Neverwinter Nights Forum Update

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(Originally posted by Darien)

Trent Oster, Producer:

Encounters and Line of Sight: Encounters can be used for non-hostile creatures as well. You could set up and encounter of friendly guards and they will disappear when you leave.

With regards to encounters, they are much less expensive than placed characters due to the AI time allocated. An encounter just gets AI when it is activated. Placed characters get AI every heartbeat (roughly 6 seconds).

With regards to encounter control, you create a list of monsters to draw from, define the minimum number and maximum number of creatures to spawn. You could make a number of completely custom NPCs and put them into the encounter. The creatures will be spawned in for the best fit to the players in the immediate area.

Q: This is one I'd like to know the answer to, as well. I've raised the issue several times, and no-one seems to know. Are unexplored areas that are not in line-of-sight visible?

A: No, you cannot into a room if there is a closed door between you and you haven't explored it yet.

Graphics: When we set out to create NWN we planned on doing a great looking RPG. I feel we have met that goal while still managing to keep the minimum requirements reasonable. For the high-end systems we have more features, for the low end, you have to disable many features, but the game is still playable. We also haven't emptied our bag of tricks.

Combat Animation: Our demo character at E3 were 15th level, so the actions were all real. The game will insert feints , sidesteps and other "combat filler" in between the real attacks for low level characters. At the higher level, everything you see is pretty much attacks.

Managing Monsters, AI, and Resources: Many placed creatures would be bad. Each creature would suck up AI time and rendering throughput. It would be better using two encounters which are triggered by the player. The result is a good ongoing fight without a ton of extra overhead. If the creature isn't in the fight it isn't created. If the player isn't there to see it the fight doesn't happen. As for the max # of creatures, we don't really know. We still have some optimizing to do in the engine and until we are final we won't have a clear idea of the cost.

Bob McCabe, Writing & Design:

Decaying Bodies and Items: Right now, when you kill something, the creature will fall to the ground, and then slowly fade away. When it is killed, it drops its belongings.

If you, as the DM, want a dead body on the ground for your module, you can simply plop down an ambient object of a corpse.

Items dropped on the ground, currently, do not fade away.

Parrying: Whether it is realistic or not, Wyked gets the oatmeal cookie for answering this question correctly; everyone else can have a chocolate chip cookie.

The combat round will feature "filler" for those characters who cannot attack often enough to fill up a combat round. Those filler attacks will feature assorted attacks, dodges, and parries.

AS WELL (as many of you brought up, and why you all get cookies), parry is a skill that you can buy ranks in, and is therefore a mode that you can enter. Final implementation, in a rules sense, is still being determined, so I won't comment on how it will work, but...

We showed this off in the E3 2001 demo when the cleric parried the bugbear's attacks with his great sword. In that instance, the bugbear had more attacks than the cleric, so the cleric had a chance of blocking about 2 of the 3 attacks from the bugbear.

More on Parrying: Fan Quote - "In the video, you can see the targets take damage. They lose blood (it falls to the ground) and IIRC, they also reacted to a hit by arcing backward slightly."

Sorry, I didn't bring any more cookies for today. So no more cookies, ginger bread or otherwise. You guys will just have to feel special with what you got

Anyway, the quote above is correct. Of course, we're still experimenting with this, and other means to make combat simple-and-easy to follow. Because "feedback" is one of our critical mantras here, we probably will continue to make tweaks until we are completely satisfied.

We have an advantage because we can do more with the new engine, but at the same time, we *need* to do more because of the on-line, one-PC-per-player component.

Brent Knowles, Co-Lead Designer:

Incorrect Release Date on WotC: Uhm. Darn. Guess I'm not going home for the next three weeks.

Actually, I'm not sure where our good friends at Wizards of the Coast got their release information but we will not be releasing Neverwinter Nights in November.

Again, unless you see a release date given here (by someone from BioWare) it is probably not accurate.

Variable Movement Rates: Actually, we have already done away with the endurance system. We were going to save mentioning this for an update but I figured I'd let you guys know so you don't spend anymore time planning alternative systems.

We will now have variable movement rates for monks and barbarians (up to a defined maximum speed). Of course this system will have to stand up to the rigors of playtesting.

Derek French, Assistant Producer:

Clarification on Managing Monsters, AI, and Resources: I understand now. The original question that Trent answered was about someone that wanted to load up an area with monsters for the party. What Trent was saying was to address two issues: processing and challenge. Placing 20 monsters in a module may be good for a party, but would probably slaughter a single player. In this instance, placing an encounter would be preferable since the encounter would scale to match the party and be less processor intensive than a preset number of monsters.

What Trent said is completely accurate based on the original question. But, this in no way implies that you must use the encounter system throughout any module you make.

Official Campaign: Heh, here is an uphill battle that we are facing. The Official Campaign is not just for a single player. You CAN play it by yourself, but it can also be played with others, as in multiplayer.

Ending Level of Single Player Campaign: We still haven't decided on the finishing level in the Official Campaign yet. It won't be 15, but 10 or 12 might be about right. Couple that with, lets say, 60 hours of gameplay, and it is actually not a bad pace.

Also, 60 hours is pretty long. It took me about 3 weeks to finish Deus Ex. Deus Ex had a time counter on it, and when I was finished, I had played for about 25 hours.

Monster Creation: You can pretty much make any monster you like in the NWN Toolset. There are a few restrictions though. You will only be able to use models that ship with the game. This is until we figure out exactly how we are going to handle user-created content. For fun, I just made a Balor-class monster that looks like a badger. Cute, until he tears you apart in 3 hits.

Was there something specific you had in mind?

Item Creation: I just created the weapon you described. No problems except for the parts of the 3rd Edition rules that you don't understand. Magic resistance doesn't work like +30% as it goes by a fixed Spell Resistance value. As for the sword's personality, you would have to script that yourself within the Toolset.

I think you can stop posting about item creation restrictions now, OK?