Neverwinter Nights Forum Update

Remove all ads!

(Originally posted by Arwen)

Trent Oster, Producer:

NPCs/"henchmen": I haven't beaten the game yet, but I have played through a large portion of the game. I have done so with a druid, a rogue, a paladunce (in loving memory of Karzak, if I remember rightly), a sorcerer, a barbarian, a fighter/rogue, and a bard.

To be honest, the game only seems harder with the other classes when you try to play them like a fighter. When you get past that and start playing the game like a rogue, or a wizard, the frustration goes away.

But this question is about henchman, and I've been keeping one hired and close quite a bit lately. And you know, I'm actually finding them very useful. My favorite henchman is one that those of you who paid attention to my ramblings about Aidan's pen&paper game might recognize. He's a thief with a lot of stories to tell.

And when he's with me, and he has permission to do so, he basically unlocks any lock that stops me from doing something I tried to do (i.e. I tried to open a door but it was locked, I move away, and in steps Mr. Thief), or warns me about upcoming traps and then disarms them, if he can.

In battle, he tends to be pretty useful as someone who does his share of the fighting.

I haven't spent much time with the other henchman, but I did take a wizard and noticed a lot of options, such as "Hey, do you think you can try to keep your spells' power level down to match our opponents?" and "I want you to nuke every goblin you see with your most devastating spell! Muhuhuhahaha!"

Okay, so maybe the dialogue wasn't written quite like that, but you get the idea.

I think our henchmen are going to be pretty solid. I have gotten pretty annoyed, at times, with some stupid henchmen-type characters in past games that I have played, which would include BG2 (I always played my one PC, and then set the others to run on their respective AIs). So far, in Neverwinter Nights, I really haven't been frustrated by the henchmen. What can I say? Henchmen are almost... unobtrusive.

I think a lot of that comes from the fact that the game is balanced to not overwhelm you with challenge. You can do it alone, but with a henchman? It becomes just a little bit easier. You get the extra fighting ability, you get the distraction in your enemy's ranks with having the henchman there to split up attacks instead of having them all focused on you, you get the use of their skills such as thiefy stuff, or healing, or what-have-you, and you get someone to talk to when you're feeling lonely Best of all, in all of the times I've played with a henchman, he's only died once or twice (which shows that they're not stupid), as opposed with the dozens of times that I have died.

I think it's a very dramatic improvement over anything we've thought up in terms of our past games NPCs AI, and I have a feeling they [the henchmen] will compare very well, if not be slightly better than, anything else that's available in the gaming world that I have seen, for the most part. And since you can modify their scripts (or copy the scripts over onto new NPCs and re-write the dialogue to make new henchmen), well, you can always make them that much better.

Overkill: I liked the day I redid the blood effect and put a huge blood emitter into the geometry chunks accidentally. I killed a character and my frame rate went to about 2 FPS. The screen was covered with red blood fountaining from the body and the chunks flying around. A herd of cattle has less blood in it than that gnome did.

Sunder feat: Sunder isn't in.
Disarm and improve disarm are.

Changing CD keys without reinstalling: You will be able to change the CD-Key without re-installing.

How to cover Bandwith and Hosting Fees: We know this is a serious issue and we will be looking into possible solutions up to and after the release of NWN.

Metamagic feats: Sadly in NWN you can only do one metamagic feat on a spell. The added complexity in doing multiple metamagic feats on one spell was too great for us to implement in our planned timeline.

Will there be Gelantinous Cubes:We didn't plan (I'm not even going to try and spell it) G. Cubes for the start because we didn't have skeletal animation in the engine.

The specs on systems YOU are building for E3: The systems are:
AMD Dual processor systems using:
1600+ MP processors
512 MB of Ram
Geforce 3 Ti500 Video Cards
SB Live soundcards
40 GB HDD (Quantum I think)

The reason the ram is so high is:
1. It's just so cheap right now
2. E3 Demo box = Post E3 workstation

Jay Watamaniuk, Community Manager:

Blood and gore animations: Gore? Man, we got gore. Blood a-plenty. Blood splashes around during combat but does quickly disappear. I was testing out a module I am writing and my poor Paladin was killed with three arrows sticking out of his back lying in a pool of his own blood.

Critical hits are pretty ace to.

Area spells: I just did a quick check and I spotted 'Wall of Fire' so, yes, Wall stuff is in. Which ones specifically I can't say or Preston will beat me up.

Firearms: I would expect that within hours people will have made firearm models based off of the current NWN missle weapons. If somebody can make a Simpsons Quake mod I'm sure somebody will spend some time making all sorts of scary weapons for NWN.

Weapon styles: There will be different animations for certain types of weapons. For example if your using a two-handed weapon or something crazy like a two-headed axe there will be different animations than a one-handed weapons. Also there are several unarmed attacked (assorted kicks and punches) for Monks and angry monsters to use. I do not think there will be much difference in specifics using a Short Sword vs. Longsword however.

Distance: Neverwinter Nights, the city, is broken up into parts separated by gates. There is a central core surrounded by these districts. By how the streets are laid out you can't really walk in a straight line so I'm not sure how long it would take. I think that most people will doing a lot of jogging/running as people tend not have the patience for walking.
Don't worry it's a big place- but it's more on interesting stuff to do than actual size.

Hide in chainmail: You can wear whatever you want but the negatives add up pretty quick against certain stealth skills for heavier and heavier armor.

Derek French, Assistant Producer:

Items created for a module: Yes, items stay with the character no matter what the module, providing that the item is created from the stock data in the Toolset.

File I/O added Not for initial release, but it is definately something that I want added post-ship.

Server on one pc play on other pc: Yes, if you run the dedicated server on that other PC.

WIll NWN natively support SMP functionality: No, NWN does not support SMP, but with duals, you could very easily run 2 copies of the dedicated server with 2 modules and portal between them.

Multi-servers on one machine: Yes, provided that your machine has the CPU and RAM to support it.

International keyboard layouts: Infogrames is sending us some international keyboards as we speak. In fact they should be here today. We'll look into the support issues, see what is involved and support it if we can.

Custom music: Yes you can add your own music, though the file format has not been finalized.

Tarrasque: No Tarrasque. No Tarrasque’s Mamma. No guys in paper costumes running around dressed as Tarrasques. No village festivals involving dancing ‘round the May Pole with Tarrasque colored ribbons and lastly, no Big Fuzzy Tarrasques surrounded by children singing, “I love you, you love me” will be featured in NWN.

David Chan, Audio Producer:

Sound effect samples: We have talked about posting some sound samples, but haven't done that as of yet. I think it's a good idea and will see what I can do.

Bob McCabe, Writing & Design:

Variable responses based on Charisma: Not only is it possible, and easy, but we've filled our campaign with it.

5-foot step rule: There are keys for side-stepping and such, and you can use your mouse to do this as well, by clicking on a nearby area while in combat. If you click further away from your character or use mouse-driving, your character will move away from combat, which could open you up to an attack of opportunity.

I know all about the move without attack doesn't draw an attack of opportunity. Remember, I'm playing a non-fighty bard in Preston's game - I know all of the exploits that allow me to stay out of harm's way

As for Neverwinter, I'm actually not sure how the rules will be implemented. Stuff seems to change now and then, work fine one day and be a little messed up the next. On top of that, a good bit of it is just hard to determine from the CPUs point of view...

I'll check it out more in-depth when things are tweaked into finality

So far as I understand the combat system, the sidesteps you take allow you to move about 5 feet in the equivalent time of one round. So yes, there is at least one or two of those silly little tactical rules in there, in addition to the flash.

Death: Defeated characters have the choice of waiting where they are, and remaining dead, respawning at the local temple at the cost of some experience, quiting the game, or reloading a saved game.

Retroactive constitution: On pg 130 of the PHB, it states that "an increase in a character's Constitution score, even a temporary one" will grant the player more hit points. They then offer the example of a character gaining +4 to constitution at 3rd level (an effective bonus increase of 2 points), resulting in a gain of 6 hit points (2 per level).

This is how Neverwinter has interpreted, and implemented, the rule.

David Gaider, Designer:

Cloaks/robes: Cloaks and robes exist as items, but you won't see them on your avatar. (No icky 'short cloak' either, I'm afraid.)

Character faces: There are a number of head models for each race and sex. Humans have slightly more variety, but only by a couple. (At a guesstimate I'd say 8 for non-humans, 10 for humans).

You can also select skin and hair color (with a full palette). Tattoos can be applied to the chest and/or the arms and/or the legs with 2 colors to select. Add that to the thousands upon thousands of clothing/armor variations and you get a pretty unique appearance.

I imagine that, as far as user content in this area goes, slight alterations to the face skins and more tattoos will be the most common mods.

Facial hair exists as part of the head models (unless it's just stubble... that would be part of the skin). Facial hair isn't a selection on its own.

Using monster models for PCs: It isn't currently possible, nor can it be scripted.

Though someone could possibly come up with a solution using a polymorph effect... but that would have to be re-applied at intervals, I believe.

Someone may end up doing it somehow, anyway, but realize that with a monster model you're only going to get weapon animations and (possibly) shield animations.

PCs as followers or henchmen: My only problem with having a DM-possessed character tag along with the party is that it takes his attention away from other things.

I suppose if you provided a bit of AI to the character, you could safely jump out and do whatever you deemed necessary when it was required... it would have to be during combat or only when convenient, tho.

You could always have more than one DM, too, I suppose.

I suppose it depends on which approach you prefer.

Me, I prefer to spend my time tweaking or watching for ways to interact with the characters, as opposed to being an NPC member of their party.

Nothing is so goose-bumpingly RPG-licious as when the party is standing in the middle of town discussing something and the nearby old man turns and starts ranting over 'those adventurer types!'... or when a passing noblewoman stops to say hello... or when the guard you're waiting to pass suddenly stops and says 'Uh? Whoozat? Someone der?', scratches his head, and then continues on walking after I un-possess him.

I guess you could theoretically script all this stuff... but why?

I love pre-made dialogue, mind you. It's what I write for a living. But when I'm running my campaign, that dialogue is to keep the NPC's occupied and informed for when I'm busy. Otherwise it's realtime possession all the way, baby. In fact, I personally would love to be the assistant DM in a campaign responsible for possessing ambient characters and monsters in a fight (heh... nothing better than having a party of monsters, all thugs except for 1 spellcaster. Let the thugs use their AI... I'll possess the spellcaster, thank you.

Henchmen: But you can direct them, to an extent.

Your one henchman, for instance, displays his own radial menu when you click on him, through which you can issue commands.

If my henchman wanders off and starts doing something I don't want him to (which has been happening less and less as the AI for the henchmen has been developing, actually), I click on him and issue the Follow command... which basically calls him back to my side.

This is aside from asking the henchmen to change stances in dialogue, as Bob mentioned.

There are more commands, of course, but seeing as henchmen are undergoing a lot of testing in the current stage, I wouldn't want to say too much since things might change.

Merchants: Quote: Will merchants/shopkeepers in NWN be similar to what they were in BG ie you initiate dialogue with the merchant, and one of the responses opens a buy/sell screen?
Yes, though you don't have to go through the dialogue if you don't wish to.

Quote: If so, will this buy screen have sections as it did in BG ie one for items, one for accommodation, one for healing?
No. Items only. Accomodation or healing would have to be accessed through dialogue.

Quote: One request that I have is that you be able to browse through inventories by category
There are four 'tabs' in a store which sift stuff by category. I believe they are as follows:

1) Armor (including helmets, boots, cloaks, and other clothing-type items)
2) Weapons
3) Scrolls & miscellenous magic (such as jewelry and wands)
4) Everything else

Not sure if you can set what goes under each tab... this just might be the pre-set for the campaign. I would have to check that. (Doubt it, though).

One thing I do like is that it's a visual display of everything available... you get one page with all the items on display as they would appear in your inventory. You can run your cursor over them swiftly to get the names or pause and examine one item in detail. A bar on the right shows how many 'pages' of items are available under that tab.

Round rooms: The only way to have a round room would be to have the entire room pre-rendered as a single tile (or, say, in quarter-pieces like a pie that could be joined together along the straight edges).

There are a couple of single-tile rooms like that in the tilesets. Beyond that, if you are using the generic tiles you can make a room that is circular (like you could on a piece of graph paper), though the walls won't be round, per se.

I mean a feature made up of several locked tiles. The brothel room, for instance, is circular and consists of 2X2 regular tiles (if I remember right).

Flying creatures: We are talking eye-level flight, here.

Signs: There are a number of signs which are placeable objects... you pick the type of sign you wish and place it wherever it's supposed to go (in front of the store, at the crossroads, etc).

The writing on the sign, if any, isn't legible. It's either an indecipherable scribble or one of a variety of symbols. The only way to has an actual, readable sign (or new symbols, for that matter) would be to edit the skin of the sign (not a daunting task, actually, but that's beside the point).

All placeable objects can be assigned a dialogue file and portrait. When you click on the sign, then, the text box appears (showing the portrait you've selected...yes, we have portraits for signs) along with the text in the dialogue file.
You don't have to have player responses. If you don't, it will just show 'The Headman's Inn' or whatever you put there. Optionally, of course, you could give responses and include scripting, if that's your thing.

Celestials: You mean in the single-player campaign? I can't think of any celestials that are NPC's, off-hand... though I might be wrong.

In the toolset, creature-wise? Maaaaybe.

Creatures: Liches = yes, both as an applied template as well as a creature model for your 'standard' lich.

Tanar'ri = which kinds did you have in mind? I think we've mentioned imps, succubi, balors and vrock in the past, no?

Lizardmen = yes, several types.

Keeping players alive by DM: With the caveat that I haven't actually seen the feature in place, myself, I believe the plan is to provide a difficulty slider accessible to the DM.

Things getting a little rough on your party? Slide it down and they'll mysteriously start missing.

Players getting a little***y? Slide it up and the monsters start getting nasty rolls. Ouch! Was that a critical?

Players can see the rolls being made, but they don't see your hand on the die.

Again, however, this comes from my knowledge of this as a planned feature. Sadly, playing with the DM client isn't something I get to do much.

Dialogs: The text box does, indeed, appear over the head of whatever object it belongs to (whether that be a creature, PC, placeable object, sign or whatever). You have a fair amount of room to write in... I know I've never had any real problems fitting a good 'chunk' into one box.

You can decide for yourself what kind of format you want to use. We don't use quotation marks and assume everything written is dialogue... when we use narrative in the body of the text (descriptions, actions, etc) there is a choice of three different colors that you can set the text to to differentiate it from spoken text (if you wish, that is).

As for disembodied text, like in the IE... no, there's nothing like that. You get used to the text boxes fairly quickly, tho... and I would never suggest writing a huge block of text, anyway, even in the IE where you could.

If you display a string, everyone who can see the table will see the string. In the text box, it's considered dialogue (to the game, anyway, even if no-one is actually 'speaking') and others will see the text if they are close enough to 'overhear'

Noel, Programmer:

Modifiable Tile Geometry: I wasn't planning on answering any threads since I'm leaving for a long weekend holiday in a few minutes... but after Ratbert's little performace I have to!

In the game we have a couple different kinds of walkmesh objects: tile, door and placeable object. The tile mesh is static and doesn't ever change. Visible pieces of the tile can move (sails, hanging things etc..) but the underlying walkmesh does not animate. This surface has different material types which specify walkable or not, ground type (for walk sounds)and other fun stuff. (this is the aabb as explained in the Gamasutra article)

Doors and placeables also have walkmesh files associated with them, but this geometry is strictly blocking (It blocks vision and movement). This geometry is added to the area when the object is loaded, and removed if the object is destroyed. Doors are a little more complicated than placeables because they need to be able to swing open/closed so they have three states: open forward, open back, and closed. (placeables only have one model) The game tests collision using the appropriate model based on the state of the door.

The drawbridge example can't be done in the obvious way, because door walkmesh geometry can't add walkable ground to a previously unwalkable place... but it can still be done in a kinda hacky way (which is pretty close to what Ratbert suggested): create the tile with a walkable bridge over the moat- except make the 'open' animation mesh of the drawbridge cover this area with a non-walk poly. When the bridge is opened, the poly goes away and the bridge becomes walkable (to match the visible model). The only problem is that any items dropped on the bridge while open, would stay floating in the air when the bridge closed... which you could correct with some simple scripting.

The hut example could be done if the hut was a placeable object: they have animations that can be toggled from scripting, even though the walkmesh stays constant.

Mike Sass, Director of Production Art:

Portraits: The BG2 portraits were not art. The straight cropping was to create a cohesive set such that the NPC characters could be re-used as player character portraits, as well the color choices were for added continuity and differentiation in the set at icon-size. The IWD portraits were great, but were treated as full-length character shots to be used as promotional devices as well. My main concern in BG2 was for the effect of the set as a whole in the flavor of the game. (Minsc and his hamster would not have worked in drab grey tones.) Keep in mind, the BG series was a second edition game, and second edition D&D is softer and not quite as edgy...
Hope that helps!