Neverwinter Nights Forum News (Nov. 10, 05)

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Here are today's Neverwinter Nights forum highlights, collected by NWVault. 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, Senior Designer Live Team

Why internet to play POTSC?
Premium modules, including the Diamond Edition and the Kingmaker pack, are purely optional. Provided everyone has updated to the latest patches, they do not place any restrictions on who you can or cannot play with.

Premium module sales allow us to finance our ongoing Live Team support of NWN so long after its initial release. The community benefits from the introduction of new funtionality, new art and audio content, new playable content, and the continual introduction of new NWN owners.

As for gameplay hours, there are plenty of NWN modules on the Vault that do not require any of the subsequent expansion packs. Taken together, the sheer amount of gameplay available for unexpanded NWN outweighs that of the BG series by an order of magnitude, especially once you take into account all of the hakpak content freely available form the community.

Lastly, regarding HotU, we're sorry to hear about your multiplayer difficulties but we were very upfront about that particular expansion being designed for single-player only.

Georg Zoeller, Designer

DM masquerade attempt

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It isnt totally unrealistic or unreasonable that Bioware might do the same for server admins if the abuse is bad enough.

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It would neither be unrealistic nor unreasonable for us to offer that service, but it would likely mean that we would have to collect some monthly fee or so to finance it, which would not be very popular

Please note that NWN has not been designed with PWs in mind, but rather small groups playing together with a DM. Running a 24/7 PW means that you will have to deal with the issues that arise from that kind of game model, like other, professionally run games out there.

NWN has a wide array of options to allow server operators to protect themselves from griefing, from ban functionality, a powerful scripting language able to query CDKey, IP, Name and to ban or otherwise disable a cheater, DM client, password protection, etc - probably more options than any other game.

Stanley Woo, Quality Assurance

"...there's a lot coming!"
There are some very neat things in the pipe. I'm looking forward to testing them.

What's up with gamebanshee anyway?
Because game reviewers aren't you (usually), it's only natural that their opinions will often disagree with yours. Not only that, but numeric grading systems are subjective by nature and should only be seen as guidelines and not hard, static numbers.

An 8.1 by one reviewer might be the best game he's played to that point, but two years later his best game ever rates a 9 or even a 9.5. Some reviewers give a 10 for games which are paragons of their particular genre or style, while others find a 10 to be the unattainable perfection to which all games aspire. You'll find different numbers on different sites, or by different reviewers on the same site, and it doesn't mean what you think it means.

My 8 and your 8 aren't likely to be the same. Hell, if you're tallying points and I'm subtracting from perfection, that would also change the value of our final scores, wouldn't it? Suffice it to say that the numbers by themselves aren't the be-all and end-all of a game's rating. Read the pros and cons of a given reviewed game, and corroborate them with other reviews. Only then can you gauge for yourself what value that game has for you.