Neverwinter Nights Preview at PC Zone

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(Originally posted by Darien)

PC Zone has posted a detailed preview of Neverwinter Nights which looks at some of the concerns with scaling battles and the possibility of cheating. It's a long one, but definitely worth the read. In this excerpt, Trent Oster talks about the encounter system.

"This is the problem with trying to balance any multiplayer game. How do you balance it for one sixth-level character, as opposed to ten sixth-level characters? To combat this, what we came up with was the idea of the encounter system.

Instead of placing a set amount of monsters in one area, you place a single encounter. The encounter has an activation radius, and when you hit that radius, it scans the nearby area to see how many hostile characters there are in your party. Let's say there are four. The encounter spawns in sufficient creatures to challenge those four players."

This sounds great in theory, but what if the player party is comprised of high-level and low-level characters? Surely the lower levels will be wiped out by the monsters spawned to deal with the higher levels? Bioware has thought of this too: "The encounter will evaluate for all the people there, and spawn enemies that will amount to a moderate encounter for the higher levels, and a really hard encounter for the lower levels."

Read the entire preview.