Post
by Liareth » Tue Oct 09, 2018 10:23 pm
The enhanced edition doesn't add much value for players outside of the initial install experience - which has been objectively improved, to their credit, making it seamless to download on Steam and start playing with a working master server and a client that has been modernised. Features like the seamless window resize are super convenient and I use them all the time. Some people don't like the new full screen effects, but I do - I think they make the game look very pretty, especially once you replace the high contrast shader with Symphony's tweaked version.
They rewrote the renderer, and in doing so broke performance in certain scenes and introduced game crashes on Intel hardware. I think the Intel crashes are BD's biggest sin. It is unacceptable that these crashes have persisted since launch. I appreciate the technical complexity in finding and implementing a fix, and I don't have all the details, but from the perspective of a consumer, and -especially- one of a product that has been sold as an enhanced version of an older game with improved compatibility for modern hardware, this is really an unacceptable state of affairs.
I thought the rewritten renderer was a good idea - after all, it exposed custom shaders to developers in a way that was natively supported by the game, which was a massive step towards modernising it. Visual effects that were otherwise impossible to accomplish could now be. Unfortunately, the feature was left half-baked, with first class scripting support unfulfilled and developer adoption (outside of our lovely Symphony) non-existent at this stage. I really hope this changes in the future, with BD expanding the feature and developers adopting it. It could be a game changer.
I don't blame BD for the disguise feature breaking on Arelith because it's not their fault. The functionality that enabled it was a NWNX feature in 1.69. It's unreasonable to expect BD to add everything that NWNX added into the base game - when Skyrim was released, did you expect Bethesda to officially implement every single mod the community had made in Oblivion? It's not the NWNX team's fault, either, because that team (disclaimer: I'm in charge of it) are volunteers who aren't on BD's payroll. The Arelith team can fix it themselves right now if they wanted to - they would need to write a very simple NWNX plugin to do so, but the team possesses the technical aptitude to do it. The Arelith team doesn't want to invest the time into a fix, the NWNX team isn't willing to commit to updating the Names plugin every patch, and BD are taking their time in accepting my change to add it to the base game. It's just one of those things that unfortunately has hit Arelith particularly hard.
The buggy state of each release is particularly disconcerting. Managing testing as a small kinda-indie studio must be challenging, especially for a game like this with such a swath of content to cover. I am sympathetic to the difficulties of doing this right. But I think they've clearly focused testing in the wrong areas - nobody, literally not one single person, should care about the OC - it's rubbish, everybody knows that. It's my opinion that people play NWN because of the multiplayer scene, and naturally that's where I think they should focus their testing. Host a module, play it a bit, do player things - open the toolset, do a bit of modding, make a new area - that's the best way to test, and doing that way would avoid these issues. In reality, I suspect they just do a full play-through of the OC each time.
Some features are excellent for PWs - nwsync (hak autodownloader for those who are unaware) will be another game changer when it lands, and its potential is truly staggering. Other features are useless. 64-bit support, for example, won't bring any real benefit to the consumer - it's a marketing buzz-phrase that is a requirement on android platforms. I have no doubt that is eating a lot of development time up - as is android support, which I personally believe to be a useless gimmick, but then again, I've always found mobile games to be shallow and uninteresting. Imagine if they'd instead invested all that time into additional functionality for developers, or QoL fixes for players.
In terms of the impact that EE has had on Arelith, I think moving as early as we did was an excellent decision. We had to fight through the teething issues - but we had direct support from BD while doing so, and we benefited directly from the switch - our player numbers increased between 30% and 50% from the migration. Switching over necessitated a new infrastructure setup, including hosting and continuous integration - which was not a product of the switch but a side effect that has improved server performance further and reduced the number of bugs that get through to the live servers.
I don't think BD are malicious, and I admonish people who cry "cash grab" as ignorant and short-sighted. But at the same time, I can't praise BD for how they have handled this launch. I think their heart is in the right place. Certainly they have done some good - they are trying to do the right thing, and have expressed an unmatched level of loyalty to the modding community, trusting a number of community developers - myself included - with access to the game's source code, as well as maintaining an active presence in most major Discord servers and offering direct one to one support to anyone who needs it. Some of their developers are incredibly dedicated and talented.
I think the problem is that BD are -disconnected-. They don't understand why people play NWN, and they are focusing their efforts in the wrong place because of it. There might be more to it - I don't have an inside view on BD's financials, but I suspect NWN was not particularly profitable for them. The lack of focus on things that we care about might be a business consequence of this. If there's no money to fix things, then money must be made before the things are fixed.
Either way, this is alienating the PW community - it makes us feel like we are unimportant and that we're being abandoned. It's not good. I hope BD realise this and take steps to improve it. It's my opinion that NWN isn't a game worth playing without the PW scene - it's a mediocre RPG, stuck in an awkward transition between old CRPG rules and modern action-based combat.
I think the thing that hurts me the most is the wasted potential. They could have taken this game and run with it from the get-go - truly innovating and improving, fixing old bugs without introducing new, even worse ones - if you'll excuse the Trump meme, they could have Made NWN Great Again. A lack of concrete focus and dedication to a core vision has hurt them. Jumping from one feature to the next and leaving a trail of bugs as they go has squandered what little loyalty they had in this community and bolstered the naysayers who proclaimed this all to be before it ever was. There's still time to fix it, but it'll take a renewed focus and some hard work.
tl;dr: I'm not very happy with EE's current state. I think BD are working on the wrong things and ignoring the right ones. They've done some cool stuff, but the implementation and presentation of that stuff has been lackluster, and consistently eclipsed by other issues introduced at the same time. A shift of focus onto real issues that hurt the day-to-day players would be welcome. The situation is salvageable if they put in the work.