Neverwinter Nights Forum Update

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(Originally posted by Tiamat)

Jay Watamaniuk, Community Manager:

Being God: Sorry, you cannot play a god unless it's the raving street lunatic variety- which does not come with a lot of super powers beyond Summon Change, Speak in Tongues, and Dancing Eyes.

Monster AI: I went to ask Preston what the word was on monsters chasing you into new zones. I had this illuminating and lucid dialogue:
Me: Can monsters chase you through zones or out of dungeons?
Him: Yes.
Me: Great.
Him: But I’m not sure about dungeons.
Me: Fair enough.

Point Buy: Here is the official word on Point Buy as of today. I spoke to Trent about this and here is what he had to say:
We are testing the game with 30. We will be tweaking the balance of the game and this number has changed in the past and will likely change again.
That last bit is important as we will be testing, testing, testing to see how things work.

Experience Division: Experience will not be split between you, your henchman, a familiar or summoned creatures. It’s not fair to the henchman et al but it’s a hard world.
Familiars level up only with the appropriate Wizard/Sorcerer level.

Scripting Magic Resistance for Locks: You could script this by making the lock immune to knock and then have the Object count every time Knock is cast. When the counter gets to the appropriate setting open the chest from the script language.

The Purpose of NWN: BioWare has stated that NWN was originally created with the idea of taking PnP and putting it on the computer and that means multiplayer...I seem to recall posting this bit before...
"As for what's the point of NWN- is it a Single Player Game with extra fiddly-bits added to include Multi-player or vice versa? Since it's initial inception the idea was to bring Pen and Paper role-playing to the computer and that means multi-player. The single game has been referred to as a multi-player game with only one player, playing on his own server. He can just as easily hook up to a LAN or the Internet and play the single game with his buddy in the next room or with complete strangers in different countries."
I find it interesting that that post was arguing for the reverse idea that the NWN is entirely multiplayer with a 10 hour tutorial stuck in.

Demo: No demo is available as of yet, sorry. You can be sure you will hear about any Beta test may decide to do when the game is closer to completion. A Demo usually comes out after a game is out in stores.
Good to hear we get some readers all the way from Turkey. Good gaming folks!
P.S. Don’t mind the many jokes from other users- some of them don’t get out much.

The Monk: Oh dear. You have asked such a perfect question that, due to unmentionable circumstances, I can't even pretend to be able to give you an answer.
I asked a designer- who understands the situation- about this and his exact words were:
The Monk? Hmmm...it's like Ben and Jerry's Rocky Road Ice Cream-complex and enjoyable. But now... now it's more like Hagen Daaz's Super Monkey Chocolate Lumps- slightly different but still a world of complex delightful flavors.

Hoods and Headgear: No hoods as yet, but full helmits are in. All the graphics are not done for items, including wearable items, so it is not a locked down thing.

Spells: Wall of Fire and Blade Barrier are in the game...and I have to say it: things may change as development continues.

Trent Oster, Producer:

Tilesets: The tilesets you suggest are a little morbid, don't you think? What about marsh filled with rotting corpses, hell city tileset with walls built from tormented souls?
On the mixing tilesets issue, we build tilesets to keep unique texture and geometry counts down so our game doesn't require a 128mb video card and 512 mb of main system memory.
Bleak, desolate areas to include:
lifeless forests, burned out grasslands, ragged rock plains, swamps with nothing but dead trees, "Scottish highlands" type settings, moors, lots of variations on rough rocky cliffsides, ruins, ruins, and more ruins and then some more variations on those ruins
...and, especially important, an ability to MIX tilesets in an area (albeit there are graphic implications for blending tiles, mixing mipmaps, etc.)

Bob McCabe, Writing & Design:

Corpses: If you kill someone, their corpse disappears almost immediately. if you want the streets to be littered with dead bodies that can be manipulated (spells cast at them, etc.), then you want to use ambient objects.

David Chan, Sound Engineer:

Music: Our music is done on a contract basis. Most everyone here agrees that that gives us the most flexibility when it comes to musical styles. As for sound effects, in the past Interplay did that majority of them. The first in-house sound was done on MDK2. I did about 97% of the sounds that ended up in the game. I use some libraries and some in-house recorded sounds. I use synths and Foley recorded here at BioWare. I process the sounds on a PC based system using some Sonic Foundry tools with Waves and TC plug-ins. We will be moving to a nuendo system soon and I'm drooling at the creative possibilities!

We do some VO recording here as well. All the chraracters for MDK2 were done locally. The guys from Three Dead Trolls and Atomic Improv were great to work with. My side was sore at the end of the day from laughing too much.

In the future we hope to do all sounds for all of our games in-house. Which is why I am looking forward to working with our new sound guy (which hasn't been decided yet). After all, we create world class content in every respect, why should sound be any different?

Derek French, Assistant Producer:

Can I make rude gestures at my enemy? No.

Server Browser: There will be an in-game server browser.
As for who is doing the backend matching service, we haven't finalized that yet, so we can't say any more at this time.

Lock Scripting: I haven't seen any lock specifications that allowed you to put SR on it. But the capacity is certainly there for something to be scripted.

David Gaider, Designer:

More on Locks: Let's see...I got my editor open right now.

OK, I plunk down a chest. It's on a big list of containers, which is a sub-list of your place-able objects. First thing I do is go to the 'Basic' tab...there you have the following:

* Name (this is what name will come up in-game)
* Tag (this is what scripts refer to it as)
* Plot? (this is a check-mark button, in case you want the item to be indestructable)
* Useable? (if this isn't checked, the item is just the same as background)

Okay...here's the stuff on the item, itself:
* Hardness (hey, someone asked about this...Okay, so it's finally in)
* Hit Points (until it's destroyed)
* Saves (you have Fortitude, Will and Reflex, just as normal)

Anyway, once I check 'Useable', the tabs for 'Lock' and 'Trap' pop up.

Under 'Lock', it's pretty basic...
* Locked? (you check whether or not the item starts off locked)
* Can be re-locked? (self-explanatory)
* Automatically remove key? (after using one)
* Key required? (if there is a key item that will open it...it will ask for the tag)
* Open Lock DC
* Close Lock DC

That doesn't do what you need. We'll check 'Trap':
* Is Trapped? (obvious)
* Trap Type (there's a big pull-down list)
* One Shot? (will the trap only go off once or every time?)
* Disarmable? (self-explanatory)
* Detection DC
* Disarm DC
* On Disarm (here you can insert a script)
* On Trap Triggered (here's where the trap's effect script goes)
* Hmmm...some other trap stuff that I don't know anything about. Looks like mods to rogues setting traps on the objects, but I'm not sure so I won't list it.

Still nothing you would want there. Okay, then...if you move to the 'Events' tab, it gives you all the possible events which can trigger a script you make. This is where you'd want to do it, I imagine...and I don't think it'd be too difficult from the looks of it. Here's the triggers:
* On Closed
* On Damaged
* On Death
* On HeartBeat
* On Inventory Disturbed
* On Lock
* On Melee Attacked
* On Open
* On Spell Cast At
* On Unlock
* On Used
* On User-Defined (everything else)

So...let's see. There will be, no doubt, some sytem for how SR is going to work. I'm not sure of it, myself, but you could add it in the HeartBeat so it's renewed. Maybe even on the Spell Cast At. Then again, you might want to think about what kind of magic you're protecting it from...and script according to that.

At any rate, it's pretty flexible, as you can see.

Thoughts on the Infinity Engine: I'm going to miss the IE, myself. Having worked with it, though, I can say that I'm also glad it's gone. There's just so many things the IE wasn't built to do...by the time we got to ToB, half the things in the game were work-arounds...and we had to put aside so many plot ideas simply because trying to make them work was just too difficult.

Where Erinjas is a little bit right is that this IS a new engine...and unlike where the IE had slowly developed since BG1 and had features upon features added into it, the NWN engine is going to be (all things considered) fairly basic. Plus, us scripting guys are pretty much neophytes insofar as knowing the ins and outs of the scripting language.

But, Erinjas, if you've done ANY scripting for the IE...just wait. I wasn't keen on learning another scripting language, but now that I have there is just SO MUCH that the NWN scripting language can do that the IE scripting language never could. It's flexibility by comparison really boggles the mind.

Not that I still don't think that there's a decent game or two that could still be done with the IE...it has some life in it, yet. But the engine can always be licensed out...Bioware doesn't have to be the one to use the engine, and we've ridden it just about as far as we want to. Time to move on.

The Single-Player Campaign: The single-player game will be very important insofar as its the Big Show for the toolset, right? But I'm not convinced it will be everything. Mind you, I suppose there's plenty of people out there who might buy the game for the single-player campaign without much thought as to how much they'll be using the toolset or multi-player aspect.

I suppose we'll discover what's what once it hits the shelves.

As far as the user-created modules that come out...I agree that that's where the shelf-life of NWN will come from most strongly. I have to agree with the ratio break-down a few posts above. I will point out a few things that will make things easier for even the casual user, though:

1) ANNOTATED SCRIPT EXAMPLES: we have a large library of easily-accessed scripts that are well-remarked in describing what they're to be used for.

2) ACCESS TO THE SINGLE-PLAYER MODULES: The single-player campaign is being made completely with the toolset, and will be completely accessible by any toolset user. This will help in many ways because everyone will be able to see how things were done and dissect them to learn more about the functions. Remember a part in the module where a monster surrenders once it's been hurt? Pull up the creature...find his scripts and look at those. Cut & Paste and then edit the dialogue, if you wish...and so forth. I'm not 100% sure on this, but I believe there's also to be a plethora of mini-modules showcasing examples that players might want to use...and containing generic, easy-to-understand dialogues that players can use and substitute.

3) INTUITIVE INTERFACE & CREATION WIZARDS: One thing I remember being most frustrated with the Vampire toolset is that it didn't TELL you anything. How could I make dialogue? Not a clue. The wizards guide you through everything from module creation to making items, NPC's, creatures and so forth.

You can literally put together a series of areas for a module within minutes. Stock them with monsters, use some of the generic dialogue (with your own details substituted in, naturally) and you've got a basic adventure. For many, this might be enough...I haven't seen much of the DM interface, but for some DM's who run a game on the fly, the ability to possess characters and plunk down needed stuff on the fly may be all they really want to guide players through their module.

So, yes...simple modules will be incredibly easy to put together. A no-brainer, practically. And while some may lump those 'quick' modules under the 65% 'total crap' category...that doesn't mean it won't be fun for some.

The real great thing is, for those people out there who want to learn the ins and outs of the toolset in more detail, they can put their effort into their modules and get a decent result for that effort. Hopefully that will mean some great stuff coming out. Considering the fact that creating an on-line community (making sure people can find these modules and know about them...and that mod-makers can find each otehr) is very important to Bioware is indicative of the step we want to take in this direction.

User-Created Stuff: Believe me...if there's going to be a lot of user-created stuff for the game out there, nothing would make us happier. We will go out of our way to let everyone know what they are and where to get them.
And seeing as we're probably best-equipped to make changes to the game (add features and so forth) and make new quality models & tilesets, I don't think there will be any shortage of stuff for us to do if the game is successful.