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Neverwinter Nights Put Out To Pasture
Right on the heels of the announcement of a new infinite dungeons module, via Broken Toys comes word that Atari has completely pulled support from the first Neverwinter Nights game. From the article: "There hasn't been any official word on all this yet but some of the most credible factors, that have been thrown around, include; the financial stability of Atari, and that they didn't want horses for NWN1 to come out officially before NWN2. This also appears to have affected other premium modules that were in production with other teams and there is probably no chance that Witches Wake 2 will ever get produced. It's hard to expect a publisher like Atari to keep on supporting patches forever, and in fact most games are lucky if they can get a few done. The NWN community has been very lucky to have had so many patches with so much free content. We shouldn't lose sight of that. However killing the premium module program makes no sense."
the more things change, the more atari stays the same...
Donald Ray Moore Jr. (mindrape)
Suspected Terrorist
Did anyone really expect them to continue supporting a game from 1991??
This is the silliest story I've ever read.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
However killing the premium module program makes no sense.
It does kinda makes sense. They want more exciting things to be avaliable for NWN2 only, I imagine.
Victory or awesome!
Officially there aren't horses in NWN1, but there have been horses in several modules and more importantly, the CEP (Community Expansion Pack) for, over a year now, so whether or not there are to ever "officially" horses in NWN1 is pretty much irrelevant to most users.
I dream of a better world... one in which chickens can cross roads without their motives being questioned.
Hah this reminds me..
Clichéquest expansion pack!
http://www.thenoobcomic.com/daily/strip186.html
I'm tempted to look at this as a good thing, actually. As the summary mentioned, we've gotten a lot of content for NWN--more than usual for games of its kind. I think the game has had an excellent run, and there is enough of it to keep me satisfied.
Depending on how profitable a game is, companies cannot be expected to keep supporting it for more than a few years without creating a sequal or new engine.
I own NWN, and I absolutely love it. So why am I glad to see support drop? Because deep down inside, there is a hope that Atari will release the source code. It's happened to a lot of classic games in the past, and I hope that this one won't be any different.
They won't do that, however, until the game has long since lost its support and isn't selling much.
Imagine seeing NWN ported to many different platforms; maybe some day in the future it will make a good game for PDA's (the mouse driven interface is just perfect for those types of machines).
Linux distributions might even distribute binary packages of source builds one day along with free, community-made content.
Maybe it's just a pipe dream, but every dark cloud should have a silver lining. :)
... so it will in all likely hood blow chunks.
I assume he is making reference to the old old old non-BioWare NeverWinter Nights. I am not sure it came out in 1991, but that date sounds correct.
According to Wiki, AOL's NWN was a MMORG and came out in 1991.
He isn't calling BioWare's NWN old, but instead making a joke about confussion and reusing the name.
If you want to mod him down, maybe Redundent as this joke awas made 1,000 times when NWN wa sin production.
I wouldn't hold my breath expecting Atari to release the source code. Their behavior in all of this is pretty lousy.
This was all precipitated when they declared they wouldn't pay for any new premium modules for the game, as recounted by DLA. It's unfortunate that all their hard work won't be compensated.
I was under the impression that Bioware handled their own patches. When I was a lead tester at Atari who infrequently got thrown onto NWN (I know Prelude better than my rear end!) during testing of various "official" patches, Bioware usually released them without telling us. The only way we found out was from a new install and auto-updating to what supposed to be the current "released" version. That was always fun.
NWN is a very complex game. I was told it took a programmer 500 hours to test the entire game. A playthrough in QA was never possible when a patch is released every other day. Since I been out of the video game industry for two years, I can finally enjoy playing and trying to play the entire NWN.
It's really very much like the console industry: If they can point at KingBonker, PriestWhacker and other cheap modules as reasons to buy NWN2 over NWN, then they don't want buyers pointing at the same titles as reasons to stick with their old and no longer particularly profitable copies of NWN. I'm honestly surprised that they're releasing the Infinite Dungeons pack for the first game at all.
It's hard to expect a publisher like Atari to keep on supporting patches forever, and in fact most games are lucky if they can get a few done. The NWN community has been very lucky to have had so many patches with so much free content. We shouldn't lose sight of that.
Once upon a time there was this company called Blizzard. They made three games: a fantasy RTS, a sci-fi RTS and a dungeon romp. They also made a bunch of sequels but those three were pretty much it.
Blizzard supported cool free online match making for their games whilst everyone else was trying to figure out how to charge people a monthly fee for it. They also kept supporting the games with new patches long after every other company in the industry would have given up.
Strangely, people kept buying their new games, which were really just incremental updates of their old games, because they knew that three years down the line they'd still be able to go online, get the latest patch, play multiplayer, etc. Each of those sequels, whilst great games on their own merit, sold incredible numbers due to customer loyalty - far outstripping just about as good games from companies that had previously screwed their customers and couldn't figure out why their cool new game didn't sell as well (clearly it needed more full motion video, duh!)
Then Blizzard decided to make an MMO. Up until that point, no monthly fee MMO had cleared even half a million subscribers. Along comes Blizzard, beloved of all the people they haven't screwed every last penny out of in the past, and they clear the million subscribers almost immediately and five million not long after.
Certainly producing good games has a lot to do with it. But the very best previous MMOs couldn't manage 1/10th the subscriber figures Blizzard got, no matter how good they were. Even if WOW was that much better, the MMO market was relatively tiny at the time. Something changed that meant ten times as many people were willing to give WOW a chance (because, without players giving it a chance, good or not, no game succeeds).
I'd suggest that was the massive loyalty Blizzard has built up amongst fans over the years precisely by not applying the, "Does this make this year's balance sheet look the very best?" school of business.
And, now... Blizzard keep having to buy bigger offices with more rooms to stuff all of their cash in as they rake in ~$90m a month in subscriber fees (so vastly much more than the profit they could ever have made from their prior six or eight titles).
Loyalty, which you get from supporting people even when there's not a quick buck, is worth a fortune in the long run.
At the same time, publishers who're famous for cutting support of a game once the last copy on store shelves is sold can't figure out why they're making great games but just can't seem to turn the crazy profits Blizzard do.
So, no, you can't blame or expect different from Atari. But, perhaps, the reason they've fallen on such hard times is because, like most others, they keep playing the short game.
NWN was supposed to have the same community support as a Blizzard game. It was supposed to live forever based on community support. Look at Starcraft, it was released in 1998 and Blizzard released the 1.13f patch on Jan 18, 2006 .
In some respects, they have succeeded. But I think pulling support now would be a slap in the face to the people who have built up the community for NWN. I don't think people would trust efforts like this from Bioware again.
NWN1, IMHO, is one of the best PC RPGs to date. Not for the original campaign and the two expansions, but for three reasons:
1: Bioware kept the updates coming. Far past a typical game's lifetime, Bioware has kept NWN alive fixing bugs and hackable exploits. Bioware has also added lots of content that is free.
2: Bioware's module editor is excellent.
3: Put the two together, and you also have hundreds upon hundreds of top-notch single player as well as persistant worlds as modules.
For the buck per hour entertained, I cannot think of any game around that has provided me with as much.
Kudos to Bioware, and I hope Obsidian does as good a job with a module vault, continuous support even of forum trolls looking for blood, and constant updates.
As for Atari, I just hope they can have a change of heart, keep NWN1 going for another year or so, so people can get their modules and persistant worlds ported to NWN2.
Atari's involvement with ongoing support for NWN was minimal, basically all the patch support for NWN for the last year was BioWare driven and funded and had little Atari involvement. The premium modules program was used to fund continued support for NWN, including the recent 1.67 patch which added a large amount of new functionality and content to the game.
c =482695&forum=42
However, the focus of this discussion should not be on the patch support (which we planned to stop sometime this year anyway), but on the fact that several premium modules developed by very hard working groups of the community were cancelled litterally weeks before the finish line, robbing these people of their chance to get professional credit and reward for projects they had worked on for years in some cases.
Some more info:
http://nwn.bioware.com/forums/viewtopic.html?topi
Georg,
BioWare
In that case, it's as bad as the outbreak of IBM Personal System/2 and Corel Paint Shop Pro jokes around the release of Sony's PS2 and PSP gaming systems.
That is indeed the harshest aspect of the whole thing. I remember a year ago chatting with Bioware and getting ready to sign a contract to create some modules. My daughter had recently been born and I was fretting about turning my hobby into a paying gig, so I ended up deciding not to. I feel like I narrowly missed being hit by a bus.
I've heard similar negative things from other module builders. Working with Atari has been a nightmare for many, I think. Initially the modules were supposed to be non-Forgotten Realms, and then later that was switched to only Forgotten Realms. Because of that, the highest ranked module ended up being released for free.
I think Bioware meant well with their Digital Download project and in many ways it has been a success. It subsidized the support for NWN far beyond that of a normal game. As a bonus, many of the coding changes will make it into NWN2, as Bioware and Obsidian share their code. The unfortunate part is that Bioware and Obsidian are simply developers, and Atari and WotC must approve every little thing along the way. Sadly this leads to a situation where the developer means well, but doesn't really control the situation. In some ways I'm hoping this triggers a move away from licensed IPs and we'll see more original IP coming out. I'm guessing the mod teams will follow along to safer pastures.
As I watch Atari struggle financially, I worry about the future of NWN2, which I've invested a lot of time planning for. Yet in a sense I'm secretly happy to see them feel the consequences of their actions over the years.
I would go even further and argue that persistent worlds are the best thing there is about NWN. And there we have a problem... Obsidian has introduced a fair few design decisions which make the life of PW builders much more difficult - much stricter limit on the number of areas, for example. When asked about it, they made it rather clear that PWs are not on their priority list for NWN2. The fact that DM client is not going to ship with the game either more than anything shows how SP-centric NWN2 is going to be. My fears are that we will get a good single player D&D adventure, but multiplayer support will be severely lacking, meaning most hardcore gamers will stay with NWN. Perhaps Atari understood that as well...
The worst part of this is that Bioware is not allowed to support NWN even if they want to. Atari have said that Bioware can't suppport it anymore. Probably becaouse Atari wants people to leave the NWN community for the NWN2 community. But I can't as I'm an all Linux user I can't join the NWN2 comunity as it won't run in Linux. So sadly I have to say farwell to the great community around NWN.
Claes
Important point. Another flaw...
"Even if WOW was that much better, the MMO market was relatively tiny at the time. Something changed that meant ten times as many people were willing to give WOW a chance"
MMORPG's are strange beasts. Despite all attempts the *play* doesn't hold people over time/levels. Many (definitely not all) WoW subscribers are surely cannibalized from other games. WoW ate all the other games' players. They sloshed into WoW, sloshed out, will slosh back in with the expansion.
WoW is a very good game. It went hoooooj by being good with great timing.
What *I* would do is hit players with an email approximately two months in. Trigger a combination of just-leveled/scored nifty phatloot/etc. Email: 12 month subscription is normally a 5% savings over month-to-month but if you do it RIGHT NOW [Read: You are jazzed RIGHT NOW. Later you will quit. Sign at a savings. Quit. Pay us without using our infrastructure] there is an additional 5% savings! You save money!
Feeling so good natured I could drool
Atary is acualy creating an anti-brand in the game industry... One of the first thing I look before buying a game is if it has something to do with atary...
When I saw a Bioware + Lucas Arts game (starwars) I knew it was good. I don't even have to play to recomend it to my friends.
But when I see anything + Atary... Well.. I won't recomend for anyone.