Slashdot Mirror
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."
Does Atari, the current incarnation, have any history of releasing source code?
They're more comfortable with letting things rot and letting the fans pick up the broken pieces. See Temple of Elemental Evil for example. This engine could have spawned a new Gold Box series of games, easily selling a half dozen hit titles had they bothered to look after it properly. Instead the fans not only fixed the engine, they're going about recreating B2: The Keep on the Borderlands . They've got a whole team there redoing everything. Professional looking maps, dialogue, etc. To me that speaks volumes about the poor decisions Atari makes.
On the other hand, neverwinter nights is potentially at the end of its life cycle here. With number 2 right around the corner, they do want to shift focus to that. However, I honestly believe its not necessary. Its Neverwinter Nights 2. If you are a fan of the series, or D&D at all, you would have to live under a rock to not know that its coming out. I believe everyone with a system that can handle it and that plays NWN will purchase it, to a certain extent, there always seems to be drop off as a series continues. The only concern I see at this point is, what if they mess up the game?
From what I've read there are going to be a variety of changes and the way things are handled, like party death for example, that some people aren't happy about. If they drop support for NWN and botch NWN2, not that Atari has ever been at the helm of a botched game, you could see it doing serious damage to the franchise.
Personally I would like to have seen support continued for about 6 months after the relase of NWN2. This gives the community time to adjust and decide if it likes the new incarnation. If it doesn't and there is a big holder over from the original NWN, it might be worth focusing on some premium modules for the original. Like how Sony did with their monthly EP for Everquest.
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.
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.
Actually, Bioware had little to nothing to do with the decision to pull the plug on NWN as far as the cancelling the premium mod. The very reason that they have moved away from working under the DnD license to create their own games, I'm sure, has to do with dealing with companies like Atari. I'll be happy to continue playing Bioware games in the future. I certainly wont trust anything that comes out with the Atari name, though. I have my doubts that Atari will be around long anyway. I have my doubts that any game they publish will have any support beyond the release date. Look at Temple of Elemental Evil. That is what I expect to happen to NWN2.
.. Atari has basically told the Linux and Mac sides of the community to shove it with, absolutely, no support at all planned for server or client sides in NWN2, for those platforms. If support for those platforms happens, it will be at the expense of Obsidian. Who will probably not see any royalty monies from NWN2 due to Atari's financial problems.
btw. Bioware HAS been supporting the NWN community for 4 years now. Atari has not supported the community at all. And with 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
Well, you can forget about that. The source code is not owned by Atari, but by BioWare. And BioWare is guarding its source code very closely. People have been working to get BioWare to release the source code for the Infinity Engine, which is finished for BioWare for over four years now. The Infinity Engine is old, stale, and trashed, but it will not be released. As someone who has worked with (against) the BioWare lawyers, I know they simply are not going to do that. They have their reasons, trade secrets are one thing, the fact that the code is a big pile of spaghetti another. It is their good right, of course, and with NWN they have given the amateur developers a fantastic tool. But the source code you will not get.
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