Neverwinter Nights Enhanced is on the way

[shortylickens]

Courtesy of Beamdog:

https://www.pcworld.com/article/323...edition-compatible-with-15-years-of-mods.html

Its on Steam but not yet for sale.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/704450/Neverwinter_Nights_Enhanced_Edition/

 

[BSim500]

I'll pass. NWN is a fantastic game, but unlike Baldur's Gate & Icewind Dale, NWN has had native HD / widescreen res support from the start (no mods needed), has an excellent minimalist UI, and whose textures have aged far better than even 9 year newer games (NWN (2002) vs Dragon Age 2 (2011), has a large pre-existing modding community (whose mods risk being broken by BeamDog's "enhancements"), and if you want the soundtrack you'll have to pay BeamDog extra for the $40 "Deluxe" version for the same music included with the Diamond Edition ($2 in 80% off GOG sales) that can be had for free simply by renaming the files in the music folder from .bmu to .mp3.

Yup, 1900% price increases for 16 year old games = same old Beamdog...

 

[whm1974]

I'll pass. NWN is a fantastic game, but unlike Baldur's Gate & Icewind Dale, NWN has had native HD / widescreen res support from the start (no mods needed), has an excellent minimalist UI, and whose textures have aged far better than even 9 year newer games (NWN (2002) vs Dragon Age 2 (2011), has a large pre-existing modding community (whose mods risk being broken by BeamDog's "enhancements"), and if you want the soundtrack you'll have to pay BeamDog extra for the $40 "Deluxe" version for the same music included with the Diamond Edition ($2 in 80% off GOG sales) that can be had for free simply by renaming the files in the music folder from .bmu to .mp3.

Yup, 1900% price increases for 16 year old games = same old Beamdog...

Well I'll happy to have Linux version for one.

 

[Craig234]

I constantly saw the campaign bashed (including the link above), but I thought mostly it was one of the best I've seen.

 

[DaveSimmons]

I enjoyed the trilogy of the first campaign + the two sequels in NWN 1. I should get around to playing the other bits included in the GoG version someday.

I'd buy this if it included new high-polygon models with new textures, but it's just allowing 4K mode and applying some shader effects, so nope not worth re-buying.

 

[Fenixgoon]

NWN:HOTU was one of my favorite campaigns. not sure if i ever beat SOTU or not. and the mod support for NWN was fantastic. There was a battle of the dragons mod - basically DOTA in NWN. Sorcs would buff up, invis, and run into your base and cast weird or wail of the banshee and just nuke the whole spawn area. god that was miserable (but awesome if I were the one doing it).

i thought the NWN2 campaign was solid. never beat NWN2: MotB or its 2nd xpac either. Ugh, too many games, not enough time.

 

[Red Storm]

NWN was all about the custom, fan-made modules. Are the existing ones compatible with this enhanced version?

 

[shortylickens]

NWN was all about the custom, fan-made modules. Are the existing ones compatible with this enhanced version?

Yes.

It says that right on the page.

 

[shortylickens]

 

[BSim500]

Unfortunately...

- "Improved Display" (all they've done is change the UI scaling for smaller 1440p / 4K screens, which is pretty much what modders have done for free in a ton of other old games (eg, Deus Ex "Kentie's Launcher"). It's probably the single-most notable upgrade for modern monitors but in no way justifies such a huge leap up in price (ultimately a 700%-1600% increase from $2 regular sale prices to $16-$34) first by slapping on comical $20-$40 "base" prices, and second by reducing the discount from 80% to 10-20% by "resetting" the game's release year (because "brand new" 2018 games get lower sales discounts)... Looking at the Steam screenshots, they haven't even improved any fonts (in the quickbar and name of your hireling's avatar on the right), what you see there is exactly the same font you already get by enabling the existing Options -> Video Options -> Advanced -> High Res Font option.

- "Advanced Graphics Options" (BeamDog have changed nothing about the textures or models / polygons. The toolsets are the same (and half come with the CEP rather than the game itself anyway). All they did with BG:EE is introduce hideously ugly cell shading on character outlines (to which an overwhelming majority instantly disable). Looking at the Steam screenshots, literally nothing about the visuals has been improved other than the introduction of an overly blurred post-processed DoF shader which itself doesn't really make any sense in an isometric top-down camera game and actually makes many game textures actually look uglier. Example - Does this (EE) look "better" than this (original) looking at how textures become mush on anything other than close up? The top-down DoF here really doesn't look like some clever first-person Skyrim-ENB style "Bokeh" photography effect, it's just plain ugly.

- "Backwards compatibility" is good to hear but has always been essential. As others have said, NWN is 10-20% OC / 80-90% Epic modules (Aielund Saga, etc), so if they broke these the EE game would be dead in the water right from the start.

I'm going to wait and see but ultimately remain cynical based on laughable pricing alone. With Infinity Engine games, you had no native widescreen / 1080p support, couldn't zoom in to compensate for higher resolution scaling of fixed size sprites, had a huge oversized ugly UI, etc, and even with BG:EE they still didn't fix stuff like 30fps cap being tied to game physics or the "fog of war" being hard-coded for 800 x 600 that still looks absurd at 1080p even with the "Enhanced" Edition. But none of that applies to the Aurora Engine which has had 1080p / widescreen support / no fps cap / zoom from the start and a fog of war that ironically fit 1080p perfectly almost a decade before the resolution became popular. Likewise a lot of minor bugs have already been fixed with 2da overrides / community patches 1.70-1.72 which also added improved henchman AI, etc.

In short, I'm struggling to see the "value" here of what BeamDog have done themselves (other than a one-man 2-3 hours of work on UI scaling) that wasn't already "borrowed" from the modding community on a far larger scale than BG's widescreen mod...

 

[DigDog]

if i recall correctly, NWN had this issue where you needed a specific patch/release to play mods for that patch/release (so, if you had 1.4.9, you could not play mods for 1.4.8 or 1.4.12). if they manage a all-mods-compatible, it could actually be worth it.

i loved NWN so much i had sex with it, BECAUSE of the huge community and the various adventure modules you could get for free, but back in 2005 modding wasn't really a science. Every mod (and when i say mod, i mean a simple adventure module) came with 5000 words of text on how to install it or else your computer would explode. Not really keen on having to do that again.

 

[aigomorla]

sigh....

they need to toss it on a new engine like the Unreal4 or Unity5 and then respin the game.
Otherwise just making slight tweaks to mesh skins and what nots, is not even considered a remastered edition.

Its called the lazy edition and should not be charged but offered for free to the people who already own the game.

This game wont sell, i can tell you this much.
We have been spoiiled silly with Gfx in games, so unless its a complete minecraft type game, anything without some form of realism in GFX wont attract a lot of audience.

Infact i look at the GFX now, and shudder... I cant believe how far we progressed in game engines from then to now..

 

[DigDog]

what they need to do, "they", is write a new NWN game based on AD&D 3 or AD&D 3.5 at worst, NOT the aberration that it has now become (because evryone needs to become super-powerful now or they won't be happy), focused on community-driven modules, with an amazing module creator, and a generic single player campaign, instead of trying to revamp a game from 15 years ago.

because honestly IDGAF about your PG13 campaign that you bundle with your game, i'm only really interested in what the warped minds of real D&D players can create

 

[whm1974]

Make the campaign Rated R with full nudity and sex...

 

[aigomorla]

even a complete engine overhall would be acceptable IMO.
I prefer the old school RPGS where u had things like choices and not the lineal designs today's follow.

But seriously i dont approve of vendors just polishing up on mesh files and releasing it as remastered.
It should be more of a patch made for free, then a full release.

 

[BSim500]

even a complete engine overhall would be acceptable IMO.

^ BeamDog won't do that unless they have everything handed to them on a plate already working. When questioned why they don't make new games, they literally said "too much effort" and that their business model is "identify just enough cheap minor fixes to 'justify' an EE on paper whilst ignoring bugs too hard to fix". That's why there's no IceWind Dale 2 :EE (which unlike all the others has missing source code). Even if they took ID1's engine and ported ID2's content into that, that would still be "too much effort" (even though it would still be 50x easier than porting to Unity or 1000x easier than writing a new game from scratch). The only reason they did BG1 in BG2 engine was it was already done for them for free by amateur modders (Tutu mod)...

I doubt a NWN engine overhaul in "jack of all trades" Unity Engine, etc, is even possible without losing most of the feel of the game (which is why people like old games in general - the feel not the looks). As old as the char models look, fans don't really care about visuals and focus on ultimately the game's key strength - the Aurora Engine and powerful toolset bundled with it that spurned off thousands of mods. The temptation to "modernize" it from D&D 3e rulseset and RTwP combat to cr*ppy 5e or change the UI to "fit" controllers would be too great and it would end up like Sword Coast Legends (which is precisely an attempt at a modern NWN clone with 5e rules without all the great mods, engine or toolset). It flopped badly and the devs are now out of business. Or they'll turn it into multi-player centric stuffed full of MT's...

Likewise, you know any new 2018 D&D game isn't going to go back to the 2-3e rules due to "the casual audience" / cross-platform consolization. Same reason why the magic system in Bioware games has become so progressively dumbed down to fit controllers, you might as well play each game as a pure fighter or release Dragon Age 4 with only 2x spells (heal & fireball)... Yet at the same time, D&D +4e rules are cr*p when they involve extreme dumbing down like removing enemy immunities (fire-breathing dragons hurt by fire, "frightened" spectres, oozes "slipping" to the ground from Grease, etc).

Even popular modern titles have issues, eg, Pillars of Eternity is written in Unity yet suffers horrible performance slowdowns in some areas due to typical Unity Engine problems with layering assets, has long 15s load times on every map change (even on an SSD), the sound cuts out when speeding up the game (needed constantly due to not being able to run). It's a big step back from Aurora in everything but the visuals. The best you can do is improve it in the original engine as best as possible, but as you said these UI scaling fixes are so incredibly weak they should have been issued as patch v1.80 (just as Blizzard released Diablo 2 (2000) patches v1.14a-d in 2016, which is exactly the same 16 years as NWN1 (2002) is today).

 

[DigDog]

my idea was always that ...

let me go back 1 sec.

back in the 80s and 90s RPG where the best thing you could get on a PC, because you needed very little graphics, but a lot of work could go into making the choice tree and the text, plus combat mechanics go to be fairly complex.
text and figures too up less space and your Apple or C64 RPG could be way more complicated and expansive than a space-invaders-like game.

my idea was that, with the "new generation" of PCs coming out, that this newlyfound computing power could lead to extremely complex worlds and long campaigns with indepth choice and differences.

unfortunately, the rush to graphics kinda ruined everything, gameplay was dumbed down to the point where the target audience of these games was nothing like the hardcore nerds it used to cater to, and with the change in the type of crew you needed to recruit to design these games, the art of creating a real RPG was lost.

if you look back at games such as Bard's Tale 2, that game is colossal compared to modern RPGs. It takes MONTHS to finish it. It does not hold your hand, it's hard, unforgiving, you can permanently screw up your game, and while it does not have many choices (it's mostly combat), when you do have to chose, the game doesn't care if you make the wrong choice and completely break your game.

finishing that really gave you a sense of accomplishment. and like that, many before him (and after).


it's not about engines or design, it's about who you recruit to create your game: nerds, or neo-nerds.