Cormyr and the Dalelands

www.gameinformer.com/b/news/archive/2017/11/20/beamdog-announces-neverwinter-nights-enhanced-edition-for-pc.aspx

...and it's backwards compatable with all existing modules and haks!  (not sure about PWs yet)

The details:


Get hyped!  

Yaaaaaaaaaas!

I've been waiting for this for a long time now, hopefully they pull it off just right.

Still nothing from inside the black box though, I take?

not holding my breath, self. Multiplayer didn't make it into BG Enhanced by the same developer. Multplayer will be the only reason to even buy it. Hopefully Beamdog realizes that.  

You'll need NWN EE to play on EE servers, so any server that updates will have to depend on all of its players making the switch too. Otherwise things should be compatible (I.E transfering the module/haks)

Everything will be 64 bit, and they're apparently fixing a lot of old bugs and default stack values.

It also sounds like they are opening up some of the hardcoded stuff, but no word on what exactly, yet.

In all, I'll buy it for 20 bux. At the very least the move could lead to more server traffic, which is rarely a bad thing

Hmm that's not as good, understandable but not as good.

Trent Oster, one of the devs, posted about it in the NWN group on Facebook here. It's a public group, so even non-facebook users should be able to read the posts.  There's mention of a GameSpy alternative that they're working on, and it sounds like it will likely go to Steam eventually as well. There's some other little bits in the discussion that go over my head, so read it if you want to know everything about everything .

Trent has encouraged everyone to continue discussion on the Beamdog forum here.

Trailer is here:

Guys... what are we gonna do without the grass/water bug feature?? Full on shadows as well! Man, it'll be like it's 2004 and we're pumping everything up to max and letting it fly..... without the crashes. My body is ready

(seriously though, when I first saw the announcement, I had to check the date and make sure it wasn't April 1st )

From the FAQ



Will the server browser work again?



Yes, the server browser has been rewritten so you can once again find servers for multiplayer. At this time the original NWN restrictions apply: The server host must be reachable at the external UDP address and port advertised through your NAT firewall.





Will 1.69 clients be able to connect to NWN:EE servers?



No. While save games and modules created in older versions of Neverwinter Nights are usable in Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition, NWN 1.69 players won't be able to connect to NWN:EE servers. Like all previous patches, we change the networking model continuously to allow us to implement new features and fix bugs. You will need the same NWN:EE client version to connect to an NWN:EE server.




Jason Knipe: The graphics engine has been updated so that everything runs through GLSL shaders, including the toolset. The shaders reproduce the old hardware T&L functionality from the original NWN, and were not meant to add detail or fidelity that did not exist in the original. However, this means that you can create and apply your own custom shaders in the game which opens up a wide variety of graphical possibilities.



Bernhard Stöckner: We've done a thorough security audit of the codebase, removing all known exploits and crash issues in the process. We have also addressed a great many engine, game and rules problems, as well as improved server performance significantly.



On the big feature front, we have done work as well. In addition to things mentioned elsewhere, you can expect to see a collection of new scripting commands and ini configuration flags, hak loading before character creation, area instancing, and much more as the beta will progress and bring in feedback.



Last, but not least, we've approached the NWNX developers and are actively helping them with a clean and complete rewrite of the codebase to the new release, so that the majority of server transitions will go as smooth as possible. Future patches will receive the same loving attention!

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________


Graphically, other than the UI scaling, it looks nothing more than an ENB mod, there certainly wont be a massive jump in fidelity but if it gets a decent level of community support the cell shading functionality will make for some interesting possibilities for community created content to look really nice and crisp





I am hyped, but lets set expectations, Beamdog are just very committed modders in terms of what they can actually do, I do not get the impression they are reverse engineering the combat system for example, however there was one bit what was VERY interesting and I think Fire Wraith  might be happy with, (Haks loading before character creation).

$20 is more than I'd be willing to spend. And as mentioned, reliant on the majority of playerbases jumping to the EE for the servers to want to transition and if server want to get more new players, then jumping to the EE whether or not most of their playerbase is on board.

Release Notes

Nice Fixes:

• • Fixed aggressive removal of spell uses for bards/
  sorcerers when charisma bonus is removed from
  the character
• Fixed an issue where placeables could get stuck
  open/closed
• Weapon Focus (Trident) should now work
  properly (Which means custom weapons may be possible, sometime?)
• Ensure that the module's desired HAK and TLK
  files are loaded before we attempt to start character
  creation within a multiplayer module (allows
  servers to specify their own set of additional base
  classes, races, et cetera)
• Area of Effect objects now move each time
  their creature moves (to prevent creatures from
  outrunning their own auras in busy areas).
• Custom-content added base classes can now be
  selected during character creation

I'll def purchase it at some point. This is the only server I play on or have any real interest in playing on for as long as I can see, but this version really helps to extend the life of NWN much further since it will support current hardware and - egads - 4K resolution. I hope that at some point in the future we'd be able to transition to the EE.

(and after purchasing the EE, I'll have bought NWN around 5 or 6 times >_>)

Still, to require both sides of the connection to be on EE is putting a huge burden on an already belabored building community for servers. I'm thinking about a couple PWs that are multiple servers large, and you're talking about having to convert to make it EE compatible.

Then, you're relying on the player base forking out the 20 bucks to keep playing on a PW on EE, so while they may tote that new potential players will come because we don't have to twiddle stuff out of the box to make NWN work, you also have to risk the attrition of players that won't bother to upgrade.

They will also be competing with GoG still offering the classic version of the game for anywhere from 5 bucks to occasionally free.

So what you end up doing is making a schism, the NWN community that stays on 1.69, and the community that moves on. In which case, I would project little net gain for either community.

CPP 1.71 put in fixes that allowed for backward compatibility in either direction from server to client. Seems to me Beamdog could have made such consideration.

But then, they're hedging bets on requiring a player base to shill out 20 bucks a pop.

Kinda surprised by the number of people not willing to part with $20.

If it weren't for the 20 bucks I shilled out for BG EE when it came out, which actually sucks compared to the classic and was buggy as hell, I might not be expecting disappointment and lies so much from Beamdog for NWN.

If it is utilized and perks more interest in NWN, here is my $20!

The EE is going to be on Steam. So in the long run, unless people are real diehard about the original client, you're likely to see more server traffic out of a switch.

Now there's something even better. I already run my own NWN thru Steam, this just would remove the middleman.

I'm not against the idea, myself, but yeah I wouldn't want to be one of the first wave servers making the switch, let others discover the pitfalls

I'd be willing to get a handful of gift copies for people, maybe, if it ended up worth the cost just to keep the server together. Ya'll cool peeps and I don't want to go looking for another server again.

~BR

Ditto on that. I'll jump at the opportunity and I don't understand half of what these features do. I dunno.. I feel like, I love this game, and it has the potential to last forever, and this update will greatly extend its lifespan with new hardware and better resolutions and such, so I'll gladly spend a measly $20 for the game and I'd even be willing to chip in to help others buy a copy if they're living dollar to dollar. That's just me and my POV though 

I'd pay just to have the OS scale. Dear goodness. This game is an abomination at 3440x1440 so I play with a tiny, tiny window in the corner. Haha.

It looks to me like the UI was scaled and they added depth of field, essentially it is the same game, not sure if worth the money.

if you look at it that way then base NWN was never worth the money. They're already got a lot of stuff planned that's only going to see players benefit from skilled development on modules/servers. Like making it so you won't need overrides to have custom base classes, since haks will pre-load. What remains to be seen is if they'll work out an autodownloader.

This is a good thing. A return to NWN in mainstream will bring life back to online rp in the way we do things. I will certainly be buying the game.

I'll definitely be picking it up eventually, but I'm not expecting to be one of the first-wave buyers and I honestly don't expect CD to be one of the first wave of servers to convert either. Also, remember that to some people $20 is a decent chunk of money, so we need to make sure it's worth the cost for those folks to pick up.  I'm hoping that if they get community engagement and stick with the project it'll be well worth it for everyone, especially if they can break into the blackbox and add more support for custom features we can't currently access.

Whatever happens. Progress and development for this project going forward has to be watched carefully, and decisions made carefully. NWN2 was big disappointment it even killed entire servers. With any luck, this Enhanced Edition will just be 2.0 Patch, and not entire new game where these communities will be forced to rebuild there entire PW. That would be disaster.

I've already pre-ordered one of each version to support this effort.  What these guys did with Baldur's Gate II improvements was great, both in well thought out refinements to the game interface and in weaving new characters into the story.

I do not share the pessimism some have voiced.  Proof will be in the end product and what may result from it, naturally, but this has potential to breathe some new life and player interest into NWN.

It's that it's $20 for a 15-year-old game. This time of year, I can get a game that came out 6 months ago for that price. And that if a server converts, every single player now needs to upgrade if they still want to play there. It's nice to see a few people offering to gift it to their friends. Sure, a $20 price point is low enough to easily reach most people's "value" point for time/vs investment, but it still seems off to a lot of people (including myself) to pay that much for something so old.

At the very least, I see it being out for a few years and it having to have gone on multiple Steam sales before some servers make the jump, which means a lot of people would be sitting on it that long before they actually got to use it >.>

But hell, I'm just a lurker echoing things other people have already said.

The original game was ground breaking for its time, I want to see it updated in a more substantial way. Yes what we are getting is good, but it could be better.
That being said I have wanted this badly forever, NWN 2 failed to capture the original, and if Beamdog is going to use the same format of private server ownership for the userbase that made the original so great then it'll soar.

It may lead to a renewal of desire to create content, and new servers. Better Hak integration and a more streamlined way to handle patching would be great. That being said I have to quote an interview from earlier this year.



If this engine was used for development of The Witcher Series, it is capable of much more than the 2000-2001 era graphics thats all I am saying.

Maybe my perspective is skewed, because age and graphics* mean bupkus to me when determining the value of a game. Given just how much time and energy and love I've poured into NWN over the years, $20 seems perfectly reasonable to me. Would I like cheaper? Certainly, an opportunity to pay less is always nice. But it's not so high as to be unwieldy.

* ESPECIALLY Graphics. Graphics are at the bottom of the list for determining the worth of a game. The current generation's trend toward focus on them - or in my words, immensely overvaluing them - drives me bonkers.

I am worried that they'll mess it up somehow, but bugfixes, increased compatibility? Yeeees.
Now let's just convince them to add spell book saving features. I think the game would be perfect with that.

+1.  Preach it brother!

I won't begrudge NWN another $20 considering I can easily log 40 hours a week in the game.  That's better value than I'll get from almost any other game, especially in the age of microtransactions and DLC.  And on the subject of graphics, I'll just mention that some of my favorite games are ones with either long-outdated engines or deliberately simplistic graphics and I don't for a second regret trading next-gen graphics for engaging gameplay.

If the product looks good and I want it I'm not especially concerned with how old it is.  Older doesn't mean inferior.  Just ask any Mass Effect fan.

Wanted to chime in here, though some questions have been answered above.

First off.  Here is, (so far) the full list of updates:

NWN 1.74 Changelog


As mentioned above, updating to NWN:EE requires both server and client (players) to be updated.


We will not be updating at release.

Why not?

A few reasons.  First off, until NWNX is updated, that will cease to work. NWNX is vital for keeping the server up through crashes, as well as a number of other functions.  We need it.  On that note, there are already requests to Beamdog to add a number of the core nwnx_funcs library functions into NWN.  That would certainly help with this process.

Second, and the larger reason, is that the level of changes they have made will involve a large amount of script integration, and possibly hak file integration.   Even with a full list of all scripts modified, this will take a fair bit of time.  More importantly, I'm going to have to finalize our current hak update first, and use that as a starting point for any possible merger into the 1.74 EE release.


To summarize:  We will likely be updating to 1.74, but not immediately, possibly not even for a few months depending on what the actual workload on updating will be.  We'll know more once it releases and we have a full list of changes.

I like that approach as I said I'm happy to get it, but letting other servers discover the pitfalls, and letting Beamdog work on fixes, huzzah

A year or so was my expectation, given that there will need to be script updates and we need to see how smooth the transition is, etc. Thank you for informing us of this so soon  

Other than (from what I understand) being able to select custom classes at start, what other new possibilities are there given what we know so far about EE?

They're taking suggestions for things to fix at the moment. High on the list are Sorc/Bard Prestige Classes and spellslot interactions with Polymorph effects.

Yeah, not enough is changed for me to want to buy this game for the fourth time. Beamdog screwed up all their previous releases of old Bioware games, so as history has taught us, this will be an equally hot mess.

Sorc/Bard prestige classes? Well that would certainly be very nice, like whoa

Their prior releases also didn't have a still active multiplayer community that was involved with the process, so I don't expect this will be a "hot mess".  But we'll see once it releases.   Just from what I've looked at in the existing changelog, it'll be worth updating.  If we get even a handful of the other suggestions the community has up so far, then even more so.

For people hurfdurfing on graphics and all. There is one very important they are doing and that is implementing full shader support. What does that mean you may ask?

Well, this is a full-screen Vertex shader from Minecraft:



and this is the reply I got when I asked if the game would be able to support this crazy level of alteration:



If you don't know much about shaders, there are two major types: Vertex and Pixel (bump map,) and supporting scripting for them means you can accomplish a lot of tweaks to make the game look much better (or very trippy) without needing to up polygon counts on everything

As long as I can tell what I'm looking at, the graphics are still pretty low on my priority list. Nicer graphics are nice, but very much not at all my focus.

+1 

Riding on what Ryoko said earlier, one thing I would love to see is a NWN revival (as in revival of interest), or at least a chance of it. What is killing NWN servers so far is not even exclusively one factor or another in most of the existing communities (a 'bad' admin in a place, or graphics, or whatever). It is the lack of new players coming into the place and keeping the dynamic element. We are not getting any newer players. Part of why, even though it can be hard sometimes, I am trying very hard to think the best of our community and reasons to be grateful for it, even in our ups and downs. Even if I might fail to help much.

Quality of the game and story will always beat graphics. Them addressing some of the concerns though as Allatum had pointed out is a nice bonus. :-) 

Best wishes,
Arya

I would absolutely positively just die and go to heaven if there was a full on graphical remake of NWN, but that would mean that all the custom stuff would need to be remade as well, and that may not happen >_<. I really can't tell much of the difference between the before and after shots I've seen (though I assume it will make a big difference live, in game). For me, personally, this is about creating more possibilities in NWN. If I can do more in-game than what I can do now, then it is absolutely worth it for me. I would positively love to see a graphical update (ie: graphics do matter to me unlike some of the others here), but the gameplay in NWN is so great that I keep playing it after all these years. I'm hyped about this release and I only understand about 5% of the changes and possibilities. My 2gp

If anyone hasn't seen it already, there was a live stream from Beamdog a few days ago on Twitch. You can see it here. I'm watching it now ^^

With the overwhelming popularity of 5e, maybe a re-release can bring some life to the online RP worlds. While the mechanics of NWN and 5e are completely different, it's a small hurdle to get over if you just want to RP. And Sword Coast Legends was such a colossal failure, I doubt we'll ever see a good video game adaptation of D&D 5e.

I spent last night and this morning watching both livestreams (because I'm obsessed ). For those that don't have 3+hrs of time to spare, here is the short version:

• The goal is to add to the game without breaking it or require an overhaul of everything
• You are very very very strongly encouraged to go to the Beamdog forum and tell them your wishlist
• They would like to remake the models, but it'll probably never happen because that would break the custom content
• Livesteams will be every Friday on Twitch in the afternoon and they'll discuss Beamdog stuff (BG, IWD, NWN, etc.)
• It sounds like they want to make transparent items (like helmets) a thing by being able to toggle equipped stuff's visual off and on
• They've got something or other that will make it easier to change the colours of equipped stuff (it was demonstrated briefly)
• A UI overhaul would be cool but it will take a long long while (Trent Oster said "years")
• If for whatever reason Beamdog goes out of business, they said they would likely give the source code for the server list to someone else
• No native linux support for the toolset because something something C++, but they can try to make it play better with WINE
• There will be 64bit support
• They want to support NWN for as long as possible. Trent said that Baldur's Gate is on year 5, as an example
• Merchandise is something they're looking in to (legal BS involved)
• Change the 64-player limit on servers to a number modern computers can handle
• An update to 3.5e rules is unlikely; that would require recoding everything (and you're def not getting 5e)
• Character scaling will be a thing. You can make a kitten-sized dragon or a dragon-sized kitten
• Downloading custom content on login instead of via the web is a possibility
• mobile support is something they want to look in to (playing NWN on our phones/tablets?? We're living in the future!)

I'd pay 20 but I am gonna raise the obvious q......if CD switches to it........will our chars come?


And would CD need to be totally rebuilt mod up?

Everything should transfer over. It's more like a patch than a new game in that regard.

I have been playing with the Beta. It is pretty fun and pretty.

I hope they add a sort inventory button, it's hell keeping ones inventory organized.

You can suggest it on their forums, Ogre. You just need to go on and request it, I think they wanted to build a list of features that players would enjoy.

~BR

For those interested, here's a summary of what was discussed during the livestream last Friday.

• The texture size limit will be increased from 64mb and this will be in the .ini file to help make it more flexible in the future
  
• There will be new content released in the future. Trent Oster says that he feels that mini-expansions would be the best way to do this
• This could also bring in something like new tilesets
• The latest version of NWN:EE will support changing the color of individual armour parts (like we do already, but supported natively. The very short demo that was provided previously makes it seem that more colors will be supported)
• Invisible helmets, or rather, turning off helmet appearance will be supported
• They're experimenting with improvements to the water shader
• They're looking in to adding support for resizing PCs much like how you will be able to resize monsters from big to small
• More quick slots will require a new UI
• This would be a "big thing" and will take some time to do. (though Trent says he really wants to "go to war" on the UI, but again, it'll take a while)
• There will be a new NWNX version released this week and a lot of the functionality will be moved in to core NWN
• The tool set will be expanded upon, albeit cautiously, as it was written in borland C++ and as such it's delicate
• A "loot all" feature on chests and such is a possible feature; it's been a very popular request
• As always, if you want to see a feature added, then go to the forum and suggest it. Trent and the team have been reading and taking notes
  

Hey, thanks for the updates! I love not having to dig.

No word yet on the Sorc/Bard thing?

I'm good for more than just asking questions and disappearing for months

edit: sometimes

I presume this is about the prestige class bug? No word, though I imagine that this would be fixed in the release. I've seen a few people mention it on the forum

Yeah that's what I meant. I knew it had been brought up a few times, but was curious if they'd responded about it in any way.

They haven't, but I'd bet dollars to donuts it'll be fixed at launch. I can't base that on anything concrete, of course, just a hunch based on the goals of NWNW:EE and the forum suggestions

They have a flexible 'roadmap' that includes improvements that can be voted on. They take suggestions from their own forums.

Trello Roadmap

NWN:EE forums

Hey guys, I'm two weeks behind now so, this is from the week before last. I'll summarize the others when I get the time ^^.

• MP3 support will be coming soon
  
• There will be more open sourcing of library stuff implemented on the backend going forward
  
• There will be a console command to make panoramic screenshots. You can stitch these together to make some pretty cool looking 360 degree photos!
• Object scaling will be coming in an update next week (now last week)
• There's a Trello board for suggestions (and as Allatum said, you can use the forum as well)
• They're looking to add custom race support at character creation
• Something something Infinity Engine 2.5 and multiplayer is going to be a priory

They had some issues and as such the stream was only 30 mins long, so the list was short this time.