Why is the NWN2 modding scene so.... meh?

[Monte Carlo]

I like NWN2 as much as I disliked NWN.

 

One of the thing that, for me, redeemed NWN a bit was of course the mods. Blessed are the modders as I am too technically inept and busy to make one myself (although I did successfully use the toolset to make a quick-and-dirty version of Monte Cookes famous "The Orc and the Pie").

 

So why, when NWN2 looks so nice and is all tidied-up, are there so few decent mods? I'm comparing this to NWN, remember. Has the novelty worn off?

 

There are some pretty fun trainers / character editors, The Keep on The Borderlands (huzzah!) and the pretty cool PoR mod (only problem is that it is so dark, I'm having to turn the contrast up and it looks odd).

 

I know nothing about D&D online, I'm assuming it's just another MMORPG, has this made an impact on the NWN modding community?

 

Cheers,

MC

[Guard Dog]

I have created a number of NWN mods and I've been working on an NWN2 ever since I opened the game box. I think there are a few reasons.

 

1) When NWN came out that toolset was unique. No other CRPG gave you the flexibility to actually create your own "games". Most toolsets allowed you to modify the OC and add your own elements to the game as it was shipped. But with NWN, you never neven needed to play the OC. Now it seems the novelty has worn off a little.

 

2) NWN now has 5 years, two expansions, and a ton of community made tools. NWN2 has a handfull of user made tools, a very limited Monster selection, and no expansions. And has been out for less than a year. The first expansion will soon be out and may well add enough content to kick start the modding community. The NWN modding really did not hit it's stride until after SoU and the first CEP was released. So it is a little early to call it dead. Granted there were some really good pre-SoU mods, but the best came after. Another thing to note, by using Granny, Obsidian made it difficult to create custom content like new monsters and animations, tiles, etc. With NWN it was not easy, but with NWMax and a few tutorials anyone could do it. That is not a criticisim of Obsidian, I know and understand the why behind the decision. Some things cannot be helped.

 

3)The tileset system in NWN made it very easy for a rank amatuer to create a decent looking area in a short time. The trade off was, it did no look that great and became horribly repetitive. The NWN2 height mapping is... extremely detail intensive. It is not impossible to use by any means, but it takes a hell of a lot more effort than the NWN Tilesets. The results when done right are really, really impressive. And when done wrong, extremely discouraging to the modder. When it comes to placing objects, triggers, etc it is really not much different from NWN. Scripting of course is the same. But making a good looking playing area requires a lot of thought and effort. And it takes a lot longer. And the sad truth is, not that many modders are investing the time it takes to learn, or are becoming frustrated and giving up altogether.

 

But it is still too early to give up. Wait until after MotB then see what happens.

[Monte Carlo]

^ That all makes sense, thanks for answering my question and good luck with your modding.

 

Cheers

MC

[Tale]

I like Guard Dog's theories. They make sense to me and fit in with my own experiences. I have a lot of difficulty with the outside areas, but that's actually not enough to discourage me. The two major contributors to how long it's taking me for my own modules are:

 

1) I doubt I'll be able to really compete with the good mods already created for NWN1. Modding now at this time, even with NWN2, has me feeling like I'm arriving late to the game because the vast amount of good mods already created that mine will likely not be as good as.

 

2) I have ADHD. I get 1/10th the way into my mod and I'm already designing my 2nd, 3rd, and 4th.

[Guard Dog]

2) I have ADHD. I get 1/10th the way into my mod and I'm already designing my 2nd, 3rd, and 4th.

 

That is so f'ing true. I have that same problem. When I have three or four projects cooking at once you can be sure not one of them will ever get done.

Edited August 7, 2007 by Guard Dog

[GreasyDogMeat]

I'm working on a module myself, and I can say the things that keep my progress slow are:

 

1: This is the first time I've worked in a toolset/editor EVER.

 

2: I'm a bit of a perfectionist. I keep going back and doing little touches on areas, I've restarted areas completly and while working on my module I have a habit of starting the game up to check every little change I make in the game.

[sogi_ya]

the only modding i'v really done is with morrowind, the nwn tool set is so diffrent that it is daunting for me to learn, ADHD here to .....

 

 

 

(some one needs to make a scripting for dummies like they did with morrowind)

 

 

 

does any one else roll there eyes at how many mods there are to turn your fem. char. into jerk off target?

[MLMarkland]

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.

[SteveThaiBinh]

I'm working on a module myself, and I can say the things that keep my progress slow are:

 

1: This is the first time I've worked in a toolset/editor EVER.

Me too. I've found learning scripting to be a real challenge, as some of the commands (functions?) don't always do what they're supposed to and don't always explain why. I spent well over six hours trawling through the Bioware forum trying to get an NPC to sit down properly. In the end, I did manage it - foolishly I'd assumed he would simply sit in the chair, whereas what I actually had to do was turn the chair into a ghost of chair (an illusion, if you will), and get the NPC to squat in the place where the illusion made the chair appear to be. I feel sorry the poor guy - it can't exactly be comfortable like that for hours on end. Still, the sense of satisfaction when I got it to work was immense. Now if I could only persuade him not to swivel his legs through the armrests when the PC talks to him...

[Kaftan Barlast]

The biggest reason why Nwn2 does not have such an active mod community is that the fantasy genre is dying out paired with the technical issues(very low fps and a never decreasing stream of bugs, not to mention a toolkit that takes 100% CPU power no matter what you were doing).

 

 

What put the stick in the wheel of our mod project was the endless corruption of modules. It didnt matter if you made backups, because as there is no way to tell if a file is corrupt, by the time you notice it it will be too late. We decided to call it quits and never to touch the damn p.o.s toolset again.

[Xard]

Fantasy genre dying out?

 

[Guard Dog]

The biggest reason why Nwn2 does not have such an active mod community is that the fantasy genre is dying out paired with the technical issues(very low fps and a never decreasing stream of bugs, not to mention a toolkit that takes 100% CPU power no matter what you were doing).

 

 

What put the stick in the wheel of our mod project was the endless corruption of modules. It didnt matter if you made backups, because as there is no way to tell if a file is corrupt, by the time you notice it it will be too late. We decided to call it quits and never to touch the damn p.o.s toolset again.

 

That also happened to one of the builders on the FRW project. After months of work his module and back up were corrupted and lost. I know that swore him off of NWN2 modding too. But hasn't that been corrected via a patch by now?

 

Josh? Alvin? Anyone know?

[Tigranes]

You've got to wonder how they made the OC with that.

[MLMarkland]

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.

Edited August 8, 2007 by MLMarkland

[Guard Dog]

I agree with ML on that point. I have "heard" of people losing mods to corruption, even spoken to one but it has never actually happened to me.

 

Also, I have yet to use the .2da editor. It's funny, it was something we were all screaming for in NWN but now I still use excel just like always.

Edited August 8, 2007 by Guard Dog

[Kaftan Barlast]

Its true that corruption is less of an issue with a better and better maintained computer, and some files may run on some computers but not on others. It was worst around Patch 1.3 I think, but we still experienced corruptions with 1.6 which was when we gave up. I remember trying to copy a dialogue tree with links to nodes in other trees would cause the toolset to crash and the file to become unstable 90% of the time.

 

 

It must have been quite a feat to churn out the OC using the pre-beta toolset. I know a friend of mine who works at a really dodgy studio known for making crap games with tons of bugs in them, mentioned that not even their toolset was as bad as the Nwn2 one.

[Azarkon]

GD nailed it. NWN 2 coming so soon on the heels of NWN 1 limits the initial flurry of activity. Let's face it, modders are not professional game developers. They don't do this for a living and having done it once and gotten it off their chest, simply don't have as much incentive to do it again so soon. As for the argument that there should be new modders, understand that they're a minority compared to the throngs of itching storytellers who awaited the coming of NWN 1. There's not, relatively speaking, that many people who want to mod badly but did not have the opportunity to do it in NWN 1.

Edited August 9, 2007 by Azarkon

[Guard Dog]

There is one other thing NWN1 mods had that 2 has not, yet. Recognition. Case in point, Adam Miller's Shadowlords and Dreamcatcher mods were mentioned in a several PC gaming magazines. That probably brought a few modders to the table once they saw what was possible. Those modules have been long surpassed in technical excellence but at the time they are a big depatrue from what everyone else was doing. NWN2 has not yet had a "break out" mod that really gets eveyones attention.

[taks]

keep in mind, too, that NWN1 was off and on in production for nearly 5 years... by the time it came out _everyone_ in the world knew it would be there. plus, it was right on the heels of several successful D&D games which bioware had a hand in, particularly the BG games. NWN2 did not, and the most recent was otherwise a failure.

 

taks

[Schazzwozzer]

A couple nuggets of anecdote from my end, as an artist modder:

 

- My experience with NWN1 definitely did jade me a bit, or at least make me less willing to spend hundreds of hours on something that isn't personally compelling in a very immediate sense. I was very lucky and had the opportunity to work on two commercial projects with/for Bioware. Both were unceremoniously cancelled and everybody involved was left empty-handed, as far as I know (for the record, Bioware was great and not to blame for the cancellations). Now, the number of people with similar first-hand experiences is probably pretty limited, but I'm sure loads of people closely involved with the NWN1 community, perhaps with their own dreams of modding grandeur, saw much of this play out, and I imagine it left them a bit jaded as well.

 

- Everything is harder with NWN2. Yes, you can do more, but it doesn't change the fact that things just plain are harder. Personally, I've had a couple pieces of work that I put a solid amount of time into, a few dozen hours each, perhaps, only to get near implementation and then hit a wall. Not like an obstacle, where you can sort of puzzle out how to proceed, but a flat-out wall, where you have no clue how to get around it. And I might be flattering myself in saying this, but I think I'm one of the more knowledgeable people involved with NWN2 art-side modding, so I can imagine the experience is only worse for people who are just starting out.

 

Anyway, the big thing there is, when you hit a wall, you lose your momentum, and momentum is hugely important when you're not getting paid. I expect this is true for the actual design-side of modding too.

[Big Bottom]

NWN sold a lot more, was better reviewed and was a lot easier to use. Maybe the expansion will attract some more modders.

[Dark_Raven]

It would be nice. NWN2 needs more mods. It would be discouraging to the developers if people didn't make use of their hard worked on toolset.

[Guard Dog]

It would be nice. NWN2 needs more mods. It would be discouraging to the developers if people didn't make use of their hard worked on toolset.

You know, you have a little talent in that area too. Why not take a shot at it?

[Dark_Raven]

I don't like how NWN2 is when it comes to modding, its nothing like BG2. I wanted to make some custom items and sell them in a custom store. In the BG games that is easy, you make your things and install it into the game. My store clerk shows up in Amn with my custom items. In NWN2 it doesn't work like that from what I have read. You can't install custom content like that into the original game.

[Guard Dog]

I don't like how NWN2 is when it comes to modding, its nothing like BG2. I wanted to make some custom items and sell them in a custom store. In the BG games that is easy, you make your things and install it into the game. My store clerk shows up in Amn with my custom items. In NWN2 it doesn't work like that from what I have read. You can't install custom content like that into the original game.

No, you are correct. That is more in line with Morrowind/Oblivion modding. And the IE games of course.