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New Preview of Neverwinter Nights
H3resy wrote to us with a new
preview of Neverwinter Nights. The game continues to look great - and combined with its release date being right around Warcraft III, I suspect sleep will not be an option.
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You can sign up for the beta test at betatests.net as well.
we need more games for alternate platforms like macosx, linux, *bsd, etc.
According to the NWN faq, the box will contain media for Windows, Linux, and MacOS.
-l
I didn't see mention of this in the article; just wanted to mention that a Linux version of this game will be released at the same time the Windows version does! It's nice to see gaming companies are taking Linux seriously as a gaming platform.
From the site:
Pentium II 300 MHz, 96 MB RAM, Windows 98/ME/2000SP2/XP, DirectX 8.1, 16 MB OpenGL-compliant 3D accelerator card, DirectX-compliant sound card and 56 kbps modem.
It doesn't say here, but Linux and MacOSX are supported as well.
The FAQ states that they are well aware of the low-ping click-fest that many real-time multiplayer games have turned into. It also states how they're using a "multilayered" approach to combat, where you default to using a basic attack unless you stack up additional moves in your combat queue.
Sounds a lot like how Star Wars: Galaxies is doing theirs. I'm interested to see how it works out.
>It's also coming out for BeOS I think
No, the link I posted clearly says the BeOS version will not be finished.
-l
It is great that it's coming out for Mac and Linux at the same time as Windows. However, be aware that the toolset (which is what really sets NWN apart from, well, everything) is Windows-only.
Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.
Bioware have been purposefully pretty silent on the story, because they don't want to spoil it. What we know is that your character starts the game in an Adventurer's Academy in the city of Neverwinter. There's a plague called the wailing death that the elders are hoping to stop by importing some exotic creatures from somewhere. The creatures go missing or are stolen, you have to recover them to stop the plague.
Bioware have seemed very proud of the single-player campaign, saying it will be even better than BG2/ToB.
Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.
The Dungeon Master mode makes it all worthwhile. The Dungeon Master can control the plot in real-time for you, allowing actual logical storylines to progress and evolve. No more will you have to listen to the NPC say the same stupid thing five times over because that's all he has to say, the dungeon master can take control of him and tell you whatever he wants.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
They really are..
Aside from developing great games, every summer they take the time out to send reps to the big lan party in Edmonton (where bioware is based) Fragapalooza(.com). And they don't just send PR people, they send the real developers.
I first saw NwN summer of 99 when they brought a demo of the early stages of the game to the event, and since then they've brought reps to the LAN every year. Really interesting to see how the game is progressing over the years.
The game will be nothing short of revolutionary once it's released, the control is awesome, the inventory and fight systems are perfect, and the graphics and environments are STUNNING.
As a side note, I had the chance to take a personal guided tour of the Bioware studios, fantastic company, really forward thinking, great staff, etc.
Bioware is going to make huge waves in the community and should expect strong sales of NeverWinter Nights. Due in part to it being: 1) a fantastic game, and 2) supported on multiple platforms.
Props to a small Canadian company with a very big heart.
-adam
Yeah, the whole game IS the editor. The adventure that get's shipped will have been created with the very same tools that you get, assuming they are sticking to what they said over a year ago. That's what attracted me to it in the first place. There was a SSI D&D creator, I forget the exact title, but it allowed you to create gold-box games. There was actually quite a large user scene for it. Hopefully it will be the same for NN, I'd love to play and convert old adventures, as well as create new ones.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
I never played Baldur's Gate, which this Neverwinter Nights seems to be related to (being written by the same company and of the same game genre), but I did play Icewind Dale, which got rave reviews as a great RPG.
... but then when you go to actually assign skill points, and strength points, intelligence, etc, you can just move any number of points from any column to any other. So you can create a dwarf that has the exact same characteristics as an elf. What is the point of having character races if you can just arbitrarily change stats any way you like? It really takes the fun out of designing a character. There is no challenge, and in fact the race becomes nothing more than a name.
Only, I thought Icewind Dale sucked. Badly. So badly that I never got beyond the first mountain pass. Here is why I thought that Icewind Dale sucked:
1. The graphics were not that great. The characters you get to select from look like they were all scanned from an airbrush that was copied out of the back of some dungeons and dragons magazine. The characters, monsters, architecture, etc, drawn in isometric view were very good either.
2. When generating a character, you get to choose from lots of neat races, like elf, half-elf, human, dwarf, etc
3. The gameplay sucked. Lots of clicking around, trying to select the correct group of people and make them do the correct thing. They're always doing something stupid - running back and forth trying to stand on the spot that you clicked on rather than fighting back against the orc that is pummeling them, or getting all clogged up at an entranceway, or stopping altogether because someone else who was trying to go the same way they were was in the way for a moment. It was just frustrating and annoying trying to control all of my party members and trying to make them do something reasonable all of the time.
4. Fighting monsters is way too hard and gives way, way too few experience points. I played forever waiting for any member of my party to get enough experience to gain a level. I needed like 2,000 experience points to get to level 2, and was getting like 10 for each monster I killed. And finding creatures to fight, and then finishing them off, took forever. So after hours and hours none of my characters had even advanced a level. How lame.
5. Stupid quests. All of the tasks that I was asked to complete by the townspeople in the first town were just uninteresting and dumb. They were all of the form "go get this thing and take it to that person." Lame. And then the amount of experience I would get for doing that was low anyway. Although, at one point I was walking around in a basement and I opened a door to find a boy who was afraid to go back to town or something. I didn't have to do anything at all, I just randomly happened to open that door, and the kid went back to town and I got like 500 experience points for each character. WTF?!?? Opening a door at random gives me the same experience as killing 50 orcs? It's no fun to try to build up your characters when fighting hard against monsters gives you almost no experience, but randomly happening upon lost children gives you tons.
6. Bugs. The game would slow to a crawl and then crash every so often.
Eventually I gave up and realized that the game was a total waste of my time. It had to be one of the worst games I had ever played. And yet I read all over the place about how it was such a great game.
Needless to say, I am extremely skeptical of the entire RPG genre, especially anything from BioWare.
If it weren't for Fallout 1 & 2, which were two of the best games I have ever played, I would probably write off the RPG genre altogether.
Get Proxomitron. It rewrites the HTML of incoming web pages before it reaches your browser to delete tags dealing with pop-up windows, banner ads, and anything else annoying. Set it up and write a simple custom filter to eliminate any embed tags with a file that has an extension identifying it as flash animation. I just went ahead and eliminated all embed tags since they're only used for evil.
I really don't want to hear how good Dungeon Siege is, because I'm not going to be able to play it ;)
i'll tell you anyway
we checked it out at a lanparty (no big event, just a cosy weekend in the basement) and some of us didn't get any sleep that night. it really was fun (maybe we should have accounted that to beer comsumption).
we didn't finish it in the ~two days we played it, so we tried to continue the following week via dsl-dialups. you cannot begin to imagine the annoying directplay issues we faced then. clients disconnecting as another was joining the game. random disconnects of a certain player. inability of others to join at all. sub10 fps in combat (well, had that during lanplay too...). i've since read postings from msces who could not resolve the connection issues either.
only my stubbornness made me finish the game with a dorm friend, i couldn't bear the issues anymore. too bad there isn't a proper ending to the poorly narrated singleplayer campaign when played in multiplayer mode. rm -rf dungeon_siege