NWN Neverwinter Nights (NWN & NWN2) Modules Thread

[Gargaune]

I wish Beamdoggie added more models with a higher polygon count since some of the stock characters still look like blockheads with hip/spine problems.

They did, you can find the NWN EE HD Art Pack here. But it's not to everyone's taste, it has some issues and, personally, I prefer to stick with the old blockheads.

 

[Jack Of Owls]

They did, you can find the NWN EE HD Art Pack here. But it's not to everyone's taste, it has some issues and, personally, I prefer to stick with the old blockheads.

I'd give you an Informative button, but, alas, since the new forum "upgrade" I have only 1 button now.

 

[Gargaune]

Don't worry, they're all still there, the Brofist on the right opens a pop-up panel with all the buttons.

 

[Jack Of Owls]

Don't worry, they're all still there, the Brofist on the right opens a pop-up panel with all the buttons.

Oh, I feel so silly. I'm thankful I only bitched about it 3 times before I caught it thanks to your help. Otherwise I would probably have gone on & on & on.

 

[Poseidon00]

New Beamdog models work just fine with animation changing mods and it all looks...good. I actually enjoy watching my character now. If the monster models could be updated (they won't) it really would look like a brand new game.

Question though. Are Beamdogs half orcs broken and glitchy or are they just not a good fit with my current mod loadout?

 

[luj1]

Does anyone have a good Cleric/Rogue build?

basically take Trickery and Travel domains

u get haste and improved invisibility which are incredibly powerful

go dex based if high magic setting, go str based if low magic

start with rogue at lvl 1 for extra skill points

race prolly human for no exp penalty, extra feat will mean a lot

attribute distribution will be tricky, u'll be spread thin with this kind of build

thats all i can think of for now

 

[luj1]

Having amazing time with The Easting Reach(persistent world mod).

what do you mean PW mod?

are you playing on a PW or offline copy of server?

 

[Jack Of Owls]

New Beamdog models work just fine with animation changing mods and it all looks...good. I actually enjoy watching my character now. If the monster models could be updated (they won't) it really would look like a brand new game.

Question though. Are Beamdogs half orcs broken and glitchy or are they just not a good fit with my current mod loadout?

There's that Q-Project add-on/mod thingie, I think, that gives the base game/expansions higher resolutions and better monster modeles. I used it with SoU and HotU in my last playthrough 3 or 4 years ago and I must admit, it made the game look really nice. But if you play modules with it- well, you'll be in God's hands since some of the monster models are bigger than their originals and can no longer fit through doors. Even the author of the Swordflight series doesn't recommend it. I personally encountered a bug with the Q-Project where dead beholders still had their alive animation after being killed. I notified the author about it and he was very receptive to the idea of fixing it soon, despite being a cranky french guy that scolded me, implying, "Okay, I'll fix it but NOT UNTIL AFTER THE WEEKEND because I'm in a mood right now, damnit!"

 

[Robber Baron]

what do you mean PW mod?

are you playing on a PW or offline copy of server?

A persistent online world yes

 

[luj1]

what do you mean PW mod?

are you playing on a PW or offline copy of server?

A persistent online world yes

how many active people?

i played on a bunch of great PWs over the years, dont know how many of them still exist

 

[Robber Baron]

how many active people?

i played on a bunch of great PWs over the years, dont know how many of them still exist

Very little, like 5-8 daily and ~20 on weekends, you'll also need to keep in mind what type of crowd plays low populated RP servers

 

[EtcEtcEtc]

I'm about to delve into modules after finishing Underdark - there's a bunch of lists & hall of fame stuff showing what's worth playing, but it all appears to run up around 2014-2015.

Is there anything top tier that came out in that time frame? Any recent modules that rank up their in your opinion

 

[Gargaune]

I'm about to delve into modules after finishing Underdark - there's a bunch of lists & hall of fame stuff showing what's worth playing, but it all appears to run up around 2014-2015.

Is there anything top tier that came out in that time frame? Any recent modules that rank up their in your opinion

The Vault is in a nearly archive state by now. Rogueknight's Swordflight is your definitive NWN dungeon crawler with ~90 hours of content across the four chapters released thus far, one or two more to go. You can get Darkness over Daggerford as a free, cancelled PM off the Vault, or you can buy its polished NWN EE re-release as DLC, Ossian deserve the business if you're up for it. You've also got Scull's free modules Siege of Shadowdale and Crimson Tides of Tethyr leading up to the 2019 NWN EE-exclusive Tyrants of the Moonsea DLC, well worth your time. That's off the top of my head.

 

[Poseidon00]

I'm about to delve into modules after finishing Underdark - there's a bunch of lists & hall of fame stuff showing what's worth playing, but it all appears to run up around 2014-2015.

Is there anything top tier that came out in that time frame? Any recent modules that rank up their in your opinion

I have played some good recent stuff (made in the 2020s) but for the life of me I can't remember which one it is because I have lots of modules and it doesn't say their creation date.

Some big stuff is coming down the pipe but it's taken a long time. For example, the Dark Sun overhaul looks fucking incredible for this engine and finally has working tilesets, but that took like 2 years lol. We have to tweak some stuff for the newer character models as well but not as much as one might think.

The unofficial sequel to the OC is what i'm currently holding out for

 

[Shuruga]

Hello all, long time lurker here. About a year ago I made a NWN:EE module (short, linear, story-based, and for martial classes) that I've been meaning to plug for this community. It is called The Ruin of Tyrbas. Here are links for the NWN Vault and for Steam Workshop.

More details are provided in the descriptions on those pages. I hope you enjoy it!

 

[luj1]

Have Diamond already and not a fan of EE but

NwN EE is like 3 dollars on steam right now, around 90% discount

so I bought it cause i wanna try that Dark Sun server which requires it, the assets are insanely good and fit with Nwn which surprised me

Lacrymas Volourn Lilura

 

[Lacrymas]

I've played on only 1 NWN server and it was ...not good. Everyone was a special snowflake character as you would expect. It wasn't Dark Sun, though.

 

[Popiel]

The Vault is in a nearly archive state by now.

I thought about that the other day. NWN:EE did at least one thing good, that is it expanded modding possibilities exponentially - yet there seems to be no rush to use these new options to make new modules. I'm not counting PWs, I have little to none knowledge about them, all I know is that they at least seem to be getting along nicely. What about SP modules though? rogueknight333 's Swordflight is the only huge, ambitious project of this kind still in development, and even it is a holdover from a previous era.

 

[luj1]

I've played on only 1 NWN server and it was ...not good. Everyone was a special snowflake character as you would expect. It wasn't Dark Sun, though.

there was a bunch of excellent ones over the years

there is still several active ones with dozens of people which is pretty good

 

[Nerevar]

Hello all, long time lurker here. About a year ago I made a NWN:EE module (short, linear, story-based, and for martial classes) that I've been meaning to plug for this community. It is called The Ruin of Tyrbas. Here are links for the NWN Vault and for Steam Workshop.

More details are provided in the descriptions on those pages. I hope you enjoy it!

Yeah wasn't too bad I beat it with a cleric. Very short though.

Character after beating module.

 

[Ninjerk]

I've played on only 1 NWN server and it was ...not good. Everyone was a special snowflake character as you would expect. It wasn't Dark Sun, though.

I played NWN online once and some high level penguin paladin (yes) was killing everything in seconds.

 

[Gargaune]

NwN EE is like 3 dollars on steam right now, around 90% discount

I'm partial to GOG myself, but I gotta say this Steam sale is jaw-dropping. You can buy the entire NWN EE panoply for under €6 with all the PMs, including DoD EE and TotM. Hilariously, the "Neverwinter Nights: Complete Adventures" pack is only 85% off at €6.26, but the "Neverwinter Nights: Adventures & Soundtracks" is 90% off, taking it down to €5.74. That's a lot of NWN for the price of a Happy Meal...

I thought about that the other day. NWN:EE did at least one thing good, that is it expanded modding possibilities exponentially - yet there seems to be no rush to use these new options to make new modules. I'm not counting PWs, I have little to none knowledge about them, all I know is that they at least seem to be getting along nicely. What about SP modules though? @rogueknight333 's Swordflight is the only huge, ambitious project of this kind still in development, and even it is a holdover from a previous era.

I think it's because Beamdog went the wrong way about re-releasing NWN, they came out too early and frontloaded the builder features instead of player-oriented value. Some of the new toolset functionality is fantastic, but modders need a sizeable active player community before they do their thing, otherwise it's a hard sell to put in so much time in at the prospect of a couple of hundred players. Whereas NWN EE didn't offer much novelty to legacy players at launch, divided opinions hampered adoption, and without old fans generating buzz, I'd imagine new customers weren't pounding on the doors and you didn't get those rekindled feeding grounds to pull new modders in.

Beamdog really should've come out with the new renderer, the HD Art Pack and the integrated Content Browser day-one, with TotM following by Christmas 2018. Instead, there were a lot of great builder improvements even early on, but new player bait trickled in slowly and TotM, the first and only official EE exclusive to date, came in a whooping seventeen months after release. They never got that big splash so now it's still mostly the old guard soldiering on, and it's a shame 'cause NWN's Aurora was very much ahead of its time and I believe the right marketing push could've made it an enduring, moderate success even today.


Anyway, that reminds me of something I've been meaning to ask - rogueknight333, would you be willing to share download figures for the different Swordflight chapters? Would be curious to see how they track across the years.


P.S. Popiel, forgot to mention for large scale projects, aside from Swordflight, you've now got Scull working on The Blades of Netheril too.

 

[rogueknight333]

Beamdog really should've come out with the new renderer, the HD Art Pack and the integrated Content Browser day-one, with TotM following by Christmas 2018...

If they really wanted to get a lot of interest from players rather than just builders they probably should have come out with a new premium module or two on day one, with announced plans for more such to come soon. To have it available so soon they would have had to actually make the module using the pre-EE toolset, but since EE is supposed to be backwards compatible, that would hardly have been an insuperable obstacle.

Anyway, that reminds me of something I've been meaning to ask - rogueknight333, would you be willing to share download figures for the different Swordflight chapters? Would be curious to see how they track across the years.

If you mean the current download counts, you can look those up on the Vault right now, though you have to check the downloads of the haks rather than the module itself, since that resets every time I upload a revised version (except for Ch.1, which has no hak but has not been revised since being uploaded to the new vault) . Haks would reset too, but I have not yet had reason to alter them after the initial release. Also, the counter for the Ch. 2 hak bugged out somehow and is stuck at 4507 despite having been downloaded many times since reaching that. I think the actual download count for Ch. 2 is c. 10000 now. Also if IIRC Ch. 1 had about 3500 downloads on the old vault in addition to the c. 16000 it has on the new vault. Ch. 2 had something in the vicinity of 2000 downloads on the old vault (again, IIRC). The old vault went down before Chs. 3 & 4 were released. Also note I have no way of knowing how many of these are unique downloads by new players and how many are die hard fans re-downloading the series to put on a new computer, or something of that nature.

If you mean how much it has been downloaded at various times over the years, I am not sure how well I would remember that myself. The initial reception of Ch. 1 on the old vault was not very favorable so it soon sank into obscurity in the months after the initial release. It got a bit of a boost later when the Reviewer's Guild on the old vault gave it a very favorable review, but never really recovered from the initial spate of negative reviews from players.

On the new vault it did better, becoming one of the more frequently downloaded modules there. I suspect this was in large part because by that point I was one of the very few NWN module authors who was still active, giving my stuff a lot more visibility than it could have hoped to obtain with the much stiffer competition on the old vault. It started to do much better when Lilura discovered it and began promoting it on her blog and here on the Codex. I am not sure, but I think at this point it might even be the 2nd most downloaded module series on the new vault, after A Dance with Rogues. However, my download numbers are still pathetic by comparison with the hey day of the old vault, where high quality modules could routinely expect to get tens of thousands of downloads.

 

[Gargaune]

If they really wanted to get a lot of interest from players rather than just builders they probably should have come out with a new premium module or two on day one, with announced plans for more such to come soon. To have it available so soon they would have had to actually make the module using the pre-EE toolset, but since EE is supposed to be backwards compatible, that would hardly have been an insuperable obstacle.

That would've certainly been ideal, but I think Beamdog could've even gotten away without a new module for a couple of months as long as they had the visual updates and content browser in. My rationale is that by that point, plenty of old fans probably hadn't played NWN in a long while and might've been persuaded to pick up the EE and replay the old content with some new eyecandy until new stuff came out.

But that's not how it played out, the EE had very little to offer players over the DE at launch, and while DoD was finally vindicated with a commercial release a couple of months later, everything else devolved into "next Friday" and TotM came out more than a year later.

If you mean the current download counts, you can look those up on the Vault right now, though you have to check the downloads of the haks rather than the module itself, since that resets every time I upload a revised version (except for Ch.1, which has no hak but has not been revised since being uploaded to the new vault) . Haks would reset too, but I have not yet had reason to alter them after the initial release. Also, the counter for the Ch. 2 hak bugged out somehow and is stuck at 4507 despite having been downloaded many times since reaching that. I think the actual download count for Ch. 2 is c. 10000 now. Also if IIRC Ch. 1 had about 3500 downloads on the old vault in addition to the c. 16000 it has on the new vault. Ch. 2 had something in the vicinity of 2000 downloads on the old vault (again, IIRC). The old vault went down before Chs. 3 & 4 were released. Also note I have no way of knowing how many of these are unique downloads by new players and how many are die hard fans re-downloading the series to put on a new computer, or something of that nature.

If you mean how much it has been downloaded at various times over the years, I am not sure how well I would remember that myself. The initial reception of Ch. 1 on the old vault was not very favorable so it soon sank into obscurity in the months after the initial release. It got a bit of a boost later when the Reviewer's Guild on the old vault gave it a very favorable review, but never really recovered from the initial spate of negative reviews from players.

On the new vault it did better, becoming one of the more frequently downloaded modules there. I suspect this was in large part because by that point I was one of the very few NWN module authors who was still active, giving my stuff a lot more visibility than it could have hoped to obtain with the much stiffer competition on the old vault. It started to do much better when Lilura discovered it and began promoting it on her blog and here on the Codex. I am not sure, but I think at this point it might even be the 2nd most downloaded module series on the new vault, after A Dance with Rogues. However, my download numbers are still pathetic by comparison with the hey day of the old vault, where high quality modules could routinely expect to get tens of thousands of downloads.

Thanks for sharing! You know, I've been browsing the Vault occasionally for two decades now, and I've finally learned what the numbers in brackets are for. Could be worse, I could've gone twenty years not knowing you could feed henchmen potions... Oh, right, that also happened.

So you've got roughly:
- Chapter 1 (2008) ~19000 DLs;
- Chapter 2 (2012) ~15000 DLs;
- Chapter 3 (2016) ~7000 DLs;
- Chapter 4 (2018) ~4500 DLs;

Even accounting for repeat downloads, which will be the case over two decades, those are actually pretty good numbers given NWN's age and you've got a continued following, it's gone down but it didn't drop off a cliff between any of the Chapters. I fished the years for the first two out of Lilura's blog and your Ch2. changelog, correct me if I got 'em wrong. If the Vault had analytics, it would've been interesting to see whether there was a spike in any downloads after the EE came out, but I guess we can only speculate more with Chapter 5.

 

[Shuruga]

Hello all, long time lurker here. About a year ago I made a NWN:EE module (short, linear, story-based, and for martial classes) that I've been meaning to plug for this community. It is called The Ruin of Tyrbas. Here are links for the NWN Vault and for Steam Workshop.

More details are provided in the descriptions on those pages. I hope you enjoy it!

Yeah wasn't too bad I beat it with a cleric. Very short though.

Yeah, I taught myself the toolset making that module and thought I'd release it before getting too far into the story I have envisioned to see how it resonated with players. Feedback was largely positive, so I've been plugging away at a longer sequel. It is a fun side project when I can find time!