Neverwinter Nights Forum News

Remove all ads!

(Originally posted by Veldrin)

Here are today's Neverwinter Nights forum highlights. Please take into account that these are only single parts of various threads and should not be taken out of context. Bear in mind also that the posts presented here are copied as-is, and that any bad spelling and grammar does not get corrected on our end.

Georg Zoeller, Designer

Bebilith: Since most players would definitly restore to a savegame when their favourite armor is destroyed (and the chance for this happening is quite high), the bebilith does not destroy the armor when it hits a player, but tears it away from your chest armor slot (unequipping it), and since you can not reequip it in combat, thats pretty bad already. If the module builder/dm wants to change to a more rules compliant version of that special ability, he/she can set a variable on the module, allowing the bebilith to actually destroy armor on hit. I think that solution should please both the hardcore rules fanatics and the casual players.

Touch Attacks: There have been changes to touch attacks, they were broken in different ways. In general they seem to be much more formidable now, some monsters are quite tough now as they actually hit you much better with them

ILR: You know, there are a lot of different opinions on ILR, some people find it too restrictive, others would like it even more restrictive. In the end it all boils down to that ILR is a tool that was designed to keep multiplayer fair, but it has a cost associated with it: it limits design choices. Plus, every time we touch IRL we would risk invalidating characters already created...Your above definition of "fixing" reveals the conflict that is out there aber ILR pretty much. Bottomline: Don't expect major changes in ILR for Hordes.

Epic Feats: Also, do not forget that there are the Great "insert ability score here" Feats that have already been announced. Since Spell Save DC in DnD is dependent on your caster's primary ability score, getting those feats will help you to increase the DC of the spells cast by you. Plus, Save DC vs Epic spells works different anyway.

Darcy Pajak, Assistant Producer

ILR: ILR is being left out just so the designers do not have to worry about creating funky cool items for player and then finding out they cannot use them for a few hours. ILR was put into place in the original game as a concern for people cheating. However we have found that the community deals with cheaters much better then we thought so we no longer see the need to keep it.

Henchman Control: Here are some reasons full henchmen interaction will not happen in NWN:
1 - NWN was partly designed for on-line play with a party of your friends.
2 - NWN was designed to have a quicker pace then our older RPG's

If we had included fully controllable henchmen, then we would have also needed to include the pause feature so players could take control of their party and set actions. If this went to an online game then we would be faced with either allowing players to pause the on-line game and forcing other players to wait for them, or not allow a player to control their party and get most of them killed as no AI routines can take into account all the possible situations in an on-line RPG. As we learn more about what people want to do with their henchmen we try to include it if it’s cost effective. The feedback we receive from the community does work its way into the game in some form or another.

David Gaider, Designer

Quote: - Like locks, henchmen should be told whether to help with traps.

This option is being added to the henchman dialogues in HotU. Incidentally, you'll also be able to tell your familiars/animal companions not to bash locked stuff if you don't want them to.

Quote: Isn't there some way to automatically set the henchmen to switch from ranged to melee weapons when they're in close combat?

We were working on this prior to SoU's release, but the decisions the henchman would make as to which melee weapon to use were kind of wonky if there was more than one in inventory... most of the testers preferred to use the inventory management system to manually tell their henchmen which weapon to use, so in the end we disabled it. It might get worked on some more prior to HotU, but seeing as manual control is available it might not.