March 2003

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Greyhawk: The Temple of Elemental Evil Forum Highlights
Posted Sunday, March 30, 2003 - 22:33 CET by Gopher

Here are today's "Greyhawk: The Temple of Elemental Evil" forum highlights. Please take into account that these are only single parts of various threads and should not be taken out of context.

Steve Moret, Lead Programmer

Quote: Shatter

I believe "Shatter" is actually going in as a modified spell. It doesn't behave 100% as the PHB describes shatter to behave. Rather than damaging items I think it does damage to crystalline things and other creatures of the earth domain. Don't worry it will be called out both in the manual and the in game documentation.

Quote: Wall Spells

You actually shouldn't * the walls. The o­nly reason they aren't o­n the list is because they couldn't get done in time for this month.

One of the reasons I posted this list this month was because "technically" this was our "Final Spells Added" milestone. We had wanted to do the walls, and Mike even did art for the Wall of Ice (and it could even be broken thru by attacking, etc,. and of course it looked freakin bitchin, thanks Mike!!!). And really, they weren't impossible to do, but there were just so many of them and they each would take a few days work. They couldn't get done in time for this month so "officially" we had to drop them.

Thats not to say they can't reappear in later months. Just don't expect them, or any other spell to be added.

Quote: Wall Protection from Fire

As far as I know, and this is the way I GM, The Protection from Elements: Fire spell does not protect you from the chemical reaction known as combustion (there for producing the effect known as fire) it protects you from damage of the type fire.

Thus the spell would absorb some of the fire damage that the boiling water would give you.

Quote: Yeah, there are lot of spells...how many of them are useful? Or are a lot of those in there because some classes can't cast anything else?

Every spell in that list has many uses in the game. We specifically excluded those that didn't have any (or o­nly o­ne single) use in the game. That was the cut off reason for most of the spells. I would say we o­nly didn't include about 10-20 because of time.

We also have 100% coverage o­n 100% of the domains, and I woudl guess every class has at least 8 (probably at least 10) and o­n average 15 or more spells to pick from per level. Does someone want to make a chart or do the statistics o­n what classes get what spells at what level in ToEE?

I heard a quote/rumor going around the office the other day that was something to the effect of that "We have more spells starting with the letter S than most other D&D games have in total."

I know that delay is in, and readying an action (for a spell to be cast, an enemy to enter a threatened area, or another creature to act) is being worked o­n. I am hoping that Sean will have readying an action to counterspell, but I'm not sure it is in, or if it will make it. Really is cool, useful, and we hope it can get in. I think it makes dispel magic a super powerful spell.

Huy Nguyen, Interface and Magic System

Quote: Teleport

The o­nly implementation of teleport right now is to essentially be the worldmap shortcut. out of combat, it allows you to bring up the worldmap anywhere, and travel to a known destination without random encounters. not exactly the 3rd edition spell, we know, but this was the best way to integrate a worldmap "shortcut" (given the choice between an item or a spell or an Orb of the Moons that could do this), and teleport was given this functionality. sorry for the Ultima reference

Dimension door is the o­ne currently used in combat/dungeons to move the caster to non-worldmap destinations. teleport may be changed/added so that it functions like dimension door, o­nly with the entire party (probably out of combat). The problem of course, with spells such as these, is bypassing scripted areas/events, where dependencies may break. we'll see

In any case, teleport will technically be teleport without error ...for obvious fun reasons!

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"Jefferson" Project Forum News
Posted Sunday, March 30, 2003 - 19:50 CET by Veldrin

Here are today's "Jefferson" project forum highlights. Please take into account that these are only single parts of various threads and should not be taken out of context.

J.E. Sawyer, Lead Designer

Quote: But the reality is I'm trying to pin down a generally accepted identity for an entire *race* - an identity which people all too often toy with, ignoring the wealth of information we have on these dark elves. To me, this is inappropriate and must be addressed.

Huh? The majority of people in any race aren't adventurers, period. Most humans don't go around cleaving goblins in twain with a two-handed sword. Most elves don't learn how to shoot eldritch flame by manipulating the Weave. Most dwarves don't hack into a giant's kneecap with a battleaxe.

If drow are to be restricted from certain things, why not surface elves? Halflings? Dwarves? Humans? It is anathema to the desires of many role-players. If all elves have to be good or neutral, run around with bows, and frolick in sunlit meadows, it takes a lot of freedom away from how people are allowed to make and play their characters. There's nothing particularly fun about restricting people, and balance isn't even a question in a case like this. If drow can be priests of Vhaeraun, and priests of Lathander are roughly as powerful as those priests, what game balance concerns are there?

Ultimately, complaining about what sort of characters other people play is kind of ridiculous, IMO. The methods by which other players have fun are irrelevant if they have no direct effect on you.

Quote: and NO drow can be clerics of Lathander (duh).

No such restriction has ever been in place, your personal opinions aside. Ugly people cannot be priests of Sune because it's part of their religion. Violent people cannot be priests of Eldath because it is anathema to their whole belief system. Lathander is the god of dawn, light, and renewal. As exceptional characters, drow make more sense as Lathanderites than many other races. Have you never read the parable of the prodigal son?

Quote: can we increase or decrease camera angle and will there be a sky. I really would love a sky.

You can move the camera between 38.5 degrees above the horizon to 90 degrees -- straight down. You will only see the sky in select cutscenes.

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Neverwinter Nights Linux Client Public Beta
Posted Sunday, March 30, 2003 - 13:55 CET by Gopher

Bioware has released the latest version of the Neverwinter Nights Linux Client; Public Beta 3. It fixes the following:

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Planescape: Torment Review at JustRPG
Posted Sunday, March 30, 2003 - 13:43 CET by Gopher

JustRPG has posted a review of the classic game Planescape: Torment, and unsurprisingly gave it a high score of 92%.

"This game has many, many hours of gameplay stuffed within it, and many more should you want to discover everything. I do have one complaint though, and that is the game's reliance on Intelligence and Wisdom stats to reveal memories. Having 18 Wisdom and Intelligence is all fine and good, but when you're a fighter, it's worth pretty much nothing. Even so, the game will keep you playing on and on to find who the Nameless One is.

And that's only half of it. You can play the game straight from beginning to end, but if you do, you're going to miss out on more than half the game. Discovering new things is what the game is all about, not just playing from beginning to end. Probably the most interesting to discover is your relation to the characters that you had before you woke up in the beginning. Once you finish the game, you will sit back and wish there was more. It feels like you have just finished a great movie or book - and don't want the magic to disappear!"

Read the rest here!

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Neverwinter Nights Forum News
Posted Saturday, March 29, 2003 - 2:32 CET 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.

David Gaider, Designer

Scripting Functions In SoU: I was talking to Brent today about a certain scripting function which will be available in SoU that has some... interesting implications. Gold star to the first person who figures out just how cool this is:

string Get2DAString(string s2DA, string sColumn, int nRow)

Hmm. Well, let me be a bit more specific on what the command does, exactly. It will actively look in any 2DA file at the specified row and column and return whatever is in there in string form (you can always use the StringTo# functions to change that data, of course). And when I say any 2DA file I mean any .2da file.

Quote: I don't think this has anything to do with persistent data storage.

No, this has nothing to do with data storage. There is no Set2DAString function... Get only. The persistent variable storage stuff is comepletely seperate from this.

Quote: This is extremely nice. Two major implications: First is the creation of custom 2das with data that you want in it, to allow data to be stored both more easily, and in a form that's customizable. The people who make custom packs, such as the trade skill people should be ALL over this, since they could use this to make custom recipes in a list format, that could be easily modified. The second implication is that a large amount of data that people have wanted will become available. You want GetAppearance? No problem, just query the race, and get the race 2da at that point, with the appearance number (column eight) and you have the appearance they should have. If this is actually put in, it will be extremely big.

Halfelf gets the gold star! That's exactly it. Customizeable wandering monster lists, summoning lists, treasure lists, trade skills... anything you need a table for in an easy-to-use fashion, there you go, no more need to fake arrays or any nonsense like that. And, like he said, you can also look up any information on the .2da's that currently exist... not to mention adding new columns to them, if you find a need for it. And somebody will, I'm sure.

Quote: It just didn't seem like THAT big a deal... since you can fake it with a list of constants in the scripting...

I suppose it's true that there are many things this function does that are currently possible... but you try creating a wandering monster table or a random treasure table via regular scripting and then try it with a .2da and then tell me how big a deal it is.

Waypoints: You know... I'm not really sure if this is an XP1 feature or if the Live boys did it, but I do know that it used to be impossible to spawn in a new Waypoint object on the fly with scripting. You can, now, and that may have some interesting possibilities insofar as teleportation goes, no? Personally, I've always thought that the Morrowind method was the best way to do teleportation in a game. There you lay down an anchor... and that's where you teleport to. That means you can only teleport somewhere where you've already been. The fact that D&D's teleportation spells do it otherwise is the real rub where design is concerned. The trigger thing we may just have to get over eventually. It won't be easy, but I suppose we'll have to at some point, eh?

Brent Knowles, Co Lead Designer

Feats: For XP1, class feat-spell abilities *will* show up dynamically, though there is a cap of 7 active abilities on the radial, if I remember correctly. So this means you could add Feat X which calls Spell X for your new prestige class and it would show up on the radial menu in game if you set the data up correctly.

Jay Watamaniuk, Community Manager

Patch 1.30: No info on 1.30 at this point folks. I can tell you that it will not be for a bit as we are really crunching hard on Shadows right now to devote much attention to anything else. Never fear fixes, features and fan-fugu-tastic bits and pieces are adding up to make 1.30 very cool when it is ready to go. A caution however: it will be a while before it is released.

Finesse Fighter: I'm all about the finesse fighter as I do not go for the tank types. The recommendation of a bit of Ranger to get the duel fighting bonuses are great but to really maximize your feats (if it matters to you) sticking to one weapon and specializing the whole nine yards with it. The weapon of choice is not really that important as long as its included in the Weapon Finesse feat (even dual daggers can be scary when you add the fighter feats to them). If you choose two different weapons you will end up spending a lot of feats to make them even. Pick one and go crazy with it. The feats you need as a finesse guy:

Dodge, Mobility, Toughness (focus on Dex not con). Weap Finesse, Weap Focus, Weap Spec, Improve Crit. Say you have 12 Str, 16 Dex to start thats a bonus of +4 to hit, and +3 dam (with double the Crit Threat range). Very cool. Add a magic weapon, higher Dex and you're off to the races.

Romance: The idea of having a romance in a RPG is, not surprisingly , one of the core elements when the story is being written. Polls aside, we receive an enormous amount of mail about the importance of romance in a long story arc. It is one of the most basic story elements to really involve people. Hack and slash is great but hack and slash where your paladin saves the kidnapped princess or the captured pirate lord is better for motivation. It requires great care and some excellent writing to make such a thing appealing to people. You also need to always have the option of completely ignoring the romance angle for those who want to get back to defeating evil/good. Human relationships are the reason for a lot of heroic moments. Collecting gold and magic is great but saving the life of your sweetheart is better in my opinion.

Don Moar, Tools Programmer

NPCs Walking Waypoints: If you place three waypoints, A-B-C, then by default, the NPC will walk A-B-C-B-A and then repeat.

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Greyhawk: The Temple of Elemental Evil Forum Highlights
Posted Friday, March 28, 2003 - 17:28 CET by Gopher

Here are today's "Greyhawk: Temple of Elemental Evil" project forum highlights. Please take into account that these are only single parts of various threads and should not be taken out of context.

Steve Moret, Lead Programmer

Quote: Near Final Spell List;

Here is the spell list as of the end of March. While there may be a few additions, removals, or changes, I think this will probably be the list of spells we will be shipping with (actually I think we're are going to do about another 30 more, but I'm not going to promise it). Everybody thank Huy Nguyen for working major overtime to get all of these done.

p.s. Before anybody gets mad saying, "Hey my favorite spell XXXX isn't there! Hey it would be easy to do YYYY do it like this, why don't you do it." Please remember we're posting this information for your benefit and we appreciate your feedback. But please make it constructive feedback. We aim to please, but we also aim to get the game done o­n time. There are a total of 224 so far. So with that said... here you go, enjoy!

You can view the spell list here, but remember this is not the complete one, as they might have some more to do.

Quote: Additional lists?

I'll try to post additional lists as we feel we can properly release them to the public. I'd like to post a Skill List, Feat List, and Class Feature List as soon as I can as well. Keep your eyes open.

Huy Nguyen, Interface and Magic System

Quote: About the Near Final Spell List;

Doh! Now you know exactly who to blame when none of them work!
heheh... yeh, this list still isn't complete yet, especially if you consider the non-PC spells that are left to do (monster spells/special attacks, magic items, etc).

Quote: There's no Otto's Irrestible Dance? No Tenser's Floating Disc, Leomund's Secure Shelter (oh, fine, so that one's impossible), Leomund's Secret Chest or even a lowly Rope Trick? My poor hobbit sorcerer will be forced to break his back and abandon all hope of shelter in this game? Most saddening.

Otto's Irresistable Dance is a level 8 sor/wiz, level 6 bard spell - not for this game. Both leomund spells mentioned are still on the list of spells to be implemented, so once i can get around to them...

For ToEE, secure shelter will most likely change in functionality to simply allow you to rest wherever you are with no encounters. Useful when deep in a dungeon...

As for tenser's, the usefulness of the spell when weighed against the special cases it would need means it is probably tossed out (if it hasn't been already). And, given options like leomund's chest, there are several other (better) ways to increase your carrying capacity/avoid encumbrance.

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Neverwinter Nights Forum News
Posted Thursday, March 27, 2003 - 18:09 CET 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.

David Gaider, Designer

Random Encounters: And, indeed, there are community-created scripts out there that do this very thing. We will have our own system for this ready for XP2.

Romances in SoU: The henchmen are a lot more interactive this time around, but no... there are no romances in SoU. Maybe next time.

Advice: I think it's much easier (and much more satisfying in the long run) to make your players really hate your villain. And by hate I mean salivating at the mere thought of running him through, abandoning quests in the middle to chase after him, that sort of thing. Players rarely fear what you think they should. A sense of mortality is very difficult even for the best roleplayer. It's like the unwritten design rule that you should never put a player in a position where the best option is to flee... unless you make it the only one, chances are he won't take it.

Patches: Yes... all the patches up to the point of the expansion's release will be included with it.

Custom Content: I just had a whole thread about this in the custom content section. Basically it's what's been mentioned, though it's several magnitudes more complicated than that. Witch's Wake has a unique advantage with regards to community content because it's not a commercial product... it's free. Bio has mentioned numerous times that this is something we'd like to look at doing, but we're not going to do it until and unless all the legal wrinkles can be worked out.

DM Possesion: You should be able to just go to the special abilities section of the radial and have them all there... unless you don't have any of the patches applied. The original NWN release didn't allow for DM's to use creature special abilities during possession, but that was fixed on the second patch, I believe.

Tom Ohle, Communications Associate

Neverwinter Wednesday: Fact is, this Wednesday will be interesting for people who play bards. Weeks where we reveal spells will be hideously boring to people who really don't like spellcasters. As far as SoU info goes... it's all going to be in your hands by release. Does the order really matter? If you don't take the bard feats now, you'll get them next week, or the week after, or sometime after that.

Craig Welburn, Live Team Programmer

Quote: Yeah, this "feature" is not likely to be implemented any time soon. I personally do not find it to be a big issue, but then again, I trust my players... Local Vault/non-passworded games are certainly a different story.

Actually we're looking at adding this for a future patch. Don't know which patch it will make it into at this point.

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Last Week's Poll's Results
Posted Thursday, March 27, 2003 - 16:30 CET by Sorcerer

What we asked:

Q: What do you think about romances in CRPGs like Baldur's Gate 2?
(477 votes total)

They're a great feature (266) 56%
They're nice, but not really necessary (110) 23%
I couldn't live without them (78) 16%
They're distracting and not really needed (23) 5%

Not surprisingly, more than half of the poll participants (56%) think that romances in CRPGs are a great feature.

23%, however, say that while they are nice, they are not really necessary.

16% of people who voted are obviously very attached to their CRPG romantic interests and couldn't live without CRPG romances.

Only 5% of those who voted feel that CRPG romances are just distracting and not really needed.

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Neverwinter Wednesday
Posted Thursday, March 27, 2003 - 11:43 CET by Sorcerer

Another week's around and here are the latest NWN Wednesday goodies:

New Bard Feats: Perform your inspirational music more often and ensure that even the memory of your music can sustain the weariest and most battle worn of companions. This week we reveal Extra Music and Lingering Song, two of the 30 new feats included in the upcoming Shadows of Undrentide expansion. Another extra feat has been released to us:

Greater Spell Penetration

Type of Feat: General
Prerequisite: Spell Penetration.
Specifics: You have trained to become skilled at slipping your spells through even the most impregnable of defenses. A +4 bonus on caster level checks is granted to the character, when trying to beat a creature's spell resistance.
Use: Automatic.

Player Note: Certain spell-resistant creatures will pose far less of a problem for a spell caster who chooses this feat giving them a wider range of creatures that will be affected by magic. This will make them mad however so be wary.

and two more to RPGVault.

Guild Profile: Dor Maeglin: This week Jay profiles the dark and merciless world of Dor Maeglin. Dor Maeglin is a visually striking world balanced around how people play on-line. Their guild currently has a membership of 250, and is run by TempusMagus and SlayerNFC.

Additional Bigby's Spells: The Shadows of Undrentide spell list has been updated with the two additional Bigby's spells released to fan sites last week: Bigby's Forceful Hand and Bigby's Clenched Fist. (We have posted those two here last week.)

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Neverwinter Nights Forum News
Posted Tuesday, March 25, 2003 - 22:11 CET 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.

David Gaider, Designer

Resting: Hmmm. Okay, I have to admit I've been swayed a little. If I make sure there is a decent amount of scrolls and potions I suppose that does provide enough in the way of resources that a player should be able to continue. All those resources should be for something, right? It puts me in mind a bit of a PnP situation that I had almost forgotten about. My entire party, after a long bout of play, ended up being depleted of spells and mostly injured just as the adventure was reaching its climax... they were up against time and they had to go and take out the Big Bad without a chance to rest. The party freaked... until they finally figured out that they had a decent collection of scrolls, wands and potions that they hardly ever used (one always saves them for "someday"). So they went into the last battle and used up almost every scroll, wand and potion they had during it... and won. I still don't agree with applying time restrictions to resting... but this thought does make me feel a bit better about the thought of restricting adventuring areas completely for resting. Not entirely certain, though. I'll have to think about it.

Quote: Any official campaign should have as open rules as possible. If you want to limit your resting. Then DON'T rest. But why should your play style more more important than someone else.

It's not all about play-style, however. From a design standpoint, I have to take into consideration the challenge of the game. If a player can recover all their resources between each encounter, then a challenging encounter would have to be one that forces the player to expend much or all his resources in order to succeed. If, however, I knew that a player could not recover all his resources easily, then having each encounter use up all the player's resources would be ludicrously difficult. I would never want to do that.I have to try and take into consideration not only what is fun and intuitive, but also the challenge that is being presented to the player.

Quote: Well, don't think about it too long. We all want the expansion released afterall!

We've decided to try out limiting resting in dungeons... you won't be able to rest on a given level until/unless certain plot points are met that make it okay (like, say, you've negotiated peaceful passage with the tribe that lives there... or killed them all). I suspect whether or not that even stays in will depend largely on how improved the AI for the henchmen will be. We'll have to see. But that's it as far as resting restrictions go, at least as far as the OC is concerned.

SetAppearance: I can always inquire about the feasibility of implementing SetAppearance for XP2. Seeing as it exists as a console command, one would think it wouldn't be too difficult... but I really don't know. I don't think it would come with a GetAppearance, however.

Official Campaign: Now this is what I call a leading question... the person asking the question isn't interested in an answer at all, but rather is just trying to make a point. So I'll make this quick:

1) No, we don't think the NWN OC is crap. We do (gasp!) realize that it probably wasn't for all types of gamers, but that still doesn't make it crap.

2) Will the SoU OC be equivalent to Fallout/BG2/Whatever? No, it won't. SoU is an expansion release, not a full game. It's going to be short, for starters. It won't be as geared towards the casual player as the NWN OC was, but I bet there's still a good chance (gasp!) that some will find it's still not hardcore enough for them.

Oh, the humanity.

Quote: well mr Gaider, I've seen your comments about the OC and you've said that you werent all to happy with certain aspects of the game (henchmen, how the story was interconnected and so on), and i can only assume that when you say "not too happy" on the games official board you actually mean "not happy at all". I might be wrong though.

Not exactly. I did say I wasn't happy with the amount of time we got to implement henchmen and put the story together, that's true... it wasn't as deep as BG2 was, which is something I like and something I'd like to do more of in the future. But that said, it's not as if NWN was unfinished or that it doesn't have an audience. It also has a great many things in it that I am very proud to have helped with and would gladly see implemented in any game, and it is a long, long way from sucking. That's all I meant. Your mileage may vary, obviously, but implicit in your question was the inference that if we at Bioware don't say that the OC sucks that we are simply not telling the truth because it's a public forum or that we are somehow blind, neither of which is true.

Quote: What I'd like to hear from a Floodgate designer is; I'm a 100% behind this game, it's the best I could do and I think it's a top contender, it's up there with PS:T.

Why does it have to a Floodgate designer?

Quote: I don't wanna read some weakly disguised exuses after the release about time constraints and how they would have done things differently if it wasn't for this and that... I want Floodgate to be proud of the game and I don't wanna hear "the campaign is not worse than BG2 it's just different"

There's a difference between 'weakly-disguised excuses' and a realization that every project is going to have aspects you wish you could have spent more time on or included or implemented differently. I doubt you see it that way, however, and I'm not about to spend more time trying to convince you... but there it is.

Quote: this be the second time I ask this; are Bioware designers involved in the expansion as well? Because it was my understanding that the campaign was all Floodgate...

I'm involved in the SoU official campaign, and I'm a Bioware designer.

Quote: But sure I'll take you word for it, is it a top contender with depth like PS:T?

It's too short to have depth like PS:T or any other full release (this is an expansion), and I don't know what your criteria are for 'a top contender'. A contender for what? I think it's shaping up to be a good adventure, probably more challenging that the NWN OC and lacking elements like infinite respawning and teleporting. We're getting more time for some attention to detail insofar as treasure placement and balancing goes, along with some great writing (so far) and some other interesting elements.
But you'll judge these things for yourself, I'm sure.

Druids and Rangers: I already commented on this in a previous thread, though I don't have a link handy. In short, as far as the SoU OC goes we've got Rangers & Druids getting a lot more mileage out of being able to talk to animals and are using a new "track" placeable in many places to allow them to track creatures and generally get more info. These are not hard-coded systems, however... we just like Rangers and Druids.

Wish we could learn a bit more about these placeables- would they have some kind of script that allows only Rangers to see? Require some kind of spot check like the hidden doors? Would everyone be able to see them once "detected" or just the individual, or party?

They are just a placeable, and everyone can see them... though in some situations they may be kind of hard to visually spot on the floor. In the SoU OC, our scripts do the following:

- when rangers get within a certain range of the track, it gives its feedback automatically.
- the feedback that is given gives a varying level of detail depending on class or Intelligence as follows:

Rangers: highest detail
Druid, Barbarian, High Intelligence: good detail
All others: normal detail

So if you find some tracks, a Ranger might be able to see that it belonged to 12 kobolds who were fleeing north. A Druid, Ranger of High Intelligence character could see that it belonged to a group of small humanoids (probably kobolds) who headed north. Everyone else would see that there were tracks there belonging to a large number of small creatures. All but the Ranger would have to click on the actual placeable in order to receive that information.

NWN Engine: Stuff that is an engine limitation is something you won't see changed outside of the hypothetical sequel. Stuff that is hard-coded you probably won't see changed in an expansion unless we feel it is worth the effort to do so... altering the coding at this point has the potential to introduce a lot of bugs and involves a lot of effort out of a very small team. If the bang involved from the zots needed isn't worth it (in our estimation), then we won't do it.

Underdark: Look, I'll say this much:

Wherever the location of XP2 is, it's going to be accessible to all character types. Total darkness is also one of those things that sounds neat in theory but doesn't work well in practice. At any rate, I don't envision the Underdark as being a pitch-black place where you can't see at all. Dark, yes. Blind-and-groping-dark, not really, and I don't see the point of limiting it to such. I see it as an alien landscape filled with glowing lichen and crystals and having a very dark and dangerous mood to it. If you've ever played Homeworld, you'll see that space looks great when you're not limiting your imagination to just blackness... and the Underdark is the same way.

Harpies: The harpy looks pretty good. Just as a suggestion, however, I think it would look better if you exaggerated the reverse bend of the legs and made the bottom half more birdlike, perhaps with larger talons of something similar.

Tom Ohle, Communications Associate

Quote: Those pillars have little variation in them (the texture mapping is not even flipped or anything) and the textures on them look to be a bit blurry. It seems to be in dire need of some good ol' polish.

Those pillars are actually placeables. That's why they're all the same.

Derek French, Assistant Producer

Linux Client Information: nwclient129beta2.tar.gz is now available on the Linux Client Download page. I would ask that anyone who is mirroring Beta 1 to get rid of it and replace it with this one. Having old Beta 1 files will just cause confusion.

Linux: There are a few issues that we want to resolve before we make a big deal and go with press releases and the like. Once we get those in and working, then we will whip out the marching band.

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Chat with the "Jefferson" Designer
Posted Monday, March 24, 2003 - 1:18 CET by Gopher

Sean K. Reynolds is a designer for "Jefferson", plus a former online-coordinator for Wizards of the Coast. He does level design, dialogues and quests amongst other things for Jefferson. He recently did an IRC Chat, undoubtedly answering some of the questions you may have. Here are some things he had to say:

Sean K. Reynolds, Jefferson Designer

Quote: I'd like him to say whether he finds Jefferson to be a big improvement over older BIS games... and if he does, which feature can he name as the most "evolutionary" in the game.

Hmm.... Yes, I think so. While I can't give specifics, we're doing something really cool with how the other members of your party interact with you, each other, and with NPCs in the game. It makes your party makeup influence the outcome of the game more than just by what your ranks in. Diplomacy and Intimidate are. People will really dig it. It makes dialogues a pain to plan out, but it's cool. Done.

Quote: Do Sean and Eric like the way the Realms are headed in general?

Honestly, I don't know where the FR is headed now! I haven't been at WotC for a year, and after Unapproachable East I don't know what books they're doing. There also isn't really an FR team any more, or a creative director whose sole responsibility is FR. So I wonder what's up. We'll just have to see. But I agree with Eric ... 3E has allowed us to easily model stuff with game rules, and we've had a reasonable balance of crunch vs. fluff.

Those are just snippets, you can read the whole thing here.

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Neverwinter Nights Forum News
Posted Sunday, March 23, 2003 - 22:42 CET 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.

David Gaider, Designer

Helmets: The problem is that the helmet slot is currently hard-coded to want to replace the current PC head model with another head model when something is put in it. There's no way currently to select amongst a group of head models to put there... it can only be one. If no model is specified, you're literally headless. I suppose you could change the current helmet slot so that placing an item in it changed the color of the normally-invisible headband you mention... but what, then, about actual helmets? It'd be more likely to get a completely seperate "headgear" slot (or whatever) that does what you want. At that point, however, we're talking about GUI alteration and more coding. Not impossible, but not incosiderable, either. I'm not sure what you could tie the appearance of such a headband to currently, other than the rest of the armor... which probably isn't the effect you're looking for.

Quote: The tricky part is when you pick up the circlet item, have a script that:

a) checks the pc's head model

This is the part that cannot be accomplished. There is no scripting hook into which head model is being used.

Body Parts: The thing I like is you've obviously found the ability to mix body parts that don't change (the tiefling's legs, for instance) with body parts that do (the rest of the tiefling body, which I assume can be armored as need be). I wonder if that means you could have, say, a fighter with an actual tunic for a chest piece (which never changed) but the rest of his body parts changed normally when armored? Very cool, regardless.

Resting: Mmm. As I said, if the marking of certain areas as unrestable seems too cumbersome, it probably won't stay in. Even as is, we may try playing with it a little... perhaps marking certain well-defensible areas in a dungeon as restable and/or turning an entire level as restable once it's been "cleared". Hard to say. It might not be worth the trouble (just like the "5 minute" resting restriction mentioned above... at that point, why bother?) Any kind of spawning system that disturbs resting is the kind of thing I'm talking about that will need to wait until XP2. Any regular roaming guards and similar already restrict resting normally, so nothing new is needed there.

As far as the OC in SoU goes, it is simply not an option to offer any sort of toggle as far as what rules will be used. That simply will not happen... we cannot afford to test and balance the campaign for each individual case. And again, as I have already said, we will not put in any kind of restriction that is too cumbersome. Ease of gameplay is still the prime factor, here... not simulating restrictions just for their own sake. As I already said, the ability to freely teleport out of combat or to a safe zone was the major piece of cheese that needed to be cut out... everything else can be designed around.

Quote: The simplest and easiest to implement moderate resting restriction is a simple script that tracks how long it has been since the player last rested and interrupts them after a proportional length of time. In other words - if you allow the player to rest fully every 6 minutes and they last rested 3 minutes ago you let them rest for half of their resting duration and then interrupt their rest.

Sorry, but as I already said I will not implement this. Forcing a player to stand around in real time because of some arbitrary time limit is not good gameplay, in my estimation. Even in PnP campaigns, the group often rests more often than once a day if they are severely depleted in a dungeon, for instance... and even if I decreed as the DM that they couldn't rest until later, if they are desperate enough they will simply say "We'll wait until we can sleep, then." As DM I could either call up an encounter or I could say "Ok, poof! Time has passed." Can't do that in NWN. Even in the BG series we didn't prevent people from resting as much as they needed to. What if you were playing BG2 and your entire party was in the middle of a module spell-less and at 1 HP? You press rest and it says "You cannot rest yet!". So you stare at the screen and wonder "Well, what am I supposed to do NOW?!" Now, I suppose it's conceivable that some could look on that as a challenge and say they'd want that. I simply suggest that it goes too far and I see no justification for putting something like that in the OC.

Quote: Just to make sure you didn't miss my point. You NEVER have to stand around in real time waiting to rest. You can ALWAYS rest. You just can't always rest for FULL DURATION. Minor point, but I like to clear.

No, I didn't miss that point, Carl, though I suppose I didn't respond to it directly. Two things about partial resting, as you suggest it:

1) Such a beast does not exist, currently. You either rest or you don't.

2) Even if a partial rest could be scripted, somehow (and it probably could), it still doesn't address the situation I mentioned. There is still an arbitrary length of real-time that is limiting the player from recovering. If they're resting, it's probably because they need to... and if they don't get back more than a few HP's and some low-level spells, what are they apt to do? Press it again. Of course, they just rested... so they'd probably get back very little if anything at this point. What do they do then?
Well, no, they don't press it again... at least I wouldn't. But they would be back to my square one sitting around in real-time until they could rest fully.

Now I'm not saying that some kind of resting restriction isn't a good thing. That just isn't it. Inconveniencing a player for the sake of realism is rarely as fun in practice as it is in theory... at least to anyone less than a hardcore sado-masochist (hey... I just spent the last two weeks trying to convince myself I was enjoying MOO3... I know whereof I speak). What I think is ideal is the same kind of resting restriction that I would use in PnP:
Let's say my party of players are a mere two rooms into a dungeon when they decide they want to rest. This with the entire dungeon aware that they're there. Prop up a chair against the door and post a guard, they say... they'll be fine. Ideally I would throw a random encounter at them. I can't do that in XP1, however, so I really have two choices.

1) Don't allow them to rest in the dungeon until it is cleared enough to be relatively safe.

2) Allow them to rest and adjust the encounters in the dungeon, since I know they'll be fully rested for each one of them. Maybe not ideal but at least this time they won't be teleporting away in the middle of a combat to return to full strength.

In either case, whenever a PC is eligible to rest, they should be able to rest fully and as often as they need to. Anything else just doesn't make sense, play-wise. That's how I see it currently, anyhow. Feel free to convince me of otherwise, if you wish.

Quote: If this were the case, you'd think they would choose to showcase three brand new tiles, not one.

While I'm not 100% down with what the art department is up to, I don't think the ruins tileset is quite complete, yet. They may not have had a choice in the matter.

Quote: Unless Arcane Archer has the race restriction removed, they've already got one racially restricted prestige class...

The restriction hasn't been removed. Arcane Archers are, indeed, restricted to elves and half-elves

Legal Things: Thank you for your assurances, Luna, and while I don't mean to impugn your professionality in any way they're rather beside the point. Legal matters and common sense don't necessarily go hand in hand. Bioware is looking at some of the methods used by other companies which have released community-made material. I don't know what the status of that is... but I do know Bioware will only proceed forward with this sort of thing when an arrangement has been made to accomodate it which we are completely comfortable with. After all... it's not as if the community at large doesn't have access to your wonderful drider models, Luna (and I do think they're great). They do. Being able to release it to a larger audience would simply be a more ideal situation... but we'll only do that when we can be certain it's a win/win situation for both sides and not have the chance to turn into some embarassing mess that we'll regret not preparing enough to prevent. I don't think we can be faulted for wanting that, do you?

Tom Ohle, Communications Associate

Bigby Spells: Interposing Hand is an open-palm hand that circles around the affected creature. Not sure about crushing, though... I'll have to check that out in a bit.

Derek French, Assistant Producer

Quote: 2. not be avaliable only to people who subscribed to the website, it's sucky enough of you guys telling everyone it will be shipped with the the game itself.

Aside from patches, all downloads from our Community Site require you to have a free, BioWare Community Account. At a later date, we will allow you to flag your self as a Linux user. I am pretty sure that the Linux community will want to uniquely identify themselves so we can judge how many Linux users we have. You want us to know about you, don't you?

Quote: 1. We bought a copy of the Windows version for my wife quite awhile ago, and I've been playing my character on her box occasionally... will I be able to move my character over? My plan based on some of the comments from Jay and Andrew was to copy the installed image from her wintendo across the ehternet, which would include the save games. Hopefully I'll be able to just load the game as I last saved it on her box and quest on....

We have done some basic testing on this, and yes, you can move everything over and it will just work.

Quote: 2. Will (at least the alpha/beta/demo/whatever) be able to share a CD key? I've been holding off pre-ordering a second copy from TuxGames waiting for at least some form of binary to come out as a preview. (once it does, my order will go in within 48 hours.) In the interim while I wait for my own CD key, will we be able to play together in a lan game? (once the play disc is read at the begining of the game, it doesn't appear to be used again, so I think I can take it out of here drive before I start my client... if not, well, this is Linux, I hack the kernel on a regular basis... I can make the game think it sees that disc in the drive no matter what.)

No, there is no CD Key "sharing" in any version of NWN.

Quote: 3. Will there be a form of bug reporting/tracking aside from the fora for the alpha/beta? (something like bugzilla or whatever) As a software engineer myself I would want to be able to file detailed bugs against the beta if it has "issues"... the fora, while a nice bit of comunity, really don't lend to that activity well.

There will be an e-mail address to report bugs to, just like there currently is for game bugs and exploits. We will announce it when the Beta Client is available for download.

Quote: 4. What should we expect for hardware requirements? My current system shouldn't have any problems with the game, with the possible exception of my graphics card. But since I run an SMP workstation, I've often found that my box was "just slightly outside" the bounds of what most programs were tested on; it tends to expose race conditions and such that are simply never seen on uni-processors, which also leads into why I'm asking about #3.

My workstation stacks up as such:
2x Athlon MP 1800+
SB Live!
Geforce 2 Ultra (glxgears averages 1700 fps)
1G ram
SCSI 3 LVD raid array for operating system and important data (bloody fast)
IDE raid for bulk storage (cheap, huge, relatively slow, but still faster than most windows machines)

Actually, we want to hear back from you as to your experience, as we don't have a wide enough variety of machines to make a good guess on this.

Quote: 5. Assuming all goes well with the beta (we can dream can't we... besides, I'm sure Andrew and team are using this extra time to test the client.) How long untill we have a shipping client from a technical perspective? i.e. how long do you plan to let us pound the snot out of it before you release to mfg?

No idea at this time. We will see how the Beta goes.

X-Packs & Linux: The executable for NWN, for both original NWN and the expansion is the same executeable. And since the resources of NWN are cross-platform, the development effort for XP1 for Linux pretty much takes care of itself.

Quote: As a last request, I would ask that a method be made available for a pure Linux user to be able to actually use this client you spent 8 months porting.

As we have said, several times, that the requirement for a Windows 1.29 install of NWN is only for the Linux Client Beta and not for the final version. While we don't have the method locked down 100% right now, it will not require any dealings with Windows whatsoever. You will still need to purchase a Windows copy of the game, but that is ONLY so you can get the CD Key from inside the manual. I would also like to point out that the info above was presented back at the Jan 17th 2003 update for the Linux Client, so this is not new news at all.

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Shadows of Undrentide Update at GameSpot
Posted Sunday, March 23, 2003 - 18:33 CET by Mollusken

GameSpot have recieved some information on the upcoming Neverwinter Nights expansion, Shadows of Undrentide. They've also got three new screenshots, which features the new ruins and rural winter tilesets.

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Greyhawk: The Temple of Elemental Evil Forum News
Posted Sunday, March 23, 2003 - 15:30 CET by Gopher

Here are today's forum highlights for Greyhawk: The Temple of Elemental Evil. Please take into account that these are only single parts of various threads and should not be taken out of context.

Huy Nguyen, Interface and Magic System

Quote: Are caltrops in? And can we make a heal check to stem the bleeding/remove the caltrops?

I have already implemented several spells that have a similar effect (spike stones, for example, comes to mind) - so if/when we get around to implementing generic items such as caltrops, i don't believe it will be too much of a hassle.

The problem of course, as always, is what priority those are set at... and i believe caltrops, tanglefoot bags, alchemist fire, etc, aren't that high on the priority list...

Quote: also, which of the following are in for magical weapon creation? Defending, Flaming, Frost, Shock, Ghost touch, Keen, Mighty cleaving, Spell storing, Throwing, Bane, Disruption, Flaming burst, Icy burst, Shocking burst, Thundering, Wounding, Holy, Unholy, Lawful, Chaotic, Brilliant energy, Dancing, Speed, Vorpal?

...I believe caltrops, tanglefoot bags, alchemist fire, etc, aren't that high on the priority list, and for sure aren't above the tons of magic items list that we have to implement. ;)

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Greyhawk: The Temple of Elemental Evil Forum News
Posted Saturday, March 22, 2003 - 20:18 CET by Gopher

Here are today's official Greyhawk: The Temple of Elemental Evil forum highlights. Please take into account that these are only single parts of various threads and should not be taken out of context.

Huy Nguyen, Interface and Magic System

Quote: Spontaneous Casting?

Yep - "spontaneous casting" is in!
In case it hasn't already been covered: if you are tending towards good, then you can convert non-domain cleric spells into Cure Wounds spells; evil-tending to Inflict Wounds spells.

Quote: Will turning and Rebuking be featured in the game?

Yep - both are in!
Commanding undead is even better than rebuking!

Quote: What about Romances?

I don't want to give away any spoilers, suffice to say that there are some romances of all kinds in ToEE.

Btw, some of my favorite NPC and/or PC "romances" in a cRPG came from Ultima VII:1+2. I think the love interest in U7:1 was some girl at the Shrine of Compassion (whether your PC was male or female), can't remember. you could also go to establishments of ill repute hehe. In U7:2 you could get down with some Ice Sorceress. it wasn't no leisure suit larry, but hey.

In general i think the NPC interaction, story, and "mature themes" in U7:1+2 is some of the best ever.

Quote: So is the skill list complete yet?

I don't believe the implemented skills list (non-item creation and non-meta magic) has changed since steve enumerated them. For sure, skills like Ride, Jump, Swim, etc, won't be implemented, as they wouldn't work well in the game engine.

Currently this is (as far as I know) the list of skills that are implemented and working in the game.

Appraise
Bluff
Concentration
Diplomacy
Disable Device
Escape Artist
Gather Information
Heal
Hide
Intimidate
Listen
Move Silently
Open Lock
Perform
Pick Pocket
Search
Sense Motive
Spellcraft
Spot
Wilderness Lore

Tim Cain, Lead Designer and Program Leader

Quote: Sanctuary Spell for Clerics?

Sanctuary is in. It was a priority 1 spell for us, given that I consider it a mainstay for clerics and that it is a domain spell as well.
Anyway, you cast it and then any NPC has to make a Will save to hit you. The spell breaks if you do anything hostile, but you can cast inoffensive spells.

Quote: Return Of The Fatcam TM!

The Troika Fatcam is back!
Some of today's highlights:

The Evershrinking Mound O'Chips
The Bowl of Untouched Fruit
The Unemptied Pail of Recyclable Caffeinated Soda Cans
The Map of Troika World Domination

Steve Moret, Lead Programmer

Quote: Are there Prestige Domains for Clerics?

Nope o­n the prestige domains, I think we are just doing the standard domains. Here is the list (currently):

Air, animal, chaos, death, destruction, earth, evil, fire, good, healing, knowledge, law, luck, magic, plant, protection, strength, sun, travel, trickery, war, water

As far as I know all of their domain abilities are in, and we currently have domain spells for every clerical domain and level except Earth level 2 (and we will come up with o­ne, or die trying).

Quote: Using skills in dailogues

I know of o­ne item (which I wont say what it is), and o­ne spell (True Seeing) that actually affect dialog.

Quote: Combat Transition Animations

Combat transition animations are something Mike has been bugging me about for years. It is something we'd really like to support, something that we think adds a lot, visually, to the game. Unfortunatly it is currently o­n my "cool-shit" list. And its not too high up o­n that list.

Quote: About Screenshots?

We make upwards of 20+ screenshots each month. However it isn't up to us o­n when they get released, how they get released, or to who they get released. We are just as stoked and excited making the screenshots as you are waiting for them.

On a side note, Mike went to Infogrames, Santa Monica o­n Monday and both our producer and our PR guy said they liked the shots. So all I guess we can say is hang o­n tight, they should be out eventually...

Quote: Will there be Psionics?

No there will not be psionics.

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"Jefferson" Project Forum News
Posted Saturday, March 22, 2003 - 1:01 CET by Veldrin

Here are today's "Jefferson" project forum highlights. Please take into account that these are only single parts of various threads and should not be taken out of context.

J.E. Sawyer, Lead Designer

Quote: How are you guys handling going indoors? Do you load a new area, or do you just remove the cielings so we can see inside?

Separate loading for interiors.

Quote: By mature I don't mean nudity, I mean cursing, drinking alcohol, using drugs(are there any drugs in D&D anyway ) and so on.

Yes, but they will not be the focus of the game by any means.

Quote: I've been out of the loop lately, and I have no idea what Black Isle has planned beyond Lionheart. Is there something else coming? Is all that awesome concept art on the mainpage for a new game or just for Lionheart?

I'm working on waiting for the game to be announced. Also, the game itself.

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Neverwinter Nights Linux Client Beta
Posted Friday, March 21, 2003 - 16:44 CET by Mollusken

A beta version of the Neverwinter Nights Linux client is now available for download, and BioWare have opened a new forum for Linux users.

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Last Week's Poll's Results
Posted Thursday, March 20, 2003 - 20:57 CET by Sorcerer

What we asked:

Q: Which of the games (and their expansions) covered on SP would you most like to see made into a movie?
(555 votes total)

Baldur's Gate II (205) 37%
Planescape: Torment (193) 35%
Baldur's Gate (88) 16%
Neverwinter Nights (25) 5%
Icewind Dale II (22) 4%
Icewind Dale (16) 3%
Pool of Radiance: RoMD (6) 1%

In accordance with my expectations due the fact that the overwhelming majority of our visitors have (only) played Baldur's Gate II, it has received the most votes (37%) in favour of it being made into a movie. Though considering the fact that the game itself is a sequel, I would say making it into a movie over the original Baldur's Gate would be a bit... strange.

My personal favourite is the runner-up, with 35% of votes. I was pleasantly surprised that so many people voted for Planescape: Torment, despite the fact that it is (unfortunately), one of the less played games covered on SP. I suppose this just goes to show how we all loved its story.

The original Baldur's Gate, the one that started it all, received only 16% of votes. Which is a bit ironic, since if Baldur's Gate II should be made into a movie, the original Baldur's Gate would have to be the first one on the list.

Neverwinter Nights, the next in the line, was supported with 5% of the poll participants' votes. Certainly very easily translatable into a movie I'd say, if nothing else...

Icewind Dale II received 4% of votes, closely followed by the original Icewind Dale with 3% of votes. We could say the majority here agreed that there is not much content suitable for movies here...

The last (unsurprisingly), is Pool of Radiance: RoMD with 1% of votes.

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Neverwinter Wednesday
Posted Thursday, March 20, 2003 - 17:38 CET by Mollusken

BioWare have unveiled the ruins, another new tileset in Shadows of Undrentide. This week they're also featuring three tiles from the tileset: pool of water, stone stage and descending stairs.

3 new Shadows of Undrentide spells are also featured this week: Bigby's Crushing Hand, Bigby's Grasping Hand and Bigby's Interposing Hand. We also have some info on another couple of Bigby's spells:

Bigby's Forceful Hand

Caster Level(s): Wizard / Sorcerer 6
Innate Level: 6
School: Evocation
Descriptor(s):
Component(s): Verbal, Somatic
Range: Long
Area of Effect / Target: Single
Duration: 1 round / level
Additional Counter Spells:
Save: None
Spell Resistance: Yes

A somewhat pushy giant hand appears and attempts to bull rush one target. The hand gains a +14 bonus on the Strength check. A target that is bull rushed suffers 1d8 points of damage and is dazed for the duration of the spell.

Bigby's Clenched Fist

Caster Level(s): Wizard / Sorcerer 8
Innate Level: 8
School: Evocation
Descriptor(s):
Component(s): Verbal, Somatic
Range: Long
Area of Effect / Target: Single
Duration: 1 round / level
Additional Counter Spells:
Save: Fortitude
Spell Resistance: Yes

A hostile giant hand appears and attacks the target, once each round for the duration of the spell. Each hit causes 1d8+12 points of damage to the target and if they fail their saving throw they are stunned for that round as well.

And the last of this week's treats is a community leader profile which features Lilac Soul, the creator of the NWN Script Generator.

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Neverwinter Nights Forum News
Posted Tuesday, March 18, 2003 - 21:16 CET 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.

David Gaider, Designer

Custom Content: Point taken, rtrifts. I'm sure when a comment like the "Counterstrike" one is made, however, it's in the spirit of the community picking up NWN and running with it wherever they care to take it to... it's not as if NWN is built in such a way as modders are locked out or anything even close to that (I think it can be taken pretty far as is, even were we not going to help out problems that the custom community faces... and I never said we wouldn't) and I think the tacit acceptance on our part that NWN is going to be modified beyond the adding of new content and providing of occasional unofficial support for that deserves recognition. After all, it's not as if the skill list being hard-coded suddenly makes NWN un-modifiable in any manner... and when someone rants that NWN is broken because it doesn't do something it wasn't designed to do in the first place it does strike me as being more than a little unfair.

We would still need the license for the Toolset if we wanted it to be D&D or even D20. Just seperating the Toolset from the client doesn't suddenly solve the problem.

Quote: David, if it is legally possible and not hugely time consuming, please see if at some point in the future you can leave a back door open to add new skills. That's all I think we're asking for.

And this is where this conversation began originally. We certainly could do this, when and if we get the chance. Seeing as it's not part of NWN's design, however, it has to be a low priority... and angry demands that we "fix this" immediately are just going to be given the Hand. Doesn't mean it won't happen, however, and we'll see what we can do.

Ivy: We've had some nice results with wall-ivy placeables, actually. It's very possible, indeed, and it can look good when used right.

I mean the expansion. As for Danmar's Dungeon, yes I have tried it out. It's good, and an excellent start for a tileset built from scratch.

Invasion Of The Body Snatchers: I had this happen, myself, when I was playing on a server... right after a few players took an area transition at about the same time. There was some lag, and when I appeared I saw my character "die" and then suddenly was in the body of some vampire that I couldn't control. Unfortunately seeing the bug isn't the same as replicating it. In order to replicate it we need to do it on the heavy-duty debug machines at work, where the programmer can pinpoint what's going on in the code at the time the bug occurs. And I know for a fact that it hasn't been for a lack of trying that this bug hasn't been replicated... it's been around for a while and it's equally irritating to us. All we've been able to do up to this point is slowly optimize the network code, and hopefully that will improve the situation somewhat. But, as Derek said, we are aware of this one and are working on it.

Tom Ohle, Communications Associate

Screenshot Cridders: Faerie Dragon. Lizardfolk type guys are actually Asabi... desert-dwelling lizardfolk types. Those aren't undead gorgons. Just the regular type.

There are still better Ruins shots coming. That's the interior ruins floor tile... there's still some exterior stuff to come.

Derek French, Assistant Producer

Linux: That being said, your original original concerns are being addressed. We have not lied, we have been as honest and open as we can be, and probably more so than many other game developers. All of our actions have been to support the Linux version as best we can, with the resources we have. Many of you asked why you didn't have your own forums and just got a single thread in the General area. We listened and created this forum. Now I recognize that this is nothing in comparison to releasing the Linux Client, but its the best we can do for you right now. If you want to boycott us, that is your right as a consumer, but don't expect us to just accept this attitude here on our forums.

Quote: Which class and alignment are you?

Ranger, Neutral Good with a side dish of Chaos. I travel the realms with my mighty penguin sidekick. You can see him guest starring in the Gnolls demo module when the Linux Client Beta is released.

Body Switching: The specific issue that you are referring to we have never been able to duplicate. Please understand that I am not saying it doesn't exist. We know full well it exists, but unless we can duplicate it in-house, we cannot even begin to address it.

Linux: The reason for the download of the Linux Client is that there will be no retail package for the Linux Client. Linux users will still need to purchase a Windows copy of the game to get the resources and the CD Key. Since there will be a retail package for sale of Mac NWN, this is the version that contains the resources, executables, and CD Key that you will need to play. This question has been asked before, on and off again, for about 6 months. Each time we have replied that there will be a retail box version that you need to purchase for Mac NWN.

Jay Watamaniuk, Community Manager

NWN: A very enlightening debate here about all manner of Linux stuff and BioWare. We are waiting for paperwork the same as you at the moment which has been stating a few times. We do not discuss business matters in public as that is not very professional. The Linux stuff is about as done as done can be and waiting as far as I know (and my sources are quite good). We are not making things up when we talk to the Linux fans and we do not have some sort of strange animosity towards them either. That would be a bit silly. We have some very zealous Linux fans at BioWare who also have been keeping us focused on the goal at hand which is to hand NWN over to you folks. Game development is not an exact science and sometimes whole bunch of completely unpredictable things get in the way of a schedule. It has happened on NWN and it will happened with every project in the future. I know from my experience with NWN getting close to PC release people started to really freak out for various reasons so it's a bit expected that tempers would start to fray during this time. That's fine just don't forget that NWN is on it's way.

Darcy Pajak, Assistant Producer

Quote: Any idea on what prcs will be in it? I'd like to see the archmage,bladesinger, dwarven battlerager, even if they had to be serioously tweaked to be put in. (yes, the dwarven berserker is in ROF)

We felt we needed to shift some prestige classes from XP2 to XP1, so we will be revisiting the classes we include in XP2. We are under a constraint that we cannot add new spell caster prestige classes because of engine optimizations specific to the original classes. Whatever they will be, we will be choosing them from input from the community.

Animal Companions: We also plan to add another animal companion for the ranger/druid characters.

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Greyhawk Artwork at Official Site
Posted Monday, March 17, 2003 - 21:30 CET by Mollusken

Troika have released some more concept art and a few images of creature models from Greyhawk: The Temple of Elemental Evil.

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Shadows of Undrentide Interview at IGN PC
Posted Sunday, March 16, 2003 - 21:03 CET by Mollusken

IGN PC Games have posted an interview with the Shadows of Undrentide development team.

You've added a whole batch of new monsters too. Any favorites?

The FloodGate artists have done a very good job creating the new monsters for Shadows of Undrentide, and we are having lots of fun playing against them. My favorites have to be the ones that can turn the player into stone (a new effect for Shadows of Undrentide), such the cockatrice and basilisks; they become much more frightening when you know they can turn you into Greek art.

We also hear you've thrown in a new type of weapon -- like a medieval Molotov cocktail. Can you explain a bit about how these work?

Our grenade-like weapons are a lot of fun. Lower level parties can use them so they can do damage to creatures in the same way higher level magic spells can. We have a firebomb, a vile of holy water you can use on the undead, for thieves and archers we have caltrops to slow down pursuers, and tanglefoot bags that stop bad guys in their tracks, allowing archers to shoot them from a safe distance.

Read everything here.

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Shadows of Undrentide Interview at EP
Posted Sunday, March 16, 2003 - 20:55 CET by Mollusken

The Electric Playground have posted a Shadows of Undrentide interview with Darcy Pajak, assistant producer at BioWare. Here's a couple of the questions:

First, warm us up with a bedtime story--give us the basic plot of the Shadows of Undrentide expansion.

The basic plot is that the player is an apprentice for an old adventurer who has retired to a small village called Hilltop in the Silver Marches. Your mentor is attacked by an old enemy and some artifacts are stolen. The journey the player takes to regain these artifacts and the places he goes make up most of the adventure.

50 new spells and 30 new feats, huh? Which ones do you think will have the biggest effect on the game, or be the most popular with players?

There's something new for every class in Shadows of Undrentide. For example, the Druid gets the Drown spell, Clerics gain the Shield of Faith, and Paladins gain Aura of Glory. Fighters gain the Great Cleave feat, which allows the Player to keep hacking monsters until they are out of range (or dead). The most visually stunning of the new spells are the Bigby's Hand line. The FloodGate artists did a very good job in creating the effects for these spells.

Read everything here.

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Neverwinter Nights Forum News
Posted Saturday, March 15, 2003 - 3:10 CET 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.

David Gaider, Designer

Static Placeables: It does exactly what he said it does... it makes the placeable part of the background. If 'Static' isn't checked, then passing your cursor over the placeable will highlight it and display the placeable's name. If it is, then passing the cursor over the placeable does nothing... no highlight, no name, it might as well be part of the tileset. Having 'Static' also does something to the way the placeable interacts with its environment. Personally I'm not sure what that is, exactly... I'd have to talk to a programmer. All I do know is that if you have scripts running (or are using dialogue) on that placeable you're probably going to want to make sure the 'Static' box isn't checked or you're going to likely run into problems. But if you just intend the placeable to be background scenery you probably won't have scripts on it anyway.

Tom Ohle, Communications Associate

Dragons: Unfortunately, neither Mercury nor Shadow Dragon will be included in the expansion. Sorry.

Derek French, Assistant Producer

Linux in Six Days: There is still a chance. As per the last update, we are just waiting on some standard contractual thingies to get folded, spindled, and mutilated, so that we can release it. Its one of those situations that has no status between "not done" and "done", so we really cannot give you more info, expect when its "done".

Don Moar, Tools Programmer

Linking Modules: 1. Open the original module in the Toolset.

2. Either:

a. Highlight the area from the Module Contents panel on the left-hand side of the Toolset, right-click and select Export Area from the context menu.

or

b. Select File | Export and add the area to the list of resources to export.

3. Open the new module in the Toolset and import the area.

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Black Isle Concept Art
Posted Friday, March 14, 2003 - 22:01 CET by Mollusken

Black Isle have released some recent concept art from their artists, and since they don't mention any specific game, maybe the art is for the Jefferson Project?

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Last Week's Poll's Results
Posted Thursday, March 13, 2003 - 16:14 CET by Sorcerer

What we asked:

Q: Which do you prefer to have in your parties more, druids or clerics?
(402 votes total)

Clerics (282) 70%
Both equally (70) 17%
Druids (50) 12%

The huge majority of poll participants (70%) much more prefer to have clerics in their parties than druids.

17% voted that they like to have clerics and druids in their parties equally. Lastly, 12% of those who voted prefer to have druids in their parties over clerics.

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Neverwinter Wednesday
Posted Thursday, March 13, 2003 - 12:19 CET by Sorcerer

Another week's around and here are the latest NWN Wednesday goodies:

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Neverwinter Nights Patch 1.29
Posted Wednesday, March 12, 2003 - 17:10 CET by Mollusken

The Neverwinter Nights version 1.29 patch has been released, and can be downloaded with the update button on the game launch menu. Linux server and standalone server updates are also available. Here's a few of the fixes:

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"Jefferson" Project Forum News
Posted Tuesday, March 11, 2003 - 22:02 CET by Veldrin

Here are today's "Jefferson" project forum highlights. Please take into account that these are only single parts of various threads and should not be taken out of context.

J.E. Sawyer, Lead Designer

Game Costs: I don't know exact costs, but I think game development is often said to cost about $1 million/year of development.

Quote: So... how was it? Did you get to showcase Jefferson (or some of its aspects, like the engine), and, if you did, what were the reactions?

No. GDC isn't really a place for developer showboating (though a few do to illustrate points in talks). Six people from Black Isle went up: Feargus Urquhart, Darren Monahan, Chris Avellone, me, Jay Fong, and Chris Jones.

GDCs have been mostly hit-or-miss with me. Despite what some developers may say, I still believe that the core of GDC is a "boy's club" with a barely-tolerable amount of inbred back-patting. That said, there were still a lot of good lectures and (more importantly, to me) roundtable discussions. Warren Spector gave a good lecture on making sequels and licensed titles that made me think more seriously about the subject. Sheldon Pacotti from Ion Storm (Deus Ex 2) gave a talk on massively complex dialogue systems that was interesting, but ultimately helped confirm many of my stubborn opinions on the subject. There were some good roundtable discussions on advanced user interface design, dealing with licensed properties, and designer interaction with the rest of the dev team.

I got to meet Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky from Troika; Matt Pritchard, Angelo Laudon, Ian Fischer, Herb Marselas (ex) Rob Fermier, et al from Ensemble Studios; and a whole lot of other cool people.

Quote: Did you get the chance to beat up the BIOweenies?

Nope. I saw Ray at the XBox party and stopped Trent Oster to ask him for directions. That was about it

Quote: but what 'bout d&d and FR dogma? is josh telling us that if we makes a FR world that we not have to accept what is in the FR books? we can not only add new material, but we can change what is written?

None of the stuff I've suggested openly defies FR canon. Some will certainly argue that there's a fine line between omission and misrepresentation, but oh well.

Quote: I'd like to see more of a humble fantasy, where magic isn't so readily availible. Everything is more subtle. I'm not to keen on seeing everybody and their mother lobing magic missile and fireball around...

You can have that sort of subtlety even in the Forgotten Realms if the author/designer chooses to downplay or omit the presence of heavy magic in the story. For instance, if you have a game in the middle of the Sword Coast, don't even put Larloch's Crypt on the map or draw any attention to it. If you make a game in the Dalelands, pretend Elminster and the Knights of Myth Drannor don't exist. If you're making a game in the Old Empires, play up the elitism of the Red Wizards in Thay, the Rashemi Witches in Rashemen, and the priests in Mulhorand and Unther. The majority of the populace in many of those nations are slaves, and know nothing of magic.

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Neverwinter Nights Forum News
Posted Tuesday, March 11, 2003 - 21:26 CET by Z-Layrex

Here are today's official 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.

Trent Oster, Producer

Projects: I would assume many other fields are close in terms of work requirements. The hours are not constant, but in the early stages of a project (provided there is no E3 demo pending) we typically pull 8-10 hour days. When a major milestone is due or a demo is approaching we run the hours up. As we close on finaling the game we run the hours up hard. The start of a project is filled with excitement and enthusiasm while the end is characterized by a lot of fire fighting and hard decisions. The great joys of working as a game developer are the people you work with and the final product you ship out to the world. So in my opinion:
Normal job vs Game development job (Normal hours + Normal people + Normal projects) < (Longer Hours + Great people + Exciting projects).

Tom Ohle, Communications Associate

SoU: Yeah, I've actually just started playing through the SoU campaign as a Neutral Evil Druid. Man, it rules. Talking to dogs to find out where the villains went, watching my alignment shift as I make dialogue decisions... I've enjoyed the first 2 hours of SoU more than any single 2-hour span in the NWN OC.

(Ed. Note: I hate you.)

Microsoft: Microsoft's relationship with BioWare at this point consists of only a publishing deal for our new game in development, based on a new intellectual property we are developing. We'll have more news on our new IP in the future. Currently development on SW: kotor for the Xbox is in progress, and scheduled to release in Spring 2003.

David Gaider, Designer

Alignments:

Quote: So: You add 'Good' and 'Evil' actions. But these represent the extremes of good and evil. Coercion and Blackmail would be 'not-good', while murder would be evil. Self-sacrifice would be 'good', while helping others, even for free, would simply be 'not-evil'.

Actually, Syrsuro, this is what I'm doing already... I thought I'd said that. Perhaps I wasn't clear. I added the "not-good" and "not-evil" and so forth simply because it didn't seem right in most cases that neutrally-aligned characters should slip one way or the other for doing acts that weren't extreme. But I didn't get rid of purely "good", "evil", "chaotic" and "lawful" acts... those simply represent the more extreme actions, as you said, by which a neutral character would also begin to slip.

More:

Quote: What if it was good? Does a good person remain good when he didn't do anything good for a long time? I think not. The same goes to evil.

But isn't this a bit of a chicken-and-egg reasoning? Alignment, insofar as D&D goes, is attempting to categorize one's views according to their actions. If one is good-aligned, then he should be performing good acts. If he hasn't "done anything good" in a long time, that means the acts he's performing are probably not good... and would therefore be sliding him towards neutrality or evil. But in the end, what's still being categorized (in my opinion) are the player's views. If a player role-plays his alignment as it stands, he shouldn't see any alignment shifts at all, should he? Outside from very extreme acts, that is. As Syrsuro suggested (which is what I'm doing), there *are* acts which are considered extreme and would affect neutrals... it's just that those kinds of actions make up the minority. Being neutral, from a role-playing perspective, indeed does mean that I should be allowed to play around in that big gray area quite a bit and not be constantly teetering from side to side for every action. I do think the system suggested above with neutrals getting half the bonuses/penalties for those acts is a pretty good compromise... I'll think about it. But it still doesn't solve the problem, however, of neutrals feeling like they're forced to maintain a balancing act... it just minimizes it.

And More:

Quote: Not doing evil moves you to neutral I think: A drug addict steals for drugs: evil acts. That drug addict overcomes his addiction and thus stops stealing and taking drugs. If he would do that for many years would I no longer consider him evil.

Heh... not to be a stickler, but I'd suggest that this would probably be a Chaotic act and not an Evil one. If he's just stealing, that is. But again, if he's not doing that for many years and not performing other Chaotic acts (or even not-Lawful acts), he must be therefore performing Lawful and/or not-Chaotic acts, right? By definition. So therefore, yes, his alignment would slowly shift. Chicken-and-egg reasoning.

Even More:

Quote: I disagree, I see stealing for drugs as an evil act, the drug addict may steal from families who may no longer be able to feed there childeren because the addict stole there money, this is certainly evil.

You never said he was stealing from families who may no longer be able to feed their children. You just said he was stealing for drugs. Stealing from the poor might qualify as an evil act, but theft in and of itself is simply chaotic (though it certainly doesn't exclude good and evil being involved in tandem.) Unless it's your intention to imply that drugs themselves are inherently evil... in which case I'll just say that I don't subscribe to that kind of propaganda, but you're welcome to your opinion. Regardless, SoU won't be dealing with that kind of issue anyway so the point is moot.

Quote: Not offending the law isn't enough to make you lawfull, imagine a country with extremely good laws ruled by leaders who are the goodness themself, a neutral good person would quite never offend the laws there but that wouldn't make him lawfull because if tomorrow a despot takes over the power would he start offending the laws and that also won't make him chaotic because goodness is his only standard of judgement.

I don't see where you're going with this or how it's an argument against what I've stated. I never said that "not offending the law" made you lawful, nor do I think I implied it. All I said was that a character that is neutral (in either scale) is not necessarily acting outside of their alignment in cases that do not qualify as falling within the extreme end of the axes, and that a character should not be experiencing any alignment shift unless they act outside of their alignment. That's it.

Guess:

Quote: (On the other hand, it ALSO isn't good. I would call it Not-good on my scale, causing a shift towards evil for goods, but no shift for any other character).

Hmmm. I'm not so sure about this, not so much in the philosophical sense but in game terms. While stealing certainly isn't nice, as you yourself point out (in so many words) it isn't "Lawful Nice" and "Chaotic Nasty". If you place it on the good/evil axis you are saying that stealing is as much a minor evil act as a minor chaotic one... I'm just not so sure how well that sits with me.

Quote: For that matter - being greedy and demanding payment (the OC version of evil) isn't remotely evil either.

See, this is the thing: I agree with this criticism. When people pointed this out, we had to stop and rethink how we were defining good and evil. It is so easy to fall into the nasty/nice trap and chalk up nasty as a minor evil act. In truth, as you note, the distinction has to be clear and consistent.In the cases regarding rewards for quests in the SoU so far, I can say that it's quite different from how we were doing it in the NWN OC. Asking for a reward or accepting one doesn't involve an alignment shift. Altruism, however, is a not-evil act. Breaking a deal that has already been made is a not-lawful act. The only time evil enters into it is if threats of violence are made... and even those are usually not-good. The good thing about this? When you look at it in that perspective, coming up with acts that qualify as full-out Evil has been a bit easier. And quite naughtily fun, according to the playtesters. (A few of the Evil alternatives that were brought up caused rather shocked intakes of breath: we can't do that! It was a bit of a revelation to sit back and examine why we had those reactions and decide: well, why not? The up-shot is that some of the play-testers who say they always tend to play good characters have found the evil options they are presented with awfully tempting... which is a plus.)

Quote: I really think the hardest thing to do is to identify clearly chaotic acts. Lawful acts will, more often then not, be those that the designer has planned for the PCs to do.

Maybe it's just the particular plots we're coming up with, but my experience has been the opposite. We have to struggle to justify lawful hits, but chaotic hits seem to exist a-plenty. Since the reason one takes a quest can be ambiguous, we tend to only assign the hits based on how the PC resolves the situation... and resolutions that jump out and say "I'm Lawful!" tend to be rarer than you'd think. (One example is when the PC can talk a group of creatures into peaceful surrender... and when the mob afterwards wants to execute them, the PC can refuse and let them go because that was the deal: clearly a Lawful resolution.)

Quote: Good luck trying to, not only figure out all the possible actions the PCs may want to take, but assigning moral weights to them.

That's my only fear, personally: that testing might result in a large number of the current alignment hits being eliminated because of the argument they generate. Alignment can be such a tricky subject that involves personal interpretation. I suppose we'll see.

Guess Again:
Granted, our team is going to have to make some assumptions if we're to put any sort of alignment-shifting in the game at all. If you want to get philosophical about it, you could probably discount any categorization of behavior if you wanted to argue about it enough (especially the law/chaos axis). While some of the argument about alignment is general is fine, it really doesn't hold up in SoU in particular. For one, we do know the kind of culture we're dealing with... and it isn't some Indonesian pygmy tribe where the concept of personal possession doesn't exist. Perhaps the mores are a little Euro-Christian-centric... but so long as everyone's aware that's the case (and I think they are), I don't see it as much of a problem. We also have the ability to take quite a bit of the circumstance into consideration before we apply any kind of alignment hit. So while stealing the magic book from the evil wizard Foozle may certainly be stealing in the abstract, I really don't think we'd treat it the same as breaking into some commoner's house and stealing the gold out of his drawers. But Gromnir is currect in saying that any 10 given players will have completely different ideas of what alignment is about. Like I said ealier, the most controversial of our decisions will likely be removed before the game even comes out (QA likes to argue about this stuff, too), and the rest of it will just have to disappoint or upset a few people... because we do eventually have to make a decision on where these actions stand on the moral compass. We'll just have to make them with as much thought as possible, because the lack of those alignment hits is (I think) almost worse.

Stores:

Quote: Thus - although I do see this as a useful limit, I think that this limit MUST BE (imho) resettable through scripting so that the cash pool can be refreshed from time to time.

Well... yeah... with the store object holding gold, you'd be able to script gold to be transferred from/to it at any time. And at any rate, all of this stuff would be optional to the builder. Chances are that in any OC from Bioware we probably wouldn't use most of it. Some, perhaps, but not most.

Prestige Classes In The OC:

Quote: I wonder if the new prestige classes will be usable in the NWN OC. Apparently it's a scritping function that sets the availability per PC...

Without knowing what the plans are exactly, I would guess that they probably will be. As a default, all the prestige classes are available automatically (so long as their pre-requisites are met). There would have to be scripts put in the OC that specifically locked them in order for them not to be available.

NWN Additions:

Quote: First: will there an ability in SoU to save local vars to file? Maybe some suggestions of database-like or .ini file-like storing? Anything like this? It is really needed to PW-builders.

Database functions are being added by the Live Team, not by SoU. Anyone buying SoU will certainly get them, however, of course.

Quote: And second question: will player might have an title? something like "Rico 'Bucher' Amolen"? DM should have a command to change this + script command.

No, no plans for any kind of inherent functions for that. Such a thing would only be scriptable inside of a module at this point.

More:

Quote: So I ask again, will there an ability to create new subcategories of placeables/creatures?

New subcategories? Nope. The engine can't create these on the fly. I believe these are handled in the 2da's (or may even be hard-coded).

Arcane Spell Failure: If I recall, there *is* an effect for arcane spell failure that will be in... allowing for null-magic zones and such. Not sure about spell failure for armor... I don't think that's planned until XP2, but I might be wrong.

Henchman Changes: Well, the AI changes that we make will work in the original OC... as will the ability to directly interact with your henchman's inventory (which is the feature they're talking about, I'm sure), but in order for there to be more dialogues with the henchmen of the original campaign that'd all have to be written... and there are no plans to do that. The henchmen for the SoU campaign will have greater interactivity dialogue-wise, however (which is admittably easier to do, as it's a shorter campaign). They'll interject into dialogues often, make comments on their own as you travel and sometimes even help you out when you're stuck.

More:

Quote: will the sou henchpeople know the propper tactics for using ranged weapons? Also, will there be a method to ask the henchperson to buff you if they have available spells?

I don't know yet, sorry. The AI is still being worked on.

Expansion Pack: Those are probably both items that will eventually be handled with the regular patches. The expansion includes new content and all patches up to that point, but doesn't fix old stuff in and of itself... indeed, anything that might be fixed by the expansion team would likely just get dropped into the regular patch system. We're not going to keep fixes just for those who buy the expansion.

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Site News - New Additions
Posted Tuesday, March 11, 2003 - 1:10 CET by Sorcerer

Subsection Updates -> Fantasy Books

Dragonlance Books subsection: Dragons of a Vanished Moon paperback added.

Subsection Updates - Games -> Baldur's Gate 2

Editors, Hacks & Custom Characters subsection: 2 mods added.

Tips, Tricks & Hints subsection: Riverwind's Guide to ToB added, Deck of Many Things Walkthrough added, Items Making Tutorial added.

Subsection Updates - Games -> Icewind Dale 2

Editors, Hacks & Custom Characters subsection: 4 soundsets and 1 mod added.

Tips, Tricks & Hints subsection: Ultimate Powergaming Party FAQ updated.

Subsection Updates - Games -> Neverwinter Nights

Walkthroughs & Guides subsection: NWN expansion details page updated.

Editors, Hacks & Custom Characters subsection: Leto updated, 2 soundsets added, 1 hack updated.

Tips, Tricks & Hints subsection: PVP Equipment Guide added.

Toolset & Related subsection:

Subsection #1: 1 tutorial added.

Subsection #2: 9 tilesets added/updated.

Subsection #3: NWN Lexicon & 19 scripts added/updated.

Subsection #4: 8 items/item packs added/updated.

Subsection #5: 11 creatures/creature packs added/updated.

Subsection #6: 8 placeables/placeables packs added.

Subsection #7: 2 various new additions/updates.

Subsection Updates - Games -> Greyhawk: The Temple of Elemental Evil

Miscellanea subsection: Temple of Elemental Evil wallpaper added.

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Neverwinter Nights Award at GDC
Posted Monday, March 10, 2003 - 21:16 CET by Mollusken

Neverwinter Nights was nominated for the "Game of the year" title and won the "Excellence in programming" category at the Game Developers Conference last week. Head over to GameSpy for the coverage.

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Neverwinter Nights Postmortem at Gamasutra
Posted Monday, March 10, 2003 - 18:43 CET by Mollusken

Gamasutra have posted a long postmortem on the client and server in Neverwinter Nights. The article is written by programmers Scott Greig and Mike Brockington from BioWare, and here's an excerpt:

Neverwinter Nights was by far the largest project that BioWare has ever attempted. By the time in was completed almost everyone in the company had made contributions to it. At its peak, there were 25 programmers working on the project. This was a radical departure from Baldur's Gate, our largest project previously attempted, which only had 7 programmers. The fact that we had so many programmers on Neverwinter Nights was a direct result of the dual need for an unbelievably large feature set, and a relatively short development time of three and a half years. This is comparable to Baldur's Gate, which took us almost three years to the day to program.

...

However, there is another issue when converting a pen-and-paper rule set to the computer. Not only do you have to adequately define, document and test what is being implemented, but you must describe the variances between that and the written rules. Our procedures were somewhat lacking in that regard: internal and external QA were reporting many bugs that were not bugs in NWN, and end users had different expectations based on reading the core rulebooks. Our technical design document, which the designers spent a lot of time writing, was not required reading for everyone who worked on NWN. And the programmers were no better than anyone else! One day, the designers got so frustrated they actually took away the core rulebooks from the programmers' desks to get us to read the document.

Read everything at Gamasutra (free registration required).

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Tim Cain Interview at GameSpy
Posted Monday, March 10, 2003 - 18:29 CET by Mollusken

GameSpy have posted a short interview with game designer Tim Cain from Troika Games. The questions are however not related to Greyhawk: The Temple of Elemental Evil, but to the Game Developers Conference held in San Jose, California last week. Here's a couple of the questions:

If you could make your fantasy game, regardless of license or technology constraints, what would it be and why?

I'd like to make an RPG that has great physics and language processing already built in so that I can concentrate on making the game fun. I spend a lot of time doing those mundane things that are important, but don't allow me to work on the fun stuff.

Of all the games that have come out in the last year, which one amazed you the most? Which one disappointed you?

Dungeon Siege pulled off the continuous world better than we did in Arcanum and I was jealous. So I really enjoyed Dungeon Siege. As far as disappointments, there weren't that many PC games that really grabbed for my attention enough that I built up any expectation for, so I can't say I was disappointed by anything.

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Neverwinter Nights Forum News
Posted Sunday, March 9, 2003 - 18:17 CET 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.

David Gaider, Designer

Drow: Unless I'm mistaken, I read in a recent sourcebook that there's a whole bunch of drow who have begun to live on the surface and have lost their vulnerability to sunlight. Of course I could be wrong... I did start barfing uncontrollably about half-way through the paragraph. Personally, I don't mind drow so long as they're well-played. When they're run by a player like he's an elf who just happens to be cool and dark-skinned... or a Drizzt clone... that's when I begin to get nauseous. At any rate, I loved writing the drow city in BG2. I'd love to get another crack at it.

SoU Campaign: Well, one thing about having a smaller campaign is that we're fitting more into less areas. So you don't have wide open vistas that exist just for exploration... but, then, that's not really the point of the adventure. That shouldn't mean it lacks for immersion or excitement, however. As for structure, let's see. The first chapter has a hub... sort of... but only in terms of the fact that it's the town you return to. The areas don't radiate out like a wheel or anything like that. You can also do the quests involved in any order, but I can safely say that they aren't structured to be completely independent... the progression you choose will alter how the chapter flows and affect your subsequent encounters. Can't really say much more than that without going into the story. The other chapters are entirely different. Um... no hub, no spokes, no respawning (at least not at this point). I can't really describe what's going on except to say that the structure is less important than the flow of the story. Does it sound like I'm telling you what you want to hear? Maybe so. We do listen to feedback, you know. The adventure is much shorter, though, like I said previously... and that will be noticeable... but hopefully that doesn't mean it's less enjoyable.

Alignment Shifts: What defines a truly 'neutral' act is pretty difficult, however. The only one I would say that qualifies is something that restores the balance... or perhaps exemplifies 'fairness', but not fairness in the concept of being good but fairness as in being equal with good or evil irrelevant concepts. Unfortunately not much fits under there.

I'll tell you one thing we're trying currently (we'll see if it pans out... maybe this is a good spot to get some feedback on it) is approaching the alignment shifting a little differently. By this I mean that not all acts that can potentially shift alignment need exclude neutrality... you could have acts that are 'Chaotic', for instance, and these are acts that would be clearly chaotic in all instances. Even Neutral characters would lean more towards Chaotic as a result of performing them. But another type of act would be 'Non-Lawful'... these are acts that would be acceptable to both Chaotic and Neutral characters, and only actually Lawful characters would receive the Chaotic hit and slide towards Neutrality. As an example (and perhaps a poor one, but here goes):

Let's say a character breaks a deal he's made... perhaps he's decided to double the money he's asking for after the fact (which does go back to the greedy bit we said we were trying to avoid, but oh well... keep in mind this is Chaotic we're talking here and not Evil). This is not somehting a Lawful character would do... but a Neutral character? It's likely not against his ethos. So only a Lawful character would receive the Chaotic "hit".
Now let's say that same character not only broke his agreement, but double-crossed the person he made the agreement with in a very large way. That would be a Chaotic hit for both Lawful and Neutral characters.

That's what we're trying out currently. The problem, really, once you start looking at all the angles is that you can only do it when the ethos behind the decision is really clear... you don't want a player sitting back and shouting expletives at the screen because his paladin had a valid reason for breaking that deal. You also have to make sure that there's just as many opportunities to move along both ends of the scale... if you hit a character for performing Chaotic acts you have to also hit them for the Lawful ones just as much, as well as make sure there are opportunities for such. This is the current theory, anyhow. We'll see if it pans out. My only doubt is that in the space of a small campaign there might not be enough time to implement all the opportunities for each side of the scale, as I mentioned, but we'll see.

Treasure System: As was mentioned, we're playing with the treasure system that we used in the NWN campaign for SoU. That said, I will say that you definitely will not find chests and crates and barrels everywhere again, either. Well, okay, barrels maybe... but it's probably going to have, like, fish in it and not gold. We're making an effort to restrict treasure to what's found on your opponents and where it's logical to find loot.

SoU Functions: Besides a few odds and ends, I'm pretty sure the vast majority of the new scripting functions in SoU relate mostly to the cut-scene controls.

Quote: Well, sure. But I didn't think you'd GIVE us that. I was looking for a less demanding change. But if you think you can knock a few programmers around and get us pricing by Base Item Type, go for it.

Well... the base item sort is the least likely of the lot to get done. But I'm willing to wrestle the programmers for it, and let's face facts: I got the weight advantage on them all. I'm not sure you could apply a modifier to a page. Sorting the items into their pages is more a GUI function than an actual characteristic of the items themselves (and I imagine it sorts them by base item type, anyhow). And to the earlier question: yes, you could still have stores that didn't adjust their prices according to Appraise. The OpenStore scripting command itself remains unchanged.

Quote: I really like the idea of the store gold pot. In the PnP campaigns I've played, it wasn't always possible to offload every little item I got ahold of. Sometimes I'd have to find a wealthier merchant to buy some of those high priced gems, or perhaps find a wealthy collector.

Sure, but keep in mind that this is like camping... it's one of those things that is really easy to do in PnP but very difficult to do in a CRPG. In PnP, the DM can just say "okay, you camp for the night" or "you spend several days finding buyers for all your loot". Such skimming over time isn't really possible on the computer... do you really want to run around from merchant to merchant trying to convince them to buy portions of your loot? I agree with you on the high-priced stuff, to a degree. Certainly I feel uneasy when I'm selling magic items to tavernkeepers for tens of thousands of gold pieces... if he has that kind of money, what the heck is he doing running a tavern?! But then again trying to find someone wealthy enough to buy the best stuff is good for a one-time quest... doing it repeatedly doesn't sound so great. The answer may be just to give out less loot... but that has it's own consequences and will be a design issue you're always going to have to face.

Quote: Just out of curiousity - of your personal list of things you would really like to see added/implemented in SoU or XP2 - what percentage have you coerced the programmers into including so far? Versus what percentage have they told you really just can't be done? (Leaving, I am sure, a long list of things that you are still harassing them about).

Programmers always tell you it can't be done... at least initially. And as for coercing, I'm just joking on that... I don't do any coercing, myself. I submit the stuff I want to see done to the producer or lead technical designer and then argue with them if I don't get what I want and I feel like crying about it. As for the number of things I have wanted to put in that I have been given a definite 'yea' or 'nay' on so far (as opposed to 'we'll see')... I'd say it's about 50/50 so far, which actually isn't that bad.

Quote: It would be nice to see a choice if you are a Druid to use animal empathy on a flying bird and learn that the enemy went into a secret cave nearby that you couldn't normally find.

Done! We're making an effort to include plenty of animals in the SoU campaign that you can talk to and often gain useful information from. Sometimes being able to use animal empathy is an alternate route to solving a quest and there's even a couple of small quests that Druids and Rangers can only get. (We did this in a few spots in the NWN OC... trying to do it regularly in SoU. One of the advantages of a much smaller campaign is that you can concentrate more on the individual plots for extra neat-o-ness.) We've also made sure that there's animals in a few places where using Animal Empathy to gain control over them can be very handy.

Quote: It would be nice to have tracking scripts for Rangers.

While it's difficult to script real-time tracking, we do have something planned that's similar: the 'track' placeable. In the SoU campaign, Rangers can glean significant information from these frequently-placed tracks ("about two dozen humanoids, perhaps kobolds, came through this area very recently running south...") while others get much less.

Quote: Use spells more often in conversations i.e., Fear, Scare, etc.

Done! (Where appropriate, anyway.) We also allow Bards to Fascinate, healing spells to be used and even divinations to gain info.

Quote: It would be nice to find uses for useless spells like Virtue as an act of kindness. Casting Mage Armor or Shield on a farmer who is going to be impaled by and Orc arrow (all done during a scripted conversation "Suddenly and arrows whiz past you and you see one heading straight for Darnin, the poor farmer!

Mmmm... nothing like this, so far, except in perhaps an isolated instance or two. This particular example doesn't work for us (no narrative), but I get what you're aiming at. I'll try to keep it in mind.

Tom Ohle, Communications Associate

SoU & Familiars: Unfortunately, Wyverns will not be in Shadows of Undrentide. There _will_ be new familiars... just not wyverns.

Jonathan Epp, Quality Assurance

Quote: Will it automaticly work on all merchants using the standard "store" setup-- or will we need to add a specific script in order for it to work. I'm hoping for a simple checkmark --Appraise applies(defaulted to yes). Otherwise Appraise will quickly become useless in Multi-player games AND it will be uselss in the NWN OC.

To get back to the original question, I think there are a couple of things Dave may not yet be aware of.

1) The merchants in the official campaign have been updated to use the player's Appraise skill.

2) The wizards for setting up stores in the toolset have also been updated. The wizards have a checkbox which allows the module builder to specify whether they want Appraise to be used or not (the default setting is to use it).

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New Shadows of Undrentide Feats Revealed
Posted Sunday, March 9, 2003 - 12:56 CET by Mollusken

BioWare have revealed two new feats which will be available with Neverwinter Nights: The Shadows of Undrentide: Silver Palm and Thug.

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"Jefferson" Project Forum News
Posted Friday, March 7, 2003 - 23:01 CET by Veldrin

Here are today's "Jefferson" project forum highlights. Please take into account that these are only single parts of various threads and should not be taken out of context.

J.E. Sawyer, Lead Designer

The Sky: The engine can show sky if we choose to do so. It will be rare that we choose to do so. Our levels are optimized for our "typical" viewing angle (between 38.5 degrees above the horizon to straight down). But yes, we have put skyboxes in our levels and whipped around like they were little Quake maps.

Quote: Why do people since Baldur's Gate say this. Hey, if you control the character it is NOT an NPC, it is a PC. Terms like CNPCs I don't think are right either.

Cohorts are classified as NPCs played like PCs (under player control). The fact is that CNPCs in Jefferson are under player control as long as they trust the Protagonist, which is even less leeway than what is given to D&D cohorts. The player doesn't make them, the player has to deal with their pre-made attitudes and biases, and the player can potentially alienate them to the point of abandonment or hostility. Those factors are all outside of the player's control.

I wasn't suggesting that Jefferson's CNPCs were "superior" to D&D cohorts. I was responding to the claim that "CNPC" is an incorrect term because the player can control them. Players can control cohorts, but cohorts are still NPCs.

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Last Week's Poll's Results
Posted Thursday, March 6, 2003 - 17:23 CET by Sorcerer

What we asked:

Q: Do you use the Turn Undead ability of clerics & paladins in the D&D CRPGs you play?
(435 votes total)

Occasionally (218) 50%
Yes, always (126) 29%
No, never (91) 21%

The majority of the people who voted (50%) occasionally do use the Turn Undead ability of clerics and paladins.

29% of poll participants use it always, while 21% of those who voted never use it at all.

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Neverwinter Wednesday
Posted Thursday, March 6, 2003 - 17:19 CET by Mollusken

Several of the new feats in the Shadows of Undrentide expansion are revealed this week. The two new spells Quillfire and Displacement, which were featured on a fan page earlier, are now also part of the new spells list at the official site. And last out this week is a profile on one of the top 5 most active guilds: Arleah.

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Greyhawk Interview at RPG Player
Posted Thursday, March 6, 2003 - 17:02 CET by Mollusken

RPG Player have posted a very short interview with Tim Cain from Troika Games. Here's a couple of the questions:

There were many side-quests in Arcanum that were brilliant and original like, for example, the one about the Siamese Skulls, and these quests had a lot of mistery and suspance like certain tv-show (X-Files for example). Will there be side quests, or even part of the main quest, of these kind or will we just have the "classical" quests related to fantasy world?

While our main quest is a classical fantasy quest, involving demons, evil high priests, dungeons, and so on, we have added many side quests that are not the typical fantasy quests. The module hints at all sorts of intrigue occurring in the area, and we have supported that feel with numerous quests that reveal secret events taking place in the villages. Plus, we have added some nice Troika- style "quirky" side quests that involve topics I haven't seen in other RPG's.

Apart from Planescape Torment, the only RPG that wisely used dialogues of great quality and quantity was Arcanum. Will TTotE have the same quantity and, more important, the same quality of dialogues or will it just be a hack n' slash type of game due also to the nature of the Paper n' pen original module?

We have spent months adding dialogs and quests to make our game as rich and as detailed as possible. For people who make characters that emphasize diplomacy or trickery, you should find many things to do and many alternate paths through the main story arc and side quests.

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Neverwinter Nights Standalone Server v1.29
Posted Wednesday, March 5, 2003 - 17:07 CET by Mollusken

Version 1.29 patches for the Neverwinter Nights standalone server for both Linux and Windows are now available.

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Neverwinter Nights Forum News
Posted Wednesday, March 5, 2003 - 0:12 CET 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.

David Gaider, Designer

Locking Prestige Classes: If I remember correctly, there is a simple scripting command which allows you to set any Prestige Class to 'locked' within your module... and once it has been locked, it remains so until unlocked (so you could put a simple script to call those commands in the OnModuleStart event of your Module). If you are running an open server, however, there is still no simple way of excluding unwanted classes from coming IN beyond the OnEnter scripts that are already in use out there.

Mirror Image: The tricky part with implementing Mirror Image is:

1) Creating a number of PC models around the PC that don't slow down the game due to the jump in poly counts.

2) Having all those images act exactly as the PC does without doing strange things like bumping other objects and getting caught up in the walkmesh like a gaggle of henchmen.

If we had some kind of 'illusion' system where we could specify that some things existed with inherent non-physical presence, that would be much easier (something to keep in mind for a sequel, I think). Did we solve those problems? You'll have to wait and find out.

Skills: Ahhh, I see. Maximum number of skills, not maximum number of skill ranks. Fair enough. The implementation of the skills is, no doubt, much the same as the spellcaster classes, races and a fair number of other systems in the game: they were done as they were probably due to time restrictions and not on purpose. I suppose that qualifies as an oversight... however the alteration of skills does not fall under the classification of 'custom content' and therefore the skills were not set up with this even in mind. Custom content is when players add new creatures and tilesets and sounds and so forth... what you are talking about falls under the category of hacking. One we officially support, the other we do not. We never claimed that it would be easy or even possible to hack skills, feats, classes or anything else related to the game system itself. Will we go back and change how this works? Possibly... if it is needed for the expansions, but unlikely otherwise.

Thin Body Types: The artists actually hacked away at the "thin" body type before release for quite a while before we decided it just didn't look very good (a few of the bodies looked okay, but on many it looked too skeletal and sometimes downright comical) and it was taken out. While I'm sure the artists wouldn't mind some more time to work on them, the difficulty would be that every race/gender model would need to be worked on and that would take quite a bit of time (which is even harder to schedule as there's no guarantee it will look good and end up having to be left out as in the original release). So there's no plans on doing that right now, no.

Just include a thin phenotype for humans? Hmm. That's a possibility, I suppose. The thin phenotype was cut fairly late, so all the work is still there (though I doubt the art department would want to release it without some touch-up work, despite newc's typically snide comments about our standards). I'll pass the suggestion along. It wouldn't make it into XP1 anymore, but it might be possible for XP2.

D&D Books: The core books are the most important. Our use of the class books has been sporadic (mainly because there were no plans for them when NWN was being done)... but it would be very cool if we could implement as much as possible from them in the future. I'd consider that a pretty complete package. For background info while writing, I use the FR sourcebook (which is very nice as far as sourcebook goes). As far as FR rules therein go, we haven't implemented much (a few creatures, perhaps) and that's likely as much as it'll be for the near future. By the time XP2 comes around, I suppose the Epic Levels expansion will become very important. Hopefully I can keep my gag reflex in check. (Just kidding... sort of.)

Headbands Etc.: Can we do this? Probably. Would it be difficult? Probably not very, though it would take a significant amount of time... time that has already been allotted to the many features that SoU already has. There are a hundred different things that various users really want or think would be cool or "couldn't you just take the time to..." ...but this issue has already been responded to and we are applying our efforts elsewhere for the moment. As has been stated many times, this is an expansion project with a smaller team and whose time must be split up on things that we feel bring the greatest bang for the time used. We cannot just throw more programmers and artists at the project until everyone feels their pet desire has been fulfilled. We may look at this again for XP2, but this board is not the place to ask for that.

Tiles: A big reason why the geography works like it does in NWN is because of the need for the tileset system. Some graphical quality was lowered to allow for ease-of-use when it comes to builders putting land tiles down that mesh together easily. If you build an entire area from scratch without using tilesets, then yes... the stuff you can do there looks amazing, as I'm sure it does in DS. Different intents entirely for the artwork. I like the rounded hills that I've seen on NWVault, and if they could be incorporated easily and are simple to use, who knows? Maybe that's something we could fit into an expansion. Beyond that, NWN will continue to evolve should we ever do another engine for a sequel or whatever... technology advances and we learn as we go, so things improve. I suspect that so long as game areas are designed to be easy-to-use for the end-user, however, they are ALWAYS going to look less impressive then an entire single area made by an artist that isn't meant to be altered. That's pretty much a given.

Quote: though it would probably mean the game areas would need to be "compiled"... and wouldn't be streamable from the server like the tileset built areas are...

Yes, I'd think that would be the biggest difficulty with regards to allowing set-ups like that. I suppose you could just look at it like it's a tileset with one tile (one big, massive tile) and include it in the hakpak, though, right? I think, if anything, the fact that the custom content community has jumped onto NWN so thoroughly will surely give it a higher priority come any sequel. Remember that back when we were creating this we could only hope that was the case... I think the number of modules being made and the amount of custom stuff being created has exceeded our best case scenario by far. Typical company short-sightedness, eh?

Cats: Probably not many. One thing to keep in mind, however: while cats would be a very cool ambient creature, they aren't proper opponents and their standing amongst the other NWN familiars would be pretty dubious (which can all fight), so the priority given to such a model would be fairly low. I'd like to see a decent cat model, myself, but this is something you'd have a better chance of seeing from the Live Team, I think.

Quote: Oh, I dunno about that. I mean, after all, there are fighting badgers and penguins, are there not? Having a dozen wily cats assault the unsuspecting mage could have quite an interesting outcome...

Oh, true enough... how badgers and penguins got into the mix originally I really couldn't say. I'd suspect it's likely because they weren't very complicated (a penguin is a teardrop with feet, basically, right?) and a proper cat isn't the same as just taking, say, the panther model and just shrinking it down. Regardless, cats aren't in the mix now, and the priority to assign an artist the time to add one isn't very high. I do hope one gets made eventually, however.

Epic Levels: We would only do that when and if Epic Levels are implemented. In the standard rules, 20 levels are all that are obtainable... you can't go above that just for the hell of it. You'd have to use the Epic rules or they're just numbers.

Quote: Just one quick concern. Did you guys manage to fix the monster tracking around placeables. They do, from time to time, get confused and will spend all walking square into a placeable.

Monster pathfinding is out of our hands, but I know Bioware is working on lots of deep-down improvements in AI. Not sure when they'll be ready, but I know it's being worked on.

Rick Ernst, Lead Designer

Locking Prestige Classes: Prestige Classes can be locked via script on a per character basis, but this will only work for PrCs, not standard classes. Prestige Classes can be unlocked via script, so a mod builder could enable a PrC for a particular character by trigger, conversation, item acquisistion... or just about anything else.

Darcy Pajak, Assistant Producer

Player Appearance: In the previous 138 post there are maybe a few dozen constructive comments, suggestions or clever and well though out opinions. Then it degrades into a flame war, which makes me sad, even if some posts are defending our decisions. Player appearance is important, so is game mechanics, the story, usability of the graphic interface, optimizing the code so it can run on an average system, building up the toolset, refining multiplayer, and adding audio. As player appearance is such a re-occurring topic one would think we would fix that. And we should, but we will not do it at the expense of any of the other above features. Our community has very high standards which we really appreciate and we do take the community seriously. We need you more then you need us. The issue of player appearance will always be mentioned and debated, again and again. We will listen. This is the Shadows of Undrentide Forum. We have made the decision on the feature set and we do not plan to change this decision. The time for deciding the feature set is long over, and now we are producing the game. Same thing goes for XP2. Last year we took the feedback at that time to decide the feature set. I lock these topics not because we don?t want to hear about it, but because for SoU they are pointless, and this is the Shadows of Undrentide Forum.

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"Jefferson" Project Forum News
Posted Tuesday, March 4, 2003 - 23:18 CET by Veldrin

Here are today's "Jefferson" project forum highlights. Please take into account that these are only single parts of various threads and should not be taken out of context.

J.E. Sawyer, Lead Designer

NPCs: Some of the CNPCs will have unique appearances (skin/outfit/equipment). They will definitely appear in cutscenes (almost all of our cutscenes are in-engine).

I created the rough outlines for all of the CNPCs a while back. Now the designers are fleshing those CNPCs out throughout the course of the game. There are "a bunch" but this may become "a smaller bunch" if we find that we can't give a good amount of attention to the number we are currently supporting.

Quote: I read that Chris Avellone is also working on jefferson. Since Sawyer is lead designer, is Avellone a co-designer or what exactly is his role on the project?

From what I have read of his posts here, he seems to be a talented individual with a very funny sense of humor and I wonder is he going to be the lead on any future BIS projects?

Chris is working as an area designer. He writes dialogues, helps with quests -- things like that. He was a designer on Fallout 2, the lead designer on Planescape: Torment, and a designer on Icewind Dale 2.

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Neverwinter Nights Awarded at The Wargamer
Posted Tuesday, March 4, 2003 - 17:15 CET by Mollusken

Neverwinter Nights won the silver medal in the Best RPG category, and went all the way to the top in the Best RPG: Reader's Choice category at The Wargamer 2002 Awards.

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Witch's Wake Status Update
Posted Tuesday, March 4, 2003 - 17:07 CET by Mollusken

Rob Bartel, the creator of the Witch's Wake module, has posted the following status update at the official Neverwinter Nights site:

I have some breaking news regarding my recent reassignment. My prototyping work on the unannounced project is now drawing to a close and it's gone extremely well. A little *too* well, actually, as it appears I've caught the attention of some of our other internal development teams. I'll be taking this coming week off to attend the Game Developer's Conference and, on my return, I'm being reassigned (re-reassigned?) to yet another project. We don't have a clear end date for this new assignment but it's looking to last a little longer than this past one.

What does this mean for Witch Wake 2? Well, I certainly enjoy working on Witch Wake. What is more, everyone involved here at BioWare agrees that WW1 was an overwhelming success and that the series is definitely a worthwhile endeavor. With that in mind, the project is by no means dead. Unfortunately, the simple fact of the matter is that these other assignments currently take priority which means development work on Witch's Wake will be suspended until further notice. I'll see if I can release a beta version of the revised WW2 template for those interested in the changes I've made to some of the underlying systems.

I apologize for the disappointing news. On the bright side, those of you who enjoyed my work on the Witch's Wake will be pleased to know that my contributions will be making their way into a variety of BioWare's upcoming titles.

Thanks,
Rob Bartel, Creator of "The Witch's Wake"
BioWare Community Live Team [Temporarily Reassigned...]

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Greyhawk Interview with Gary Gygax at Eye on Troika
Posted Monday, March 3, 2003 - 8:56 CET by Mollusken

Eye on Troika have interviewed Gary Gygax, the creator of Dungeons and Dragons and the World of Greyhawk. The interview is focused on the Greyhawk setting and the Temple of Elemental Evil module.

Is there a recurrent theme throughout the setting, in its history and its people? If so, what is it?

The original theme was the waves of invasion-migration into the continent by the Suloise and Oridian and Baklunish “races” who displaced and generally absorbed the original inhabitants, the Flan people. These migrations brought the invaders into conflict with each other, and even affected the geography of the continent by magical means in their wars.

How do you describe the temple itself?

The adventure is a long o­ne that requires players to use hit & run tactics often. After initial exploring is accomplished, and the first opponents dealt with, some assessment of information and planning is in order, likely done at a safe place in the nearby village. This same pattern repeats throughout the module. Based o­n that, the general description of the Temple is a campaign-length adventure of considerable complexity, with increasing challenges in both problem solving and opponents encountered. As it was originally written, players could expect a high character fatality level unless considerable caution was employed and expertise exercised. Doing the “wrong thing” is quite possible, which can cause the adventure to be a failure in terms of its mission. I never have heard from anyone who participated in its play, though, who faulted the work in regard to fun and excitement.

Read everything here.

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"Jefferson" Project Forum News
Posted Sunday, March 2, 2003 - 17:54 CET by Veldrin

Here are today's "Jefferson" project forum highlights. Please take into account that these are only single parts of various threads and should not be taken out of context.

J.E. Sawyer, Lead Designer

Engine Name: Naming engines, like games, really sucks. Unless you have one autocratic figure making the decision -- then it either rules or sucks based on that one individual. You can't get a group of even five or six people to all like the same name. They're basically all like Reservoir Dogs wanting to be Mr. Black. They all think that their name is the best and usually dislike all the other names put forward.

I did suggest Mystery Engine, though.

Though you can still tell the Jefferson engine (which is, even as I type this, going through the process of name selection) is a 3D engine, I've had many people walk into the office and sincerely ask me, "Oh, hey, is this [2D game name]?" It really is very nice.

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Shadows of Undrentide Interview at CVG
Posted Saturday, March 1, 2003 - 20:23 CET by Mollusken

Computer and Video Games have interviewed Tom Ohle from BioWare on the upcoming Neverwinter Nights expansion:

Will you be updating the dungeon building software with Undrentide? If so, what features will you be adding?

Most of the improvements to the BioWare Aurora Neverwinter Nights Toolset come in the form of new content. The BioWare Live Team recently implemented the Plot Wizard into the toolset, which allows builders to quickly and easily add quests and plots to their modules-this tool will be included in Shadows of Undrentide.

There will be a large number of new placeable objects (including lots of types of furniture -something fans have been asking for), and all of the new features we're putting into the game will be available to module creators: monsters, spells, feats, etc.

BioWare also has another Neverwinter Nights expansion in development. Can you give us any details on this at this time?

We're actually waiting on releasing info on XP2 until Shadows of Undrentide has been released. What we can say is that it will be geared towards higher-level players, and will feature even more new features, spells, feats, and monsters, along with a brand-new story-driven campaign in a setting that should really get D&D fans excited.

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Wyrms of the North - Klauth Profile
Posted Saturday, March 1, 2003 - 20:11 CET by Sorcerer

Wizards of the Coast have posted a long article profiling the red dragon Klauth, whom everyone who has played the official Neverwinter Nights campaign will recognize. The article originally appeared in the Dragon Magazine #244 and was written by Ed Greenwood with supplementary material provided by Sean K Reynolds. Here's an interesting bit:

Even Elminster is a trifle hazy over just how Klauth discovered how to use red dragon eggs to make himself more mighty, but he knows what spell the much-scarred red wyrm employs to do so: a Netherese spell named Thellar's argauneau, after the mage who devised it (an archsorcerer who delighted in "bettering" dragons with his experiments, over a long career that produced two-headed dragons and several more stable subspecies).

Click here to read the whole thing.

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Gary Gygax Chat Log at GameSpy Arcade
Posted Saturday, March 1, 2003 - 20:04 CET by Mollusken

GameSpy Arcade have hosted an IRC chat with Gary Gygax, the creator of Dungeons and Dragons. The chat was for subscribers only, but the chat log is public.

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Shadows of Undrentide Screens at GameSpot
Posted Saturday, March 1, 2003 - 19:59 CET by Mollusken

A few "new" screenshots (desert tileset) from Neverwinter Nights: The Shadows of Undrentide have been posted at GameSpot.

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Neverwinter Nights Wins AIAS Award
Posted Saturday, March 1, 2003 - 19:38 CET by Mollusken

Neverwinter Nights has won the "Best Role Playing Game of the Year" award at the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences' sixth annual interactive achievement Awards, presented in Las Vegas. Adrenaline Vault have got the entire press release with the rest of the winners.

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