Neverwinter Nights Forum News

Remove all ads!

(Originally posted by Z-Layrex)

Here are today's official Neverwinter Nights forum highlights. Please take into account that these are only single parts of various threads and should not be taken out of context.

Trent Oster, Producer

Projects: I would assume many other fields are close in terms of work requirements. The hours are not constant, but in the early stages of a project (provided there is no E3 demo pending) we typically pull 8-10 hour days. When a major milestone is due or a demo is approaching we run the hours up. As we close on finaling the game we run the hours up hard. The start of a project is filled with excitement and enthusiasm while the end is characterized by a lot of fire fighting and hard decisions. The great joys of working as a game developer are the people you work with and the final product you ship out to the world. So in my opinion:
Normal job vs Game development job (Normal hours + Normal people + Normal projects) < (Longer Hours + Great people + Exciting projects).

Tom Ohle, Communications Associate

SoU: Yeah, I've actually just started playing through the SoU campaign as a Neutral Evil Druid. Man, it rules. Talking to dogs to find out where the villains went, watching my alignment shift as I make dialogue decisions... I've enjoyed the first 2 hours of SoU more than any single 2-hour span in the NWN OC.

(Ed. Note: I hate you.)

Microsoft: Microsoft's relationship with BioWare at this point consists of only a publishing deal for our new game in development, based on a new intellectual property we are developing. We'll have more news on our new IP in the future. Currently development on SW: kotor for the Xbox is in progress, and scheduled to release in Spring 2003.

David Gaider, Designer

Alignments:

Quote: So: You add 'Good' and 'Evil' actions. But these represent the extremes of good and evil. Coercion and Blackmail would be 'not-good', while murder would be evil. Self-sacrifice would be 'good', while helping others, even for free, would simply be 'not-evil'.

Actually, Syrsuro, this is what I'm doing already... I thought I'd said that. Perhaps I wasn't clear. I added the "not-good" and "not-evil" and so forth simply because it didn't seem right in most cases that neutrally-aligned characters should slip one way or the other for doing acts that weren't extreme. But I didn't get rid of purely "good", "evil", "chaotic" and "lawful" acts... those simply represent the more extreme actions, as you said, by which a neutral character would also begin to slip.

More:

Quote: What if it was good? Does a good person remain good when he didn't do anything good for a long time? I think not. The same goes to evil.

But isn't this a bit of a chicken-and-egg reasoning? Alignment, insofar as D&D goes, is attempting to categorize one's views according to their actions. If one is good-aligned, then he should be performing good acts. If he hasn't "done anything good" in a long time, that means the acts he's performing are probably not good... and would therefore be sliding him towards neutrality or evil. But in the end, what's still being categorized (in my opinion) are the player's views. If a player role-plays his alignment as it stands, he shouldn't see any alignment shifts at all, should he? Outside from very extreme acts, that is. As Syrsuro suggested (which is what I'm doing), there *are* acts which are considered extreme and would affect neutrals... it's just that those kinds of actions make up the minority. Being neutral, from a role-playing perspective, indeed does mean that I should be allowed to play around in that big gray area quite a bit and not be constantly teetering from side to side for every action. I do think the system suggested above with neutrals getting half the bonuses/penalties for those acts is a pretty good compromise... I'll think about it. But it still doesn't solve the problem, however, of neutrals feeling like they're forced to maintain a balancing act... it just minimizes it.

And More:

Quote: Not doing evil moves you to neutral I think: A drug addict steals for drugs: evil acts. That drug addict overcomes his addiction and thus stops stealing and taking drugs. If he would do that for many years would I no longer consider him evil.

Heh... not to be a stickler, but I'd suggest that this would probably be a Chaotic act and not an Evil one. If he's just stealing, that is. But again, if he's not doing that for many years and not performing other Chaotic acts (or even not-Lawful acts), he must be therefore performing Lawful and/or not-Chaotic acts, right? By definition. So therefore, yes, his alignment would slowly shift. Chicken-and-egg reasoning.

Even More:

Quote: I disagree, I see stealing for drugs as an evil act, the drug addict may steal from families who may no longer be able to feed there childeren because the addict stole there money, this is certainly evil.

You never said he was stealing from families who may no longer be able to feed their children. You just said he was stealing for drugs. Stealing from the poor might qualify as an evil act, but theft in and of itself is simply chaotic (though it certainly doesn't exclude good and evil being involved in tandem.) Unless it's your intention to imply that drugs themselves are inherently evil... in which case I'll just say that I don't subscribe to that kind of propaganda, but you're welcome to your opinion. Regardless, SoU won't be dealing with that kind of issue anyway so the point is moot.

Quote: Not offending the law isn't enough to make you lawfull, imagine a country with extremely good laws ruled by leaders who are the goodness themself, a neutral good person would quite never offend the laws there but that wouldn't make him lawfull because if tomorrow a despot takes over the power would he start offending the laws and that also won't make him chaotic because goodness is his only standard of judgement.

I don't see where you're going with this or how it's an argument against what I've stated. I never said that "not offending the law" made you lawful, nor do I think I implied it. All I said was that a character that is neutral (in either scale) is not necessarily acting outside of their alignment in cases that do not qualify as falling within the extreme end of the axes, and that a character should not be experiencing any alignment shift unless they act outside of their alignment. That's it.

Guess:

Quote: (On the other hand, it ALSO isn't good. I would call it Not-good on my scale, causing a shift towards evil for goods, but no shift for any other character).

Hmmm. I'm not so sure about this, not so much in the philosophical sense but in game terms. While stealing certainly isn't nice, as you yourself point out (in so many words) it isn't "Lawful Nice" and "Chaotic Nasty". If you place it on the good/evil axis you are saying that stealing is as much a minor evil act as a minor chaotic one... I'm just not so sure how well that sits with me.

Quote: For that matter - being greedy and demanding payment (the OC version of evil) isn't remotely evil either.

See, this is the thing: I agree with this criticism. When people pointed this out, we had to stop and rethink how we were defining good and evil. It is so easy to fall into the nasty/nice trap and chalk up nasty as a minor evil act. In truth, as you note, the distinction has to be clear and consistent.In the cases regarding rewards for quests in the SoU so far, I can say that it's quite different from how we were doing it in the NWN OC. Asking for a reward or accepting one doesn't involve an alignment shift. Altruism, however, is a not-evil act. Breaking a deal that has already been made is a not-lawful act. The only time evil enters into it is if threats of violence are made... and even those are usually not-good. The good thing about this? When you look at it in that perspective, coming up with acts that qualify as full-out Evil has been a bit easier. And quite naughtily fun, according to the playtesters. (A few of the Evil alternatives that were brought up caused rather shocked intakes of breath: we can't do that! It was a bit of a revelation to sit back and examine why we had those reactions and decide: well, why not? The up-shot is that some of the play-testers who say they always tend to play good characters have found the evil options they are presented with awfully tempting... which is a plus.)

Quote: I really think the hardest thing to do is to identify clearly chaotic acts. Lawful acts will, more often then not, be those that the designer has planned for the PCs to do.

Maybe it's just the particular plots we're coming up with, but my experience has been the opposite. We have to struggle to justify lawful hits, but chaotic hits seem to exist a-plenty. Since the reason one takes a quest can be ambiguous, we tend to only assign the hits based on how the PC resolves the situation... and resolutions that jump out and say "I'm Lawful!" tend to be rarer than you'd think. (One example is when the PC can talk a group of creatures into peaceful surrender... and when the mob afterwards wants to execute them, the PC can refuse and let them go because that was the deal: clearly a Lawful resolution.)

Quote: Good luck trying to, not only figure out all the possible actions the PCs may want to take, but assigning moral weights to them.

That's my only fear, personally: that testing might result in a large number of the current alignment hits being eliminated because of the argument they generate. Alignment can be such a tricky subject that involves personal interpretation. I suppose we'll see.

Guess Again:
Granted, our team is going to have to make some assumptions if we're to put any sort of alignment-shifting in the game at all. If you want to get philosophical about it, you could probably discount any categorization of behavior if you wanted to argue about it enough (especially the law/chaos axis). While some of the argument about alignment is general is fine, it really doesn't hold up in SoU in particular. For one, we do know the kind of culture we're dealing with... and it isn't some Indonesian pygmy tribe where the concept of personal possession doesn't exist. Perhaps the mores are a little Euro-Christian-centric... but so long as everyone's aware that's the case (and I think they are), I don't see it as much of a problem. We also have the ability to take quite a bit of the circumstance into consideration before we apply any kind of alignment hit. So while stealing the magic book from the evil wizard Foozle may certainly be stealing in the abstract, I really don't think we'd treat it the same as breaking into some commoner's house and stealing the gold out of his drawers. But Gromnir is currect in saying that any 10 given players will have completely different ideas of what alignment is about. Like I said ealier, the most controversial of our decisions will likely be removed before the game even comes out (QA likes to argue about this stuff, too), and the rest of it will just have to disappoint or upset a few people... because we do eventually have to make a decision on where these actions stand on the moral compass. We'll just have to make them with as much thought as possible, because the lack of those alignment hits is (I think) almost worse.

Stores:

Quote: Thus - although I do see this as a useful limit, I think that this limit MUST BE (imho) resettable through scripting so that the cash pool can be refreshed from time to time.

Well... yeah... with the store object holding gold, you'd be able to script gold to be transferred from/to it at any time. And at any rate, all of this stuff would be optional to the builder. Chances are that in any OC from Bioware we probably wouldn't use most of it. Some, perhaps, but not most.

Prestige Classes In The OC:

Quote: I wonder if the new prestige classes will be usable in the NWN OC. Apparently it's a scritping function that sets the availability per PC...

Without knowing what the plans are exactly, I would guess that they probably will be. As a default, all the prestige classes are available automatically (so long as their pre-requisites are met). There would have to be scripts put in the OC that specifically locked them in order for them not to be available.

NWN Additions:

Quote: First: will there an ability in SoU to save local vars to file? Maybe some suggestions of database-like or .ini file-like storing? Anything like this? It is really needed to PW-builders.

Database functions are being added by the Live Team, not by SoU. Anyone buying SoU will certainly get them, however, of course.

Quote: And second question: will player might have an title? something like "Rico 'Bucher' Amolen"? DM should have a command to change this + script command.

No, no plans for any kind of inherent functions for that. Such a thing would only be scriptable inside of a module at this point.

More:

Quote: So I ask again, will there an ability to create new subcategories of placeables/creatures?

New subcategories? Nope. The engine can't create these on the fly. I believe these are handled in the 2da's (or may even be hard-coded).

Arcane Spell Failure: If I recall, there *is* an effect for arcane spell failure that will be in... allowing for null-magic zones and such. Not sure about spell failure for armor... I don't think that's planned until XP2, but I might be wrong.

Henchman Changes: Well, the AI changes that we make will work in the original OC... as will the ability to directly interact with your henchman's inventory (which is the feature they're talking about, I'm sure), but in order for there to be more dialogues with the henchmen of the original campaign that'd all have to be written... and there are no plans to do that. The henchmen for the SoU campaign will have greater interactivity dialogue-wise, however (which is admittably easier to do, as it's a shorter campaign). They'll interject into dialogues often, make comments on their own as you travel and sometimes even help you out when you're stuck.

More:

Quote: will the sou henchpeople know the propper tactics for using ranged weapons? Also, will there be a method to ask the henchperson to buff you if they have available spells?

I don't know yet, sorry. The AI is still being worked on.

Expansion Pack: Those are probably both items that will eventually be handled with the regular patches. The expansion includes new content and all patches up to that point, but doesn't fix old stuff in and of itself... indeed, anything that might be fixed by the expansion team would likely just get dropped into the regular patch system. We're not going to keep fixes just for those who buy the expansion.