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

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.

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..

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.

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.

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.