From the Official Neverwinter Nights Boards

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(Originally posted by Darien)

Here are some interesting comments to fix your Neverwinter cravings, straight from the official NWN message boards.

Cord Grimwinder-8d, Interplaygames.com Moderator

On the single player game: Actually, the "single player" game you mention shipping with NWN isn't; single player designed that is. It's a multiplayer game that *can* be played solo. The game is designed to dynamically scale to match the number of players playing it, that includes the number "one" ;-). The only real difference with the single player game is that you will have more NPC hireling opportunities and that you'll be able to pause the game without the DM doing it. So, to make a long story shot, you can design modules for one player specifically, or set it to scale to meet the needs of varying numbers of players from one, up to as many as your server can support.

On area transistions: You may set up area transitions pretty much however you please. You can make a door a transition point, a single tile edge or the entire edge of the area. You can set up teleport points as well. Because NWN is a real time multi player/ multi party game there will not a be a overland map where you click and travel from point to point and time passes, this would cause players to get out of sync on the clock. When you cross a area transition you will merely step into the linked area on the other side immediately. Travel time will have to be directly controlled by a DM if it is desired.

On tilesets: Well, there's something you have to understand here, when you say "lack". First, it takes a *team* of programmers and artists anywhere from 1 to 4 months to complete a tileset. Given that, it'd be sometime in 2004 before we actually got to play NWN if they were to expand the initial release tilesets to include the rest of the Forgotten Realms.

That's because those same people are also putting together the rest of the game in addition to tilesets. Sorry, but that's just the realities of game making ;-). Think about PnP D&D, did you see everything in the first book/boxed set? No, and if you're like me you have *several* book shelves full of source books and rules and *still* don't have half of the "world" of D&D covered. NWN is the first boxed set so to speak, and it focuses on the cities of Neverwinter and Luskan and their environs, simple time and resource constraints prevent more for now, not a lack of wanting to. SO, they aren't trying to compensate now for any outside perception that NWN lacks tiles because from the view point of their design goals, it doesn't.

The upside is that in expansions all the underlying rules and such will be in place so they can focus almost fully on things like more tilesets ;-).

On the cut scene editor: Since the cutscene editor will use the game play content and there isn't any climbing, I doubt they'll include any extra climbing cutscene animations. After all, they would have to include an animation for all of the possible models to really make it "suspend disbelief". That would take a rather large chunk of the artists' time for a limited use feature. So, we're probably going to have to rely on imagination in this case, and wait to see what we can do with camera angles in the editor mode.

On Torches: Ubless there's been a change of plans, yes you can add and remove torches.