Neverwinter Nights Forum News

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(Originally posted by chevalier)

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

Updates & Multiplayer: You do not need to install gamespy to play NWN online. NWN comes with an integrated server browser. To play online, make sure you have updated to the latest version of the game, using the Update Button.

Patches:

a) Time. It takes up to several days to get a new patch built and tested. It takes weeks if you add translation and external QA. Each change made to the patch requires it to be retested.

b) Resources. Same as above - people building a patch and testing it are not available for fixing things in the mean time

b) Fragmentation. By patching every week or so, the online community would fragment, many server operators wouldn't be able to update their servers fast enough and finally custom content creators and people running online modules would have hell of a time updating their hakpaks. It's not like we are running an MMORPG where we can force patches down on every user once he logs on.

All in all I think we have a pretty reasonable response time for bugs and issuing patches, faster than most companies out there. It certainly would be nice to have some patches out faster (i.e. emergency bugfixes), but then again, things still need to be tested. It's not that a bug is reported and fixed within a day - the exact cause of the bug has to be located, a fix has to be made - and - it has to be tested. If it's a programming change, it will most likely require a full retest of all three Neverwinter Campaigns, because we can never risk to break them (and that alone is about 40-50 hours, even for someone who played through all of them dozens of times).

David Gaider, Designer

BioWare: Speaking as someone who came to Bioware without industry experience myself, I'd say the main reason we do pretty well and keep improving is that we have a little niche here. We specialize in RPG's and so look for people who are passionate about RPG's... and seeing as that's what we focus on, it gives us the chance to constantly work on our skills. Not many development houses, for instance, keep on full-time writers (never mind a whole bevy of them) and I doubt there's very many places where I would have been able to hone my craft over the years like I have here. Not saying that I'm perfect (not by a long shot), but I know certainly that I've improved a great deal over the last four years I've been here. That and I'm probably more passionate about games now than I ever was before... and I'm not alone. How many workplaces do you know of when you can turn to anyone else at the lunch counter and start a discussion about the relative merits of turn-based combat or, say, the sexual subtext present in Sailor Moon and they're right there at your level? Not many, I'd imagine.

Patches: Quote: Write all of their conversations (make sure you tie them in to appropriate trigger points and character levels.) They'd need to tell your character all about themselves and the hero of Neverwinter a little bit at a time. Make sure you stay in character for all of them, be sure to add banter between each of them depending on which combination of party members you are taking with you and add in Deekin and Valen and Nathyra. Since you are looking for this for the other chapters, you need to add in Aribeth and Grimgnaw too. Now that you have basic conversations, you are going to need to add romance options because, really, who wants to romance Aribeth when you can romance that sweetie Linu? Oh, yeah, you need to allow for them to level up, possibly persuing whichever prestige class the community wants them to persue.

I had to chuckle when I read this. Believe it or not, the original plan was to do all this (minus the Grimgnaw bit). After writing Deekin first, however, we realized just how much dialogue was required to have an NPC go through the entire game... and after some quick mental calculation simply realized that it wouldn't be possible to do that four more times AND have two new characters with a romance. Someone could suggest, I suppose, that we should have taken Nathyrra and Valen out of the picture. Those two, however, were originally supposed to be the only henchmen in the game (waaaay back before the 2nd henchman function became a reality) who joined you back in Chapter 1. Deekin and the other four came later when I got all diva-ish and decided that Deekin was a requirement (which didn't take all that much convincing, come to think of it) and that I wanted to give those other four characters another kick at the can (which took more convincing, but we thought we had more time back then). I still regret not being able to add Sharwyn, Daelan, Tomi and Linu into the rest of the game... it was a hard decision to have them sent back when you meet Halaster... but in retrospect I think the game would have been missing something important if we hadn't kept Valen and Nathyrra in (who had been written as part of the plot by that point).

Waterdeep in Hotu: We wouldn't have minded taking the player through Waterdeep, really. The only problem with that setting specifically is that it's been done to death in PnP. There are supplements that have the entire place mapped out in detail and tell you what's inside every house... a situation which brings up the spectre of the dreaded FR Fanatic to tell us in his best Comic Book Guy voice about how we got Waterdeep completely wrong because the building at the end of Church Street actually has three levels and not two, and he knows this because in his campaign (*snip*... you get the idea...) Sometimes we'd really just rather go to areas where we can come up with our own stuff. HotU was about visiting famous places, however, and it had to start in Waterdeep... only trouble was that it really didn't seem to fit having the player wander around the entire city while it was being besieged. What would he do? You can't write something like Athkatla in that situation... the city's in a state of emergency, it's not "business as usual" and we couldn't stick side-quests all over the place without seriously detracting from the sense of urgency of the situation. Which is why we didn't splash "You can go to Waterdeep!" all over the place... though that doesn't stop some folks from assuming that's the case when the city's name is mentioned. It certainly would be a cool place to place an adventure in. Here, however, we're dealing with more of a dungeon crawl in Undermountain and the Underdark rather than a city adventure in Waterdeep. Too bad, maybe.