CrumpetsForBreakfast

Considering the reception of NWN EE by the community (which is larger and more active than NWN2), I think if the hardcore NWN2 fans aren't willing to pay $50 for a minor touch up then I'm not sure developers could justify the investment of making an enhanced edition for NWN2. It's probably more likely to get some semi-official bugfixes or a proper Kotor II remaster.

The multiplayer does still work but you either need to direct connect or connect from your server history tab. You can also use the Skywing client extender which is recommended to reduce walk animation stuttering, the extension uses a new master server list. Beamdog also uses a new master server list for NWN EE which seems like it was made with the technology for the replacement list. In essence it functions equivalent to the list already available but is a separate list, some servers even broadcasted to both lists simultaneously. The conclusion is that technically NWN2 already has a restored multiplayer but it's one that you can't pay extra money to use, but you can donate to the maintenance if you really want to pay someone. The other argument is that a re-release would breath new life into the game by drawing new and old interest to it. This is somewhat true but it looks like for persistent worlds more people still play the old NWN rather than the enhanced one. There are various reasons for that but eventually servers will most likely all switch over, yet the total extra players seems to be somewhere around only 10% to 30% more than before the remaster got released. Most of the NWN EE players were already playing the old one but now they're divided into two halves. I think that's the best estimation for how much an NWN2 re-release will actually improve the multiplayer community. My final conclusion is that a remake or re-release would be good for the NWN2 community and there are definitely some bugs and performance issues to fix but it shouldn't be a factor stopping you from enjoying the game or modding a server for it right now.

NWN2 was an Obsidian game and it is not likely that Beamdog will ever do anything with it or be able to justify the investment. Their people worked on the original and are intimately familiar with the technology but did not work on the sequel and are unfamiliar with it. If there's an NWN3 it might be done by many companies including Beamdog but if there is an NWN2 remaster it is most likely to be done by Obsidian.

I agree an RPG should give more options for what kind of character you play, at least giving options to play something that relates to yourself. Unless the whole point of the setting is to play a robot or mystical monster creature. It would be a lot more progressive and respectful than having yet another poorly written token gay or trans character in an rpg whose entire identity is "hi I'm gay btw" which is generally insulting to LGBTQA anyway. Playing non heteronormative binary characters happens in table top games so it's nothing new, it would just mean a computer game is finally catching up.

Where does only single player game come back from exactly? If you google you can find there was multiplayer in infinity games and also neverwinter game series where it was a primary part of the experience. A lot of multiplayer only games today have very simplified and streamlined designs that can be understood and tweaked in spreadsheets. They also rely on various addictive techniques such as what some call "loot chests" which are essentially virtual slot machines. Those are problems that need not apply to a role play game. I also don't think taking out multiplayer changes a game's direction in the way that going from 3d to 2d does. Many people appreciate multiplayer but might still buy the game regardless. I suppose you could cut many non essential features if the question is only if it's necessary to get buyers, most features aren't necessary for buyers either. In general a role playing game is always multiplayer except you can substitute primitive and scripted AI for the dungeon master. Your companions are controlled by the player, but I imagine some people would much prefer being able to go on an adventure with their friends or SO.

What will the current Wizards/Hasbro owner do with this Icewind Dale license - draw the comics? Why not sell the rights to Obsidian to make a new Icewind Dale 3, but the past games remain in their Wizards/Hasbro property and GOG will also sell old games. Is it possible to do so? Who else can develop a Icewind Dale 3, except Obsidian devgroup with a technically ready SDK for developing. The current moment is most suitable to sell this title to Obsidian, right? I'm more than sure that the current Wizards/Hasbro owners have become such by chance because of many coincidences. They need this license as the fifth wheel of a cart, no? No it is not possible to sell it because it is part of the Forgotten Realms property they own. They still sell products with that name in their table top RPG called D&D. They also do sell comics and many novels by RA Salvatore that involve Icewind Dale. It's such a key property to them and the video games came much later, they're very minor in comparison. Like I've said it's all about legal business stuff, they might get the license but I think it will be very different now since the setting and rules have changed.

you have identified a fundamental difference 'tween fighting games and crpgs. the effectiveness o' a crpg character is based on the character's stats and numbers and math as 'posed to the player's skill at hitting the correct button combination at the correct time. is precise 'cause the player's manual dexterity is not what determines the efficacy o' the crpg character which is making awareness o' the numbers important. similar, am imagining how agiel would react if the numbers were removed from his military simulation games. don't need specific ranges for fighter avionics when can simple use a range o' yucky to exceptional. flight ceiling and air speeds being discussed numerical no doubt confuses agiel and others who play such games. would be better to remove the numbers in military sims and strategy games and replace with more psychological satisfying adjectives, no? the most obvious and clear manner to express the capabilities o' military hardware is via numbers, particular in a computer game. in crpgs wherein the player's character efficacy is largely defined by computer math (whether you see the numbers or not) it is difficult to imagine an approach using adjectives which would make the game mechanics more clear than numbers. HA! Good Fun! It is the same for a fighting game, there is no amount of player reaction that saves you from making a bad move and not knowing the numbers either from feel or from examining the numbers. If you take arbitrary numbers that must be lower than 0 to prevent failure and one player has +10 and the other has -7 then obviously they will fail. This is the same as armor class vs attack bonus, or spell dc vs saving throw. A player that understands the values and picks the options (character selection in fighting game or feat selection in rpg) with better bonuses has the advantage. Manual dexterity is similar to reaction speed in an online rpg like NWN or an MMO. Players that think quickly and react quickly do have an advantage but a 25 + d20 saving throw vs fire and 15 fire damage reduction avoids a DC 25 fireball because the rpg player knows the numbers just as a fighter player knows their numbers. Obfuscating numbers with adjectives or visual representations doesn't make things easier to understand in any numerical simulation I know of. If you play a platformer and you know a jump never goes above so many pixels and an obstacle is 1 pixel higher than that range you know you can ignore it without slowing down. Difficulty is gained from hiding the numbers and forcing players to learn from experience, because they don't yet understand the parameters, not the other way round.

I've seen that too, he has quite a few interesting takes on things like padded armor being very good.

She seemed the most potentially interesting so far but I wouldn't invest too many expectations in a sequel to a product that isn't even finished yet.

It's funny people are arguing about numbers now. If you look at an alternative example in say fighting games, there are no numbers, there are only buttons and moves with various combination. They don't show numbers and instead use visual information like life bar and character animation. The games are still broken down into numbers by the players that reverse engineer it and call it frame data and reverse engineer how much life each character has. The exact same argument of learning curve is given for fighting games, which hide their complexity, because players have to understand the hidden numbers to do well. People say they're too difficult to get into, learning curve is much too steep, and too esoteric to do well. If your simulation is based on numeric values then it's probably easier for players overall to make the important stuff explicit.

Yes what it means is they can't use Icewind Dale or anything about it because they don't own it. You might be surprised but ownership of intellectual property can be quite complicated and make things impossible. For example in the movie industry three or more businesses can own the rights to some part of a movie which means they all need to agree to the terms to have a sequel made. So fans and original cast might really want that movie but the companies can't come to an agreement that makes it feasible. Apparently if you've read some Obsidian interviews before they have worked on quite a lot of projects that got cancelled because companies that owned the rights to the property pulled the plug. If you look at the release of regular D&D licensed games, with the exception of mobile games and rereleases of old games, their last game was Sword Coast Legends and before that it was Daggerdale in 2011. Both did very poorly. So the trend would suggest Wizards/Hasbro probably doesn't want to focus on that right now. It's much easier for them to let GOG parcel their old games with an emulator and make a page for that than to fund full production costs of a modern game from scratch.

I personally find visual customization of a character the most interesting and expressive part of creation. I think 3.5 D&D and Pathfinder have some mechanics that are interesting, like flaws and traits and alternative class/race features, which are excessive if you're not familiar with the basic rules. If you have played it for some years with friends then maybe next time you want a ranger that isn't exactly like every other ranger you've seen. More customization is just inherently more complex tho. I did try out Arcanum recently and I did not find it too complicated but I was more perturbed about the sexist limitations in character creation, and subsequent sexist and sleazy limited quest options. I was an elf with the sickly childhood background and I bought a gun and a purple dress at the start and misfired everywhere while my henchmen all wore tuxedos and hit things with their fists.

Using the 3.5 rules is free for everyone under the OGL license. A lot of groups have started their own publishing companies and their own products with this license, but you have to follow all the requirements in it. That is what Pathfinder is, but if you look at Pathfinder you will understand some iconic monsters are absent, so is the setting and some of the cosmology. Those are official Wizards/Hasbro identities not covered by the OGL. So you can use 3.5 rules, but you can't associate it with D&D, can't be Forgotten Realms, and you can't call it Icewind Dale. Since Icewind Dale is actually a place in the Forgotten Realms, it's under the product identity license. The same thing is probably why Numenera was called Torment: Numenera instead of Planescape: Torment 2 or Planescape: Numenera, because they can't get a license for the Planescape setting. Plus it's much easier negotiating with Monte than with a room of 20 Hasbro lawyers. So as Fardragon says, their solution is called Pillars of Eternity.

The point is that as far as Icewind Dale is concerned Obsidian doesn't get to make any of those decisions. Wizards of the coast makes those decisions, it should seem beneficial to Hasbro. Currently all the material in both rules and setting is outdated. It is not a question of the newer being better, it is a question of what they're selling now isn't that old stuff. The only way I can see the old stuff getting new life today is because it's incredibly low investment with some returns. People still criticize Beamdog but all things considering I think they're doing pretty good with what they have.

It isn't a case of role based characters "initially seeming" more constricted than class based characters. It is simply a fact by virtue of a roles tightly defining what a character can and cannot do whereas a class is just a package of stuff you start with. The inception of role cased systems for the MMO genre brought about the so called Holy Trinity which is a rock-paper-scissors style concept that ensures a tank needs a dps and healer to succeed, a healer needs a tank and dps, and a dps needs a tank and healer. From a historical view the MMO industry has been stuck in this design pattern ever since with very few variations. On the other hand D&D and other games have had things like multiclassing since decades long gone. There is very little restriction in a table top role playing game, a character with fighter class can be a sniper, can be a socialite, or like Indiana Jones, or the modern concept of a "tank" character. Class systems just give you a base package and you fill in the details as much as you like, AD&D did this with proficiencies and non combat profiencies among other rules like class kits and feature buy systems. D&D 3.5 did this with an extensive skill list and near limitless feat list, flaws, traits, alternate class features, and beyond limitless multiclassing options. The only limitation in computer games is due to the limit of options developers make available, and I don't see how an alternative system increases developer productivity and reduces costs. They also had story heavy progression rules like in 2nd edition AD&D when a druid would stop leveling until they could succeed or defeat various ranked druids, eventually they could rise to be the boss druid or they could step down from power and become the hierophant druid. In D&D 3.5 the designers also specifically added tests and organizations which would guard access to certain prestige classes but also feats. So those features have always existed but if people didn't use them that's kind of their own fault. It's not like you can say it's never been done professionally before. There's a wealth of material out there now, all easily accessible, so anyone interested in design can easily find out what designers came up with before.

It wont be the same anymore if you do the "official" route. The rules don't exist anymore and the old setting doesn't exist anymore, both have been dramatically altered, it's centuries in the future after two or three armageddons. It might as well be an entirely new game as PoE.

Maybe it's not your fault then for the bad localization of the marketing and packaging but today you can look it up and find out the truth. They kind of spell out their mission statement and you're right it's not all there is to it, it's only 90% of what NWN was. Obviously they didn't spend over 4 years just developing the OC, that would have been weird. Even as an action RPG it would have not been nearly as popular as it was and they would not have called it a revolution.

PoE3: TWTW That's where I would place my bet.

It was marketed as a set of tools including the editor, it was developed as a set of tools including the editor, it was sold as a set of tools including the editor, and it was widely used as a set of tools including the editor. It wasn't a incidental addition that happened to get popular, it was the whole purpose of the product. Even wikipedia knows this, even the game box explains this to buyers, I don't know how you buy it and never know what the game is really about. It is in the same class as Unlimited Adventures and Sword Coast Legends more recently, it is not in the same class as Planescape: Torment. You see, different types of products entirely. If you don't believe that then I don't know what to tell you to be honest.

The point of size isn't that you don't have enough disk space it's about connections. Tho you can definitely make the argument that it's a very wasteful use of disk space because interiors also need to be baked now and tiles didn't with NWN so it doesn't have the same bang for your bucks. More than anything it hampers multiplayer and persistent worlds, putting limits on things. You can make amazing looking tiles today for a game I'm sure and they should be able to stream fast without anything needed to be downloaded when you add in a new area. The data for all tiles is stored on the client, the server just needs to tell you the arrangement and settings of the tiles, that's like a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the data an NWN2 area needs. So it's possible for players to host games on a domestic connection and it's possible with NWNX to add new areas without resetting the server and forcing a new player download. So servers can in theory offer customized player housing and also procedurally generate dungeons. Those are some of the reasons tiles are very very very powerful. Even if NWN2 servers could stream areas like NWN does without baking you can't just add a single area for 50 mb, stream it to 70 or 150+ players and expect it's not going to cause issues. Using tiles like NWN did was a genius move that guaranteed that it is still somewhat popular today. As far as I could tell the Neverwinter MMO and Sword Coast Legends were really unpopular with both NWN and NWN2 communities so I wouldn't look to either of those for inspiration if you want NWN3.

Did a sanity check of some folders for NWN2 servers and it's about 1-2 gb player download for 200-300 areas. Compared to nothing extra downloaded for NWN persistent worlds with 1000+ areas. NWNX allows NWN servers to dynamically add new areas, which you can't do with NWN2 obviously with the walkmesh. With NWN you can teleport between servers with minimal issue. For NWN2 you need the walkmesh for each server downloaded. Each area change in NWN2, is a new walkmesh download. No way you can stream that content like NWN can. So that's pretty significant for people it does concern. Obviously not much if you don't care about it but then you could mod Dragon Age or Skyrim or Fallout

It's fine to like what you like, but it's simply fact that NWN has better customization and in some cases orders of magnitude better. It seems most of the community thinks that so that's why they're still using a graphically inferior game that was built for Windows 98. The argument against heightmaps isn't even an edge case. Everyone knows they cost more which becomes a limiting factor, what do you get for it? Well, this is what an NWN2 exterior "tile" really is. You can faintly make out the tile borders where I point them out with arrows, a 32*32 exterior makes 16*16 of those red and black bordered squares and those 4 boxes inside are the tiles. The criss-cross green lines display the heightmap so that's 7*7= 49 vertices, compared to the number of vertices per tile in the wealth of NWN tiles made. So that's a really small amount but the area size in mb becomes huge, as in Donald Trump voice it's HUGE it's gonna be HUGE So you pay more for customizing that tile but being limited by baking, texture count, stretching, resource size, and so on. If you like it that's fine but it's fair to say it's not really more expressive than a large set of 3D modeled tiles. Lack of exterior tiles is probably one of the most frequent complaints I've heard from players that didn't switch over. So if someone ever does an NWN3 even if it's just a fan project or spiritual successor, please don't use heightmaps instead of tiles.

rjshae I've used both systems for clothing extensively and I know that NWN2 just isn't as good. Like it's not even close, most that play both games understand this. Those parts in NWN2 are meaningless because they don't change the model they float above it like a vfx so it doesn't replace anything, nobody makes mods for those parts. You just can't compare it to the infinite options you get with NWN. On an interesting aside NWN modders have overcome things like resize things now. Just like they were able to overcome the GUI limits on NWN. Tho NWN2 still has it's limits. If you make an outfit in NWN it's completely custom since each part has hundreds of variations. A conservative estimate of the number of unique variations on outfits in NWN before adding color would be about 200^22 variations but with NWN2 you're always stuck with the outfits the modellers made, always. In NWN I can make an outfit of almost any fictional character that comes to mind and on a server I can sell it for a lot of gold pieces and roleplay an expert seamstress, on NWN2 that's not even remotely possible. Because on some NWN mods you can customize every single detail of every single part, including position, size, orientation, all color channels, and base model. on NWN2 you can scroll through single body meshes, add a tint and stick on an ugly arm guard. They're not even remotely comparable. It's like comparing lego to .... something that's not lego. NWN rolling hills is not an imitation since it actually came first. In NWN2 you can't create arbitrary terrain because each point is connected so it slopes from the adjacent points. This means you're stretching and squashing the texture to which you're limited to using only 6 textures at once? And then you can't make 90 degree inclines, and you can't make cliffs that hang over the lower area. So it's a misconception that you can make any terrain, tiles are simply far superior for that. Then there's other limitations like grass in NWN2 exploding the size of areas, walkmesh limitations I've been over, and of course shadows where even today the conventional wisdom is to limit shadows and lighting in NWN2 because it's a resource killer. So everything you win by using NWN2 you pay back another way. You can look at the community statistics too. nwnlist.com NWN: 430 players NWN2: 150 players neverwintervault.org NWN: 293 pages of custom content NWN2: 16 pages of custom content neverwintervault.org custom content forums NWN custom content: 4569 posts NWN player's corner: 1427 posts NWN2 custom content: 1465 posts NWN2 player's corner: 329 posts Community packs NWN: CEP, CEP2, CEP 3, Project Q NWN2: ..........? Now if someone can't accept this reality then they're not going to learn the game design lessons they could learn by comparing the two and understanding what happened and why. It's not that NWN simply has more mods it's that NWN2 has severe limitations on modding compared to NWN. It's also not because NWN2 is more powerful, like in NWN you can also use tools to override the properties of tiles including height and variation to craft interiors never possible in NWN2. I don't "hate" either game but after some time I did wonder why the old NWN is still more popular, I talked to people, I read up on things, I tried mods and I learned why. I wish NWN2 attracted more players and more modders, but it didn't, I wish most people from NWN converted over to NWN2, but they didn't. It's a good exercise to try to understand why.

The point of why it's an indefensible mechanic design is not because it can't be beat but because the solution is narrow yet required. It boils down to "this is how you play the game" which then excludes the bulk of alternative options. It's not about difficulty, it's people learn they need magic to get past it, or dramatically outnumber them, not very inventive just limiting. I believe that if you had a party of xaurip skirmishers that could level up like characters you could beat the game blindfolded. Actually it begs the question of why wouldn't xaurips just train more skirmishers and then conquer the whole world. That's just how silly the mechanic is and why it isn't defensible. There are a million better mechanic designs than a disabling effect on hit.

rsjae it's great that you and a small few of the dedicated people with copies of the now completely unavailable tools are still plodding along making new content. On the other hand you had all sorts of oozes and worms like a decade ago for NWN. It's 10 years too late for NWN2 modding to start playing catch up. You should also not brush off the things I've mentioned to you. Your armor in NWN2 is definitely not as customizable. What you're referring to is "armor parts" which float over the armor mesh rather than customizing the armor mesh itself. It is not possible for example to have a pale master with a bone arm like it is in NWN by default on any armor you're wearing. If you wanted that the same for NWN2 you have to make a separate mesh of the entire armor just for a bone arm variant for every single armor mesh. That's not friendly to modding! I think you also misunderstand the tint issue. NWN2 has 3 tint channels. Here's a list of the channels NWN has that you can change and override: Skin, Hair, Cloth 1, Cloth 2, Leather 1, Leather 2, Metal 1, Metal 2, Tattoo 1,Tattoo 2 NWN body sections include: Head, Neck, Shoulder 1, Shoulder 2, Bicep 1, Bicep 2, Forearm 1, Forearm 2, Hand 1, Hand 2, Torso, Pelvis, Thigh 1, Thigh 2, Shin 1, Shin 2, Foot 1, Foot 2, Belt, Cloak, Robe Just from that anyone understands that NWN has more options for character customization, an endless amount of permutations as each part has hundreds of variations. If you wanted that in NWN2 you have to rebuild the body system from scratch and use the floaty "armor parts" or vfx mesh to make a whole new body and then do that for every race, that would be a modding headache. So NWN2 outfits are always whole body presets and never really unique. Moving on the only reason someone thinks flying and mounts aren't important is because they're not really part of the game that was released. NWN introduced it and it's an option so not a fringe thing. For NWN2 it was promised along with things like swimming and climbing but it was never delivered, so that's a big minus nobody solved in 10 years. NWN2 interior creation is not as easy as NWN since it's not automatic, you have to paste each individual tile and individually go thru each of the variations where this happens automatically in NWN. The idea that NWN areas aren't as good is silly, especially if you've seen mods, they're very advanced and can do rolling hills and all sorts of inclines that aren't possible in NWN2. An NWN pw has maybe over 1000 exterior areas, an NWN2 pw has maybe 50? Huge drawback. Heightmaps weren't good for modding and PW support, the areas look like they're all made out of wax and the models don't always interact with them naturally with jittery animation occurring frequently. If you had to use one of the two games as a blueprint for spiritual successor "NWN3" styled game you should definitely use the first game and bring that technology into the new graphical age. There are reasons that even today user activity for NWN is still three to five times as big as it is for NWN2, reasons people did not switch over, reasons fewer mod for NWN2. People still care less about the angular models and graphical limitation for NWN than they do about the technical limitations of NWN2. It should be a lesson people should learn from if they're interested in this kind of modding game. Not something that should be brushed off or minimized, because then you don't learn anything and you make the same mistakes.