Neverwinter Nights Forum News
Posted Friday, March 19, 2004 - 21:00 CET by chevalier

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

Georg Zoeller, Designer

Adding a weapon: Adding a new weapon to NWN is a major undertaking, mainly because of the huge number of different areas it affects - programming (feats) , art (weapon, probably animation) , design (ai, feats, treasure systems, 2da) , qa (testing) - this makes it highly unlikely that we are going to introduce another new weapon in the future - the manpower cost is too high.

Rob Bartel, Co Lead Designer

Witch's Wake: I've retooled the Ability Use system I created for WW1 so that, for WW2, it will be capable of tracking success and failure on a per character basis (the NPC may have been successfully intimidated by the half-orc barbarian but the halfling sorcerer is going to have to whip out the Scare spell if he expects the same result). I may not be able to accommodate all of your requests or expectations, Enigmatic, but I'm hoping to handle most of them.

Digital Distribution: I've been seeing some speculation in this thread and elsewhere that the DD Project has been approved and is definitely going ahead. Just to squash rumors and set the matter straight, here's the current status:

1) While we're getting very close to having the necessary contracts signed by all interested parties (BioWare, Atari, et al), it hasn't happened yet. Once it has, we'll definitely let you know, both here on these boards and probably through some accompanying press releases. Until you see those announcements, the DD Project remains unofficial and purely speculative.
2) Despite the fact that no contract has been signed, BioWare is committed enough to the project that we have launched a limited beta test of multiple modules that we feel have DD potential. The remastered version of Witch's Wake 1 is among these but we are not yet ready to discuss the others. Our hope is that these modules will be the first of many more to come.
3) The potential of the DD Project has already invigorated the Live Team. Without it, Patch 1.62 would probably have been the final patch for NWN. Substantial work has already been completed for our upcoming 1.63 patch, however, and you can expect to see a lot of long-awaited fixes and improvements. Feedback from the community and from the testers and builders of the various DD modules has been instrumental in helping us identify and prioritize the ongoing improvements we intend to make to NWN. We expect the 1.63 patch notes to be among the longest and most complete yet.