Incline D&D games really should all come with module editors like NWN

[Comte]

I just want good, great even, D&D game.

Solasta or KOTC 2

 

[Cryomancer]

NWN2 is amazing. You can easily re write the code of spells and recompile then, sadly a lot of stuff are "hardcoded" in NWN1

 

[d1nolore]

NWN2 is amazing. You can easily re write the code of spells and recompile then, sadly a lot of stuff are "hardcoded" in NWN1

You can change spells easily in NWN too, they are not hardcoded. You probably mean feats and skills?

 

[Cryomancer]

NWN2 is amazing. You can easily re write the code of spells and recompile then, sadly a lot of stuff are "hardcoded" in NWN1

You can change spells easily in NWN too, they are not hardcoded. You probably mean feats and skills?

Many mods like PRC adds spells as feats cuz spellbooks are hardcodded.

 

[rojay]

I would love to enjoy Neverwinter Nights but the engine is so bad and Jesus the combat. I have tried over the years to enjoy those Aurora-engine games but I have not found a way to do it. The combat sucks, the graphics are a step backward from the infinity engine games and the AI is terrible. If I want to play a 3.0/5 game, I still have ToEE to play, and I'd much rather play through that or Knights of the Chalice again than any of the innumerable "MUST PLAY SO AWESOME" fan-made modules for NWN.

Bless your heart if you like it, though.

 

[d1nolore]

See the thing about NWN's editor was that it was super easy to get things going and you was super friendly to work with. Stuff like where D:OS was at launch wasn't friendly at all, in fact, it kind of pushed you out instead of bringing you in with how obscure every thing was.

people who need an easy to use editor aren't going to make anything of value
"b-b-but that's not true!" you say
I merely have to point at the fact that Fallout/2, with no real editor whatsoever, has multiple fan modules worth playing. Probably more than NWN.

NWN has a large cache of high quality content, much more than probably any other game. Problem is it’s hard to find things, it’s easier to find by word of mouth. You are only considering a small handful of single player campaigns that you have been told about, there are some you have missed.

There is also a large amount of of good multiplayer content you have missed. I played NWN primarily multiplayer; there are or was a lot of great servers with very fun and intricate modules online which were much larger and more complex and sophisticated than single player mods, they were updated and added to for years by teams some of them. There are also multiplayer mods you could get on the vault to play with friends, I use to play castle siege mods where you would have a team of attackers who would try to take the castle from the team of defenders. There are also the experiences created in real time; the DM client allowed a full DM experience where they can create encounters/items/objects in real time based on what players did. So you could play a module and the DM adapts it as you go and you end up not even playing the original module, it can go anywhere. So in essence DMs could create a module outline that is largely contentless without a DM and create a whole adventure in it, similar to how it’s done in PnP. So there are benefits to easy of use of the toolset and this is what NWN was designed for.

So yeah, you are inaccurate.

 

[d1nolore]

NWN2 is amazing. You can easily re write the code of spells and recompile then, sadly a lot of stuff are "hardcoded" in NWN1

You can change spells easily in NWN too, they are not hardcoded. You probably mean feats and skills?

Many mods like PRC adds spells as feats cuz spellbooks are hardcodded.

Yeah you can’t just add new spells you needs haks and stuff for that. You can directly edit existing spells, and adding new spells to spell books is pretty common place nowadays. I think you are thinking of past limitations.

 

[vortex]

nwn2 would be a much better game if I had

But can you work on BG3 and sweet talk to Swen for RTwP? The world depends on you. Thx

 

[JarlFrank]

It's funny how they made NWN2's editor intentionally harder to use... because NWN1 had so many amateurs releasing modules even shittier than the OC.
So the bright minds at Obsidian figured, if the editor is harder to use you need to spend more time learning it, improving your module making skills in the process.

That wasn't the intent. The developers never sat down and thought "let's make our tools shittier to filter out the amateurs", rusty_shackleford never worked at Obsidian. A "difficult" toolset like Electron doesn't just set a high bar of entry, it also increases time and labour requirements for skilled users too. What you saw there was a small, unfiltered glimpse into Obsidian's software engineering standards at the time and why they were constantly releasing games held together with spit and duct tape.

The sad part is that they had some good ideas to increase fidelity and flexibility over Aurora, but they fucked up the interfaces beyond any excuse. Electron isn't just harder to learn, it stays more labour intensive even after you've learned its processes, and far more so than would be justified by its upgraded visual standards. Its concept of ergonomics is a runaway freight train filled with flaming dumpsters.

Yeah that's ultimately the problem of hard to use tools: people who are good at level design decide not to use them because it's too much of a bother.

That's one of the reasons why Shadowrun Returns modding never picked up big time, the editor wasn't powerful enough and doing the things you want to do is too cumbersome.

 

[AdamReith]

This is the dream, the only way we are going to get modern day auteur classics. Swordflight being a great example of what can be achieved.

The modern day development team might be able to manage a game engine that doesn't crash every five minutes (after a few years of patching) but a clear creative vision and implementation is completely beyond them.

The halcyon days of multi-classed programmer/creatives being able to form collectives are long behind us. You only need to browse this forum to see they can be counted on one hand and they all seem to work alone for the most part.

That said, if I spent years working on an RPG engine I probably wouldn't be in a rush to give it away for nothing and people can't be expected to do everything for free. Will be interesting to see if KOTC2's module publishing model gets any traction.

 

[d1nolore]

Simple answer is: It’s been tried and is not profitable.

Look at all the people on Codex who shit on nwn because the OC wasn’t BG. If they took all that time and money put into all the amazing features and just put it into the OC then all the humdrum fans would be praising it. People are fickle and shortsighted.

 

[Dorateen]

The IceBlink toolset is excellent for crafting D&D adventures.

 

[JamesDixon]

FRUA is the only set of tools for real D&D/AD&D. Anything made for DANDINO 3.x and later is D&D In Name Only.

 

[Gargaune]

Simple answer is: It’s been tried and is not profitable.

Look at all the people on Codex who shit on nwn because the OC wasn’t BG. If they took all that time and money put into all the amazing features and just put it into the OC then all the humdrum fans would be praising it. People are fickle and shortsighted.

I'm not sure that's entirely accurate. The thing to remember is that 2002's NWN, despite the justifiably cold reception the OC got, was a success. It got two dedicated expansion packs, a number of "Premium Modules", one of the most prolific community content scenes up to that point (and maybe even since, still) and Atari eventually sought Obsidian for a sequel after BioWare went a different direction. If anything, NWN was a little bit too far ahead of its time to enjoy the same staying power that Oblivion did a couple of years later - while their "modding" scenes are very different beasts, they were both empowered by mass broadband adoption and culture to support that sort of community content phenomenon, which arguably hadn't fully crystalised during NWN's prime. Hell, NWN's Premium Modules were effectively a "DLC" attempt before the term came about and certainly a higher quality offering than Bethesda's infamous Horse Armour.

But the catch is that NWN was designed precisely for this purpose, not just as a D&D-based videogame, but as a platform for online-capable D&D altogether. Both cooperative multiplayer and campaign authoring were chief priorities, likely moreso than the OC itself (whose development I continue to believe was significantly impacted by a secondary goal to "demo" the toolset, rather than to just make an adventure module), so as to unlock "playing D&D" from the need of a local meet-up. I don't think it's pure coincidence that BioWare/WotC/Atari chose to recycle the "Neverwinter Nigths" brand from 1991's multiplayer Gold Box title, which had been a groundbreaking step in the same direction at its time. To this end and as central development objective, NWN's Aurora Toolset remains unparalleled to this day in combining accessibility and authoring capabilities, where an amateur can pick it up in a couple of hours, yet an expert can cram a Space Invaders replica into their module.

And today? There's certainly an interest in the "content creation" aspect of videogames, ranging from Solasta's map editor to Bethesda's "settlements" to stuff like Little Big Planet, but developing a similarly simple yet powerful toolset like Aurora is an expensive proposition and no trivial task, even more so given the higher visual fidelity standards at play. Ironically, that's something that Obisidian's Electron Toolset proved as well - they built the features, but didn't dedicate the necessary resources to ergonomics. As for BG3, I've argued it's conceptually more of a successor to NWN than BG and it's clear WotC are keen on that same "play D&D on your computer" angle rather than just a "D&D-based videogame", but I have a growing suspicion it won't feature a toolset at all, otherwise you'd imagine they'd have featured it in their promotional push. I remember having a brief look at D:OS2's toolset on YouTube and it wasn't quite up there with Aurora, but it seemed a promising contender and BG3 should've been the perfect opportunity to close that gap, but alas.

 

[PorkaMorka]

Sure, it would be nice, so would a lot of things.

However, it seems like a lot of work to add a full fledged construction kit, if you start out making a normal single player game. It seems unrealistic to expect for-profit companies to do this for every game.

A good construction kit has to be part of the design from the beginning and it may involve compromises and tradeoffs in terms of how good the actual campaign that comes with the game is.

Also D&D is kinda declined now, so you'd either be making a retro construction kit for a tiny minority of grognards or a modern 5th edition (6th? 7th?) construction set for fans of the hit series "Critical Role". (No idea what that is, but I hear it's full of libs, just like modern D&D)

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

Retro kit?

Well.......

there is ACS and ACK.

All these decades later.... poor poisonous snake. WTF Sir Handsome!
WTF!!!



https://dosgames.com/game/adventure-creation-kit/

ACK WARNING!

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Simple answer is: It’s been tried and is not profitable.

Look at all the people on Codex who shit on nwn because the OC wasn’t BG. If they took all that time and money put into all the amazing features and just put it into the OC then all the humdrum fans would be praising it. People are fickle and shortsighted.

We got a bunch of garbage mods that don't live up to either BG1 or BG2. Because quantity is better than quality or something.
For some reason a bunch of retards think this was a good tradeoff. It wasn't.

 

[Roguey]

Everything has a cost, and the cost that's required to make a user friendly toolset is too high both when it comes to the quality of the official campaign and the quality of the art (to make it easier to create levels). Certainly not worth it, given the quality of the average amateur mod (usually garbage).

I've worked with a lot of different toolsets and engines and stuff that we've developed internally, and making an engine, making a toolset is so incredibly time-consuming and so frustrating for so long. Keep in mind that when we released Neverwinter Nights 2, there were people that said "give us the real toolset." "Like, what do you mean?" "You didn't make the game with this toolset, give us the real toolset." "No, dude, you're right. We didn't make the game with this toolset, we made the game with a toolset that was worse than this for two years and you got the best version of it." And that blew people's minds, because it takes so much time and it's so hard and frustating.

 

[FriendlyMerchant]

FRUA is the only set of tools for real D&D/AD&D. Anything made for DANDINO 3.x and later is D&D In Name Only.

Speaking of FRUA. It seems that this works

Spoiler

 

[Cryomancer]

and the cost that's required to make a user friendly toolse

It doesn't need to be user friendly toolset. If is "programmer friendly" enough like re writing spells in NWN2, you already can have a huge modding community.

 

[Roguey]

It doesn't need to be user friendly toolset. If is "programmer friendly" enough like re writing spells in NWN2, you already can have a huge modding community.

NWN2's toolset didn't really give the OP what he wanted.

 

[Serus]

They can't sell DLCs if their games include editors. Simple as that.

They couldn't sell bad DLCs. And even this isn't true. If the customer base is large enough and with enough fanboyism going on a critical mass seems to form. Then you can sell DLCs even if it's shit, even if there are free products available that are 10 times better. Possibly even literal shit, knowing some fans. The thing is, for mod tools that require resources to make to be profitable, a big modding community must form to attract more customers for official products and DLCs. This works rarely judging from past experience (NWN1 possibly was one of the few cases) so companies that make D&D crpgs, rarely try it or do it half-assed. I can't say that I don't understand their logic. Consistency and low risk are in high demand.

nwn2 would be a much better game if I had

If you made it turn-based and insisted on a fixed or at least less retarded camera then yes, it would. Also better OC would go a long way. Or a better game in general.

 

[rogueknight333]

It used to be fairly common for games to ship with a toolset or map editor or something of the sort. It would indeed be good if that became common again, especially since these days it appears that most professional developers have little interest in creating anything besides declined and pozzed garbage.

Unfortunately, the near uniqueness of the NWN modding scene (perhaps FRUA would also be a good example) suggests that making a toolset that can produce the same is not that easy.

In the first place, one needs a toolset that is relatively easy and quick to make use of, or the only people using it will be people with no job and no life. The whole purpose of using a toolset (as opposed to, say, coding an indie game from scratch) is to save time, so the more efficiently if saves time, the better. For all I know, there might be a correlation, and even a correlation that is not negative, between people with too much time on their hands and people with a talent for game design, but the evidence for this proposition seems insufficient.

Secondly, users will want a toolset powerful and flexible enough to make the kind of game they want, rather than something that is largely a copy of whatever official campaign the toolset shipped with. Ideally, even if the OC was a pure combat slog, the toolset would allow one to make a storyfag game with cutscenes, special class and race options, complicated conversations full of choices and ability checks, etc., and vice versa, allow one to make interesting combat encounters even if the OC was just an interactive novel.

NWN hit the sweet spot and managed to meet both conditions, but most editors fall short in at least one direction.

One also apparently needs a large community of players who are actually interested in the toolset. Most people are not going to do much with an editor unless they know there are people out there willing to play and give a friendly critique to what they produce. NWN managed to provide not only module making tools but also a large group of people willing to play modules, partly by being easy to get into, and partly (sadly, but undoubtedly a factor in this) by being put out by a major developer and thus getting lots of hype and publicity, including some for the module-making specifically, since unlike most games that was NWN's chief selling point. Naturally both these factors meant that a high proportion of the modules put out were not very good, especially in the early days, but there were enough people involved that even a very low number of good modules in percentage terms still added up to quite a few good ones in absolute numbers. For that matter, the large number of less good modules probably also helped to get people with actual design talent to try their hand at the toolset. A lot of people who might otherwise have been too intimidated to release their modding work to the public were probably encouraged to do so by noticing that the bar for "above average" was not set that high.

Come to think of it, the questionable quality of NWN's OC might also have helped in the same way. I know it encouraged me. When I first purchased NWN I expected I would have some fun playing around with the toolset (as I had with editors for other games) but never imagined I would be able to make anything remotely on a professional level. After playing the OC my reaction was something like: "WTF is this? I could make a better RPG campaign than this in my sleep!"

 

[rogueknight333]

NWN2 is amazing. You can easily re write the code of spells and recompile then, sadly a lot of stuff are "hardcoded" in NWN1

You can change spells easily in NWN too, they are not hardcoded. You probably mean feats and skills?

Many mods like PRC adds spells as feats cuz spellbooks are hardcodded.

I suspect what you are thinking of are caster oriented prestige classes like Eldritch Knight, Arcane Trickster, etc. that also add to the spellcasting level of the base class. This sort of thing is supported in NWN2 but not NWN1, so if one is trying to add something of the sort as a custom classes in NWN1 (as PRC does) one often needs to resort to kludgy workarounds to get them to work the way they are supposed to. Aside from a few special cases like that, there is actually more hardcoded stuff in NWN2 than in NWN1.

 

[<3sRichardSimmons]

There’s a reason that the top rated mods on nwvault back in the day (Lone Wolf, A Dance with Rogues, etc.) were to a large degree adventure games: the combat implementation of 3E in NWN was shit. There’s just nothing you can do to NWN combat to make it not shit. The best you can do is make it be over quickly.