Ibbz said:
Does it ever occur to you that Bioware only has a limited number of people? The programmars/developers are making an expansion pack with new features etc that will be used in the expansion story line, they're not there to fulfill all the community's wishes{Which would be impossible considering the number of differing requests}.
Are you that clueless or do you get off on pretending to be that way? Just so you know, cluelessness isn't exactly a trait that'll get you any modicum of respect.
First, let's examine Bioware and the so-called 'difficulties' which they seem to encounter during the development phase of any game. I'll bring out the light ammunition first - Cloaks. I'll paraphrase what theyv'e said about cloaks so far: "Oh, they are too hard to implement, as high quality cloth is difficult to program, especially in such a short amount of time - 5 years."
And yet Troika's able to pull out cloaks, robes, and all forms of seamless high quality cloth in ToEE in just under 18 months. Similarly, there are developers made up of extaordinarily few members (comprising of 5 or less) who can produce, or are attempting to produce similar results (in different areas, not cloaks per se), albeit to a lesser degree, such as the folks working on Restricted Area, or to a greater degree, companies like Larian Studios, which do not exactly have a large budget - they're able to produce a graphical masterpiece like the upcoming Riftrunner, with probably 5% of the budget that Bioware consumed for its development of Neverwinter Nights.
Heck, you've got modders and graphics designers who managed to produce the cloaks they desired in NWN in less than a week, which are sadly difficult to implement as Bioware decided it was in the interest of some invisible decision-maker that certain modelling functions, including the implementation of cloaks, would be hardcoded into the system and thus difficult to implement properly. Surely, there are workarounds (which utilize the head mesh to carry the cloaks) but the point is that the modders shouldn't have to build workarounds for Bioware's own lack of support.
The live team handles most of the community requests and have made alot of improvements - Eg: Plot wizard, new monsters etc I believe their currently working on database feature for Persistent worlds. People also seem to forget that they're doing it for free with Bioware not actually making any money from it.
Most of which are unreleased and can't be used. Oh, and nobody cares about new monsters - people want dialogue editing options. Doing it for free? Hardly - when you pay the 70 dollar pricetag on NWN and the 50 dollar price tag on SOU, you expect that kind of continued support. It's promised on the box, and hence is part of the service. It is exactly the same with Blizzard's Battle.net service. Suppose they discontinued it, you could sue them and actually win.
Also I dont see whats so hard about the scripting language, most people wanting to build modules have picked it up within 3 days. Those with the expectation that they can just tell the computer to "Make a module with an epic storyline, new monsters with the BEST NPC's evar!" and expect it to just appear are deluding themselves. If you want to do fancy things, then you have to know how to script, simple as that. Wizards will never achieve all that you want. I'd suggest people who want something that easy go back to Click n Play.
DMs shouldn't be expected to learn C in order to port their campaign into the PC on a game which promised to be the most user friendly game, ever. While it is certainly true that most people would in fact benefit from learning a new scripting language it doesn't change the fact, or shift away the responsibility from Bioware to produce a cleaner UI for modding.
