Neverwinter Nights Forum News

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(Originally posted by Veldrin)

Here are today's 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. 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.

David Gaider, Designer

Bugs: I find it interesting when someone starts shaking the bug issue about. The plain fact of the matter is that video games are exempt from responsibility for bugs in their software because without laws to identify exactly where negligence comes into the picture there simply would be no video game industry. Period. There's your alternative. Nice knowin' ya.

Nobody would be willing to open themselves up to that liability. And the reason that laws defining negligence has not been made is obvious: where would you set the bar? Which bugs "should have" been fixed prior to release and which ones are okay? Ask someone like newc and you'll get a list of every bug in the game plus a heaping helping of issues that were designed that way on purpose and not even bugs. Ask more reasonable folks and you'll still end up with widely varying criteria. Ask non-industry folks (like the people making the laws, likely) and the answer will be even more different. And would you restrict programs on a sheer number and severity of bugs... or does the complexity of the software play into it at all?

Not that there isn't some software being released that makes it awfully tempting to try and make such legislation. I can think of a few games I've purchased in the past which I could think of as buggy to the point of negligence... playing them brought me to the level of frustration where I was imagining wicked corporate types callously releasing software they knew wasn't ready. It's not a valid mental image in the least... and the satisfaction I would get from getting that legislation and sticking it to those wicked corporate-types would be short-lived indeed. And, incidentally, as far as game programmers making lots of money: I believe almost every one of them could go into a professional field with their computing knowledge and earn at least 3x as much as they do now. At least. They're not paupers, but money is obviously not their biggest issue.

Whirlwind: Whirlwind is not in SoU. It's being considered for HotU.

Server Exploits: As has been said before, it's not within the scope of the expansions to fix bugs... except as they come up based on the work we do for that expansion, in which case any fixes are dropped into the next general patch. As far as server exploits go, there are a number of those and a huge list of bugs (which includes stability corrections) that the Live Team is slowly going through. We don't give out status reports on that, however.

Tom Ohle, Communications Associate

Greater Missile Storm: I believe this has actually been changed since that preview build went out. Greater missile storm does 2d4 for each missile.