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Hordes of the Underdark Goes Gold
MattW writes "Bioware announced that Hordes of the Underdark has gone gold. This is the second expansion pack for Neverwinter Nights, and the first to be developed in-house by Bioware. It's also the first CRPG to feature 3rd Edition epic levels. Looks like it will be fun. Some of the biggest requests from the custom content community are in, like custom talk-tables, that should allow for a much better level of customization for the game." I can't say enough good things about the Neverwinter Nights titles, but if this game is anything like the last couple, it's going to steal a lot of my time. I hope I manage to make it home for the holidays.
Most of the people that play NWN don't play the orginal story outside of maybe one time through. The real charm to NWN is downloading other people's senerios and stories to play.
Well even though it took a l-o-n-g time for the Linux client to come out, it is a fun game. In fact it is the only game I play on a daily basis on my Linux system. Granted I have had moments of outrage to long delay's it is a great game, and I'm so happy to see the company still support the game and develop for it. This is a game that truly allows the end user and developers to continue the legacy as long as there is a demand. If they actually make a NWN II I hope they will concentrate on bring the Linux release up to par.
P.s. The gfx is pretty cool, not great but I don't play a game solely based on gfx, I need good playability and challenging tasks.
This SIG pulled due to lack of funding. (This damn war is costing too much!)
NWN Gold comes with Shadows of Udrentide.
Which, I may add, makes a nice alternative to the original campaign when you're levelling up your 50 characters...
-Erwos
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
i just remember going to a talk at gdconf last year where the lead AI programmer talked about decisions they made in neverwinter nights and said "please don't hurt me" when describing the AI system and problems they were having
I believe there's one for NWN and the first expansion, SoU.
0 00 09MGVF/qid=1069164519/sr=8-2/ref=sr_8_2/104-769983 3-0575100?v=glance&s=videogames&n=507846
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B
About the only feature that I am really missing is... spellcaster prestige classes. There's a bug in their code that doesn't allow them to do "casterlevel +1" for a prestige class. This is really sad.
i thought they fixed that
with the dragon disciple and the pale master both needing that fixed...
you would think they could have done it
i am looking forward to the max level cap being raised to level 40 and the 6 new prestige classes...
some of them seem interesting enough to use
unlike the harpers scout of shadows of undrentide
[echelon]
Try playing online on a persistant world server. It makes the official campign modules seem like training camp. Hell I never even bothered to play the OC for SoU, still haven't in fact, and I never even finished the original module. Multiplayer for NwN is where its happening.
They have 2 new 2da fields -- Divine and Spellcaster level offset in classes.2da, so they say. They allow you to give a +1 spellcaster level to any PrC, and they're using it themselves for Pale Master (which gets +1 every other level per the books).
The custom talk tables are a REALLY big deal, however, since they allow you to add in custom strings, needed for custom classes, spells, etc, without including the 8+ Mb dialog.tlk file in a hak pak (or requiring people to put a new dialog.tlk in their override directory, since it wasn't even hakable before)
But yeah, HotU > Sou, big time. Although SoU had a nice official campaign, IMO -- more fun and better story than the NWN OC -- it was feeble. The PrCs were broken, the spell additions were either dull or unbalancing (say, flare and Isaac's * Missile Storm, respectively), and the 'new tilesets' were rather bare -- totally lacking placables and features that they didn't absolutely need for the SoU OC.
Incidentally, you can run the toolset under Wine, or so I hear. I'm pretty happy they did a linux version at all. In fact, if they'd done it simultaneous release, I'd be using it. (But who could wait a year?!)
There are some really spectacular community-produced modules too. CC1 and CC2 in particular were really very good. There are some really strong writers out there.
And Bioware has been keeping the Linux client up to date (and in some cases, even slightly advanced over) the Windows client. I'm VERY happy with the Linux support. Supposedly there is a Linux toolset coming too (OpenNights or something like that)
Thumbs WAY up BioWare!
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
FYI: IGN has a contest going for the best community created module for the transition from SOU to HOU.
s tHotU.shtml
... two cards I know of: wyrm card ... RED DRAGON!, and the Knave card .. :( ... looose all backpacked equipment!! ... nasty but fun :)
1 0661123 20015.shtml
Check it out: http://nwvault.ign.com/features/contests/IGNConte
So far I have only played Shadohaunt since it had such high reviews. After finishing it, I can certainly tell you it deserves it. decent plot, lots of laughs, and some neat items (the deck of cards is my fav
I HIGHLY recommend playing it. My only complaint is that its abit too easy.
http://nwvault.ign.com/Files/modules/data/
The scripting language has GetSecond() to get the number of seconds since the module began, and you can use that info to vary your monster spawns.
The Memeitc AI Toolkit is a comprehensive system for designing realistic NPC AI for persistant worlds. It uses a meme metaphor to rationalize the hows and whys of NPC life. The Memetic AI Toolkit provides an artificial life designer with a host of tools, documentation, example code, and a community to help with their projects.
This implementation is written in NWScript and is designed to run on a stand alone server using Bioware's NeverwinterNights game platform. It is distributed as a set of scripts that can be imported into Bioware's toolkit. It does not require a database, or hacks to the original game.
Links:
Major features include:
-W. Bull