in general, they need to be stated as high as reasonably possible (just under outright lying) so the game remains competitive to players who purchase mainly on the game-hours metric.
    I don't think so, I think the numbers you are getting from us are quite balanced. I remember that it took me significantly longer to play through both SoU and KotOR for the first time than the time we stated on the box. But it's still a subjective thing, you will always have people who claim that they only took 10 hours through KotOR and other's who spent 200 hours with it.

    More:
    Understood. A couple of follow-up questions:

    (a) Would it be incorrect to say that the estimated game time originates from people sitting around the table in the conference room and informally discussing how long it took them to complete the game? (I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that, I'm just wondering.)

    (b) Is there pressure from the marketing folks at BioWare to advertise the game time towards the high end, due to the players that discriminate between games based on the game-time metric? Or is this a non-issue, and the marketing folks stay out of it?

    (c) Is the ballpark game time decided in advance before the plot of the game is hammered down?

    I'm not trying to ruffle your feathers or generate any heat, I'm just curious how things work in the gaming industry. Pardon in advance if my inquiries are overly blunt. :)
    a) I don't know how this is decided, but I guess a lot of data comes from QA and focus testers.

    b) I don't think so, but I'm not working in PR. What I can say is that the figures PR is putting out are usually on the conservative side and often lower than the estimates floating around in design, which I think is good.

    c) You usually aim for a certain number of gameplay hours when you start a project, but the dynamics of development are so fluid, you can't pin it down until much later in the process.

    As said, I personally find the focus in gameplay hours problematic as it is such a subjective kind of thing, but I can also understand that people want some figure how much entertainment a game is going to provide, so unless the industry comes up with a unified AweSomeNess Index(tm) for games, which is unlikely, we will probably be stuck with this bandaid measurement unit. My advice would be to compare how accurate you found previous time measurement provided by BioWare and go from there.

    Pardon in advance if my inquiries are overly blunt.
    Wielding the "the mighty club of bluntness" around here, I think that's nothing to apologize for as long as you can live with the potentially blunt answers :)

    One more question about online authentication
    Well, actually, two =) First, I do have a permanent Internet connection; however, it has to go through an HTTP proxy (I live on the campus). As I understand it, authentication mechanism won't be able to handle this, right? Or am I wrong and I can buy those safely?
    If you can join a nwn multiplayer game on the internet, you should be able to play these.

    [ November 04, 2004, 16:29: Message edited by: chevalier ]
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Jan 3, 2018
    chevalier, Nov 2, 2004
    #1
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