Wish list

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• No loops in dialogues. Even an 8 INT idiot would realise he's talking loop.
• Conversation skills that actually matter. Conversation skills should matter in conversation no less than combat skills matter in combat. And I don't just mean better rewards or avoiding fight. I wish for something meaningful.
• No skills that don't exist in PNP Forgotten Realms setting.
• Skills, feats and the like should not be changed unless the original effect can't be rendered by the game engine.
• [rant]No politically correct crap, pretty please. If you want to make a homosexual half-orc paladin and make it hit on the PC, pray do. Just don't put a gay romance NPC on your to-do list as a mandatory point, together with a feminist warrior, a vegetarian ranger, a great non-Caucasian leader of a mostly Caucasian community, an egalitarian aristocrat renouncing his status (BG2 is full of them) etc. Please, please, no heart-warming stuff about overcoming, divisionsand differences, promoting tolerance and individual's rights. Err... unless the character would really say that. I don't appreciate it when characters in games speak things that aren't natural and sound more like current social politics than fantasy dialogue. I don't launch a game to hear what's good and what's bad, thank you very much. Make the character's personality first and his political & social agenda later. If it fits the character, I'm fine with it. Really. But if the character is an excuse to make a political or social point, I'm against it. Realism all the way. The same applies to heart-warming pro-family stuff - I don't want that either.[/rant]
• Perhaps make trade make sense? Different prices in different shops, discounts for large purchases or smuggled stuff... waiting for the merchant to get the stuff you want from a caravan or some such. Ability to act as a merchant in your own right (you typically end up having a bigger supply of mighty items than any merchant in the game and boatloads of gold). Ability to argue prices. Merchants asking you to get items they want and paying you well. Well, one could surely come up with many ideas here.
• Saving at any moment in the game, no matter what.
• No non-sense no rest locations. If it's possible to go back five levels of a dungeon and half the nearby forest to rest in a tavern, the player will do that instead of adapting his strategy and he will blame the game maker for that.
• Sufficient supply of masterwork or already enchanted weapons of all common types and a reasonably comfortable way of obtaining masterwork or enchanted weapons of less common or exotic type. Being able to ask a blacksmith to make a masterwork weapon of your desired type (unless he can't make it because it's too exotic in his location, or some such) would solve the problem.
• A good think would be to avoid a common situation when in the beginning of the game you find lots of unidentified stuff and can't identify it on your own. Easier checks or items that don't require identification, or plain cash would do better. It's raining magic items...
• I would really appreciate complete absence of one-way immunity-driven fights.
• The same goes for script-driven attacks and damage. It's rarely needed and nearly always annoying.
• Things shouldn't be too-damn-hard on normal difficulty.
• Puzzles should be weighed carefully and rely on the player's abilities and not simple luck or repeating attempts ad nauseam. Wiping the screen with mouse pointer to highlight a hidden switch is not my idea of fun.
• A little more diversity in romance options than the current trend dictates, please. One girl or one guy isn't quite enough, especially if there's only one right dialogue sequence.
• Err... Could some of female romantic NPCs NOT be elven priestesses?

That would be it, for now

[ August 09, 2004, 22:22: Message edited by: chevalier ]

 

An easier to manage inventory screen. I hate having to flick between different tabs because I can't re-arrange the big sized items on one tab. While, we're at it, can we have all inventory items represented by small icons so they all fit on one screen?

 

Completely new engine.

 

Good plot.

 

Mounts damnit! I want friking mounts! I'm wearing full-plate for Torm's sake! I'm in the middle of NEVERWINTER - a HUGE damn city - they MUST have horses of some type here.

No level caps. Set enemy levels like Baldur's Gate, not the evolving enemies like KotOR, I should be rewarded for my side-questing.

Bigger parties with better AI for party members and battle characteristics. I want to see my chaotic-neutral halfling rogue run like a pansy away from an unwinnable situation, not fight to the death.

 

How about an inventory auto arrange that seperates items by type; armor here, slashing weapons there, rings in this pocket, etc. Not restricted, just arranged. Let me mix it up if I prefer. Plus, a keyboard shortcut to switch between the types/tabs if they don't all show up at once.

Also, I'd like to see a better representaion of varying sizes and enable varying sized PCs. I want my enlarged halfling! (In PnP, my halfling always ended up getting picked up and tossed around. Eventually, he got a potion of Growth and drank some while being held overhead. Ha!)

P.S. - Just had a thought as I posted this. Is there any intention of accumulating these ideas and submitting them to Obsidian, or are we just dreaming out loud?

 

If we are at it, what about size of items being calculated basing on their real dimensions instead of whether you have some free slots in the inventory or not? Rings don't take the same amount of space as halberds like in BG saga and IWD saga, or 1/6, 1/9 etc of plate mail's place like in games where inventory items occupy a certain number of squares in which the inventory screen is divided. Containers are a nice idea, however, I really think they shouldn't be extradimentional and should still use the normal total weight, only reducing the space needed. Doesn't mean you shouldn't have extradimentional Bags of Holding, no. It's just that some cheap potion or scroll case, or gem sack, isn't really supposed to be so powerfully enchanted.

 

3.5 rules.

 

How about the ability to switch between active panes in the toolset. I hate having to save and close the script editor just because I can't remember what the blueprint of an item was or the tag of creature. That would save a lot of frustration.

 

@Ancalìmon: Feargus says it will be 3.5.

 

Realistic AI for ALL charaters, realistic inventory calculations; weight, size and magic bags of holding...I prefer the ones from BG2 not NWN1, they were pointless. Z-axis...say no more on that one . Horses? It would be nice, maybe dragon riders aswel (ohh that would be fun), but does this mean everything that comes with owning a horse? Will it level up? Will I need to have a skill/trait in riding for different levels of horses? Will I have to buy gear for it down the stables? Will I have to take it for walks and feed the bugger when it gets tired of riding down monsters etc? If somone has some decent and realistic ideas for the "horse" theory I'd like to hear them.

Oh yeah and most importantly, a decent story with half decent personalities

[ August 12, 2004, 10:53: Message edited by: Slayer of the Coast ]

 

A morale system would be nice. An individual goblin isn't going to try and take down a party of adventurers.

 

Multiple endings .
Plus, an alignment system like in Planescape Torment would be cool.

 

Though I normally play Chaotic Good chars I'd really preffer at least BEING GIVEN the chance of playing an evil char an evil way, in NWN1 you just HAD to be a goody-two-shoes. That SUCKED!

 

- Quasi-realtime/turnbased (realtime with pause), like in Bg2.
- Ability to disable party AI and command them yourself. Party AI never works, ever. They always screw everything up, making the player pay the price.
- New graphics engine, as already mentioned by Sarevok.
- As chev said about skills and effects etc not being changed when not needed, I'd like to extend that to spells. I do not want to see the heavens rain down in the disco of the millennia when the spell is supposed to appear all but that. Finger of death does not need a blob to fly on to the opponent, it's supposed to kill the instant the caster points with his finger and pronounces "Die". The stupid super-effects take out immersion, mystique, and power of authority from the spells.
- Increase the amount of summoned spells active at the same time by one character. I love a summoner sorcerer, but it's useless with the limitation of being able to summon only one at a time, especially when the power of these monsters hasn't been upgraded to compensate for the lack of quantity.
- Include spells and abilities that are not just combative. NWN certainly has potential to be a lot more than a simple dungeon-crawl.
- Include enemy mages in the single-player campaign that are as powerful as mages should be (take BG2 for example). Friendly mages for the sake of counterspells or breaking down spell barriers were useless in NWN as no enemy mage could even hope to beat a single fighter
- Get rid of the stupid autoscaling enemy level thing. It's ok if it just adds a few enemies to an encounter etc. It's not good when it makes every lousy barbarian take 5 hits from a fireball just so the sorcerer would be hard-pressed for "challenge".
- Less potions, clerics should mean something.
- Include truly deadly / troublesome traps to make sure the stupid barbarians learned the hard way to wait for the thief to check that trap out.
- Rest should be possible virtually anywhere, but proper precautions should be done to ensure a *safe* rest. No more "let me blast a thousand fireballs to that room there and then we can rest again before a minute has passed from the last time".
- Otherwise I agree with about everything that has been said by others thus far.


And now for the grand thing, the big huge step of advancement to multiplaying genre as a whole:

Ignore combat-balance. That's right, ignore it. If it's forgotten realms, then sorcerers and mages are supreme. No use making them equal just because of PvP. Destroying the realism, the immersion, and the rules of base D&D for the sake of a 'balanced' computerized PvP for people who don't care to understand the realities of the world, is a hefty price to pay for such an insignificant thing. If you want sheer personal power for PvP, then a magic-user is the most powerful. Balance should exist in other forms though. Classes not suited for direct 'one-on-one' combat, such as thieves, druids and bards, have their own respective strengths. Druids shouldn't be egoistic power-boasters, but nobody would press them into combat in their own forests, even few mages should dare. Also, I'd like some class-based quests. Bringing out the difference of the academic nature of mages vs. the natural way of the druids vs. the rather hectic and 'scoundrel-ish' way of the bards vs. the hard training and actual warring of the fighters vs. the religious education of the clerics and paladins... etc.

In summary: Make classes the way they're supposed to be. Don't put balance where it isn't needed. Don't make this another copy of the many single-players and MMORPGs out there where everything is a copy of each other with a different graphic and a different name.

[ August 17, 2004, 12:22: Message edited by: Foradasthar ]

 

- control of the whole party, preferably 4-6 characters

- no idiotic guess-miss-guess again-miss-reload riddles like for example IWD2 chamber 1 in the Black Raven monastery

- "Everlast" arrow, bolt and bullet

- and again... control of the whole party

 

I would like wider terrains and more individual NPC's in them so I could have the idea a little town is a little town and a big Druid grove is a BIG Druid grove...

 

i'd like to see custom made weapons that you actually have to work for. ie you complete a class specific task, and get to choose a weapon type from a few appropriate options. the smith won't accept a commission until said task is completed, then gives you a choice of prices and various components to collect. depending on what you bring them as base materials and how much you fork out, your chosen weapon will vary in quality and features.

 

That'd be nice, but is something that can be relatively easily scripted into NWN. I don't see that as an actual improvement to the game.

 

You should be able to have 3 followers, minimum. A group of 4 characters is considered an actual "party", so I want a party dammit!

Complete control of your followers' actions. Allow them to make their own descisions about leveling up and stuff but give control over to a human mind which is infinitely more adaptable than AI. Obsidian can then in turn make a more challenging game which will equal more fun.

Full support for item creation. Mages should be never have to switch to weapons if they run out of spells, Bards should be equipped with the latest, most fashionable, magical armor.

Rednik made the suggestion of controlling alignment like they did in PST. Guess what? Aurora can already do that. Use the features you already have Obsidian.

Locks and traps that are appropriate for what they are guarding. This annoyed me to no end in the OC. I'd run into a chest, door, etc. with an impossibly high Lock Pick DC, Disable Device DC, and/or damage resistance. Naturally, I thought I'd be getting at something important by cracking it open and so I'd proceed to waste some charged item on it. Turns out there's 2gp and a rusty dagger. I really hope people realize locks and traps can cost a lot of money, and so it doesn't make sense for them to be guarding something worth less than they are.

Armor according to DnD rules. First time I played a Ranger I outfitted him with a Chain Shirt, since it's the best light armor you can get. Well, in PnP it is. In NWN its been combined with Scale Male, so its medium. Some items are just better than others, get over it.

More prestige classes. I'll always be amused by the line in the HotU manual where it says Dwarven Barbarians make good Dwarven Defenders (which is not possible because of alignment restrictions). This to me shows what a lack of prc's there where in NWN. To me, the whole point of prc's is there are tons of them, allowing more choice and customization. Ideally, I'd like to see each class being able to have 4-5 prc options, though I know it wont be anywhere close to that.

Support for true turn based combat. I doubt the engine is capable of doing both real time and turn based, but I can dream can't I? My belief is that DnD was made under turn based rules and plays much better under those rules.