Neverwinter Nights Forum Update

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(Originally posted by Tiamat)

Derek French, Assistant Producer:

Frames Per Second: The biggest misunderstanding from BG2 was that the slider had something to do with "video frames per second". That slider was used to adjust "AI frames per second"; it had nothing to do with the video.
And no, there will be no correlation between frame rates between client and server. Especially when the server is dedicated and doesn't display any video.
Pretty much any question comparing BG2 to NWN will result in a "they are totally different" answer.

Teen Rating: Wow, this one wandered all over the place. Not a bad thread, but to answer the original question, no, there will not be adult content in Neverwinter Nights. We are going for a Teen rating, so it won't be anything beyond that.

NWN Toolset vs DS Editor: I will have to say that the NWN Toolset will be best for NWN and the DS editor will be best for DS.
I know that sounds wacky, but the two games are really quite different in approaches, target markets, etc. Comparing a toolset between the two, would be like comparing UnrealEd to Q3Radiant. They are both specific editors to specific games and are almost impossible to compare.

Limiting Views: Part of this reason was for art and performance issues. By limiting the view, it allows us to not have to worry about certain types of art.
We don't have to draw a sky or horizon, etc. thus giving us higher performance. This allowed us to crank up the detail on the art that we are showing.

Placeable Objects: We have many placeable objects that customize the look of an area. Add in full lighting control (with tint), NPC styles, and a fair amount of variety within a tileset and there is actually quite a bit of variety that you can create, limited mostly by your imagination. The other requirement for tile-based, was ease of use. If we didn't go this way, I am sure we would have made the module contruction ability available only to an elite few.

Supporting User-Created Content: We are looking into GMax and we are trying to figure out how to best allow user-created content. All we have said is that it probably won't be available on initial release. Plus, someone always figures out the file formats and adds content anyway. We just want to make sure that adding user-content is as easy to do as use the Toolset. We really don't want to handle user-created content poorly. Nevertheless, there has been no decision yet; we are just investigating it at this time.

Player Limit: Well, NWN is not being designed with persistant worlds in mind. The possibility of a persistant world working in NWN is something that we will be watching with great interest and trying to support somehow, but it is not one of the design goals. I am not sure what kind of player count you are looking at supporting, but portalling servers and running multiple copies of the server will allow you to run more than 64 players, just not in the same server process. As with all things, this is subject to testing. If we find that just short of release we can support more than 64 players on one server process, then we will up the limit. We have said this all along.

NWN Design Goals: The game is being developed from the ground up with multiplayer in mind. The game makes no distiction between 1 client or 64 clients. There is no "single player module". There is only the Official Campaign that supports anywhere from 1 to 64 clients. Unfortunatly, this is the hardest concept for us to get across to our fans.

This is a multiplayer game, but there are some stark realities that have to be addressed. Any game with multiplayer capabilities that is sold in North America ends up with just over 60% of the sales being playing in single player only. It is even higher than that in Europe. The significant part of our development has to address the majority of our customers without ignoring our primary design goals.

The Official Campaign: To be clear, the Official Campaign wasn't "added", it was always part of the original design of Neverwinter Nights.

The Official Campaign and New Modules: Our designers are really hard core and are going to be doing some really amazing things. This force alone is driving a great deal of the features in NWN's development. Since they are going to be making a ~60 hour campaign, taking your character from 1 to 10-12th level, we are pretty sure this will capture most of what everyone needs to make their own modules.
After ship, if there is a demand for something specific and we can work it in, we will probably add it in an update. We will be listening to the community quite a bit.

Public Servers: BioWare will not be running any public servers for NWN.

Jonathan Epp, Quality Assurance:

Reputation Loss: Faction standing will change only if a witness is present to see a transgression. If you, as a module designer/DM, want to adjust faction standing anyway, it can be done through scripting (the high ranking merchant lord you assassinated was being scryed by his wizard advisor and has alerted the guards).

Items Placeable Per Tile: There is NO limit to how many objects you can place per tile. Except that if you place a gabazillion things your frames per second will turn to seconds per frame. I suppose this could possibly change, but I don't see why.