why hasnt anything come out better than NWN 1

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frightnight
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why hasnt anything come out better than NWN 1

Post by frightnight » Mon Aug 22, 2016 4:38 am

for a bit there my life seemed to take precedence over my fascination with D&D inspired RPGs but lately ive taken to perusing the internet in hopes of finding something that has that same "je nais sai quoi" that initially pulled me into NWN.. i will be honest.. ive spent countless hours scouring the internet and my findings have been rather fruitless and uninspiring.. false promises..'cancelled development.. uninspiring mmos built more like action rpgs on a micro transaction business model.. soulless titles.. stupid lore.. limited customization..

how can all the new titles just miss the mark so
badly?

the games ive had interest in just dont seem to do it for me.. DDO online looks dumb..'NEverwinter online..'terrible... baldurs gate sword coast legends? 4 player ish co op? give me a break

and WoW, everquest, DAoC, asherons call, various rogues, MUDs, etc etc etc they just dont do it for me

so will there be a spiritual successor to nwn 1.. anyone have an opinion?

ive just been hoping in some time shards online might fullfill that role but im uncertain
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Re: why hasnt anything come out better than NWN 1

Post by The Rambling Midget » Mon Aug 22, 2016 4:48 am

Many newer games try to lead you by the hand and show you the way. This makes it easier for new players to get into them, but often limits the scope of their stories to what the original creators had in mind. NWN gives you a huge amount of freedom, which can be daunting and confusing to new players, but allows for much greater variety in play styles and storytelling.

New games may come out which are equally fun, but I don't believe that anything will come out soon which can match NWN's versatility.

New games are individual meals. NWN is the kitchen.
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Re: why hasnt anything come out better than NWN 1

Post by Iceborn » Mon Aug 22, 2016 4:56 am

The reasons are many. DnD in general is rather obscure, complicated to emulate properly as a video game and a little bit of a lost cause by itself.
I don't think you'll find anything that closely resembles NWN again, not unless the saga is ever reanimated, and I doubt that would happen, or that a "NWN 3" would not be too alien of what we have here, considering that anything new may follow 5E, whereas we are permanently stuck in 3E (which, in my opinion, is still the best edition).

I am not sure what you are after. Multiplayer RPG titles? Half-MMO? RP platforms?


I'll rant a little more.
NWN is a wonderful game. And I may be a fast learner, but I do remember how abstractly complicated was to learn how to interpret the game by itself without knowing anything about DnD the first time that I touched it. I remember having to absorb two different sets of rules, PnP and NWN, and understand how they meshed together. I remember the simple struggles, or learning what "1d4" was.

At first, I didn't care a bit about the rules. In fact, I did rather, like many others, the simplicity, but once I was into the universe that was DnD and I had a grasp on the basics, once that I understood the nature of the beast, I only wanted more and more depth. More complexity, more mechanics to toy with.

It's funny thinking about it.

It's the complexity of mechanics what keeps new players away, but it's the complexity what keeps the old players in.
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Re: why hasnt anything come out better than NWN 1

Post by Nitro » Mon Aug 22, 2016 10:05 am

I think NWN, much like Dwarf Fortress or Baldur's Gate is an acquired taste. It's not a mainstream title, but extremely well appreciated by the crowd that does enjoy it.

Try giving Pillars of Eternity a try though, a very good recent title in the spirit of old western RPG's.

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Re: why hasnt anything come out better than NWN 1

Post by dicerollings » Mon Aug 22, 2016 11:01 am

Obsidian (NWN2) has the game rights to Pathfinder, and (hopefully) has learned the lessons of NWN2, so maybe eventually.

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Re: why hasnt anything come out better than NWN 1

Post by livingNPC » Mon Aug 22, 2016 11:34 am

Try Pillars of Eternity. It really motivates me to create some great emotes and emotion out of my toons

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Re: why hasnt anything come out better than NWN 1

Post by Nitro » Mon Aug 22, 2016 12:43 pm

livingNPC wrote:Try Pillars of Eternity. It really motivates me to create some great emotes and emotion out of my toons
I want to like pillars, but holy exposition dump batman is that game too heavy handed on the exposition for me.

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Re: why hasnt anything come out better than NWN 1

Post by Iceborn » Mon Aug 22, 2016 1:01 pm

I liked Pillars of Eternity, but the best tactic-rpg that I've played in the last years was Divinity: Original Sin.
Given, I played it in full coop with one of my best buddies and we trolled and broke all the mechanics of the game, but I think the game was meant to be broken and allow that level of freedom.
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Re: why hasnt anything come out better than NWN 1

Post by Artos13 » Mon Aug 22, 2016 1:34 pm

Nitro wrote:
livingNPC wrote:Try Pillars of Eternity. It really motivates me to create some great emotes and emotion out of my toons
I want to like pillars, but holy exposition dump batman is that game too heavy handed on the exposition for me.
Amen, brother. I really wanted to like that game, but every single NPC seems to prattle on forever about their life story right after "hello." That, and unfamiliar game mechanics combined with my zest for inebriated play made it rather chore-like. I may revisit it someday though.

New BG expansion was big fun at first, if for nothing more than the nostalgia, until I saw just how railed in the game was. Very linear, and what I liked about BG1 in the first place was the freedom.

Shards makes some big promises, but I see lots of problems in its development, not the least being the art direction (waaay too cartoony)

NWN1 is so great because it's like Lego. Classic, accessible, flexible, timeless.

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Re: why hasnt anything come out better than NWN 1

Post by Flameborn » Mon Aug 22, 2016 1:40 pm

All we can hope for is a pathfinder game with all of NWN's values. Please, pleeeeease.

Neverwinter Nights has all the things a game needs to be a great place for rp, that no other games can have, due to money or what the "majority" of people want.

~ You need to be rp focused.
Having 95% of a server running around in an MMO uncaring (or worse, trolling) for rp breaks immersion badly.

~You need open world pvp
Rp without some sort of mechanic to fight other people just leads to weird...ask fights, where you can only do what others allow you to do. Very easily abused

~You need admins overseeing the whole server.
Admins in MMO's don't give a damn that a naked guy jumped into your bar scene rp to yell about how stupid you all are. But DM's do, and they keep the trolls out of it.

Theres even more things to list, but those three, are the exact things that have kept me from going anywhere but nwn. No other game has those three things to make it a great place to rp.
Last edited by Flameborn on Mon Aug 22, 2016 1:45 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: why hasnt anything come out better than NWN 1

Post by Daedin » Mon Aug 22, 2016 1:44 pm

I have 50 hours into Pillars of Eternity, but I had to take a break. Like folk said above,it can be cumbersome.

I will also echo love for Divinity. That game is so much fun, specialy in coop. Cant wait for the new one.


And very honestly, the one thing I tried lately that proved to be as much fun as nwn..was actual tabletop D&D. I only wish I could get another group going.

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Re: why hasnt anything come out better than NWN 1

Post by Sab1 » Mon Aug 22, 2016 3:00 pm

I believe the people making the latest D&D game shut their doors. One of the big issues is a game like NWN isn't a huge moneymaker in studios eyes. NWN came out but focus went to the paid subscription games. There was more money there. Now the genre like WOW is drying up. For a company the money is in games like Hearthstone, Heroes of the storm where they can get you to spend money for items in the game. That right now is the big. The small studios who try don't seem to last very long, the big companies care about where the most money is, so for them there is not a lot of incentive for them to invest in a game like NWN. NWN2 to this days remains one of the biggest disappointments in my mind.

Same with SW Knights of the Old republic, everyone loved that series and was a great seller. But after the second one they weren't going to put out another.

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Re: why hasnt anything come out better than NWN 1

Post by Griefmaker » Mon Aug 22, 2016 3:05 pm

Iceborn wrote:I liked Pillars of Eternity, but the best tactic-rpg that I've played in the last years was Divinity: Original Sin.
Given, I played it in full coop with one of my best buddies and we trolled and broke all the mechanics of the game, but I think the game was meant to be broken and allow that level of freedom.
My own experiences echo this post completely. But in my mind, I think Pillars of Eternity could have been far superior had they designed it for turn based action. They may have had to lower the number of random junk spawns perhaps so as to not make the game take an eternity just getting from point A to point B, but I found the layers of the system (heavy micromanagement) would have benefited more if it could be played more like chess.

Then again, I am an old fart just old and like taking my time on things and considering all angles.

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Re: why hasnt anything come out better than NWN 1

Post by MissEvelyn » Mon Aug 22, 2016 6:26 pm

Temple of Elemental Evil (the PC game version, not the PnP campaign) is one of, if not THE most D&D 3.5 true game out there. That said, much like the Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale series, it's not possible to do persistent worlds, like in NWN.

NWN is a rare pearl, even among its own genre.


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Re: why hasnt anything come out better than NWN 1

Post by Aelryn Bloodmoon » Mon Aug 22, 2016 9:57 pm

Single player? KotOR. It was based on the same engine NWN was run in, and uses d20 rules, as well, just set in a different universe.

I have an unpopular opinion. I believe NWN2 was better than NWN. I have owned and played both. I played the online aspect of 2 for the better part of a year before a friend asked me to run a concept with them on another NWN1 server, and I go for the story, so I didn't mind the graphics drop.

The last time I booted NWN2, there were still multiple persistent world servers, some of which frequently broke 60+ players.

However, NWN2 had a few things working against it.

1: A few things in the UI were changed, including the reversal of mouse buttons. I personally found the reversal to be irritating at times, but I also found it to be more efficient once I adapted. Once I came back to NWN1, I was irritated by having to switch back, and moreso by the perceived lack of efficiency as a result. (Drop down menus are extremely superior to radials.)

2: Its own complexity and flexibility worked against it. The toolset for NWN2 was widely regarded by people I knew from both sides of the debate as more diverse and capable of superior creation by far in both coding and area composition... but the toolset was nowhere near as friendly.

3: Graphical and mechanical Superiority - at the time it came out, high speed internet was becoming a common commodity, but it wasn't, yet. Imagine the hardware of ten years ago. Now imagine that today we still have players on NWN1 that experience lag, and servers with beefy hardware that sometimes experience server-wide lag in NWN1. Now take all the extra complexity from point 2, and apply it to this concept.

4: The thing that many people jumped on - the initial buggy release. People don't like change. Very few people actually wanted to throw out everything they'd done in NWN1 and learn from scratch for NWN2. People were upset at the lack of backwards compatibility.

Many people happily overlooked just how many patches and updates NWN1 released before the 'ideal product' that we all still love today could get to that point, and eagerly jumped on the faults, justifying it as a fad to throw into the trash pile rather than spending any time learning something new. But having seen many, many NWN1 worlds and only a handful of NWN2 worlds, someone dedicated to the craft of building in NWN2 can create much prettier, more interactive environments.


If I weren't so attached to this giant story running here, I might try to find my copy and reinstall...
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Re: why hasnt anything come out better than NWN 1

Post by dirza » Mon Aug 22, 2016 10:01 pm

There are no new players to want game like NWN, BGs and other. Pillars of Eternity were done for those who still desire after old times, but majority of new generation players want to have simple play, having access to all easily, and game designers are also leading them to that. It results all games are same crap, and the only thing most people are into are graphical improvements or mechanical cookies.

Is why all MMOs look similar and are played similar. It is a fashion of new age. Everything gets simplified, and so on from fridge control up to pc games :D

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Re: why hasnt anything come out better than NWN 1

Post by frightnight » Mon Aug 22, 2016 10:10 pm

thats really the bottom line..thanks to everyone in the thread and their opinions..i suppose nwn 1 really is the best thing out there for now at least...
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Re: why hasnt anything come out better than NWN 1

Post by Waigoogin » Tue Aug 23, 2016 12:40 am

it's not NwN, per se that people necessarily love, we're here for the persistent world aspect, the roleplay. you just don't find this type of thing anywhere else. no other games have this, or at least few other games. to me it's a unique gaming experience, and nobody is out there trying to match it.
pure roleplay servers in an MMO? nah people would rather speak frankly about what they need to grind, and casual chat, than keep an IC focus (a concept most players really don't even grasp). this isn't what they expect of games, nor is it what many want.

for those who do want it, here we are, year after year..

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Re: why hasnt anything come out better than NWN 1

Post by Seven Sons of Sin » Tue Aug 23, 2016 1:55 am

I always wondered if CDProjecktRed would release their toolset for the Witcher 1, since it was heavily modified version of the Aurora Engine by BioWare (which to my knowledge, is similar to NWN's engine?).

It's not leaps and bounds ahead, graphically, and the combat is kind of hokey, but... the "feel" of it would be so NWN.
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Re: why hasnt anything come out better than NWN 1

Post by JediMindTrix » Tue Aug 23, 2016 2:23 am

There will never ever be anything like Neverwinter Nights. It is one of a kind and will remain that way. I am thankful to have experienced it.

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Re: why hasnt anything come out better than NWN 1

Post by Mithreas » Tue Aug 23, 2016 10:44 am

Short answer: graphics.

Since computer games first existed, graphics have got better and better. There were some really good games in the early 90s, that still stand up to modern games in terms of playability and fun - if you can look past the (by modern standards) awful graphics.

You can't release a game now that has 90s graphics. Or even NWN-style graphics (early 2000s). It looks outdated, and you won't sell copies.

Building the graphics for new games is now a huge portion of the cost. The difficulty to make a game engine hasn't changed since Doom and Warcraft 2... in fact, the evolution of standard ways of doing things has made the design process a lot simpler, with fewer decisions to make over controls etc. Similarly, story hasn't changed - some do it better, some do it worse, but the Quest for Glory and King's Quest series have stories that are the equal of Witcher (IMO!).

So, modern titles put a lot more effort into graphics just to stay current.

So why is this relevant to NWN?

NWN's unique strength is its sandbox. As a developer, building a sandbox requires exposing (parts of) your engine, and letting users build in your world. The difficulty of implementing the latter scales with how complex your graphics are. This isn't theoretical - if any of you have experience building modules in both NWN1 and NWN2, you'll know that NWN1 has a much, much more usable toolset. NWN2 lets you build much prettier modules, but each area takes you an order of magnitude more time to do. Building and maintaining a NWN2 PW is, simply, much more work than NWN1, and it took the Obsidian team more time to build an inferior toolset due to the more advanced graphics.

Then there's the challenge that graphics and custom content pose to distribution (getting users to be able to connect to your world). In NWN2, the community built a (frankly) clunky workaround to let you pre-download the files you needed to be able to navigate areas (walkmeshes) since they can't be standardised in the way that they are in NWN1 - you have flexibility to build areas in 3d. The more complex your graphics get, the more data you need to send to your players in order for them to be able to see the world as you do.

All these problems are solvable - but they are expensive, and it's very hard to recoup that cost. When you release, you're compared on graphics and cost to the other titles releasing when you do... and it will take months before there are good community-built multiplayer modules available for players to join, by which point your game is already old news.

So - not impossible that there will be a spiritual successor to NWN, but unlikely - and would basically require a company to do it because they wanted it, rather than because it made great business sense.
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Re: why hasnt anything come out better than NWN 1

Post by Silent Handshake » Tue Aug 23, 2016 11:52 am

this might be closest to what you would want but still i bet it wont be like nwn.
https://swordcoast.com/

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Re: why hasnt anything come out better than NWN 1

Post by Waigoogin » Tue Aug 23, 2016 1:14 pm

kickstarter is the only way. but as time goes on and graphics and pc power improve steadily i can see a time and place where at least the NwN model could be graphically improved upon, if people in the community set their minds to it.

given the number of servers still running, there is a cult demand. and cults are known to do some pretty crazy things :)

hell if a guy took the time to build baldur's gate within NwN2 I'm certain there are hermits out there who someday could simply upscale all of nwn (i'm sure that's not exactly the techy term, i'm more suggesting it could be rebuilt, but better, given the nature of how graphics have improved so steadily, a much nicer looking nwn will be more and more reasonable as time goes on)

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Re: why hasnt anything come out better than NWN 1

Post by Bashagain » Tue Aug 23, 2016 2:48 pm

NWN is great; Arelith is great; but the OS and support has disappeared. The game is so old that I had to build a separate machine to continue playing NWN. So long as Old NWN is updated for mobile and tablet platform, I think NWN could live on for another decade or two.

As for what's next, it's NWN Go! Where you can capture and train a rabid Arelithian badger at the corner of 57st and Broadway. Just pay attention to the traffic while you use your augmented reality games.
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Re: why hasnt anything come out better than NWN 1

Post by Irongron » Tue Aug 23, 2016 3:20 pm

Neverwinter Nights was born out of a wish to really be able to run PnP Fantasy Role-play adventurers online, and with friends.

At the time it was the holy grail for RPers, as there was a massive divide between PnP and computer games. In short, it was made, at least in part. for a generation that had grown up with a handful of d20s and a wall full of source books.

It's a different age now, and while RP is still popular, it is entirely eclipsed by the popularity of online RP games, which can be very different. I don't think many developers are any longer considering taking PnP for their inspiration, but rather working from existing computer games.

NWN is tabletop RP, and I just don't think that's a market that game developers are any longer queueing up to exploit.

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