rjshae

The end of the game is the point where your character is supposed to be at their highest level, and accordingly the items are among the best you're likely to obtain. It wouldn't make sense to put them earlier because they'd let you plow through any battles. An alternative would be to have upgradable items and make the best upgrades available toward the end.

Bring new meaning to the term 'spanner'...

Well... they're not Christian, so the religion is entirely different. They are also a colonial power, which is behaving more like the Western European nations of that epoch. (Presumably then they don't own a spice trading monopoly?) But otherwise yes, they are deliberately modeled after Renaissance Italians. To me that's a break from all the masses of fantasy works based off English culture.

Tile use made sense in NWN because of the primitive graphics requirements, restricted number of tile variants, and limited walkmesh flexibility. But increasing area design flexibility requires an exponential growth in the number of tiles needing to be developed. There'd be no reasonable way to, say, make a Fallout 3/4-style area map using tiles because the memory requirements on the end systems would quickly become prohibitive. Exterior area tiles are not going to cut it; they only made some sense for interior areas of NWN2, and in many ways they are very limiting for game design. Ideally, for maximum efficiency, you want to make repeated use of each tile, but what this does is produce repetition and tedium. NWN areas all end up looking pretty much the same, like an enhanced version of a GoldBox game.

I suspect they won't answer that right now because of marketing reasons. They'll let us know in due course.

Agreed. I'd say grazes of disabling effects should merely be debilitating: strong enough to allow a sneak attack from a rogue, but not strong enough to prevent all actions.

Twin Elms actually seemed better on a subsequent play through. I think the change of pace following the Defiance Bay events may be throwing people off a bit -- that made the Twin Elms section feel anticlimactic. When I went through the White March after Defiance Bay, it made the pacing in Elms feel more like a pleasant interlude.

A possibly far fetched scenario would have Beamdog making an IWD2:EE release, then working on a sequel.

An "Exertion" talent might work for this purpose. You take a modal talent that lets you use a different attribute to determine your Might damage bonus: Wizards use Int; Fighters use Con; Priests use Res, Rogues use Dex, &c. However, this talent always causes endurance damage each time you use it. This talent would let your wimpy Wizard cast a devastating Fireball by focusing her massive Intellect on the task, but leave her more physically exhausted afterwards. I suspect this wouldn't be unbalancing because the player must weight the cost versus the benefit during each battle. Sure they could min-max the different attribute, but most of the time the endurance penalty would be too steep to allow constant use.

To me it's good because it breaks with expectations and intrinsic biases. The game designers are already borrowing rather heavily from Earth history, so a little change up is necessary. You see the Valians and you immediately know it's a different world where you'll need to adjust your thinking to get ahead.

Yep, well Baldur's Gate Reloaded is around 2.5 Gb so yeah that's pretty beefy. It hasn't stopped 28,700 people from downloading it though. To me this stopped being an issue years ago, but I guess if you're still stuck on XP I can see why it would be a problem. As for modding other games, none of them have quite provided the game system I want.

I'm not sure how practical it is to even use tiles for 3D exterior areas any more. Modern games all seem to be based on custom meshes. Do we know what they used for the 2013 Neverwinter release? Or how about Sword Coast Legends? What I'd really like is a terrain modelling tool similar to what they demonstrated for Sui Generis. That worked very rapidly, yet it produced a quite natural-looking terrain. It could probably be expanded to sculpt a wide variety of surfaces and elevation variations, including flowing water channels. Vegetation could be handled in a similar manner. If it is fractally-based, then presumably the areas can be low bandwidth.

Well sorry but to me these arguments are like comparing razor blades. Is the razor blade with 9 blades superior to the one with 7? Well perhaps by a microscopic amount. I prefer the one with the tiltable head and 7 blades to the one with a fixed head and 9 blades. To me, the factors you raise do not make NWN any more inviting. The options in NWN2 are vastly more than I need. Your argument about the NWN2 exterior area building is based on corner cases. I can create pretty much any area I want. Would I like to have more than six textures per grid square plus one 16-bit color tint per vertex? Sure, but as you point out, that would come at a cost. We can make some very nice and realistic terrains using the current system. Yes, the features that make NWN2 area building vastly better come with a memory cost. What of it? Disk space is cheap these days. I've worked with the NWN toolset and found it rather constrained and unappealing compared to NWN2. I've also tried doing some mods for NWN, and found it quite limited because of the various size constraints. For example, there's almost no way to port most NWN2 tilesets to NWN because of the poly count limits and texture size constraints. It would take a ton of work to diminish the poly count enough, and the textures would need to be shrunk down and the normal/tint/illumination maps removed. The end result would be pretty ugly. Like I said, it's a matter of personal preference. I'll stick with NWN2; you stick with NWN.

Mmm no, I don't think I did. In NWN2, the flesh1, flesh2, hair, hat/helm, cloak, armor, shield, belt, and boots all have three tint channels, as do each of the armor parts: 2 bracers, 2 elbows, 2 arms, 2 shoulders, waist, 2 thighs, 2 knees, 2 ankles, and so forth. There's a vast number of variations, as well as model scaling, that allow endless tweaking. Sure it's not the same as NWN, and I can see benefits to both approaches. But kindly don't think that NWN2 clothing is particularly limited. There's also a pretty large number of clothing mods available for NWN2, along with armor, weapons, shields, hair, and the usual nude variants. Ugh, no thanks. I have seen the "rolling hill" mods for NWN. They're a pale imitation of what you can do with the NWN2 exterior area tool. In NWN2 I can create arbitrary terrains, complete with texturable surfaces, moving water, randomized trees and bushes, paintable grass, relocatable buildings, and, in particular, it doesn't have a boxy grid squished up look. Personally I prefer quality over quantity, so I'll take the NWN2 PW any day. It boils down to personal preferences. I like the power, party control, and improved graphics of NWN2; you prefer the ease and greater number of mods for NWN.

Kamal tests out a frame buffer visual effect that produces a mirror-like surface:

Kallister 68's previous tileset release is a homage to the Elder Scrolls sewers in Oblivion:

Kalister68 demonstrates his Larva creature:

Here's MERP UK's NWN2 Plug #11:

I'll take the Valian Pizza Trading Company, now with extra bread sticks and sauce.