"Jefferson" Project Forum News
Posted Thursday, January 23, 2003 - 21:50 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: ...would it be possible to have some unusual environments in which to play in Jefferson? The volcano in IWD2 was cool, but I mean thinks like a busy seaport (may not be possible in first game, but would be cool if Moonsea is available) where you actually board ships and stuff, or fighting on a snow-covered cliff where you have to worry about being too loud? Personally, too many games follow the "You are in a clearing and you are being attacked" formula for my tastes. I enjoy combat in places that are difficult at best, impossible at worst. Imagine having to ram and board several Zhent ships, fighting off hordes of pirates, attempting to get to the leader, or battling a dracolich on a windy, snowy cliff, knowing that fireball and lightning bolt could call down an avalanche! Man, that would be cool!

If we could have made a flyable terrain type for IWD2, I wanted to have a part of the game where Oswald's flying ship was attacked by harpies and other creatures en-route to Kuldahar. Cliche, but I think it could have been fun.

Quote: As a sidenote, this was possible to do within the Aurora engine but Bioware decided against using racial speed in NWN.

Because people always think they want exact racial speeds until they have to actually watch their characters travel that distance. How many of you would have made dwarf fighters in full plate for IWD2 if they moved half the speed of a normal character?

Quote: After all, racial speed is a part of the core D&D ruleset, it seams unfair to ignore it completely.

CRPGs and PnP RPGs are two different beasts. There are a lot of parallels between them, but real-time movement isn't one of them. In PnP, when the players say, "We walk from the cave entrance to the mill and then back to town," it takes seconds for the DM to say, "Okay. You guys walk past the mill, then back to town. You don't encounter anything unusual along the way." It might take two, three, or four minutes to walk that distance in a CRPG. If you have an armored dwarf in your party, that becomes four, six, or eight minutes.