Thoughts on NwN2?

[Louist]

I haven't seen too much about it so far, but I do have some issues.

First is that It isn't being made by Bioware. Its being deligated to the same company that made KOTOR2, which was a poor game when compared against the first.

Second, I heard that it is to be released this summer, which seems unlikely

Any thoughts?

Hope its better than I'm expecting!

[Philosopher]

Louist - 5/6/2006  5:57 PM

I haven't seen too much about it so far, but I do have some issues.

First is that It isn't being made by Bioware. Its being deligated to the same company that made KOTOR2, which was a poor game when compared against the first.

Second, I heard that it is to be released this summer, which seems unlikely

Any thoughts?

Hope its better than I'm expecting!

I thought KOTOR2 was made by Bioware - Not sure it seems to ring Bioware bells in my head...

It's going to be released in September I think, and how can it be unlikely? Possibly many many many happy little people are working on it.
To be honest, I'm looking forward to it, NWN2 is obviously going to be much better than NWN, or more features included - It's not going to be any worse than NWN.

[darkstorme]

No, Obsidian made KOTOR2.  However, as with KOTOR2, NWN2 is being assisted by and monitored by and advised by Bioware, if not actually MADE by Bioware.  Since they're using a toolset based on the NWN set, and the interface will be similar if not actually the same, and they've moved to a stronger engine than the Aurora toolset, I can't see now NWN2 can be worse.  The main weakness to KOTOR2 was that it was forced to release before they were finished - they cut about 6 sub-plots and an entire additional PLANET out of the loop.  The beauty of NWN is that the OC is just the BEGINNING of your experience.

And who knows?  Bioware might put out some premium modules again... even though it isn't their game this time.  We can only hope.

[xXDenizeNXx]

I think we all have the same concerns mate floating around in the very back of our heads, 'what if NwN 2 sucks? My 2 cents is ..... who cares? Even if Nwn 2 does bite the bullet I am sure that LAYO nwn2 won't
Peace
Den

[Milo]

xXDenizeNXx - 5/6/2006  8:26 PM

I think we all have the same concerns mate floating around in the very back of our heads, 'what if NwN 2 sucks? My 2 cents is ..... who cares? Even if Nwn 2 does bite the bullet I am sure that LAYO nwn2 won't
Peace
Den

Right on!

[iceyfire]

Im pretty sure the team that is making Nwn2 has a lot of the Ex- Bioware employee's that worked on NWN.
Thats from memory i read that somewhere...
Anyway think of how much nwn has changed since it was first released... Mistakes can be righted, and im sure they will put out at least a few expansions to help with this.
So best not worry, nwn 2 is no doubt a very big change as it is 3.5 ruleset which gives us warforged and makes illusion a really good focus school etc..
Time to learn and have fun.
The only thing that worries me is how compatible the current toolset will be with the updated one.
Hopefully we will be able to make a seemless tranferance between both then work on updating it to how many years in the future i think it was about 300 from memory?.

[Deacon]

iceyfire - 5/6/2006  10:52 PM
which gives us warforged

I thought Warforged were only in Eberron, if not someone correct me because that would be sweet to play one.  

Furthermore, even though KOTOR2 did not live up to the standards of KOTOR1 (and what sequal ever lives up to it's original) it was still a very good game.  Especially if Gamespot gave it an 8.5 (Gamespot KOTOR2 Review) and IGN gave it a 8.7 (IGN KOTOR2 Review).  Bottom line is it may not have lived up to the previous installment, but it was an awesome game.  I have no doubts that Obsidian will do an awesome job with NWN2, and neither should you.

[Dorganath]

On the toolset question...
  By all accounts, the only things we'll be able to import directly are scripts and conversations. The way areas are constructed in NWN2 is vastly different than NWN1, based on informtion available on the NWN2 forums and what game info has been released.
  There will be plenty of work to transition us to NWN2, if for no other reason that we will be making all the areas again new, and that will take some time. Though if you want to look at it this way, what we have now is a rough sketch of how things will be. The world is already designed and laid out. I many ways, the hard part has already been done.

[PsychicToaster]

iceyfire - 5/6/2006  10:52 PM

Im pretty sure the team that is making Nwn2 has a lot of the Ex- Bioware employee's that worked on NWN.

Obsidian is made up of mostly the old members of Black Isle Entertainment.  They were the ones that did Planescape: Torment and worked with Bioware on the Baldur's Gate series.  

All the quality assurance in the world can't make a rushed game into a polished gem.  So don't judge them too harshly on KOTOR 2.  Think of it like this.  Star Wars is forced to release three months early in order to make it in time for Christmas sales, so they don't have time to shoot the final battle and the trench sequence.  Luke has to "use the force" to shoot the torpedoes from light years away turning it from heroic to cheesey in the blink of an eye.  

Even if the OC for NWN2 sucks, there are already less hard coded features and more options for modding.  That alone is worthy of an update.  The more power community developers have, the more they can fix themselves after release.  If your favorite PrC/spell/feat wasn't feasible in NWN, it might be in NWN2.

[Shadowblade225]

Dorganath - 5/7/2006  12:09 AM    On the toolset question...
  By all accounts, the only things we'll be able to import directly are scripts and conversations. The way areas are constructed in NWN2 is vastly different than NWN1, based on informtion available on the NWN2 forums and what game info has been released.
  There will be plenty of work to transition us to NWN2, if for no other reason that we will be making all the areas again new, and that will take some time. Though if you want to look at it this way, what we have now is a rough sketch of how things will be. The world is already designed and laid out. I many ways, the hard part has already been done.
 

 
  Which means people like me who can spend hours and hours on end designing areas to specifications and historical accuracy may have a spot on the layonara team if applications open to such roles.

[SquareKnot]

All the quality assurance in the world can't make a rushed game into a polished gem. So don't judge them too harshly on KOTOR 2. Think of it like this. Star Wars is forced to release three months early in order to make it in time for Christmas sales, so they don't have time to shoot the final battle and the trench sequence. Luke has to "use the force" to shoot the torpedoes from light years away turning it from heroic to cheesey in the blink of an eye.

 This is what has me worried. NWN2 is very rushed. Don't believe me? They announced today that NWN2 will ship without a DM client. Why? To quote Patrick Mills of Obsidian: [INDENT] "The DM Client will very likely not ship with the game. There just isn't enough time to finish, test, and polish it before launch and we don't want to ship something that sucks. We do have plans to release one, but I don't know when it will be available..."[/INDENT]  I just really hope when NWN2 arrives, we don't find that it's been stripped down to just a new graphics engine and 3.5E rules. Each week brings more news of features that were cut from the final product. There was also some talk that the original campaign had been cut from 40 hours to 20 hours of gameplay. If this is even somewhat true, it seems in the same league as eliminating a planet or shooting torpedoes from light years away.  * crosses fingers *

[Dorganath]

One comment on the DM client portion...
  While it is disappointing to see that, there's also something to consider, and that is that the code for the game will be released to manufacturing at least a month before the planned ship date, if not more. This is to allow time for duplication, packaging and distribution. In that time, the DM client could, conceivably, be finished and released as a download. I'm not saying it will or it won't but a lot can happen in a month.
  Granted, this does imply a bit of a rush to release, but it also implies (to me, anyway) that the experience from the player's perspective is being given full attention....which ultimately is a good thing.
  And if we have to wait a bit to get a DM client, then fine. It's not like we're going to be ready to run on NWN2 here on Layo as soon as the boxes hits the shelves.

[Deacon]

Yeah, Dorganath is right.  I would rather have a very intuitive and awesome single player experience to play through while I wait on Layonara to be converted over.  Hopefully by the time Layonara is ready to launch it's Neverwinter Nights 2 version, the DM client will have been released.

[Chuckles_McChuck]

I can almost gaurantee Leanthar wont release Layonara NWN 2 until there is a DM cleint for it.

Though I understand your concerns.  I imagine if they need more time Atari would not refuse poseponing the game for christmas, always a good time for sales anyways.  I doubt they will allow it to go out any later though.

[Deacon]

I actually doubt they would postpone it, but who knows.

[ItalianDDog]

well..   whatever they decide dont matter to me.. in the end I know NWN2 will be MUCH better than NWN1.. and should be easier to express your character in a RP environment.  I mean look.. this game came out what?  2002?!?   Look how much it has came.  I dont think NWN2 will dissappoint any of us in the long run. Just dont expect it to be perfect out of the box. Are any PC games really? Not that Ive played.  

Anyone agree?


one more thing to consider on my edit here...  companies are out to get money...  so being it is NOT a mmorpg game...   Im sure they have planned certain things to be held until expansions.

[iceyfire]

From a development standpoint, it is said that only the scripts and dialogue will be saved from layonara..
Everything else will have to be built up from scratch....
Granted none of us will need to venture to the harder area's of Layonara on layonara 2 for a great deal of time leaving much for development.
With some of the new features however it is going to be a very different experience.
The World map system for instance.. Works on hotspots similar to that on Final fantasy 10.
Where basically we have a big map of layonara and we click to travel to places.
I am not sure however.. But from what i here we can customize this some so we can place restrictions on going to certain area's hopefully.
But this will eliminate a lot of the useless travel through area's, and allow the team to concentrate on making very nice interior and exterior pieces for us to travel to.

The new issue to consider is that layonara will probably cost more to maintain with the added difficulty to host massive persistent worlds.
I could be wrong but i think the current level is at around 20% of what the new standards will be.
The new walk mesh and deformable terrain for exterior area's is a massive hog for one.. The biggest area's taking about 20meg of ram to hold up when active.
One thing i should point out however... Is that if you have pc's in an area that area is active and takes up a much more ram then a area that has no pc's in.
Think of it like switching lights on and off. While on it consumes a lot of power.. But when off it is barely doing much at all just waiting...

Anyway.. Interiors are still using the tile system, so they will stay relatively the same but the looks of these area's is going to be insanely nice especially with dynamic lighting.

And another fun feature is they are listening to us when it comes to customisation... So we can create our own skills, spells... Etc.. Instead of just the bioware defaults...

It is said if say we wanted to make a spell that creates a giant hammer to come down and squish an enemy we could... It would be a feature in the toolset.

All i know is im probably going straight into the toolset as soon as i can to have a bit of a fiddle around with this stuff... Sounds great!.

From what i see however... They are in the polishing stage.. All features they wanted are in the game, now its just finding the bugs for a few months then taking a month to mass produce and distribute them.

Just imagine the ability to call up a giant demonic lord of fire to rain flame upon everyone *Evil laugh*, or the ability to flick a bit of fire in ones palm when they get a bit bored.... I would say its really possible for such things.

- Just summarising it a bit , didnt read earlier comments in the middle heh.

[Schmack]

Just a bit of info on races and sub-races, they still have the seven full races, Dwarf, Elf, Gnome, Halfling, Half-Elf, Half-Orc, and Human, but they've also included some sub-races too, which do have extra abilities (no idea what they are), I think there are only 10 sub-races, as they've said there are 17 races and sub-races in total, so far the sub-races I've some across are: Drow, Gold Dwarf, Gray Dwarf, Aasimar, Tiefling, Sun elves, Wood elves, Deep gnomes.
 
 That's only 9 sub-races, but I read somewhere that wild elves will be included aswell.
 
 Edit: Gah! I said moon elves, meant wild elves, and I don't think they've confirmed it yet, which would make the tenth sub-races if it is .
 
 Edit(again): I can't do simple math, that was only 8 races listed above, I left out strongheart halflings, on that note, ghostwise halflings aren't going to be included in the sub-races.

[Faldred]

Louist - 5/6/2006  12:57 PM

I haven't seen too much about it so far, but I do have some issues.

First is that It isn't being made by Bioware. Its being deligated to the same company that made KOTOR2, which was a poor game when compared against the first.

Second, I heard that it is to be released this summer, which seems unlikely

Any thoughts?

Hope its better than I'm expecting!

Many people have already said that KOTOR2 suffered from the marketing people rushing it out before it was done.  (Lord knows why they never made a patch for the PC version, though -- maybe to keep the XBox people from whining?)  Two things work in Obsidian's favor this time, however: 1) the release date was not committed to a long time in advance, it was only announced recently, which seems to imply that they have a good idea when they're going to be ready, and 2) they're only doing PC this time, no XBox version, so less concerns about two-version maintenance (not to mention, you can always patch a PC version...)



And, despite some of the plot issues in KOTOR2, there were some really nice features as well that are making their way to NWN2, specifically, control over your henchmen and the "influence" system that further customizes your henchmen based on your own actions and itneracions with them.  In the OC, the henchmen are supposed to play a larger part in the story, too, which would be an improvement over KOTOR2 (in the respect, it would be a lot like the sub-plots for certain party members in a Final Fantasy like game, if what I've heard is true).



The release date is Sept. 19, so if that's your idea of summer, it's summer.