The World of Avlis

Hey all,

I saw a handful of interesting things pertaining to NWN over the weekend, and I thought you might be interested.

First:

http://www.gamespy.com/articles/septemb ... dex2.shtml

Gamespy has rated NWN as one of their 25 most overrated games of all time. Key issues include:

1. A completely undocumented set of modding tools. (Check.)
2. A frantically complicated and buggy DM client. (Check.)
3. Years of hype for a game that, while nifty, just is NOT the revolution in online gaming that they made it out to be. (Check.)

Next:

http://nwn.bioware.com/forums/viewtopic ... 2&forum=42

Apparently someone has set up a hotmail account w/ a Bioware related address, and is sending e-mails to server operators trying to cull CD keys from people. Not a very sophisticated approach, but it's best to stay educated on these sorts of things.

And, for those of you who are in the know, Urath Online has rescinded their pay-for-gear policy, due most likely to intense community pressure and repeated complaints to Maximus of the NW Vault. It's worth noting, in the midst of all the flaming and childishness expressed on both sides of the issue, that Bioware: a) Has remained very, very quiet about the issue and b) Maximus has claimed that he SPECIFICALLY contacted Bioware about this issue and was told, in so many words, that it "wasn't a problem".

Also, in anecdotal news, NWN has been listed in the Atari catalog as a "Strategy" game. A quick browse of their catalog will reveal that they do NOT have an "RPG" category. It's also worth mentioning that the Atari main forums do not have a board for Neverwinter Nights.

Bye Now,
Jerry Cornelius - Your friendly gaming news-hound.

Actually wrote:Also, in anecdotal news, NWN has been listed in the Atari catalog as a "Strategy" game. A quick browse of their catalog will reveal that they do NOT have an "RPG" category. It's also worth mentioning that the Atari main forums do not have a board for Neverwinter Nights.

It's also worth mentioning that Atari is a horrendous piece of shit company, they're up there with EA in terms of complete dickheadedness.

*ROTFLMAO* Yes thats it! I can't even look into the atari website, they are running so much IE shit and a bunch of scripts that my firewall refuses to connect.

KTA

Just look at the comments made.
And, while I consider myself an intelligent guy, the tools and the minimal documentation almost required a computer science degree.
No buddy your an idiot.
Open a browser, type nwn.bioware.com and start reading.

But the near-total lack of documentation out of the box made this difficult, and the supplemental book published supposedly for this purpose had wonderfully helpful suggestions such as "learn C++" and (paraphrasing) "take a script from a character in the game that's similar to what you want to do and then modify it accordingly..." without even telling me what the various elements in the scripting language meant to begin with!
I wonder if this guy ever looked at the SDK code for Half-Life or Unreal.

Bioware has given us a game that is UNMATCHED in quality.
NO playin costs like UO
NO server restrictions like Diablo
Editable unlike Diablo
And look what pap was able to build out of what was available.
Unrelenting support for over an entire year
Willing to "look the other way" when something from the comunity did not really fit the EULA and reverse engineering (ask pap about his nwnx2 hack)

If this WERE EA or Blizzard we would have been shut down in a heart beat.

Ya know, I'm pretty deep into NWN, and I think I know the Toolset pretty well.

For all its problems, it's by several orders of magnitude better and more powerful than anything I have ever read about, much less experienced firsthand.

- Aloro

The fact that it utilizes C++ for its scripting language is, by far, the coolest thing about it. Yes, C++ is not a quickly-picked-up language, but it's very powerful and can make NWN very customized.

Now, if they would just incorporate PERL next.

NWN has bugs and sometimes I want to throttle the toolset (Who doesnt?). But I still think that NWN, specifically Avlis, is the best game I've ever owned. BG2, Betrayal at Krondor (don't laugh. It was good) , PS:T, Age of Kings, none of them are as fun for me as NWN and Avlis. I knew very little C++, just the basics, but I still was able to put together some decent scripts. Speaking of C++, anyone know eher i can download a free compiler for it? Or just C. Preferably both.

The question is simply: If you think it to be that bad, why are you still playing it? )


No hard feelings, hopefully.

1. A completely undocumented set of modding tools. (Check.)

True, some proper documentation would have been okay... but then again, there's been quite a few level editors or whatever coming out packaged with games, and while this one may be slightly more important than those, the fact is that they didnt have much of any documentation either, and basically no user support at all.

2. A frantically complicated and buggy DM client. (Check.)

Buggy, yes. Complicated? Oh well, whatever...

3. Years of hype for a game that, while nifty, just is NOT the revolution in online gaming that they made it out to be. (Check.)

Check yes... but then again most any game that's ever been has promised to be a grand revolution in its field while really being a rehash of what's gone before with a few extra dashes. And I would say that compared to most of the same kinds of games, NWN does have its share of dashes. The greatest "revolution" that's inherent in NWN (at least as far as online gaming go) is however the customizability, and like Doom, Quake and Half-life, that's what's going to keep it alive for at least another year.

Yes we love to bash Bioware for all their faults and all the bugs that keep popping up in our games... but when it comes to it, they've delivered a game that more than delivers what it once promised to, and so I dont think it really deserved this here 'award' as much as half a dozen other games that's come out recently does.

And, for those of you who are in the know, Urath Online has rescinded their pay-for-gear policy, due most likely to intense community pressure and repeated complaints to Maximus of the NW Vault.

Yay they unbanned me!

Vidboi wrote: Now, if they would just incorporate PERL next.

Now THERE's something that would make a world-builder our of me

Basically, the normal diatribe about how bad the toolset/scripting is... 99% of the time comes from people infected with the id10T bug.

NWScript is C++! If you want to script, you need to learn C++. Using anything easier would remove all power, flexibility, and scalability from the toolset.

The toolset is not a tool for the average person. You can do simple things easily, but you need to be a programmer to use it since it IS a development tool.

Perl? Please no...
I don't think we need all those unreadable horror things that can be created with Perl.
I vote for Python

Silk wrote:NWScript is C++!

hmmm... It looks more like C to me.

Where are the classes, polymorphism, inheritance, etc etc? The only significant difference from C is that it has a string class. Yes it is build on C++, but all the powerfull things you can do with C++ which makes it different from C are not available... Also it much easier than either C or C++ as some of the most difficult things (memory (de)allocating and pointers)) are handled by the program itself.

I think you'll do fine if you learn something easier such as visual basic (script). But if you wish to learn C++ to use the toolset, this is a good tutorial.

HarveyH wrote:Perl? Please no...
I don't think we need all those unreadable horror things that can be created with Perl.
I vote for Python

Yes, I will second that. If anything Python, not Perl. But it's best to just stick with C+ (somewhere between C and C++) as far as I'm concerned.

I've only done a beginners course in C++ programming and with a little help from teh NWN lexicon and one or two questions to those more gifted in the scripting department I've been able to script anything I desired so far (granted: this hasn't been a whole lot, but the limit is not reached either).

I'm still looking for her:

uhmmm... hu hu...
come to Butthead...
uh.. hu hu..

I find it amusing that people go off on the NWN Toolset. I mean yes, there's things in there I wish they had done differently.

But you can quite easly make a fully functoning adventure with it, and not enter a single line of code.

To do anything beyond a simple one shot adventure does require scripting, but that was always known, and how it should be.

Yup and the fact that there even IS an editor AND a scripting language.

Funny they did not mention that fact.

Not only is there an editor and a scripting language, but shit... Those idiots need to wake up... NWN IS A THREE DIMENSIONAL MUD!

I can remember being a freshman in college playing muds and thinking, "Damn, if this were graphical that would be the end of me." It's bad enough I mudded my GPA from a 3.5 to a 2.9. Damn, if NWN had been around, I'd have failed out of college.

Wanna know something about Muds? They're still around 10 years after I started playing them!!! WHAT game EVER did that aside from Half-life which is on its way? Yes, that's right folks. People still play those stupid little text games online! Why? Because they're fun as hell! Now that those stupid little text games have gone graphical, it's just beginning.

Bioware did a good thing simply by creating a game that we can run with long after they've abandoned it. Just think of what could happen 5 years from now when Bioware decides to either liscense or give away the code to the NWN server.exe? What would happen if Pap or Jeroen got a hold of something like that? It would extend this thing for a LONG time.

I don't know of any other game that does that.

Quake dropped my GPA from 1.7 to 1.4.

I remember countless times thinking "Ok, I can go to class now or I can kill a few more fuckers"... then i would procrastinate making the decision and then say to myself "well, if i leave now i'll be late... so i might as well kill some more fuckers"

I'm still confused how I got a BS in computer science with a 3.0+ Cum. Very bizarre considering Ultima Online opened up during my Junior year... there was a huge time-suck.

If either of those two got ahold of it we'd be swinging from chandeliers and jumping from roof to roof in no time

And yes, NWN has by far the most powerful toolset of any game I have EVER played, simply because it uses an unholy mesh of C and C++. You have to be a programmer, or learn programming, to get far.

But ooo the possibilities...

Orleron wrote:Wanna know something about Muds? They're still around 10 years after I started playing them!!! WHAT game EVER did that aside from Half-life which is on its way? Yes, that's right folks. People still play those stupid little text games online! Why? Because they're fun as hell! Now that those stupid little text games have gone graphical, it's just beginning.

Hell yeah!! I used to play MUD's all the time in high school. Anyone ever play the mud L.O.R.D?? (i think thats what it was called, but it was over 10 years ago )

Those games were kick ass, because you really got to use your own imagination to picture what was going on, just like you do in PnP.

LONG LIVE THE MUDS!!!

I, personally, find the toolset and NWNScript fairly easy. I'm also the kind of guy who reads "SAMS Teach Yourself C++ in 24 hours" for fun, w/o resorting to a compiler.

However, to play Devil's Advocate on the side of Gamespy... Keep in mind that the article in question is not about BAD games, it is only about OVERRATED games. No one in that article says NWN is a bad game.

The point about the toolset and it's inscrutability (we're talking about inscrutability at RELEASE time, not now when we have community resources like the Vault and the NWN Lexicon) is that Bioware spent several years telling anyone who would listen that NWN would give any casual gamer the ability to build and run their own modules right out of the box. This was probably their single strongest marketing direction. But what they RELEASED was a heavily single-player targeted game with a toolset that didn't even come with a readme.

It's a clear indicator that what they were SELLING didn't quite match up with what they DEVELOPED, and that's really all the article was about. Do all games get unwarrented hype? Yes. Do all games take out full page ads with pictures of half-naked women on them? No. The one's that do are prone to being called out by the gaming journalists.

As for the DM client being complicated (let's not even talk about the handful of people who mysteriously can't connect to a game under the DM client at all), well, I direct you to any post discussing the "Jump All Players to Location" feature. As complicated as Vampire:The Masquerade? No.

I can list any number of games with godawful toolsets, but if we pulled up the pre-release press for those games how many would we find talking about the toolset as if it was the POINT of the software, not a nice addon made available for hardcore fans?

Anyways, I like the article. I'm a fan of Gamespy's articles usually.

Bye Now,
Jerry Cornelius - And I love me some Fargo.

I'd also say that NWN is quite possibly the best single game ever; so long as you can connect up to servers with it, I believe it will be around. Its multiplayer can be highly addictive, especially on places like Avlis, where it takes forever to reach level 20, let alone level 40. There is a built-in hak pak utilizer, and it uses C for scripting, making it an incredibly power tool.

Hard to use? Maybe. But once you get used to it, it is VERY good, and very versatile, with nearly endless possible permutations. Players themselves can keep adding to and changing the game endlessly.

And this last is the true secret to a game being successful. Starcraft was incredibly successful, and is still being played by many people, because of the toolset available. It was cludgy and had a very limited scripting language, but people did amazing things with it. Blizzard didn't have to endlessly come up with new material for it; the players themselves did.

Half-life, too, has survived because of things like Counterstrike and other player-created modifications to the game. Players can make maps and even make essentially whole new games, though it is much harder to do.

The other thing these have in common is free online gaming. Because the company itself doesn't need to endlessly come up with new material, letting the players do that, they give free online arenas to find other players on.

NWN has a powerful toolset, free online gaming, and is very customizable indeed. I think we will have NWN for a long, long time to come.