Neverwinter Nights Forum News

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(Originally posted by Veldrin)

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.

David Gaider, Designer

Alignments: Interesting topic. I would tend to agree that the option should be available for players to change their alignment through their actions, but I would also say that it's a given that there is a vast difference between how this can be played out in a PnP environment versus being implemented in a computer game... and this should not be put aside as being irrelevant. Offering a variety of options that allow one to move not only along the Good and Evil scale but also the Lawful and Chaotic scale is without debate the most desired option... however, in order for such a system to be applicable inside a computer game there must be enough options of each type for this to be playable.

If you insist that a player move towards Chaotic for stealing and/or lying, then you must also provide enough options for the player to move towards Lawful. You are going to have to create situations where this is so, in fact, even if the possibility does not immediately occur to you lest you end up with players of alignment-restricted classes losing the ability to move forward in their chosen class because of (what they might consider to be) arguably suspicious quantification of their moral decisions.

Not only that, you're going to have to extend many of these options in dialogue to the point of defining the reasoning behind those decisions... because, let's face it, I'm sure all of us can think of possible situations where characters might take the same course of action but for entirely different reasons. Do you hit the character with a Chaotic shift for lying even if the player thought he was doing it for the best of reasons?

Now a player might look at all of the above and say yes, yes and yes... this all looks exactly like the kind of game I want to play in. Fair enough, and I believe it certainly can be done (though I think, to be fair, the only way it would be possible as a whole would be to state up front that an alignment shift will occur on the dialogue choice before the player selects it)... but what few players might consider inside of a game is the sheer volume that such a design style brings to it. I've said many times in the past that the more options and paths that you bring to a story (or stories, as the case with many quests might be), the wider it's going to end up... ie. the more work that is going to have to go into implementing these options even though the player taking the path through it will never see them.

Case in point: let's say you have a quest that takes approximately 1 hour for a player to complete from beginning to end. You could have two paths through the quest, meaning you have to create 2 hours worth of story... or you could have 10 paths through the quest, meaning you have to create 10 hours worth of story. Either way, the player only gets 1 hour worth of play out of it... only that portion of the players which replays the quest in a later game might even see the rest of the work. And, believe me, when you're putting in the time to create that 8th option that is really, really cool but probably only 1% of the players will ever even know exists... you really start to wonder which end of the scale is better. So, too, must you weigh the difference as follows: if you have 100 hours of work scheduled on the project, do you put in 10 quests or 50 quests? And which, taking in all types of players, is the best value overall? A tough question, since people consider value in different ways. A player who expects all options open to them might be ecstatic to discover them all there... and yet vastly disappointed when the game is over in, say, 10 hours. Where does the value lie, then?

I'm not going to say which is better, overall, but taking an extreme view in either case is bound to mean you're ignoring something important. And I'm not claiming that the NWN OC or even BG/BG2 (or even Planescape:Torment, for that matter, which I include because it's a good example of that end of the spectrum and not because we worked on it, which we didn't) handled the division between these necessary considerations very well... I will say, however, that in all cases it was a learning experience and that one end of the scale can't be considered without the other. Unless you're simply talking idealism, which is fine in and of itself, but not very realistic when it comes to application (at least in a commercial sense... community-made stuff can naturally fit themselves into whatever niche they wish and that's part of the point, I guess).

Hmmm. I think I've started to ramble. Time to stop there.

Tom Ohle, Communications Associate

SoU Avatar Shots: You just have to find the right robe for your character I took those shots using the "Robe of Vecna." That's in the toolset already.

Quote: You are naive. NWN is an action oriented game and more than likely the expansion will only have spells that have combat uses only.

Precisely. We've announced 5 out of 50 spells, and they're all combat oriented. MM hmm.

Derek French, Assistant Producer

CopyObject Bug: CopyObject() actually works, except that there is a resource bug that is causing it to do that cool underflow thing for you. We tested all of your sample scripts here and they all work fine with the fix. This will be in the 1.28 final.

Jay Watamaniuk, Community Manager

True Strike: The spell True Strike is one of the most powerful spells out there. In my PnP game I have a few levels of Sorcerer (3) for my Rogue and use the Spider Climb and True Strike to deadly effect. If you also consider that since True Strike adds 20 to an attack roll that means you can also fire a bow reeeeally far. The spell is part of the Player's Handbook and so the debate about the inclusion of it into the D&D universe has already happened. As with everything that gets put into a game it will be looked at when we get down to straight balance testing for XP1. If it proves to be too crazy we will make adjustments. If we want to talk about crazy stuff how about that there Spiked Chain business. Whhhoooeee

Hostile Henchman Bug: We have made some progress on this issue. There will a fix for the hostile henchman problem in the next patch (a beta of the patch should be out this week some time).

Corrupt Player Characters: Quote: Okay, I've sent an email to nwbugs with the description and a copy of the corrupted bic file and the lines that were corrupt. I also sent the same thing to infrogames. But is there anyway to keep it from happening? Or what exactly is causing the problem?

Not sure at the moment what caused the character to get corrupted. I tested your character with the 1.28 beta version that was recently released and it didn't seem to cause any crashes (even after multiple reconnection attempts).