CrumpetsForBreakfast

To say the highest difficulty setting shouldn't be considered isn't right. Paths of the damned just emphasizes how poorly designed the mechanic is at the core. So paralysis is up to about 4 second duration or more? and they attack every second or two? Your chance to avoid the effect declines on a curve even if you have high defenses. They can put a character into permanent paralysis with very little chance to save. So the only reliable way is to get the monster first or get immunity. You just can't really defend it. This is the kind of design that amateurs come up with, that amateurs have come up with in their own mods of games. There's nothing special about it, you create an arbitrary false sense of difficulty, so you don't spend as much time actually developing mechanics further and unique attacks for monsters. Now if a player could start with that ability on every attack ...... mmmmm.

It sounds like an MMO system or heavily based on the MMO design formula used today. Roles are more limited than classes, because roles didn't exist in 3rd and previous editions of D&D a fighter could focus or not focus on various things. The area problem is just because of repeating content and addictive cycles which MMOs use.

Disabling effect on hit for every hit always is just bad design and there's not much sense in justifying it. If it happened in any other game or in dungeons and dragons people would say it's bad design too. Instead people say that dungeons and dragons is bad because it had limited use 'save or die' effects but things like Pillars is okay because it's on every hit every second even with low level critters. That's why the way to play is with wizards, rogues, and/or stacks of scrolls. Josh has spoken out about lopsided fairness like that in games such as dungeons and dragons before so it would be odd if it doesn't get reworked. $0.02

I think they were always open and honest about it. Using Unity means that modding with exterior data loaded by an engine is either not possible or extremely difficult. It's something to do with how Unity bundles or internalizes assets, I'm not sure on the details but I've heard it before for other things too. Good toolsets would probably have to be in house projects so probably using their own engine instead. Also the levels are all pre made from 3D renders I think so probably the best they could do is allow people to import their own background image. I don't think a toolset for Pillars was ever in the cards to be honest. It's still a good game but not that kind of game.

rjshae it's not a fallacy but it's very nuanced, NWN2 has newer graphics but that's where it stops and everything else is worse for modding. If you think you can make a way to port all of the customization options in NWN over to NWN2 then go ahead you will be a hero for solving such a big issue. Characters in NWN2 have much fewer color channels and every outfit in NWN2 is what is called a robe in NWN which eliminates customization for each body part. NWN also had much more character animation mods because of how simple it was, different combat and walking styles too. The animation mod pack that NWN2 has are creepy and uncanny valley "intimate poses" by someone that obviously never had any experience or artistic feeling for it, so obviously something went wrong. If it was so easy why did nobody do better? NWN also has mounts, mounted combat & ride skill, including horse mounts, spider mounts, monster mounts, dinosaur mounts, drawn carriage mounts. NWN2 only had horse mounts but they were never properly finished or animated properly. NWN2 never got more new wing or tail types while NWN mods added infinite amount of tails, infinite amount of wing variations. That also includes mods for flying animations in NWN which don't exist in NWN2. Also the tools you need for NWN2 animations are proprietary and costed thousands of dollars and aren't remotely available anymore but the tools that work with NWN are still functional and free. NWN2 has things like bumpmaps and tintmaps but ultimately fewer options and harder to mod, so it's just more complicated. As for building areas in NWN you could build an area in less than 10 minutes, the variations around each tile were automatically generated unlike NWN2 but you could use tools to change that if you like. NWN2 has graphical superiority over NWN on account of the first game being made in the late 90s before modern graphics hardware existed. Other than that NWN is a modding paradise but NWN2 is extremely restrictive in comparison. Many NWN modders tried NWN2 and then went back when they found out the restrictions. It's like the NWN2 modding community is still playing catchup with NWN's first or second year so it can't be that great.

I like moon godlike too. I'm not too worried about helmet slots for bonuses but visually it limits options so much. Like if it rains you will always get wet and you can't wear anything on your head even if it's just for visual purposes. Combined with only having three head variations and no separate hair variation means all godlikes look the same. I just wish there were more options to differentiate godlike characters visually.

If you don't have complete adventure creation, multiplayer, DM/GM client, server, scripting language, and suite of tools to easily replicate table top games graphically in 3D then it's not an NWN game or an NWN spiritual successor. If you don't want any of that stuff or never used it or cared for it then Pillars of Eternity or Tyranny can be your "NWN" sequel because they're good single player stories. If people want Pillars to allow modding that's still not the same as what NWN provided but it might be interesting none the less. Doing multiplayer in Pillars would be interesting too.

People bring up Obsidian making a new NWN successor often but realistically I don't think experience shows that they are a company focused on modding. Bioware and Bethesda games are known to be more modding friendly but Obsidian makes games like Pillars of Eternity with technology that doesn't lend to a lot of modding. A friend of mine told me that NWN was a perfect storm for that kind of game that wont be repeated. I'm inclined to think that might be true especially for a commercial game with a product license. I think it's possible future Obsidian might make something that has modding like Elder Scrolls or Dragon Age but not like NWN. Pathfinder is interesting because it uses the OGL license which is public and free for anyone to use commercially or privately as long as you comply with the terms. Paizo owns the Pathfinder brand, the setting Golarion, and various product identities not released under the OGL. So it would effectively be two licenses, one public from Wizards of the Coast that every derivative work has, and one private from Paizo. Some indie games just use the OGL license by itself so I guess anyone can do it for free as long as they follow the letter of the law. Some things have Wizards of the Coast copyrights like Forgotten Realms, Neverwinter city, Drizzt, Planescape, The Great Wheel cosmology, Mind Flayers, Beholders, some other monsters, the exp amount rewarded per monster. Not even Pathfinder can include those things legally, it has to be an official D&D brand licensed product to use any of that.

The books have sidebars which explain the reasoning behind it. There are optional variations of dice used and they explain what the difference will be. A twenty sided die has 5% for each number and covers 20 points. If you rolled a six sided die then you have 16.6% chance for each number and a +1 modifier from a six sided dice game would be a +3 modifier in comparison for a twenty sided die game. That means a larger die allows more room for character advancement. If you used the 3 six sided dice method you would have numbers between 3 and 18 with a bell curve, so it favors average results. According to the D&D game designers that also means there would be more emphasis on maximizing your points because you can't rely on luck to win as much. They also have a variation which does dice explosions which they suggest for epic games which reduces the chance of always winning and always losing.

NWN was better than NWN2 without a doubt. If someone bought NWN for the story they made a mistake because it was sold as an adventure creation kit. Nobody reviews an instrument like a keyboard for the quality of whatever tune was preloaded onto it. They review it for how good the instrument is and what capabilities it gives musicians. That is the only fair way to compare titles in this franchise. I doubt there are any people that really feel they would love to see Obsidian make a story-only sequel to NWN2 over any other IP they could work on instead. The story in NWN was more like a tutorial for modders because the product being sold was the toolset with the DM client and PW support. NWN was the RPG genre's Minecraft before Minecraft even existed, NWN mods were even used by educators in the classroom. Nothing like that happened with NWN2 because it just wasn't as good as NWN in that regard. Metacritic also lists NWN as 10 points higher than NWN2 and about 20 points higher than NWN2 in user rating. Hint-hint, it's not because of the story or game mechanics. * NWN2 used proprietary middleware no longer even remotely available for things which NWN does with easily available tools and file formats. * All NWN2 areas need to be baked and downloaded on servers which need to be restarted too. For NWN it's never an issue which allows modders now to dynamically create new areas on servers without restarting, that's not ever possible for NWN2 because of walkmeshes. * NWN mods and servers can have thousands of areas that simulate large worlds and big adventures. NWN2 servers usually get 50-100 exterior areas, they're small vignettes which makes NWN2 servers feel like mini-golf instead. * Outfit customization was a feature in NWN with 21 alterable body parts and 6 color channels. NWN2 has about 4 parts with 3 color channels and couldn't be customized in game. Modding later expanded NWN's capabilities to mind boggling degrees that let players create any kind of character, NWN2 character customization was only available with a database modded plugin and still limited. * NWN has thousands of amazing tileset mods that creature natural terrains. NWN2 has heightmaps which end up looking like poorly done tilesets with shear inclines that stretch textures and can't do 90 degree angles. Since content creation was the whole point of the franchise (otherwise Bioware would have done Baldur's Gate 3 instead of NWN) then I think it's very clear that NWN was better because it succeeded better at being a virtual dungeon master's world building toolkit. It's still the best at what it does almost 15 years later.