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

[Zboj Lamignat]

I don't care for NWN so meh. But it is pretty weird how after bad sales of IWD EE, PST EE and that BG1 dlc of theirs they think this is a good idea? NWN is ranked shit-tier by many people who enjoyed IE games. Unless the community is really big an eager to latch onto this.

What's most impressing me: Beamdog announced PST: EE in March and is announcing NWN: EE in November. Two games a year is an impressive feat and is a very good pace for a small studio.

Yes, the sheer pace at which they are patching their releases is particularly impressing. Whenever I feel like getting impressed I go visit the IWD EE patch thread on their official forums. Much impressment to be had.

 

[Sizzle]

But it is pretty weird how after bad sales of IWD EE, PST EE and that BG1 dlc of theirs they think this is a good idea?

It looks like they didn't even put the bare minimum of effort (and work) into "enhancing" this, so however little this sells - they'll probably still end up making a profit.

 

[Cael]

Holy shit guys I am beyond excited! What will they add I wonder.

I already hate beamdog and expect nothing from them after SoD and the retarded shit they put in BG:EE but..... It is gonna be worse isn't it...

You are tempting them hard, aren't you? :D

Oh, NWN is 3.0. Monks didn't get the bonus to quarterstaves until 3.5.

 

[Lilura]

It looks like they didn't even put the bare minimum of effort (and work) into "enhancing" this, so however little this sells - they'll probably still end up making a profit.

It'll sell well.

Update: Admin and one of the most talented coders in NWN community is a coder on NWN:EE.

 

[Sizzle]

It looks like they didn't even put the bare minimum of effort (and work) into "enhancing" this, so however little this sells - they'll probably still end up making a profit.

It'll sell well.

And you're basing this on what?

The IE EE's had more of a reason to be made (no matter how flimsy), and they've been selling worse and worse with every game they've released.

 

[Lilura]

And you're basing this on what?

Women's intuition, the most powerful force on Earth.

 

[d1nolore]

If you weren't a big fan of NWN and the expansions you probably don't see the potential. HotU(or was it SoU?) Added improved henchmen(can have 2), and cutscenes which would make a massive improvement to the OC, and other stuff too. This is a slamdunk for the OC. They'd have to be dog shit useless to mess this up. As I mentioned before; people get cringey when there's talk of changing classics like BG/BG2 because we don't want them to get fucked up. But NWN was never based on its OC, plenty of player made mods are much better, as multiplayer and mods were its strength as that was the point. So no one will care if they fix it up and add content, its an easy win.

Only way they could fuck up the OC would be if they added trannies and lesbian gnomes or some shit.

 

[TT1]

Beamdog is excited to announce the return of a classic! Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition can now be pre-ordered on Beamdog or (soon) be wishlisted on Steam!

But first, a note from Beamdog CEO Trent Oster:
“Neverwinter Nights was a unique game that distilled the essence of Dungeons & Dragons and allowed players to build, share and act as Dungeon Master for amazing gaming experiences.I think this unique combination makes Neverwinter Nights one of the most versatile role playing game experiences of all time.
“I invite everyone interested in the future of Neverwinter Nights to join the Beamdog forums. We hope it will become a new home where you can speak directly with the development team. We need to know what YOU want to see Neverwinter Nights become, and we'll do our best to meet and exceed those expectations."


What’s included?

All the content of Neverwinter Nights Diamond Edition!

The original Neverwinter Nights campaign: Find yourself at the center of intrigue, betrayal, and dark magic in Neverwinter Nights. Journey through dangerous cities, monster filled dungeons and deep into uncharted wilderness in search of the cure for a cursed plague ravaging the city of Neverwinter.

Two expansion packs:

• Shadows of Undrentide: Another adventure begins in Shadows of Undrentide! Charged by your master to recover four ancient artifacts, travel from the Silver Marches to unravel mysteries of a long-dead magical civilization.
• Hordes of the Underdark: Continue the adventure started in Shadows of Undrentide and journey into the ever-more bizarre and hostile depths of Undermountain to challenge a gathering evil.

Three premium modules:
Discover over 40 hours of new stories, then go on to sample the hundreds of modules created by community members just like you.

• Kingmaker
• ShadowGuard
• Witch’s Wake

The Aurora Toolset: Build your own world full of unique monsters, items, traps, encounters, and settings, then share your creation with the rest of the Neverwinter Nights community. (Windows only)
Dungeon Master Client: Become the storyteller! Control monsters, creatures, and characters your players will meet over the course of an adventure.

Can't wait? Get a Head Start!

We'll be selecting lucky fans from the pre-order pool on Beamdog for the Head Start program. This is your chance to play NWN:EE, dust off old modules, and update your persistent world servers early! Getting ongoing feedback from experienced fans will help shape the future of Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition, so let us know what you think!

What’s new? Enhanced Features!
Mostly noticeably, we’ve added an improved display that looks great on modern monitors. Your portrait, combat bar, inventory, and other UI elements now adjust in size based on your chosen resolution and you can select what size scaling you prefer. We’ve also added Advanced Graphics Options! We believe the added pixel shaders and post-processing effects make for crisper, cleaner visuals. Now you can choose to enable contrast, vibrance, and depth of field options as you desire.

These new graphic options are open to modders, and we’re already hearing lots of great ideas from our early testers. We’ve made an effort to ensure NWN:EE is backwards compatible! All your save games, modules, and mods from the original Neverwinter Nights work in the Enhanced Edition.
Check out this gallery of feature comparison screenshots.

And that’s just the start!

Beamdog’s team on this project is a mix of original developers and key members of the Neverwinter Nights community such as Bernhard Stöckner (AKA Niv) from Neverwinter Vault who have come together to curate important fan-requested improvements. Our goal is to support Neverwinter Nights players, storytellers, and modders with ongoing development.

There’s a lot to be excited about and we can’t wait to share more. Tune into the Beamdog Twitch announcement Nov 21. at 12pm PST for more details!

Check out the full list of changes between Neverwinter Nights 1.69 and Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition here!
Have questions? Here’s a handy FAQ! If you don’t see your answer, let us know on Facebook, Twitter or the forum and we’ll answer if we can!

Join the Beamdog community and let us know what you want to see in Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition!

http://blog.beamdog.com/2017/11/neverwinter-nights-enhanced-edition.html


Full List of Changes:

Installable through the Beamdog Client and Steam

The game uses an install directory (read-only), and a user directory for your content and save-games that is independent of the install directory.

This user folder can be found in:
[My Documents]\Neverwinter Nights (Windows)
~/Documents/Neverwinter Nights (macOS)
~/.local/share/Neverwinter Nights (Linux)

Launching executables with the command-line option -userDirectory alternative_directory will use alternative_ directory instead of the one specified.


New Advanced Graphics Options (nwn.ini)

• Advanced Frame-Buffer Effect (Vibrance). Boosts saturation (or colour vibrancy) in areas that are monochrome.

[Video Options]
Enable FBEffect Vibrance=1

• Advanced Frame-Buffer Effect (Depth of Field). Causes more distant pixels to be blurred. This effect only becomes visible as the camera zooms in close to the player character.
[Video Options]
Enable FBEffect Depth of Field=1

Upscaled UIs Added
When in full-screen, Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition will automatically use your desktop resolution. The UI will now upscale to the largest resolution possible (3x scaling on a 4k monitor).

New Shader Support

Custom content authors can apply both vertex- and fragment-shaders on textures by supplying the command “customshadername XXX” in a .txi file. The game engine will look for the files fsXXX.shd and vsXXX.shd (put them in override or in a hak) and apply them to each texture instance. For details, see Shaders_README.txt.

Linux Install Rebuilt

For nwmain, we now link against a different set of libraries for audio (see LinuxInstall_README.txt for more info).

macOS Support Updated

Both the main game and the standalone-server should now run on macOS (OS X) 10.9 Mavericks or later.

Gamespy (Unique Player Names Support) Removed

Now that Gamespy no longer operates, unfortunately we can no longer guarantee player names are unique across the community. Your identity is now based around your public CD key (granted through Beamdog servers).

Languages Updated
French, German, Italian, Polish and Spanish translations of v74 have been completed. NWN 1.69 was English only!

Server Changes
• Optimized multiple hotspots in the servers to speed up processing speed.
• Exposed new .ini option to let servers use less CPU when not enough players are connected, but run at full throttle once enough players are connected.
• Conversation performance dramatically improved on busy servers.
• Servervault characters will be saved by public cdkey (secured via master server) instead of by player name.
• Features added for server admins to allow them to switch servervaults from NWN 1.69 to v74 (see official Beamdog forums for more information on what clients and servers must do to make this work).
• Added a crash reporter to the Linux server that will enable server administrators to easily report issues.

New nwnplayer.ini Options

• Option added to allow users to claim names permanently and associate the name with their CD Key. Off by default. Turn on ONLY if you are running a persistent world.

[Server Options]
Sticky Player Names=0

• When Sticky Player Names is set, this allows the old NWN 1.69 servervault characters saved by player name directory behaviour. Recommended for old persistent worlds that do not want to swap to the new servervault format.

[Server Options]
Server Vault By Player Name=0

• Specify the number of clients required to be connected to a server before it stops aggressively attempting reduce its CPU usage via sleep().

[Server Options]
Clients Required To Disable CPU Sleep=1

• Specifies the maximum number of scripting instructions available to run within a given script before the script is assumed to be in an infinite loop and terminated (was 131042 in NWN 1.69, minimum = 131042, maximum = 16777216)

[Script Options]
Instruction Limit=524288

New nwn.ini options

• Language. If you wish to override the language choice as specified by the Beamdog Client, you may set this entry directly in nwn.ini.

[Display Options]
language=en

Choices available are:
• German: de
• English: en
• Spanish: es
• French: fr
• Italian: it
• Polish: pl

Note that if language selected does not exist in your build, English will be selected by default.

• SetUIScale. The UI attempts to resize to the maximum scale possible (when at the default value of 0). However, if this UI choice given is too large for you, you may set the UI Scale to a lower number. If the number is set to a value between 1 and 8, it will attempt to give you that exact UI scale. The game may decide to override this value if you are running at a resolution that does not allow this value properly on the screen.

[Video Options]
SetUIScale=0

New Scripting Commands

Crashes Fixed

Other Issues

 

[Lacrymas]

I'm looking at the screenshots and I can't see any difference, the screen just looks blurrier or maybe that's just me.

 

[Infinitron]

Announcement stream:

 

[TT1]

Full List of Changes:

Installable through the Beamdog Client and Steam

The game uses an install directory (read-only), and a user directory for your content and save-games that is independent of the install directory.

This user folder can be found in:
[My Documents]\Neverwinter Nights (Windows)
~/Documents/Neverwinter Nights (macOS)
~/.local/share/Neverwinter Nights (Linux)

Launching executables with the command-line option -userDirectory alternative_directory will use alternative_ directory instead of the one specified.


New Advanced Graphics Options (nwn.ini)

• Advanced Frame-Buffer Effect (Vibrance). Boosts saturation (or colour vibrancy) in areas that are monochrome.

[Video Options]
Enable FBEffect Vibrance=1

• Advanced Frame-Buffer Effect (Depth of Field). Causes more distant pixels to be blurred. This effect only becomes visible as the camera zooms in close to the player character.
[Video Options]
Enable FBEffect Depth of Field=1

Upscaled UIs Added
When in full-screen, Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition will automatically use your desktop resolution. The UI will now upscale to the largest resolution possible (3x scaling on a 4k monitor).

New Shader Support

Custom content authors can apply both vertex- and fragment-shaders on textures by supplying the command “customshadername XXX” in a .txi file. The game engine will look for the files fsXXX.shd and vsXXX.shd (put them in override or in a hak) and apply them to each texture instance. For details, see Shaders_README.txt.

Linux Install Rebuilt

For nwmain, we now link against a different set of libraries for audio (see LinuxInstall_README.txt for more info).

macOS Support Updated

Both the main game and the standalone-server should now run on macOS (OS X) 10.9 Mavericks or later.

Gamespy (Unique Player Names Support) Removed

Now that Gamespy no longer operates, unfortunately we can no longer guarantee player names are unique across the community. Your identity is now based around your public CD key (granted through Beamdog servers).

Languages Updated
French, German, Italian, Polish and Spanish translations of v74 have been completed. NWN 1.69 was English only!

Server Changes
• Optimized multiple hotspots in the servers to speed up processing speed.
• Exposed new .ini option to let servers use less CPU when not enough players are connected, but run at full throttle once enough players are connected.
• Conversation performance dramatically improved on busy servers.
• Servervault characters will be saved by public cdkey (secured via master server) instead of by player name.
• Features added for server admins to allow them to switch servervaults from NWN 1.69 to v74 (see official Beamdog forums for more information on what clients and servers must do to make this work).
• Added a crash reporter to the Linux server that will enable server administrators to easily report issues.

New nwnplayer.ini Options

• Option added to allow users to claim names permanently and associate the name with their CD Key. Off by default. Turn on ONLY if you are running a persistent world.

[Server Options]
Sticky Player Names=0

• When Sticky Player Names is set, this allows the old NWN 1.69 servervault characters saved by player name directory behaviour. Recommended for old persistent worlds that do not want to swap to the new servervault format.

[Server Options]
Server Vault By Player Name=0

• Specify the number of clients required to be connected to a server before it stops aggressively attempting reduce its CPU usage via sleep().

[Server Options]
Clients Required To Disable CPU Sleep=1

• Specifies the maximum number of scripting instructions available to run within a given script before the script is assumed to be in an infinite loop and terminated (was 131042 in NWN 1.69, minimum = 131042, maximum = 16777216)

[Script Options]
Instruction Limit=524288

New nwn.ini options

• Language. If you wish to override the language choice as specified by the Beamdog Client, you may set this entry directly in nwn.ini.

[Display Options]
language=en

Choices available are:
• German: de
• English: en
• Spanish: es
• French: fr
• Italian: it
• Polish: pl

Note that if language selected does not exist in your build, English will be selected by default.

• SetUIScale. The UI attempts to resize to the maximum scale possible (when at the default value of 0). However, if this UI choice given is too large for you, you may set the UI Scale to a lower number. If the number is set to a value between 1 and 8, it will attempt to give you that exact UI scale. The game may decide to override this value if you are running at a resolution that does not allow this value properly on the screen.

[Video Options]
SetUIScale=0

New Scripting Commands

Crashes Fixed

Other Issues

 

[TT1]

I'm looking at the screenshots and I can't see any difference, the screen just looks blurrier or maybe that's just me.

They are better now:

NWN: Diamond Edition vs. NWN: EE With All Advanced Filters

Check the gallery: https://www.beamdog.com/nwn_faq#28

 

[Deleted member 7219]

They are the pits of the world. This is their laziest effort yet.

 

[Jazz_]

They should fix the npcs bobbing their heads constantly.

 

[TT1]

Man, I have no memories of playing NWN, even though I played until the expansions. WTF?

 

[Lacrymas]

The muted colors are more "atmospheric".

 

[Deleted member 7219]

Beamdog’s next enhanced edition will be the game with no changes at all except for Beamdog’s logo.

 

[*-*/\--/\~]

Oh crapdog, just die off already.

 

[Old One]

I could respect a true enhancement of NWN - after all, there's so much to "enhance" - but this, from the looks of things, doesn't even come close.

Significantly upgrading the ugly graphics, changing the awful combat, and adding a lot more flexibility for the module makers would be a bare minimum. I might even pay more than $20 if it were done properly.

But it won't be.

 

[axx]

Compare both pictures and you'll notice that the sword on the right is darker. Courtesy of advanced filters. This is what 15 years of technological advance brings.

 

[Jimmious]

It's really crazy how little effort they put into this. I hated the graphics even when the game came out. Crappy early 3D era, everything was blocky, edgy and asymmetrical. And all they can offer to "enhance" them is a bit of a color change and some slight effects? ffs

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

Man, I have no memories of playing NWN, even though I played until the expansions. WTF?

How happy is the blameless vestal's lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot.
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!
Each pray'r accepted, and each wish resign'd;
Labour and rest, that equal periods keep;
"Obedient slumbers that can wake and weep;"
Desires compos'd, affections ever ev'n,
Tears that delight, and sighs that waft to Heav'n.
Grace shines around her with serenest beams,
And whisp'ring angels prompt her golden dreams.
For her th' unfading rose of Eden blooms,
And wings of seraphs shed divine perfumes,
For her the Spouse prepares the bridal ring,
For her white virgins hymeneals sing,
To sounds of heav'nly harps she dies away,
And melts in visions of eternal day.
- Alexander Pope

 

[v1rus]

They aint gonna restore any cut content, are they?

 

[Cael]

Full List of Changes:

NWN didn't crash in all the years I played it. Crashing was never an issue, so that "change" is pretty much bullcrap or they caused it with their inept bumbling in the first place.

Therefore, the only real changes there for the single player is basically some tinkering with the colours that makes the game lose some of its spookiness.

For the multiplayer, you basically have a DRM check with the CD key thing.

For modders, they changed one variable (number of scripts) and added an unspecified number of "new" scripting commands.

Anyone paying for this has to be out of their minds. I'll stick with my Platinum.

 

[Kyl Von Kull]

No one’s mentioned the biggest improvement in all the enhanced editions. Unlike the originals, they’re consistently playable in Windows 10.

Making these titles run on modern machines is a time consuming pain in the ass, at best! For the technologically inept and people who are paranoid about downloading stuff from random websites, it can be damn near impossible.

Very relevant example: I recently spent maybe an hour trying to make NWN start on my 64 bit Windows 10 machine, at which point I quit and played something else.

I’m sure it’s easier if you have the patience/knowhow to set up a virtual machine running XP, but the enhanced editions are so people can pay extra for the convenience of having the game run with the click of a button.

Everything else, every minor improvement to the graphics or the UI, every bug fix, every piece of new or restored content, that’s all just gravy. Enhanced edition really just means Windows 10 and mobile compatible edition.