Neverwinter Nights Forum News

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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.

Jay Watamaniuk, Community Manager

Best character for going solo?
My knee-jerk reaction would be to say Fighter/Rogue but I think a better combination would be A cleric/Barbarian or some such. With the vast amount you can do with spells to make life easier, healing, turning all wrapped up with the combat/hit point bonus of the Barbarian I think you would be in good shape.

Rob Bartel, Senior Designer Live Team

1.64 Beta DD hints
Okay, everybody - stay on topic and keep a lid on any name-calling, personal insults, or silly threats. As for the notion of a check card, one option may be to set up two bank accounts. One would be your master account, filled to the brim with wads of cash (hey, a man can dream...). The other would be your mini account where you only put as much money as you're willing to risk ($20... $50... $100... whatever you feel comfortable with). Attach your check card to your mini account and transfer money in as needed through in-person banking. It may or may not seem feasible for your particular circumstance but it's the cleanest way I can think of when it comes to getting around a bank's unwillingness you insure you against card fraud. One other notion we've talked about (though we aren't actively pursuing it at this point) is the idea of prepaid cards. I've been seeing prepaid cards for EQ and a handful of other MMORPG titles sitting on game store shelves these days and I could see us someday introducing prepaid 'BioBucks' cards in the same fashion. For now, though, we're going to start with baby steps and see how it all turns out. Bear with us,.

Georg Zoeller, Designer

1.64 Beta DD hints
Hey, just to weight in my view on these things.

- There is no debate DD vs. another XP. The truth is, another XP would not have happened, regardless of DD or not. It's not a question of "they do DD, they should do another XP instead", another exp is not a possibility at this point, it would not generate enough revenues to justify the time put in by all parties (not just BioWare) to create it. Another XP would probably have sold ok and been a commercial success, but moving an expansionpack sized team away from other projects such as Jade, <Secret project> or Dragonage would delay these projects and that would cause significant loss of income later on.

- Please think twice about bashing our publisher, they have been really supportive to the project and they are still supporting patches to NWN 2 years after it's release, which is not a common thing in the industry. Their support for the DD project is great, they could just have stopped it from happening but instead they support it and make it possible in the first place.

- As Rob mentioned, the community, including people who don't want to participate in DD, would benefit from this. Without DD, the Live Team resources on NWN would not have been sustainable and been put to another project. It's not that continually supporting NWN costs us only printing the cdsleeves - things like the gamespy browser support, the considerable bandwith costs for this community site with all it's community building functions like "guilds" and the cost of having some of the companies best people locked away from active projects is not small at all. Without a source of revenue like DD to justify these expenses of both cash and valuable manpower, the level support for NWN we offer at this point would not have gone past patch 1.64, it would have been the last patch.

- I consider "they wouldn't need the live team if the game had no bugs in the first place" a knee jerk reaction, because the Live Team has done so much more than just fixing bugs, including
- adding database functionality
- adding new creatures (kobolds, gnolls, large cats,...)
- adding new placeables
- adding around *50* new scripting functions
- adding the Toolset/game new store functionality
- Plot Wizard
- free modules like WW1
- directly supporting mod groups
- adding modding support to the level where it is now. NWN would be long dead without 2da's hakable, etc.

- It has been said before, DD is benefitting everyone in the community, even those who won't buy the modules. I've seen some of the stuff the Live Team is working on and I think Rob is correct with his assessment that it will cause another surge for the community and that means that everyone will have it easier to find someone to play with in multiplayer, new content to try out and new modules to download to free from the vault for an extended period of time.

In the end people who want to pay for it get premium modules that offer several hours of fun and excitement, the community gets continual upgrades and content releases and the Live Team gets something to point on and say "see - we generate enough revenue to justify working on NWN instead of moving on to DA right now" - everyone wins, as it's not that someone is forced to buy these modules.

Finally - to quench those fears - it's not "pay to play" in an MMORPG sense. You pay ONCE for these modules - not on a monthly basis, and you can redownload them if you lost them somehow at any point.

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I've already dropped $70 bucks for the core game and 2XPs. Now I'm supposed to drop 9.95 or 19.99 or whatever PER MODULE *PLUS* the price of my net connection has to be added to that price as I will not be able to play the mods without a net connection?

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I fail to see the "supposed to" part. As said, nobody is forced to buy a DD module - people who want to play it do it, people who don't want to, don't need to. I wonder if you have the same reaction when you walk by that car vendor you bought your car at and see that they *offer* a new CDPlayer combo for only 99.99$ for your model. I mean, you already payed 30k$ for your car, why shouldn't you get that CDPlayer for free, especially since you still have to pay for the CDs to make it useful.... riiiighht.

Now add in that the car salesman tells you that by selling those CDPlayers to some of their customers they are able to keep a team that performs regular upgrades, inspections and even add some nifty new features from time to time for all their customers for free, and you probably won't get very understanding looks from them when you are finished yelling at them for trying to rip you off.

As for "paying more for less", the modules will be fairly priced for the amoung of content they offer - we have no intention of shooting ourselves in the leg by selling people overpriced products. There is always the option to wait for reviews and asking questions on the boards before buying things, so you can gauge if something will be able to meet your expectations or not.

More:

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The number one problem I see with digital distribution of anything is one virus or other computer problem can force you to pay multiple times for the same stuff.

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As mentioned above, this is not going to happen. You will not be forced to buy something again you bought before, even if you lost it and all your backups are broken.

More:

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I was indeed talking about the custom content from the community being free (yes, I know Bioware hasn't given anything for free, except patch support).

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really?

Monster encounters not respawning

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Question is: Is this how the respawns work? And out of curiosity, have they always been like that?

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yes, yes