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.

Rob Bartel, Co Lead Designer

Digital Distribution: Yes, just to reconfirm, we are in the process of developing a BioWare-specific Digital Distribution system which is entirely separate from Atari-On-Demand. When (and if) the DD Project rolls out, Atari will receive a portion of the revenue from the sale of NWN material, in keeping with their role as publisher of that core product but the design, development, and hosting of the system itself will be handled exclusively by BioWare.

Georg Zoeller, Designer

Persistant Worlds:

Quote: Yet the PWs made in Neverwinter are pretty significant for a game that was never intended to support them.

Sorry, in terms of numbers, they are not significant. We have a pretty good overview about how many PWs are out there and how many people play on them, since we run NWNs master server in house and thus have a pretty good picture about what's being played. However, we won't share those numbers with the public (as they pose valuable data to base business decisions on), so you will have to believe us when we say these numbers are insignificant when it comes to the decision whether a build-a-pw-toolkit would be commercially viable or not.

Finally, as Dave said, it's not only a question of commercial viability or if we see a market for it, we currently do not WANT to make a PW toolkit, as it is not the type of project we are interested in doing right now(and that argument alone should have terminated the discussion a long time ago). So again: A "build a PW toolkit" is not an interesting product for a AAA-Game developer as the market consists of a small and very vocal group of people that could never sustain the cost of making a AAA game title, or even justify the cost for modfiying a build-your-own-module title like NWN to scale like good enough to sustain a PW framework.

In addition to the assessment above, there are currently no plans at Bioware to do such a product, because we currently are busy to do other things we find more interesting.

Dynamic quivers:

Quote: Didn't DLA already make dynamic quivers?

Yepp, but I think they used the armor appearance changes to add a neck part with the quiver. In any case they pointed out that using VFX could allow the community to do these things far more efficiently and that you should be able to add your own VFX and specify if they align with the player instead of overriding the few effects that were hardcoded to do so. So yes, a properly constructed VFX could probably used to simulate all kinds of neat equipment like quivers, sheath, exploded heads or even cars, coaches or ships (no more weird polymorphs). We experimented with that stuff in Hordes a bit (check the last entry in visualeffects.2da) and found some interesting use for it.

Patch 1.63: Yes we are working on patch 1.63 (amazing, the game is out for almost three years now). It has an impressive list of bugfixes, (probably the longest up to date) in game code and scripts as well as optimization and some new features, which we are going to reveal in the future. It will be released when it is done and tested (sorry, but we won't provide any estimated release date). There will most likely be one more more beta patches you are welcome to test once they become available.

There are a lot of mentions regarding specific fixes in this patch all over this board, you can either use the "Search by Developer" feature on Craig Welburn, David Gaider, Derek French, Jonathan Epp and me to find them, or check the "developer posts archive" on nwvault.com where Mayseth tracks our written words for all eternity (ouch).

Level cap: People where complaining about the levelcap in BG and BGII and even ToB (at which point it started to get really ridiculous), and these games weren't really multiplayer friendly at all. No, a game without level cap promises endless adventure, and the higher your levelcap is, the more a powergamer will be pleased ("and then I can take this power, which will make me nearly invulnerable, and after that level, I can try to take on a god, muhahah"), I don't see a specific strong link to multiplayer here.