Neverwinter Nights Forum Update

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(Originally posted by Darien)

Trent Oster, Producer:

The Story of NWN: The story in NWN has just undergone a series of revisions. Our Director of Design at Bioware, James Ohlen (lead designer BG, Co-lead BGII) has assisted us with our recent revisions and they story is shaping up very strong. In a number of ways the NWN storyline will be even more compelling than the BGII storyline. We can't take a step back in quality in any aspect of NWN. We shipped BGII with a great story and our fans responded, so NWN will feature the same attention to story and adventure, with the added benefit of the lessons learned from BG and BGII. In short, The NWN story is going to be the best story we can create, single player or multiplayer. It's your choice.

Aribeth: Ah yes, Aribeth the Tyrist Paladin. In the picture Marc painted up she is praying to Tyr, thus the reason for her pose and her expression. In the story Aribeth is a respected member of the Neverwinter leadership and interacts often with the players. Sadly, Aribeth is too busy with the affairs of the city to join your party and adventure by your side. IT appears the small matter of a plague seems to have the city in a little bit of a panic. There will be interesting henchpersons in the game who will adventure with you. Henchmen will respond to a few commands, but you do not have direct control over them.

Time Stop: If a mage gets Time Stop off the combat is over. Bloody nasty spell. We are looking at the protection / breaching balancing in the spells and we may have to get a little creative here and there. In the end we will make the game the best balanced D&D game we can.

Weapon Size: Bastard swords will be one handed for medium sized creatures (humans, half orcs, etc...) and two handed for small creatures (halflings, etc...) The added complexity of one handed and two handed wielding as a play choice is hard to justify in terms of development time when it only applies to one weapon.
Quarterstaffs are two handed pole class weapons and require both hands to wield.

Non-Bipedal Animation: We have some support for arbitrary (non-bipedal) bone animation in NWN. As this was a very recent addition, most of our initial ship creatures will not be using this technology. We use a custom set of plug-ins in Max 3.1 for our bone stuff.

The Beholder looks pretty good. As for Poly count, around 1000 is a little on the high side, but it is reasonable.

Server Requirements: Actually, the server is fairly CPU heavy. In terms of CPU time, the client is very light. Since the server runs all the game AI (including pathfinding) it is currently fairly demanding. We still have a lot of optimization to do, but the server will always be quite CPU hungry. You are quite correct about the memory though. More ram=good. The fast disk will cut loading times and is more important for the client as graphics are much heavier in file size than game data.

We don't have a clear picture of the overhead right now and the optimizations stage is still a way off. We will make the server as fast and efficient as possible including script execution.

Derek French, Assistant Producer:

Official FAQ Update: The FAQ, coincidently, is being reviewed today and a newer version with many changes should be uploaded to neverwinternights.com and bioware.com within a few weeks.

Gone Gold Says Spring 2002?: Sorry guys, but this is just old news popping up again. Interplay has posted this kind of information about NWN several times, but it doesn't change anything.

Neverwinter Nights has never had an official release date. That being said, we are still on track for releasing the game this winter.

T E R M I N A T E D

Multi-Platform: Sorry, but this one started off just fine, but has degenerated into insults. I could devote a great number of pages to this, but I will try to summarize why developing on multiple platforms was the right thing to do for us.

- Bugs were found on the other platforms that did not show up in Windows, but were there, waiting to blow up on us nonetheless. Being on multiple platforms found us more bugs and will lead to a better, more stable game for all. Other developers have discovered this, too.

- The concept of "dropping" OpenGL and "switching" to Direct3D would add somewhere from 3 to 6 months of development time. We are not going to do this. This would be a bad decision.

- Ignoring the Linux dedicated server would be a Bad Thing. Over half of the game servers for Half-Life and Quake 3 run on Linux. Providing a Linux dedicated server expands the number of game servers out there that our customers can run.

- No investment of time and energy that produces positive results is a waste of time.