Neverwinter Nights is Gold

Urthpaw writes "Neverwinter Nights, the D&D based RPG from BioWare (Makers of Baldur's Gate among other titles), for Windows, MacOS and Linux has Gone gold. The game allows players to make their own "modules", or adventures, and DM them for up to 64 friends. Server-linking features allow the assembly of distributed MMORPGs."

Comments

i cant play it

[Anonymous Coward]

my mom says D&D is satanic, so i cant play it.

I'm 19 and dont care what my mom says but she said that when i was little and all through my life so now i just have no interest

Who owns what?

[WankersRevenge]

The game allows players to make their "own" modules, or adventures, and DM them for up to 64 friends.

Who owns what module? Bioware? Or the consumers? Inquiring minds want to know!

I don't get it.

[Telastyn]

Why would anyone want DM'd games online? You loose pretty much every benefit of P&P rpgs; loose pretty much every benefit of single player rpgs; for what? the ability to play across distances, a computerized dice roller, and some pretty graphics?

I think BioWare will make a fun game, with alot of features, but I don't think (and history hasn't proven) that the id "make an engine, let the community write the game" approach works in rpgs...

Re:I don't get it.

[nick_davison]

Why would anyone want DM'd games online? You loose pretty much every benefit of P&P rpgs; loose pretty much every benefit of single player rpgs; for what? the ability to play across distances, a computerized dice roller, and some pretty graphics?

That's pretty much the point of NWN - they've attempted to give back most of the features that you traditionally lose by moving to a computer.

For example: The freeform interaction that a real world DM gives is brought back by allowing the DMs to take over characters, manually trigger events, adjust the difficulty via a slider to ensure everything's always perfectly balanced for interesting play.

Where the computer gains the advantage is that it allows a lot of things to become automated. Think about those D&D games you played as a kid. Half the time the game degenerated while the DM focused on a single player, looked up a rule, etc. On top of that, they'd be dropping rules all over the place because they couldn't remember them or they took too long to figure out. Now all of that stuff's handled automatically.

So, the end result is you get a game that [ideally] handles everything you don't want to handle or don't have time to handle, giving that postive aspect of computerised gaming and yet allows the DM to step in wherever's needed, keeping the benefits of traditional gaming. Of course, that's assuming everything's ideal, but they're looking like they're pretty close.

Re:I don't get it.

[startled]

I don't think you're familiar with how the game is set up. You don't have to go find a random server with strangers. You set up a server and play with your friends.

Actual fun with actual people-- I'm not sure what you're saying here. My friends aren't actual people? I'm pretty sure they are, unless I'm more insane than I thought. If you're referring to lack of voice, use GameVoice/RogerWilco/TeamSound. If you're referring to not having them in person, have a LAN party!

Not allowed to "cheat"-- I don't understand at all what you're talking about here. NWN should enforce the rules much better than any DM normally would, so the problem would almost be the other way.

Single player rpg-- you seem to be forgetting that there's supposed to be a very good single player RPG in NWN. Only time will tell, of course, but that's the same as any other single player RPG.

Save games/quick to play-- how do you lose that? This is way faster than P the only limit is that your friends will expect you to play more than 10 minutes.

Actual story (usually)-- aside from what ships, there will be lots of community-released adventures, or you can make your own. You'll have more (and in many cases better) stories than what you get in your typical single player rpg.

No evil DM's to ruin game-- get a better DM!

simple math doesn't bother me/isn't hard-- wow, you're in full denial mode now. Computer-run combat is a lot faster than P&P.

I play some P&P with friends locally, but we're really looking forward to NWN. Is it going to totally replace our P&P sessions? Of course not! But getting a group of us together online with NWN and voice is going to be awesome, for different reasons than P&P is awesome.

Everyone knows there are real tradeoffs to be made between this and P&P-- no need to make up fake reasons to justify your apprehensiveness. But people are excited about this game because it's doing something totally new. Games that try something new are one in a million these days.

System Requirements...

[Thenomain]

There is still no information on whether or not NWN will be available for Mac OS X or just Mac OS 8/9, or both, or what. In fact, they don't even mention the platform in the press release.

You think they'd know by now, wouldn't you? I get the feeling that it just isn't ready yet.

Re:I dont care....

[eviltypeguy]

Actually, not quite. While they're releasing the MacOS and Win32 versions to the shelf.

Linux will see the online release of the Neverwinter Nights server at launch and the client shortly afterwards. However, Linux gamers will still need the Windows version of the game to register at the Neverwinter Nights community site and to import game resources into their Linux server and game. (The editor is currently not planned for Linux)

This should be good

[forkboy]

After being rather disappointed with the last few RPGs to come my way (Morrowind being the latest) I'm hoping this lives up to the good Bioware name. Fan sites are already working on plans to mod all the old D&D modules we knew and loved back in the day....Ravenloft, Tomb of Horrors, White Plume Mountain, the Drow and Giants series', Temple of Elemental Evil....all the good old stuff I played in high school. It will be worth it for nostalgia's sake alone.

Another plus to this game is that I'll be able to game with all my old friends back home again, just us, not as part of an MMORPG, and in modules of our own design. I'm really looking forward to it.

It's a little weird

[Lord_Pall]

They went gold right as their public beta testers started to receive their cd's..

I'm wondering if they're planning on patching day of release to fix multiplayer problems..

Linux version not in-box?

[TiberiusX]

What I'd like to know is why (once again) Linux is not being represented in the retail box. All the way up to release, the story I heard was "versions of the product for Linux, Macintosh, and Windows were going to be in the same retail box." That was one of the biggest reasons for my money going into this game (other than being a fan of Bioware's previous works like the Baldur's Gate series, the revolutionary approach to this game in particular, and of CRPG in general). Sure I'll still buy the game, but I dislike in the extreme having to wait "a short time" (which could mean a month) to play it on my OS of choice.

What happened, Bioware?

Does gold have meaning?

[eison]

Does going gold have meaning anymore? Don't we live in a world where we *expect* to have to wait a month *after* we buy something for it to work, and the chief effect the CD seems to have is slightly lowering the users' initial startup time and the publisher's bandwidth costs? Why still call it "going gold"? Why not say "started pressing the patching/update client"?

Sorry, I just find this depressing.

Gone Gold? Huh?

[Dr. Shim]

What does "gone gold" mean anyway? I thought it ment that the game hit store shelves.

Enlighten me.

MW was okay.

[eddy]

I disagree, I've hade many weeks of fun with Morrowind. The quests are not solely FedEx.

Were I a game-designer I would try for a game which could generate quest-trees from a grammar and a database (the game would use a decent database and I would equip the game-engine with a suitable query-language, such as a limited subset of SQL) of the world objects. There would be actions, locations and conditionals, and then... but I digress.

Linux Version

[michaelsimms]

The Linux version will be available as a downloadable addon to the windows CD. As such your Linux vote will get lost in the Windows numbers. PLEASE either do one of the following: Send in your registration card with the Linux box ticked, or buy from Tux Games who will be reporting back each and every sale we get as a Linux sale.

We did the same for Wolfenstein and had positive response from our numbers we handed in to id. We intend to do the same for NWN and hopefully ensure more games get ported.

Whichever way you do it, DO IT. Unless you make your voice heard, they wont listen.

Re:Subscription?

[Jerp]

Just found the answer: no subscription required

Why it appeals to me.

[Jethro]

Why would anyone want DM'd games online?

I'd much rather DM a real-life game. But since me and another guy from the The Party moved to the other side of the world, another guy got married and has kids now, one's not been heard from for about a year and one has an erratic schedule, I find the idea of setting up an online RPG module and having them all be able to play whenever they have a few minutes quite interesting. Kind of like PBM only with graphics.

Not that I think this will come to pass, nor that this is EXACTLY what the system is meant for, but it still sounds like fun.

P.S. Yes, I have tried starting something local with real people, couldn't get it to fly though.

Don't want imagination dictated by the game...

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want to use your imagination instead of looking at the pretty pictures may I suggest you try OpenRPG.
Its a tool for playing your old fashioned P&P rpgs and tabletop miniature games over the internet. Its pretty much a virtual gaming table without the chips and soda.

OpenRPG is available for Linux and Windows and there is a java version available for Macs and people who don't like Python. It's GPL'd, already at V1.0.3 (out of beta) and actively being developed.