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NWN Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition - Beamdog's final enhancement - now with new premium modules

Gargaune

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Mar 12, 2020
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Serious question: how bad is this Enhanced Edition? As disastrous as the Baldur's Gates or is it rather acceptable, like their version of Icewind Dale? I ask because I never played the first Neverwinter Nights (or the second, for that matter; I went straight to MOTB) and this is being sold for peanuts right now. Since purchase adds both the original and the Enhanced Edition to my GOG library, I've been wondering which version I should use for my first playthrough of this.
It's quite fine and well worth the purchase, especially on sale, but you should be aware that's coming from someone who likes the Infinity Engine EEs. NWN EE's running issue is that Beamdog's QA remains uneven, so you've got some cool new features but also run the risk of the odd new bug rearing its head at some point. That said, I've played four full campaigns on the EE without a hitch, it's more the Toolset side that I've had worries with.

Since you're actually buying it now anyway, just roll with the EE, skip the OC and do SoU and HotU for best first impressions. I get DE owners wondering whether the EE's worth it, but in your case what's the worry? The campaigns are untouched content-wise if you were afraid Neera found her way to Neverwinter.

If you're going with the EE, my only major advice would be to limit the framerate from your GPU controls, not using the in-game limiter. You absolutely do wanna cap it, since you don't want your GPU going nuts over 500FPS for no reason (do 140 for a smooth camera enable Vsync for smooth camera rotation), but the internal limiter messes with the mousewheel zoom, the driver one doesn't. And I also just figured this one out, was complaining about it earlier - if you see some jagged white outlines on objects in front of water, that's because you forced AA on through the driver while the new Shiny Water shader is enabled.
 
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Jack Of Owls

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Yeah, sound general advice about never letting your framerates get higher than they need to. Don't wanna risk bricking your GPU with extra FPS that your brain can't even perceive. I once destroyed an old ATI card I had for only a couple of years that way. I still play most of my games - old, new, borrowed or blue - at 60 FPS, but NWN1 does run kind of shitty if you want a smooth camera rotation at anything less than 120 FPS, though 140 FPS is even better.
 

Gargaune

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I still play most of my games - old, new, borrowed or blue - at 60 FPS, but NWN1 does run kind of shitty if you want a smooth camera rotation at anything less than 120 FPS, though 140 FPS is even better.
Dude, I screwed up! I was just messing around with it a bit more now and lo and behold - Vsync! Just force Vertical Sync on, which caps me at 60 but suddenly camera rotation's smooth as butter. I really should've looked at this earlier.

This is excellent advice. I also intend to play NW2 later (without jumping straight to MOTB, as I did before), so your guide on it will be extremely useful. Thanks a lot!
:greatjob:

One thing I forgot to mention about the first NWN - if you run both the EE and the DE on the same machine, keep in mind that your GPU manager will see both of them as Neverwinter Nights (nwmain.exe) by default, whatever you configure for one will apply to the other. So, for instance, if you wanna have AA on the old one but no Shiny Water outlines on the new one, configure driver AA to enhance the application setting rather than override it.
 
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Jack Of Owls

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I always do that first thing with most games I play if the input lag isn't too bad - just enable vsync instead of messing with internal or external framerate limiters and what not. Will automatically lock my frame rates to my monitor's refresh rate then it's usually smooooooth sailing after that... usually. Every now and then though you get the weird game like Gujian 3 that has no option to enable vsync and framerate limiters don't work without evil evil micro-stutter and even your gpu's control panel can't do it. Then, in a last desperate measure, you have to use a horrible hack, like Special K, and inject it straight into your system's vein. That can't be good for you.
 

Gargaune

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For anyone else stumbling in, lemme just take a moment here and list what enabling Vsync has fixed on my NWN EE install:
- obviously, having the framerate locked to refresh (60), means my GPU's no longer revving up to push out 500 pointless FPS;
- input problems which arose from limiting the maximum framerate, i.e. choppy camera rotation and uneven mousewheel zoom, are gone altogether, everything's silky smooth;
- the F9 Test Module function in the Toolset is once again in perfect working order, whereas previously it was stuttering so hard it was literally unusable (I'd rigged a discrete shortcut with args to launch my hobby module).

Seriously, Beamdog, just how much stuff is tied into the render loop on this one? Put Vsync in your in-game options and enable it by default, the performance impact is irrelevant on a twenty-year-old game.
 

Orud

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Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming!
If you're playing HoTU I recommend that you play the latest dev build. It fixes a nasty bug that's been in the campaign these past few years:
The area where all magic is suppressed doesn't remove the suppression from your items once you turn off the source of the suppression. Leaving you permanently with a metric ton of heavy paperweight.
The dev build also seems to fix the AI in HoTU. Before, my companions never attacked in combat and/or often became completely unresponsive. Hopefully they also fixed the AI running to the center of a trapped area in order to disarm a trap.
 
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Cael

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Nov 1, 2017
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If you're playing HoTU I recommend that you play the latest dev build. It fixes a nasty bug that's been in the campaign these past few years:
The area where all magic is suppressed doesn't remove the suppression from your items once you turn off the source of the suppression. Leaving you permanently with a metric ton of heavy paperweight.
The dev build also seems to fix the AI in HoTU. Before, my companions never attacked in combat and/or often became completely unresponsive. Hopefully they also fixed the AI running to the center of a trapped area in order to disarm a trap.
Ain't it lucky that I have the original Platinum edition and skipped cuckdog's shitpile?
 

d1nolore

Savant
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May 31, 2017
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662
they fixed these bugs or rather just removed what they introduced. I never had any bugs like that way back on release
 

Orud

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Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming!
Yeah, I think I'll be shelving HoTU for the time being. Any save I load in chapter 3 causes a scene to play where the camera pans around where my character should be (but he's invisible) for 6 seconds, followed by the credits being played and being sent back to the main menu. Guess I'll have to wait until the next official version is released. Pity, since I was really enjoying my time playing it (although it was a bit easy).

Oh well, time for Swordflight.
 
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Gargaune

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Mar 12, 2020
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Hopefully they also fixed the AI running to the center of a trapped area in order to disarm a trap.
I don't think that's a bug, I believe it was intended design for when you order a henchman to disarm a trap they don't have the skills for - they "disarm" it by springing it.
 

Gargaune

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Mar 12, 2020
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New patch 8193.32, TLDR below, full notes here. That UI scripting sounds interesting, but I think I'll hold out for now, the .27 Toolset's working fine for me and I'm wary of poking it.

Patch Highlights
  • Renderer | Significant performance improvements & better shadows
  • New Curated Content | Play as a drow in Markus Schlegel’s campaign, A Hunt Through The Dark
  • Scriptable UI | Module authors can now create custom UI panels!
  • Apple M1 support | Owners of Apple M1 devices now will have a much better experience playing NWN:EE!
  • More than 100 fixes | Many other new features, script commands & fixes
 

Gargaune

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Mar 12, 2020
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Cross-posting just in case anyone stumbles in here, if you updated to .32 you'll wanna get the new .33 patch to fix the tile lights at the very least. Dunno whether there's any new bugs to be aware of, haven't had a chance to test this one myself.

Greetings from the Neverwinter Nights team!

We’re pushing Build 85.8193.33 to the live branch!

Patch notes:
  • Fixed local multiplayer failing with error 110622
  • Fixed a crash when some PLT textures failed to load
  • Fixed area tile source lights showing up as red when they previously were off after a game save & load
  • Fixed some pathfinding regressions where creatures had difficulties leaving corridors/rooms
  • Fixed a crash in the GetPlayerDeviceProperty script call when passing in an invalid player object
  • Updated Steam SDK to version 152. This should fix the Mac M1 build not running natively when launched from Steam
  • Added a message box when the user directory fails to initialise (instead of crashing). This is most commonly caused by Antivirus preventing write access to the Documents directory

This will be the last stable patch in a while! We want to thank you all again for your continued feedback!
 

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
This is random: https://www.pcgamer.com/uk/meet-trent-oster-the-bloke-who-launched-neverwinter-nights-twice/

Meet Trent Oster, the bloke who launched Neverwinter Nights twice
"It took a couple of games to learn moderation.”

Back in the ’90s, everybody told Bioware that the western RPG was dead. “That’s the best news you can hear,” co-founder Trent Oster laughs. “That means that there is absolutely nobody looking at your market space, and you can roll in and do fun things.”

It also meant, however, that the studio was short on good examples to follow. Bioware’s model for a great D&D game, Pool of Radiance, had come out in the late ’80s and looked like Teletext. By 1995, the studio was instead playing Warcraft, the pioneering real-time strategy game. That’s why, when you click on a Baldur’s Gate party member, you often hear a funny, fourth-wall breaking quip in the style of early Blizzard—a “Yes, oh omnipresent authority figure?” or “Stop touching me!”

Warcraft is also why Baldur’s Gate has real-time combat. After Bioware’s game became a hit, almost all its competitors followed suit, and today Warcraft’s influence on the RPG is so pervasive as to be invisible.

“Warcraft was held up on an altar,” Oster says. “Worshipped for taking the concept of a multiplayer battle game and building the best possible interface you could do.”

Ironically, by the time Bioware had finished Baldur’s Gate, Oster hated its interface. He’d spent months testing the multiplayer component, and grown tired of all the thick, thunking buttons. “It was so much grey stone on the screen, and it was so many clicks,” he says. “Unnecessary clicks build a rage in me that you cannot comprehend.”

When Oster was handed Neverwinter Nights to direct, he immediately threw out all the grey stone in favour of a minimalist, MMO-style interface. Even the inventory was transparent. The benefit was clear, if you’ll excuse the pun: players could always see an orc coming. But Bioware lost some of Baldur’s Gate’s weighty, earthen charm in the process. “I called it the Bioware pendulum,” Oster says. “We never made the same mistake twice. We made the polar opposite mistake. We’d do something equally atrocious in the opposite direction. It took a couple of games to learn moderation.”

Ever Winter

Oster stayed on until Dragon Age: Origins. Bioware might have swung back to Baldur’s Gate’s style and aesthetic, but its culture had fundamentally changed—from a “mom and pop shop” to a big company that ultimately answered to a private equity firm.

“Greg [Zeschuk] and Ray [Muzyka] kicked into overdrive mode trying to make their bosses happy,” Oster recalls. “Under Electronic Arts, that just became even more prevalent. There were priorities that EA was giving Greg and Ray that wasn’t getting passed to the rest of the studio. As a result, it seemed to a lot of the senior people that we were making dumb decisions. Because we weren’t seeing the entire picture of what was going on.”

Oster left, and his first act as an independent was to buy an iPhone “because EA would provide phones, but they wouldn’t provide smartphones”. A year later, the iPad launched, and Oster’s interface sense was tingling again. “My thought was, ‘Wow, Baldur’s Gate would be amazing on this. I wonder where Baldur’s Gate is at?’”

Over the ensuing decade, Oster has helmed the modernisation of Bioware’s Infinity Engine—an effort which has ultimately given us enhanced editions of Baldur’s Gate, Icewind Dale, and Planescape: Torment on Steam. Once done, Oster returned to Neverwinter Nights too. He was even able to fund the completion of Darkness over Daggerford, an official expansion campaign that was cancelled without warning by Atari back in 2006.

Many game developers decide that it’s best not to look back on their previous games throughout their career. It’s a wise coping strategy in an incredibly turbulent industry, where it’s sadly common to lose years of work to cancelled or compromised projects. Oster, though, can’t seem to pull himself away from the early games of his career.

“It’s like an abusive relationship with Neverwinter Nights,” he says. “I still love it, but every time I look at it, it hurts me. I see it for what I wanted to do, not for what it does. It’s always missing something in my eyes. But when I see what the community’s done with it, and what fans have been able to extend it to do, I can see past some of the shortfalls that drive me up the wall.”
 

anvi

Prophet
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Imagine working in a creative profession and yet desperately needing to follow other peoples examples. Losers.

“Unnecessary clicks build a rage in me that you cannot comprehend.”
I can comprehend it all too well you hacks.

It took a couple of games to learn moderation.
It still sucks, but most games are bad at it too. Most games are either tedious nerd busywork games, or mindless pleb shit.
 

Slaver1

Savant
Joined
Dec 9, 2019
Messages
341
I too hated the additional clicking to find a mod to remove the fanfic cringe those hacks inserted into my game. Trent and Beamcuck have yet to add the square root of fuck all to the Baldurs Gate experience. The bare minimum they could do is upscale the graphics which I understand is eminently doable in the current version of the engine. It's too much work for these shameless parasites. After Larian received the rights for BG3 they bowed out like whipped curs and should have fallen on their swords then. Fuck Trent Oster and fuck Beamdog.
 
Joined
May 3, 2011
Messages
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USA, NY
Well, they finally updated the graphics. Not to shabby:

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/704450

The HD Models & Textures Pack for Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition
Good day to all Neverwinter Nights adventurers!

Beamdog is happy to announce that after several years of hard work, Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition models of player characters and their equipment (armor, weapons and shields) have finally been remade! Thank you kindly for your patience and support over these years!♥️

81f2202411265a99bf1678ae78a5ef38378c8834.png


Attention: using remade models on lower-end machines can lead to potential problems with the game performance.

This is why we’ve decided to provide a separate link for all our players to download The HD Models & Textures Pack for Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition (4.1 gb). This pack includes updated models of weapons and shields previously released as the Steam Workshop content.

db7363d7f6148d795c807800beb503b030689850.png

4a84dc7fe94dfafe38755be25289b07183f75b33.png


New models now support normal and spec information. All of these pieces can be further modded by the community, which is in line with the base game setup.
 
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anvi

Prophet
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Couldn't they have done this before they released it last year or whenever? :argh: I already did my reminiscing so this is way too late.
 

vazha

Arcane
Joined
Aug 24, 2013
Messages
2,063
Does the EE include the Undrentide thingie? Been planning to replay that one for a while now
 

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