MLMarkland

The reason to use the NWN2 engine is that the quality alternatives [source, UE, etc.] are either more challenging to work with or not particularly well suited to creating an RPG module on a hobbyist basis or a combination of both factors. I disagree vehemently that the NWN1/Aurora engine is easier to use than the NWN2/Electron engine. There are aspects of NWN2 that are more challenging, such as the creation of terrain. On the other hand, cutscenes and quest scripting are much easier for a beginner using NWN2 given that the conversation editor has built in support for cinematic cutscenes and a large library of global action and check scripts. Over time people will recognize the power and value of NWN2, even if folks were slow to appreciate it for what it is: the finest rpg mod tool ever created.

Thanks for the kind words Mr. Sawyer. This is dead-on accurate. We've had a big team to be sure, but we're also making a rather enormous game module. If someone is content to make shorter things with a little more reasonable amount of CC, the NWN2 engine is hands down the greatest thing ever made for rpg modding. It's just absolutely perfect for making DnD adventures. And, on the far other end of the spectrum, if someone wanted to spend 4 years making a post-apocalyptic turn based total conversion, they could do it with NWN2. The GUI mod-ability and nwscript really make that possible (with possibly some necessary tweaks to dynamic listboxes and the like from OEI and a few compromises on game mechanics by the modders).

We are planning on putting all in-game text into a single tlk for easier translation. Note however, the phrase "easier translation" rather than "easy translation." Even with a single tlk to work with it'll still be a monumental task to translate over a quarter million words of very cant-heavy dialog and description into other languages. We will do everything we can to make it as easy as possible for people to translate it And thanks so much for the kind words Rob and Baron. Everyone on the team really appreciates it. This would all be impossible without the power of the NWN2 engine and toolset, so we've got Obsidian and Atari to thank for making another Planescape adventure possible.

Fallout 2 is the most bang for your buck from that list. If you haven't played Bloodlines you should add it to the list.

I think Hellgate:London uses a soft-targeting scheme like that (though I might be remembering incorrectly).

Congrats Vaei and all the other artists

It takes time to make a great mod. Counterstrike wasn't just "cranked out overnight". Neither was Darkness Over Daggerford or Wyvern Crown of Cormyr. Furthermore, the NWN2 Toolset is much more suited to making a "great mod" than the NWN1 Toolset ever was, that's not holding anyone back.

The opening of the game is one of the most memorable and stunning game experiences I've ever seen.

How much collaboration is too much for something to be art? How many people? How many hours?

In the interests of logical consistency, the word "film" in my post above should be replaced with the phrase "films made by at least two or more individuals". Thus, according to Ebert's definition of art, which includes "authorial control" as a necessary condition, your home movies are more likely to be qualified as art than the works of Michelangelo Antonioni or Wes Anderson or Roman Polanski.

Ebert's argument is flawed because the foundation of his argument is that consumer choice usurps authorial control and authorial control is a necessary condition for the classification of a thing as art. Ebert claims: 1) Films can qualify as art. 2) video games do not qualify as art because of a lack of authorial control. Ebert cannot make these two claims and maintain logical consistency. Why? Because films, generally, are not the creative product of a single authorial controller, but rather the product of a group of individuals working towards a common end. Therefore, Ebert can only claim, with logical consistency, that either films & games cannot be considered art due to a lack of authorial control, or admit that authorial control is not a precondition for the classification of a thing as art. Thus, authorial control can not be said to be a precondition for the categorization of a creation as art; or, films are not art by Ebert's definition. Since it is highly unlikely, nigh impossible, that Ebert will agree that films cannot be art, he therefore must accept that games could possibly be art, subject to other criteria. However, authorial control is clearly -not- one of those criteria, if some films can be considered art. Furthermore, Ebert's argument will find no recourse in an examination of the comparative level of authorial control. Such an examination would rapidly run afoul of Zeno's paradox. To argue that the comparative level of authorial control is a determining factor in the classification of something as art would require a comparison of whether those individuals infringing upon original authorial control were 1) co-local to the original production; 2) paid to do so, or volunteers; 3) actively infringed upon authorial control (e.g. the acting choices made by an actor -interpreting- the writing of Shakespeare or Bob Towne); 4) whether passive infringement upon authorial control actually degrades authorial control (e.g. an art professor claiming the Mona Lisa is actually a painting of a man); ad infinitum. The claim that video games are not art because authorial control is ceded to a consumer is a poor claim indeed, because authorial control is -always- ceded to the consumer, and is often ceded to co-producers as well. Does Hemingway's work become less his work because an editor made changes? How many changes can an editor make, before the work ceases to possess requisite authorial control to qualify as art?

I really think the perception that the toolset is particularly unstable is not accurate. The toolset has not been, for us, particularly unstable or prone to corrupting modules. After thousands of individual saves, hundreds of thousands of changes to over 6,000 individual files over the course of 11 months with as many as a half-dozen people working on various portions of the module in the toolset, we've lost a tiny fraction of work. This of course does not prove anything, the experiences of one group, but neither do the experiences of any other group or single individual. However, the longest continuous cooperative use of the toolset outside of Obsidian's own use shows pretty stable results. We have seen one former team member with bizarre and inexplicable corruptions to their work back in 2006, but I am convinced that the underlying problem there was with his installed OS, or drivers or .NET rather than any particular fault of the toolset application itself, as his work product was generally recoverable on another system. The toolset does require a pretty stout and clean/up-to-date machine to run on without incident; and you will probably run into more problems if you operate in .mod mode as opposed to directory mode. I don't have any statistics to back this last claim up, but my perception is that five years ago the NWN1 toolset was significantly more unstable for me personally, though again, I suspect that that was because I was probably running it on a low-end machine at the time. Could it be better? Sure. The conversation editor and the 2da editor are prone to data corruptions. The 2da editor corruptions are readily avoidable because there are much better applications for editing 2das anyways. The conversation editor corruptions are unfortunate, but they also seem to be relatively rare (three instances of conversation corruption out of over 800 individual conversation files), are not fatal to the underlying data, and are readily fixable in the toolset when discovered. We've managed to put together a 20 hour crpg game with it over the past 11 months, and we've not really struggled with lost work at all. I'd hate to see folks not even attempt modding for NWN2 because of some potentially inaccurate prevailing opinions about it's underlying stability and functionality.

Good mods, like good games in general, take time to make. The toolset is phenomenal and people will see things created with this game and engine the likes of which they will have never seen in video games before.

rofl Yeah, I leave mine on a lot and no problems so far. It's kept horizontally, the vertical setup just looks iffy to me and I am mystified like a caveman by the DVDs not falling out of the machine that way. I keep it on an open shelf, not all hemmed in by stuff or enclosures, no problems so far. I did throw it off the roof once though.

Truly awesome

Right now taking a break from PC gaming (and modding) to play Gears of War and... It's absolutely insane. The most fun game experience in coop I've ever had. One of the most fun game experiences in 5 years. Takes a little bit to get used to the control scheme, but once you do its nothing but fun. Getting "stuck on cover" in versus kind of blows, but it's at least funny when it happens, especially if you get chain-sawed. Easily the best shooter since HL Episode One, and in my not-so-humble opinion, one of the top five of all time.

Deciding early on that we would do VO for the cinematic cutscenes definitely increased the amount of work necessary to complete the modules, so we've tried to keep the number of VO'd cutscenes and the amount of dialog to be VO'd limited. Whereas the NWN2OC has 11,000 voice clips, Purgatorio will probably end up with around 600 or so. The vast majority of dialog in the game is old school NWN1-style. Thanks for the support

I think it creates an interesting challenge for the voice-actors, since oftentimes we've got an American writing the dialog using 19th century English thieves cant + Planescape cant and then a voice actor from Spain or the Netherlands or South Africa or whatnot recording the dialog. It all makes for a very eclectic mix of things. Also though, we tend to keep our most excessive cant-sprees in the non-cutscene dialog. There's definitely a lot of cant in the cutscene dialog as well, which is the dialog that gets voiced, but we get a lot more experimental with the NWN1-style dialogs because we know a) no one is going to have to voice it; and b) pending a satisfactory implementation of the cant dictionary GUI, the player will have access to definitions of words they can't translate from the context.

Howdy Xard, better late than never eh? I grabbed some screens of things we're working on today, and here they are along with the older shots of dialogs from the rpgcodex post: [Remember that there will be grammatical errors and the like throughout these, some shots are months old, while others are things we're working on now, but we certainly appreciate any reports] <spoilerationbegins> A conversation from a Doomguard sidequest: Ponzo is a Powderman, a cant word for drug dealer: This is one of the generic one-liners convos that random Cagers draw from: [Faction members draw from their own one-liner convos, these are for unaffiliated cutters] A sidequest for the Fated goes through this conversation: This is a beat from the critical path: Qaida is one of the Cagers you are likely to meet early on in the Hive: We give a lot of attention to every detail that makes up the Hive Ward, right down to every single one of hundreds of custom items having a unique description: </endspoileration> Things are progressing well, we've got a ton of work left to do, but I'm excited to see it all coming together. When we're finished, I think Purgatorio will have a word count of around 150,000. All that writing is certainly not the work of one person, by any stretch. There are six people on the writing team (including myself), so rather than a single person writing what is effectively a 600 page novel, it's more like six people each writing a short novel and then throwing them at each other. Roz - Writing Team Fractal - Writing Team Snowy - Writing Team Kobold Avenger - Writing Team Lordchaos - Writing Team Some jerk - Writing Team One of the most fun things about the project is working with planar cant. We've taken the original cant vocabulary from the source books and Planescape: Torment, and expanded it dramatically, using references from the internet like mimir.net (Planar Cant Dictionary); the Grose 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (Grose 1811) -- I believe this dictionary was one of the sources for the original Planar Cant; along with some phrases from ****ney slang and stuff we've just made up. All of this makes understanding what some NPCs are saying a little difficult at times, so right now DavionShores is working on a browsable Planar Cant dictionary for the in-game GUI, so that you can flip through and look up words you need to get while inside a conversation (it won't be accessible during cutscenes, but most of the more inscrutable cant-speakers use NWN1-Style dialogs.).

Winona Ryder

No no, I'm not saying that you need to enjoy FPS games, I'm just saying that the type of gameplay you enjoy and game design that you enjoy is not "in vogue" right now, and that those sorts of things are cyclical, and you'll see the market shift back and forth, as people react to a new, cool idea, it becomes popular, it gets overplayed and people react in the opposite direction.

Hey, it's been a very sparse few years (but I gotta disagree on HL2, that game is pretty much the definition of awesome first-person shooter). Just think positive, things'll turn around and you'll get a slew of games that you love and look back on fondly. Everything is cyclical.

I wish I had kept all my old comp games as organized and -in possession- as you Tale I've lost so many copies of so many games through college and grad school and moving around. Digital distribution will save me from myself, however.

There's nothing of gameplay substance, but those are game assets rendered with the render engine according to Bethesda, so there is something of substance in the trailer. You're getting a first-look at what the game is going to, partially, look like, in terms of art direction especially. Obviously it could change a lot over a year and a half, but still, that is certainly of substance. Also, the trailer is cool, I got that old Fallout feeling like when I first looked at the box cover over at a friend's house and asked, "what game is that?" And he proceeded to explain my noobery and the greatness that is Fallout.

Sure, I'll post both the old stuff and some new stuff. But it might be a while until I can take time out to do so (late tonight maybe), trying to put the final polish on the companion interactions systems today.