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.

Craig Welburn, Live Team Programmer

Saving crashes: Things that were discovered to cause crashes during saving in the past were:

Using a custom portrait that was saved in the incorrect tga format (or was saved in some specific image editing tools).

Having the date of your sytem clock on your PC set to some thing completely inacurate.

Both of these issues were fixed in previous patches. If you haven't patched your game up to the most recent version (1.62), I suggest trying that first.

Georg Zoeller, Designer

NWN:

Quote: Instead it plagues all PW's except for the ones who have imposed draconian strictures on their players.

PWs are not the scope of NWN.

Quote: Because Bioware decided to cut corners the rest of us have to deal with a completely artificial set of restrictions that varies dramatically from server to server and DM to DM. There's good game design and implementation that creates amazing possibilities for people. Then there's mediocre game design and implementation of a great game concept that creates something less. Bioware has done the latter at this point.

No, you have to deal with the restrictions that arise from using NWN as something it was not intended as. Thats your problem and you have to deal with it. It's not that we didn't say often enough that NWN's scope was not PWs or so...We are happy to add new features and make changes that benefit the PW part of the community from time to time. We have done so in the past, and we will do so in the future (i.e. deactivating the copy character feature for server vaults was requested by the PW community) - but it is not and will never be the major focus we have. The majority of our customers are playing the game the way it was meant to be played - and thats where the majority of our resources has to go as well. Making the changes to the skill point allocation during character creation does not benefit enough people to be worth the hassle that would arise from it.

NWN and DMs: I wonder what your "route" comment is supposed to mean... (As I said several times before ... if you think you won't be able to live with the answer, you might want to consider not to ask as at all). Zelphi pretty much explained it. NWN was designed to be played with a group of people and a DM - or SP. In SP, the player can do what is fun for him/her. If you play with a DM is there, just like PnP, there is either trust or the DM can use his powers to crack down on people that exploit the game in a way he doesn't approve. Even if there is no DM and you are playing with casual friends, it's your decision as well.

If you are talking PW again here ... sorry, then you are out of luck - our need to fall back to DMs or scripted solutions, because that's not NWNs original scope and you will have to live with that (or work around it). People logging in/out is usually a reaction to resting restrictions, by the way - and if you feel it's exploiting, tell them and kick them if they do not want to follow your rules - just be careful that you don't get too extreme with micromanaging what your player do, because as soon as it's no longer fun (i.e. waiting several hours real time to be allowed to rest), they will usually find a way around it. Also please don't misunderstand this - I have nothing against PWs - I have great respect for many of the PW builders out there and what they managed to do with an engine that's not designed to be used in that way.

Lag: 300 areas means a lot of management overhead in the game. The game will start to skip lower priority events (such as time updates) in order to keep up running at a fairly reasonable speed.

Weapon effects: No, if you have two item properties of the same type on your weapon, only the higher one will take effect, that's how it's supposed to work.

Shifter: The nonweapon shapes are mainly useful for "utility purposes" (i.e. the manticore has a superior ranged attack, the kobold commando is a stealth expert and so on, the mindflayer is nice to reduce whatever brain is left in that attacking grunt into jello).

Polymorphing: It's not that simple. Polymorphing you could modify stats, it will unequip items and do a lot of other things to your character that can interfere with which spells you have memorized, etc. In NWN there is no spellcasting while polymorphed and it is highly unlikely that there will ever be any. The official campaigns have been balanced with that in mind