Beamdog Announces Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition

[Ballistic_Dummy]

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.

People have imported Witcher 1 and 2 assets, even whole areas, into their NWN game worlds. How did CD Projekt come to use the Aurora engine? Do you have any great stories to share there?
Trent: We had known the CD Projekt fellows from the BG1 days when they translated Baldur's Gate without external support. They basically reverse engineered the text system and injected their localization.
We later met with the CD Projekt team as they started on the Witcher series. They were interested in licensing the Aurora engine and tools as the starting point for the Witcher game. They pulled together a really impressive internal demo and without much further discussion we licensed the team the engine, which they did a ton of work on before shipping the first Witcher game. I'm certain some of the ideas behind Neverwinter Nights and the Aurora engine live on in their team and their products.

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.

[Edge]

Nov 23, 2017 7:48:54 GMT -5 Garage Trashcan said:

Nov 22, 2017 12:44:55 GMT -5 Edge said:

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

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.

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.

[Misty]

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.

[trylobyte]

Nov 23, 2017 9:56:39 GMT -5 Edge said:

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.

+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.

[Vincent07]

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.

[Darvins]

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

[Kymus]

Nov 23, 2017 14:20:22 GMT -5 Vincent07 said:

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.

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?

[Edge]

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.

[Not Batman]

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.

[Kymus]

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

[Vincent07]

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.

[allatum]

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:

Hello Allatum,

we're currently supporting full-screen shaders (like the acid one you linked) and texture shaders (material shaders). Both of them are in the early stages, so configuring them from scripting is not implemented yet - but that's something that will eventually happen!

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

[Edge]

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.

[Arya]

Nov 24, 2017 17:32:00 GMT -5 Edge said:

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

[Kymus]

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