Neverwinter Nights Forum News

Remove all ads!

(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.

Georg Zoeller, Designer

Hail Of Arrows: The Hail of Arrows and Seeker Arrow spells have been changed lately to include proper bow and critical damage, strength modifier, proper treatment of weapon specialization and correct damage penetration for the piercing part of the arrow, making the ability quite a bit more useful. These fixes will be in an upcoming patch.

HotU: HotU comes with over 100 new scripting commands, 4 new tilesets, new heads, new events like OnEquip, OnUnEqup, OnHitCastSpell, Dynamic Item properties, 16 new monsters, new feats, spells, epic level support until level 40, a big bucket full of new, high quality placeables and more. Most Builders will be more than satisfied with that.

Trapkits: As a side note, all Trapkits in Hordes will be marked as "stolen" by default, making it harder and less profitable to sell them.

Shifters: Yes. the shifter forms can change Con, Str and Dex, but most forms only change one or two of these stats, the other ones stay like they are in non-shapeshifted form.

Arcane Archers: The arcane archer's enchanted arrows have been fixed to cut through the appropriate damage resistance. The fixes will be rolled out in an upcoming patch. DR 20/+5 means you need a weapon of +5 or higher enchantment to hit a creature or you will have 20 points of damage subtracted from each blow.

David Gaider, Designer

Open Game Design: Part of the problem, of course, is that we do not really get access to a broad slice of our fanbase when getting this feedback... the portion of the users represented on this board are comprised mostly of the hardcore RPG player. Accepting that and knowing that for what it is, some types of community input on design could be quite helpful. I think, however, that it remains mostly useful as a litmus test for some of our decisions and for those things Bioware feels it needs specific help with. At best, perhaps we should be more willing to "dip into the pool" (so to speak) when such situations arise, but I'm sure anyone who is a regular on these boards could understand our hesitation.

After all, we have to approach many of these decisions from a viewpoint that the majority of the community simply can't understand. I say can't because the limitation for most isn't one of intelligence or willingness... it is simply impossible for many to comprehend the factors that need to go into these decisions. Even if we had dedicated folks trying to educate the community, it still wouldn't work: players view design decisions purely as players, and while that's invaluable input to have access to you certainly wouldn't want to base larger decisions solely on that.

And if we did open up larger decisions to the community? Besides the likelihood for such to descend into arguments (when did the community ever agree with itself?), in the end we'd still have to make our own judgement call... and thereby risk the anger of community members who suddenly felt they had some ownership of the process. Sure, the chances of finding a gold nugget idea in all of that seems appealing... but what are the chances that it would get lost in the general cacophony? Pretty good. I appreciate the idea, and think that in some isolated circumstances it might be an alright one, but overall it's a bit too optimistic considering what's involved.