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

Kruno · Dec 23, 2017

It's a no brainer. Full party control it is.

Taxnomore · Dec 23, 2017

The whole concept of Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition Head Start is to get it out early and let people tell us what features we should work on

Wow. Imagine the ideas they could come up with if the game had fifteen years of feedback.

Lilura · Dec 23, 2017

Full party control is where it's at.

New poll is up on my blog, embedded to left sidebar.

Taxnomore · Dec 23, 2017

Subtle trolling.

DeepOcean · Dec 23, 2017

Another possibility of why Trent doesn't care about implement full party control is not that BeamDog has any morals or designer vision but just that this requires working and that gets on the way of the plan of doing nothing and get paid for it. I will bet with you that this head start shit is just a way for Beamdog to get some shekels from naive people that will just give them money and wait forever for their ~~overhyped insignificant patches~~... oh, eh... I mean... "enhancements".

DeepOcean · Dec 23, 2017

taxalot said:
The whole concept of Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition Head Start is to get it out early and let people tell us what features we should work on

Click to expand...

Wow. Imagine the ideas they could come up with if the game had fifteen years of feedback.

If they actually based their decisions on old feedback, how could they do the "We aren't reselling you a 15 year old game with some lame irrelevant bug fixes guises, we totally will work on this, we just need to wait for your feedback, polling is that hard, you know. So we will analyze your feedback for a really LONG, LONG, LONG time, but keep giving us money while we are at it, right?

deama · Dec 24, 2017

I don't care about full party control, what I care about is more polygons, better/more animations, more assets, better UI, more interesting classes/feats, and more interesting engine features/skills like mountain climing, jumping etc...

full party control is so fucking low on my NWN:EE priority list it's even lower than voice acting.

Goral · Dec 24, 2017

lol
GOG has deleted my "Beamdog is the parasite of the industry" wishlist, those cucks couldn't refuse Beamdog. It was the second or third most popular wishlist for Beamdog titles.

JudasIscariot

Edit:

It had around 500 votes last time I checked.

Deleted Member 16721 · Dec 24, 2017

deama said:
I don't care about full party control, what I care about is more polygons, better/more animations, more assets, better UI, more interesting classes/feats, and more interesting engine features/skills like mountain climing, jumping etc...

full party control is so fucking low on my NWN:EE priority list it's even lower than voice acting.

Not sure why people think it would be fun to slog through NWN combat with 4 characters. The UI would be a nightmare, it would be much slower than any other RTWP game, etc.. Just upgrade the AI and save that Total Control stuff for Baldur's Gate & Icewind Dale where it's much easier to manage.

Fedora Master · Dec 24, 2017

They keep making these walls of text as updates but somehow nothing is different when the final product is released. That's kind of astonishing.

Lilura · Dec 25, 2017

Lilura said:
Experimental EE shader stuff.

Update: Dynamic snow. Thanks to vault admin, Fester Pot, for the info.

Bleak northern wasteland in the Aielund Saga:

This was a pretty immersive segment:

Imposing walls of barbarian fortification:

Falling rocks:

And Snow Hunt employed winter wilderness, too:

fantadomat · Dec 25, 2017

Is there a game that does snow right? In most games the snow is constantly raining and there is barely any on the ground. It will be nice if there is a game where the snow after a blizzard is meter or two not 5cm .

DeepOcean · Dec 25, 2017

fluent said:
Not sure why people think it would be fun to slog through NWN combat with 4 characters. The UI would be a nightmare, it would be much slower than any other RTWP game, etc.. Just upgrade the AI and save that Total Control stuff for Baldur's Gate & Icewind Dale where it's much easier to manage.

I don't see why people see NWN combat to be fun at all the way it is now and I don't get why not changing something that is already utter crap wouldn't make it better. If the toolset for NWN 2 was as easy to use as the NWN 1 toolset and was good to quickly produce content, no one on his right mind would waste his time making mods for NWN 1.

Do you want to play decline utter boredom combat? Play the 400 or so mods on the Neverwinter Vault, some of them are even good but even the best ones like Swordflight are good despite the horrendous combat and not for it and rogueknight was pumping blood from stone to make that mess remotely playable. I'm not asking for mandatory henchmen control on all mods, only the option for the modder to allow it or not, I would take messy UI and slower combat any day of the week than what people call combat on NWN 1.

I'm interested on this not because I expect any existing mod or the OC to be changed but because I have a pretty good idea for a mod that I tried on NWN 2 toolset but it required so much work to produce content for it and is prone to crashing so I would have to waste all my free time and patience to produce it, what wasn't acceptable, D:OS 2 editor is useable but the ruleset is fucking atrocious out of amateur designers appealing to casual RPGwatcher players. NWN 1 editor is just perfect, the ruleset is pretty good (at least in comparison with other crap out there on the PC), it just need a decent combat. I don't see why more options for modding is a bad thing.

About Ai patches, sorry, I never played a single game that had decent AI even with mods, NWN 1 Ai is atrocious and will remain so, some people expect some miracle Ai system but sorry, base on previous experience, I will remain highly skeptical of that.

Lilura · Dec 26, 2017

As expected, I'm not the only one:

Excerpt from An Argument for Full Party Control in NWN:

Now, I have to say that I'm quite disappointed with that response. Trent Oster headed up development of the original Neverwinter Nights, so I respect his vision of the game; it's his vision to explore as he likes. However - and this is the crux - I think eschewing full party control showed a grievous lack of foresight by BioWare over their five year dev cycle of Aurora. The frankly embarrassing decision went against their Infinity Engine player-base, causing veterans of Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale to criticize NWN primarily for that omission; in fact, many thought it a total joke and wrote it off. Readers who were around in 2002 will know that to be the truth. Some of the most knowledgeable veterans were among them. As a result, they didn't gravitate to NWN and stuck with the likes of Baldur's Gate, Black Isle, Troika and Sir-Tech through the heyday of NWN. How many talented modders - who actually understand combat systems and encounter design - did the community lose there? Quite a few, if the proliferation of "story-based" modules that might as well have been adventure games is anything to go by. And many of those that did make the transition never stopped longing for full party control due to the dumb-as-rocks companion AI NWN shipped with. Bone Kenning is, tragically, the only module I know of that implemented a welcome companion control hack, but it's just that - a hack. As well, I don't think Balkoth's Minion Control has been employed by builders at this point. But again, while an admirable attempt, Balkoth didn't have access to the source code and so it's a far cry from proper full party control with marquee selection and formation-based movement.

So now, Beamdog have access to the source code, and therefore a golden opportunity to actually enhance Aurora in a profound manner, yet they are not taking full party control seriously. It's not on their Trello board for consideration and yet "completion of Witch's Wake" actually got on there when I've seen no one, not a soul, talk about it on any public venue in the last 5 years. Who the hell cares about Witch's Wake? Answer: A few Beamdog forum butterflies who haven't played the greatest modules the platform has to offer, and no one else. People on the Trello board are just voting for whatever's on it. Put full party control on there and it shoots straight to the top, alongside the populist eye-candy enhancements.

Ideally, this is what would be implemented: full party control with marquee selection and strategy cam along with formation-based positioning/movement and companion building and inventory control.

Nano · Dec 26, 2017

So since Beamdog is erasing all traces of the original versions of these games from online stores, does that mean they should now be counted as abandonware?

Kruno · Dec 26, 2017

I am more interested in the increased modding potential of having updated tools. I want to go back and make my own simulation module. Hopefully an increase in the resources available (extra threads and resource limit removal).

Irxy · Dec 26, 2017

I want the Witch's Wake official module continuation, though I doubt anyone but the original dev can handle it.

Gepeu · Dec 26, 2017

Nano said:
So since Beamdog is erasing all traces of the original versions of these games from online stores

At first I was like

, but then I was like

Popiel · Dec 26, 2017

Irxy said:
I want the Witch's Wake official module continuation, though I doubt anyone but the original dev can handle it.

That's what Shitcurs should do instead of what they are doing.

Sykar · Dec 26, 2017

I just bought the NWN Diamond Edition on GoG just to spite Beamdog and so I will never be forced to pay for their shit since it seems to be common that the original versions get replaced by "EE" shit instead of getting offered separately.

Lilura · Dec 28, 2017

Added some more highly opinionated sections to this article, mainly due to the stupid responses it's gotten on reddit and GoG.

Excerpt:

D&D has always been about a party of adventurers. And D&D has always been about combat, first and foremost. Ask any Ars Magica fan or go and read transcripts of D&D sessions run by the late, great Gary Gygax, co-inventor of D&D: far from being about storytelling, it's about a fight for survival inside a meat-grinder dungeon. You meet at the local tavern and into the dungeon you go. What happens in there is your story. That might be a startling revelation to the ignoramuses who have played lots of "adventure game" modules for NWN, but it's the truth: you haven't been playing D&D and you don't have the faintest idea what D&D is. Go and play Swordflight: that's in the spirit of D&D. Again, the only reason those lame-o modules are prolific is because the Baldur's Gate crowd didn't transition to NWN en masse due to the lack of full party control. So instead, we got a bunch of twaddlers that just wanted to tell their "interactive stories". But I digress. If D&D computer games are going to allow for party-based adventuring then full party control should be employed because the AI isn't up to snuff. Tabletop D&D doesn't suffer from other party members doing tactically stupid things. If a player is disrupting play with their stupidity, the other players will demand the DM kill them off or kick them out because you can't partake of satisfying cooperative gaming when someone is threatening TPK with frequent and randomized stupidity, as NWN companion AI does.

Cael · Dec 28, 2017

Sykar said:
I just bought the NWN Diamond Edition on GoG just to spite Beamdog and so I will never be forced to pay for their shit since it seems to be common that the original versions get replaced by "EE" shit instead of getting offered separately.

I got that years ago, so I don't have to even bother looking at LGTIBDJGIDYRABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPdog's latest trash.

Irxy · Dec 28, 2017

Lilura said:
Added some more highly opinionated sections to this article, mainly due to the stupid responses it's gotten on reddit and GoG.

Excerpt:

D&D has always been about a party of adventurers. And D&D has always been about combat, first and foremost. Ask any Ars Magica fan or go and read transcripts of D&D sessions run by the late, great Gary Gygax, co-inventor of D&D: far from being about storytelling, it's about a fight for survival inside a meat-grinder dungeon. You meet at the local tavern and in you go. What happens in there is your story. That might be a startling revelation to the ignoramuses who have played lots of "adventure game" modules for NWN, but it's the truth: you haven't been playing D&D and you don't have the faintest idea what D&D is. Go and play Swordflight: that's in the spirit of D&D. Again, the only reason those lame-o modules are prolific is because the Baldur's Gate crowd didn't transition to NWN en masse due to the lack of full party control. So instead, we got a bunch of twaddlers that just wanted to tell their "interactive stories". But I digress. If D&D computer games are going to allow for party-based adventuring then full party control should be employed because the AI isn't up to snuff. Tabletop D&D doesn't suffer from other party members doing tactically stupid things. If a player is disrupting play with their stupidity, the other players will demand the DM kill them off or kick them out because you can't partake of satisfying cooperative gaming when someone is threatening TPK with frequent and randomized stupidity, as NWN companion AI does.

Click to expand...

Bullshit.
That dude forgot to mention that a party in D&D means that each character is controlled by a different player, thus each player only controls a single character.
A game where a player controls a party of characters with a sole focus on combat is called a wargame, which is a different genre.

Lilura · Dec 28, 2017

Irxy said:
Bullshit.
That dude forgot to mention that a party in D&D means that each character is controlled by a different player, thus each player only controls a single character.
A game where a player controls a party of characters with a sole focus on combat is called a wargame, which is a different genre.

Not for computer RPGs, fuckstick. PS:T, MotB, Jagged Alliance 2, BG, IWD, ToEE - all of the best party-based role-playing and combat RPGs have been full party control.