Neverwinter Nights Forum Update

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(Originally posted by Darien)

Here's a batch of comments from the official Neverwinter Nights message boards.

Bob McCabe, Writing & Design:

Skills and Feat Packages: I think there's some confusion on this topic; you will be able to hand pick all your skills and feats. Packages are designed for people who aren't as familiar with D&D, and simply want to create a certain style of character, such as a swashbuckling rogue, or a sword-wielding cleric, for example. With packages, you don't need to know anything about skills and feats; your starting set-up is chosen for you.

Cloth Animation System: Framerate hit might have been one of the factors but there are others, as well. The primary one is that the algorithms we use for the cloth effect don't take collision and sorting into effect. A lock of hair, for instance, might cut through the character's ear in a strong wind. It's not that noticeable on a lock of hair but, if you apply the cloth algorithms to an entire robe, for instance, you'd constantly be seeing your character's knees poking through the fabric as they walk. Also, the movement of the fabric itself would be based on what the pelvis is doing rather than the movement of the legs themselves.

In short, while our current cloth system looks great and works wonderfully for what we're doing, it's not really a technology that lends itself well to cloaks and robes, etc. When the time comes to tackle those issues, we'll probably take a different technology path (though this one might still be useful for little details like fringes and tassles along the base of a cape, etc).

Building Large Areas: It really depends on what kind of use you are making of that space. Take a look at the Infinity Engine Games, and you'll be able to see what we're going for. In Icewind Dale, you can sit on one map for hours with all of the back-and-forth action and efficient design. As well, think of how long it took you to explore Baldur's Gate (the city), even though it was "only" 5 areas or so

Creating a rich city filled with possibilities for intrigues and explorations will not be difficult. It just comes down to changing your mind set a bit... hope that lifts the spirits some

Custom Stats: Yeah, some stats are pretty objective. Strength would be very easy to determine, but something like charisma?

To be honest, though, my friends and I used to try and do similar things. I think for intelligence we used IQ / 10; for dexterity, we had an archery competition; for constitution, it was how many laps we could do, or something like that... and so on.

Even if you can't get an accurate assessment of where you would fit into a D&D world, it's fun to make a non-heroic character, and still become a hero in the end. I feel like this is all leading down the path to non-powergamedom...heh...

Cord Grimwinder-8d, Interplaygames.com Moderator

Pre-Ordering: The thing about pre-ordering....at least in my experience, is that you usually can still buy the title at the local software store before your pre-order arrives, no matter which shipping option you pay for.

I've pre-ordered like 4 different games in the past couple of years and wound up buying all four at the local stores before my "pre" copy arrived. I would imagine it's mainly a luck of the draw type of thing, the smaller number of multiple copy orders for stores stand a better chance of getting out the door and delivered on time as compared to the thousands of individual copy orders for direct customer orders.

It's just easier to ship 100 orders for 20 each to a list than it is to ship 10,000 orders for one to a list.

Rob Bartel, Co-Lead Designer:

Moving a ship from area to area: You can't move the section of tiles themselves but you can run a script that parses out the locations and identities of all objects in the area and then "reseeds" them in the new area.

Aidan was doing some interesting research into some of this for one of his experimental modules and I seem to remember him being quite satisfied with the results. Maybe you can corner him in the Nexus chat sometime and pick his brain for details.

Subraces: Just to verify, yes we will have a subrace field available in the character creation process. While the official campaign will not be taking subraces into account, I can imagine user-made Underdark modules where being a drow will be tightly woven into the story and all of the special drow abilities will be scripted in for those who wish to play them. There has also been talk within the community of user-made drow "script-packs" that can be plugged into any module to make them 'drow-compliant.' In short, the subrace field is a powerful, open-ended feature that we wanted to make available to our users.

Trent Oster, Producer:

Pre-made player packages: We didn't get the Guis for Skill and Feat choices pretty enough for E3 so we didn't show them. It is basically the same as pre-made characters, you can use a package, or use the customize option and pick the skills and feats you want. You could also go into the skills and feats after choosing a package and change the skills and feats which come with it.

The 3 second casting time We've put in the 3 second casting time as an initial idea, in reality we will probably have to shorten the casting time to allow mages more opportunity to cast spells.