Neverwinter Nights 1

The last thing I expected to happen after playing Neverwinter Nights 2 was that I might also get into Neverwinter Nights 1 after my initial lackluster impression of it.

I had tried NWN1 briefly a few years ago, and I was not inspired to continue. I played the original campaign from the beginning up until escaping from the besieged Academy, and it was an incredibly boring experience (not at all like the delightful starting experience of its sequel), with a headstrong companion who I couldn't control and who kept engaging with far-off enemies when I needed a break. It had a radial menu (good for gamepad, pointless for PC) with monochromatic abstract icons that didn't even tell you what the options were until you moused over them. Icons are for buttons. Menus want text. And monochrome icons are another offense to UI design. The priority for UI design is function, ease of use, and clear differentiation between options, not a unification where everything looks like everything else.

The graphics, as I've mentioned before, were from that transitional period when publishers stopped accepting 2D-based games, and so every game had to be 3D, even though the hardware of the time required them to use a frighteningly low number of polygons and extremely low-rez texture maps to support a wide enough customer base, regardless of whether or not there were enough skilled artists out there who could make good-looking art under such restrictions. If there were, most games' budgets weren't being used to hire them.

All these things kept me from getting into it at the time. But I couldn't help noticing that it remains a very popular game, and has a very large number of free campaign/quest mods to download (around 6000?) -- far more than NWN2. I found many interesting-sounding and good-looking NWN1 mods by accident while searching for mods for NWN2.

Also, when I first tried the game, I was tending to play it with the camera pretty close to the action, and with the characters clearly in view, where all their flaws were most evident, but in my recent playing of NWN2, I'd been generally playing with the camera zoomed far out and above, in the kind of pseudo-isometric perspective to which I've grown accustomed in the Infinity Engine games, which I hadn't experienced until after my first brush with NWN1. So if I tried playing NWN1 with a zoomed-out camera like that, I reasoned it would make the blocky meshes and low-rez textures irrelevant.

So, when GOG had a sale recently that included Neverwinter Nights (diamond edition), I succumbed to the temptation and bought it, because it was a pretty good gamble that there would be enough enjoyable content to warrant the cost at that price. I ended up pleasantly surprised.

Mods

Happily, I also found numerous mods to improve various aspects. First I should state here (in case there's any confusion) that there are two different meanings for the word "mod" in the context of gaming that I use here (not counting a third meaning, which refers to forum moderators). The kind of mod I'm about to talk about here, which is short for "modification", which modifies or changes aspects of a game, and then there's the kind of mod that's short for "module", which comes from the old modular adventure packs (originally called "modules") that were sold for D&D, which were designed to be modularly added to fit into anyone's already-running gaming campaign. I'll be talking about both here, and I'll try to reserve my use of the shortened "mod" to only mean "modification", and try to remember to use the word "module" to refer to anything that adds new adventures or quests to the game.

Amethyst Dragon has several mods that improve the UI by colourising the icons (including scroll icons), as well as making many parts of the UI transparent. I need to figure out which files do what on that last one, though, so I can disable some bits of the transparency. I like the transparent quickbar and the no-background compass, but some of the UI shouldn't be transparent (such as text boxes).

There were also a few head packs that improved the character design, a shader mod that adds some better lighting effects, bloom, and better colour saturation, and an environment mod that improves some of the geometry and textures. However, managing all these mods and dealing with conflicts arising from everything going into a single "override" folder promised to quickly become a headache, so I looked for a mod manager like I used for Oblivion, Morrowind, Dragon Age, and even the Infinity Engine games via WeiDU. Surprisingly, I couldn't find any. There were a couple of override managers I found, but they seemed to work by making backups of entire different sets of the override folder, instead of keeping track of which files are associated with which mod and tracking conflicts and such.

I ended up repurposing the Morrowind Plugin Manager for use in NWN. I needed to have a dummy "morrowind.exe" file in my NWN folder to get it to set up its directory structure, but after that it worked without complaint. This allows me to install and uninstall any override mod without having to remember which files it installed. The only inconvenience is that I need to temporarily rename the override folder to "data files" any time I want to install or uninstall something, and then rename it back to "override", because that's where Morrowind Plugin Manager installs things, and I couldn't find any way to change that, or fool it with a shortcut to the override folder. This also means that I still have to install certain mods manually, if they include files that need to go somewhere other than in the override folder.

I also needed to "prepare" the mods I wanted to install, by having each mod in a single ZIP or RAR file, with any extra folders removed, and any readme files renamed to something unique to that mod so that they didn't get overwritten.

For some reason, mod pages on the Neverwinter Vault are often full of multiple revisions of each mod, in multiple parts (for patches or optional components, or other reasons), sometimes with the same files duplicated in multiple archive formats, and rarely any explanation as to which files are actually necessary to get it running. If the Vault doesn't allow revising file descriptions, I suppose I can understand it, but if they insist on keeping old versions on the page for the sake of maintaining download counts, there should be some kind of clear separation between the latest and the older ones.

After dealing with all that mess, though, it's a convenient install and uninstall. I could get around the folder renaming and override-only issue if I placed my entire NWN folder inside another folder called "data files", and then included the "override" folder in the directory structure in the RAR files, but I'm not going to go that far.

Content

The GOG bundle came with the original campaign (of course), the toolset, the expansions Shadows of Undrentide and Hordes of the Underdark (two names that can be easily confused for new players), as well as premium modules Kingmaker, Shadowguard, and Witch's Wake. (All of the screenshots in this post are from the Kingmaker module, with various improvement mods applied.) There were also some nice wallpaper images included. Most of them I'd seen on the web already, but these are in resolutions higher than I've seen elsewhere.

"Premium modules" appear to be what we would today call "DLC", and it also appears to have been an early experiment on Bioware's part, because several of them were made with sequels in mind, and had cliffhanger endings that were never resolved. More of these premium modules were in the works, but Bioware apparently changed its mind about publishing them, and canceled the rest of the projects for reasons unknown to me. Even stranger is that there are three premium modules that were published, but were not included in the pack and are no longer being sold anywhere.

I've heard it said that I should look at the NWN original campaign as if it were an afterthought; just a kind of large demo module for what they were really selling, which was the toolset for making your own modules, combined with the multiplayer component for conducting DM-led D&D sessions as you would in a pen and paper session, except with a group of people online in a shared 3D world.

I'm more interested in single-player modules, myself, since playing this kind of game in realtime without the ability to pause or take turns is not at all the kind of experience I enjoy (such as missing a turn because I was trying to find a scroll in my inventory to cast). But with that perspective on the OC in mind, I figured the premium single-player modules would be a good choice to try for a more enjoyable experience than the OC had been. I started with the one called Kingmaker.

Kingmaker

The word "kingmaker", which I think I first heard in the movie Being There, describes an individual with considerable influence who remains backstage while pulling strings in order to get a personally chosen and groomed candidate into a position of power, possibly with the intent of controlling things from the shadows.

I tend to think of Merlin of Arthurian legend this way. Though it might not be how it was intended, I imagine that when Merlin embedded a sword into a stone and declared that only the one who could pull the sword out of the stone would become king, he must have been in full control of whether that sword would budge at all, and for whom. The people would surely never accept a wizard for a king, but why not a man chosen through a feat of strength? It would probably have been easier to get popular support for the idea that way, since history is full of kings who became king through brute force. But he tricked them all by allowing the sword to be pulled out of the stone by the child Arthur, a boy that he could influence and shape to rule as he wanted him to, while he sat in the background as court wizard. That's the kind of "kingmaker" that appears in this premium module.

As a player, you find yourself raised from the dead by a shaft of light who tells you that he wants you to gather up some allies and win an election to become Lady or Lord of a local fortified town. Mr Shaft then manifests himself as a magic talking weapon to help guide you along this chosen path. You then have to choose only two of your former four companions to be resurrected alongside you, which is a choice made more difficult than simply choosing them based on their classes due to the fact that some of them are more eager to live than others. I ended up choosing Kaidala the nymph druid even though she had fully embraced her death, because there was a monster waiting for her spirit to be released so it could torture and devour her. Calibast was an easier choice, since he was very friendly, clearly wanted to live, and I needed a tank.

This module takes the abstraction of buildings to an extreme when it comes to the dungeons, or at least that's one possible interpretation of why almost all dungeons outside of town are represented by small shacks. It's possible that I'm meant to understand that all of these shacks are simply protective structures around staircases that lead underground, where the actual dungeons are located. But some of them don't lend themselves well to that explanation. For instance, a ranger's dwelling inside the trunk of a large tree turns out to be a standard-looking (and very large) house on the inside, like a TARDIS. [Note: the windows pictured here are not part of the original tileset.]

The companions generally behaved nicely with the basic management commands "attack nearest", "guard me", and "stand your ground." They had a good amount of interaction and personality, too, with some nice lighthearted dialogue, some joke conversations, and even a romance option, which was a pleasant surprise.

In fact, there was quite a bit of personality all over this module, from most of the NPCs. I especially liked the personality and voice of Alias, which prevented me from hating her for the issues surrounding her. One was that if I took her offer to escort me to a quest location, and had her stand by to escort me back when I was finished, it made it extremely difficult to move around the surrounding area, because the game kept automatically targeting her and making me run to her and initiate her "Are you ready to go back to the keep?" dialogue. I was able to override it by repeatedly clicking on the spot where I wanted to go, and I could have sent her back to the keep without me, but that would have aggravated one of the other issues.

The other issue is one of design. You can't complete all of the quests in the module without some very careful planning and workarounds, because there's a vote to be had, and you can only delay it 3 times, after which the election has to take place, and all other quests are closed off for good. Walking around town, which is necessary for some quests, leads you past certain spawn points where Alias appears to tell you about the vote. It's possible to avoid those spawn points except when you go to the area of the keep where the guild hall is located, because there's a spawn point there that you can't avoid when you try to leave. I hated having to game the system in that way, but I really didn't want to have to play through the module 2 or 3 times just to finish those quests.

There were numerous dungeons to crawl through, some of which had some puzzles or unique features. The manticore room was a notable instance. You have to lure a manticore into a gas chamber and lock it inside, to kill it without damaging its pelt. It was a bit difficult, though, because most of the times I ran in to get its attention, it stood stock still without pursuing me, and just shot darts at me, which tended to kill me in one strike. I can't tell what it was that I may have done differently that got it to chase me, but once it did, it all went smoothly.

Those were the only bugs I recall, and the rest of the module was great fun, and a very positive experience. I enjoyed dealing with all the traps in the dungeons (which can be recovered as well as simply disarmed, giving you a free trap!), and experiencing the variety of creatures and architecture. A couple of the dungeons had riddles and puzzles as well, with secret doors and environmental hazards to either disable or attempt to use against my enemies. There were some interesting, non-dungeon-oriented side quests as well, that could be solved through character skills like persuasion (there were many skill check opportunities throughout the module), and an interesting mystery in which you can get involved if you decide to purchase a haunted house. Some of the quest text didn't quite match up with the locations, such as referring to an unseen power of the ghost on a nonexistent second floor of the house, but that's a tiny niggle in an excellent questline, which is nice and lengthy, involves many NPCs, and can be solved in at least 3 or 4 significantly different ways.

This module proved to me that NWN1 can be just as much fun as NWN2. Next I'll have to talk about the Wyvern Crown of Cormyr.

A few more screenshots

Neverwinter Nights 2: You say goodbye, I say hello.

It was sometime last year, while I was looking for some good fantasy style artwork for character portraits, that I came across this "Aribeth's Farewell" picture (reproduced here), marking the final official Bioware patch for Neverwinter Nights 1. I had no idea who this character was, or anything about the plot or stories of the NWN campaigns, aside from them being set in Faerun.

I wish someone had tried to convince me to look into the second game of this series earlier. Despite its numerous flaws (which you can be sure I'll unflinchingly enumerate in detail over the course of my posts on the subject), it has in abundance what I've found to be missing in the games of this type that have come after it. The second game, developed by Obsidian, appears to have also already received its final patch at the time of this writing. So here again, is a game whose developers have said goodbye to it years ago, and here I am coming in just now to say hello for the first time.

"This is so exciting! Wow! Where to begin?"

--Neeshka, a character I think I'm going to like.

Now I can see that my comparison between Dragon Age: Origins and the Baldur's Gate games was missing this very relevant intermediary. A great amount of what I found to be missing in DA:O (compared to BG) is in fact in Neverwinter Nights 2.

So, coming from DA:O, which has 3 races and 3 classes to choose from, I was delighted with the character creator for NWN2, which sports 8 base races and 16 additional sub-races, with 28 classes to choose from, not counting specialisations within a class. I picked druid for my first character, partially because I've enjoyed playing a druid in WoW, and also because I liked the style of armour. Each of these classes has its own style of armour! And from what I can tell, it doesn't have to become obsolete once you find better armour, because the crafting system allows you to put up to 4 enchantments on it. So after selecting the druid class, I was further delighted when the character creator basically asked me, "okay, now what kind of druid?" with a selection of druid specialisation packages to choose from, or the ability to customise my own.

Sample head and hair combinations

The one place where character creation seems to be inferior to Dragon Age is in the appearance, since they use a selection of pre-made heads rather than facegen sliders, and the artistic design of the heads and hair is rather unappealing, though not as bad as some other games I've reviewed here. There are, however, a number of mods that provide better, more appealing heads and hair, including a conversion of the popular Ren and Idkrr hair sets, known from the Oblivion mods. NWN2 does have one notable bonus in the appearance category, though, and that's the height and girth sliders for your general body type, allowing you to be tall and skinny or short and stocky. It would be nice if more games included that option. Even when it's a simple scaling and not actually visibly changing your body fat/muscle tone ratio, it's a welcome additional bit of customisation.

There was a pretty long list of voices to choose from, as well, though the voice sets seem to be shared across all races. There were no really good dwarf male voices that I could tell, for instance, but there were several that suited my female sun elf. What I don't understand is why they made the voices randomly shift pitch up and down, both in the character creator and in the game. In other words, the vocal lines that you hear over and over in the game will sometimes be raised to near chipmunk-style pitch, and sometimes down to demon-style pitch ("Urr lerrtle wrrrghed derrrwn errt therr merrmerrnt!"), which, even when it's somewhere between those extremes when I hear it in the game, always sounds obviously artificial. Who thought this was a good idea, and what did they hope to accomplish? We've already picked the voice set, so why is the voice changing? Are they suddenly breathing helium or sulphur hexafluoride?

Graphics and art design

The graphics have some pluses and minuses. The major advantage is the sheer variety of items, textures, environments, placeables, architecture, etc. The world of Faerun is perhaps the most detailed and expansive fantasy world ever created, and the range of story types that can be set there is very wide, and this is reflected by the art assets. However, the art style used for these assets lacks personality, being in general rather bland and inorganic in both modeling and texturing. This critique extends to the characters and their animation, as well, which I find to be stiff and awkward in places. Dwarves are especially awkward, always having their heads tilted forward, with their chins in their chests.

The textures of the interior environments also appear to be very mild on the specular mapping, giving a dry, clay-like appearance to everything, and in some cases (like the crypt walls) the normal mapping seems a bit excessive or inexpertly applied. There are also glaringly obvious seams in some oft-repeated wall textures and extremely pixellated cobwebs that I can't believe got past quality assurance.

I'll be interested to see if any of the user-made campaign modules make improvements to the basic items and architecture.

Optimisation, bugfixes, and tweaking

The game may be poorly optimised and have some performance-reducing bugs, but over the past couple of days I found the necessary tweaks and workarounds to get it running smoothly and change the control scheme to something more comfortable and familiar (in fact, almost exactly like DA:O or WoW). Kornstalx's NWN2 Hotkeys v1.05a changes the camera control from the middle mouse button to the right one, and also allows me to simply hold left and right mouse buttons to move the character forward and rotate the camera at the same time in whatever direction I want to move, which is the comfortable DA:O and WoW control scheme.

I have the graphics settings almost all at maximum, at 1920x1080 resolution, with the only reductions being no point light shadows, no rendering of far distant shadows, and character shadow quality set to medium. I would actually rather have character shadows disabled completely, but I can't find any way to do that without also disabling the environmental shadows, which would degrade the visual quality of the environment greatly. The character shadows I'm talking about aren't the ones cast on the ground under the character, but the self-shadows, such as the ones cast on the character's face by the hair, which is unnecessary and generally looks bad.

Tweaks to the nwn2player.ini file reduce the ridiculous sensitivity of the camera control to normal levels, as in any other game of this kind. These are the settings I found to be comfortable:

[Character Mode Options]
Mouse_Turn_Min=0.050000
Mouse_Turn_Max=3.000000

I use character mode all the time, and don't really see much difference in any of the other cameras, aside from the fact that you can change settings for each of them individually. I can zoom in closely or zoom far out to a distant overhead or faux-isometric view in character mode, as well as either click to move or hold the mouse button to move, or even move with the keyboard.

The NWN2 Client Extension fixes a timing bug that was causing the background to move in a kind of choppy stutter when panning. Now it's all smooth sailing.

What it felt like Shepard was saying

Poorly timed for my entry into this game was the decision a few months ago by Bioware to take offline their pre-Social forums, which contained uncountable numbers of posts about NWN and NWN2. In my searches for solutions to the problems I mentioned above, I would almost always hit several links on Google that looked from the summaries like they had the exact answer I needed, only to be directed to Commander Shepard's ugly face on the front page of bioware.com. I cannot adequately express how much this repeated occurrence increasingly felt like an insult, and how much bad faith it engenders. It has been months since their incident, and they haven't put that knowledge base treasury back online in any form, preferring instead to use all those links as a redirect to an advertisement. The likelihood of me buying Mass Effect 3 is surely decreasing with each such instance.

Crashes are rare with this setup, and far fewer than the crashes I still sometimes get with Dragon Age.

There are still some issues with the movement. Characters, including the one I'm controlling, can easily get blocked and stuck by environmental props. If I run too near to, say, a barrel, I can hit the collision box and just start running in place until I unstick the character. When companions do this, I may not notice until I'm on the other side of the temple. Other games handle this sort of thing better, by transferring some of your forward motion to the sides, so instead of stopping you, you're deflected around the item.

Interface

The user interface is designed in XML, and can be changed without any special tools. Thus, there are many user-made interface changes to choose from. I've found ones that increase the window sizes to use more of the available screen space for larger resolutions, as well as a larger font for the same reason.

I've also installed a tweak to change the size and aspect ratio of the portraits for the PC and the party members, making them use the same portrait size as NWN1 (larger, and a better proportion for portraits) instead of a square one. The default portraits in NWN2 are simple snapshots of the rather unappealing 3D character models, just like in Dragon Age. They're all facing the same direction, with the same expression, and have nothing to make them uniquely identifiable or artistically represent aspects of their character. Obsidian apparently understood this as a flaw, since you can easily change the portraits by double-clicking on them in the character sheet screen and selecting a new file in Targa format. There are many custom made portraits online to choose from in the correct aspect ratio since I'm using the NWN1 portrait mod, although finding appropriate portraits for the OC characters in particular is just as difficult as it was for Planescape: Torment, or even more so since the few actual portrait replacements I've found were made in the same square aspect ratio.

But look at the difference! The 2D portrait has personality and mood, while the 3D one is just a bland screenshot of a doll-like 3D model.

Starting experience

I found it highly refreshing to play a game with a starting experience like this. After so many games starting me in a barren wasteland, junkyard, prison, or other unpleasant surrounding, here I began in a land of lovely green wetlands and meadows, during a harvest festival full of games, entertainment, small-town rivalries, and competitions. The townsfolk had vibrant personalities, and the whole setting of the harvest festival allowed me to learn the controls of the game in a relaxed, pleasant environment before getting thrust into battle.

During the initial introductory areas, two friends are provided as party members: a fighter and a wizard, with a couple of other party members added briefly for tutorial purposes. Once you leave for the wider world, the first two companions that seem to be available are a dwarf fighter named Khelgar and a cheerful tiefling thief named Neeshka, who I quoted above. I don't yet know how long it'll be before I find any more, but I'm glad I'm a spellcaster (as a druid), since otherwise that role would be lacking.

Comparisons to Dragon Age: Origins

I'm noticing quite a number of elements that Dragon Age could well have acquired from this game, such as the companion influence system, the 3-companion limit, and the area-of-effect circle marker that you place on the ground when casting an AoE spell. That last one is one of the things for which I praised Dragon Age, calling it an improvement over the blind AoE in Baldur's Gate. Characters who die during a battle also get right back up again after combat is over, as in DA:O, so I don't know what good these "raise dead" scrolls are, unless it's for combat rezzing.

Problems and letdowns

The AI is abominable in this game. That goes both for pathfinding and for following the orders I bloody well give my companions. They'll sometimes directly ignore an order I broadcast right in front of them, such as "follow me", despite me ordering it multiple times and moving in a direction, and instead they'll charge in the opposite direction right into the Cloudkill that was billowing in the hallway for the enemies I wanted to draw out. Not to mention unexpectedly charging forward to attack distant enemies while I'm having Neeshka disarm a trap. Running right onto the trap, naturally, before I can stop them, and when I thought I had them all on "stay". Even failing to obey my orders, the AI should be smart enough not to run into poison clouds that I cast or traps that I've detected. It's a real exercise in companion wrangling. I don't even want to get into the times in the heat of battle that I position myself to cast spells that cause damage in a straight line (like Lightning Bolt) so that they'll hit multiple enemies and none of my companions, and it's almost guaranteed that several of my companions will get right in front of me to receive the full blast when it goes off. I might have to try the "puppet mode" where they don't do anything without orders, even though that's not what I want -- what I want is for them to act intelligently.

Companions are constantly getting stuck on scenery. There's no excuse for the party members getting stuck on walls while running down a hall. When they're following a party leader, they run in a direct path toward the leader, and clearly aren't using the walkmesh for the level. Switching to controlling them directly, and clicking on the spot where I want them to go makes them correctly run around those same obstacles they get stuck on when they're following the leader. That's bloody ridiculous! How can this have gone unfixed for so long? The companion pathfinding is one area where Dragon Age: Origins is clearly superior to NWN2. Companions should always use a level's walkmesh, following or not.

A stranger bug that I often encounter is that sometimes I'll be running around and am abruptly teleported back to where I started from. This can happen at quite some distance, causing me to need to retread my steps. What the hell could cause that, and how can that have gotten past quality assurance?

On an aesthetic topic, the various temples are very disappointing compared to the Baldur's Gate games. Whereas in BG they were unique and interesting, Obsidian basically went the Oblivion route with the temples, making them all look like generic Christian churches with hard wooden pews and angelic choir music, with a token shrine to the particular god near the front. By contrast, the temple of Helm in BG2 was dripping with atmosphere appropriate to that stern, obey-the-law kind of god, with industrial sounds and an authoritative voice echoing through it reminding everyone of the laws they must follow, while the temple of Umberlee the water-queen was essentially a giant indoor pool with narrow catwalks crossing over it for the adherents to walk on.

Spelling mistakes and incorrect grammar are also noticeable. "Nevermind" instead of "never mind," using the word "discrete" when they should have used "discreet," "it's" when they meant "its," "pouring over books" instead of "poring over books," "who's blood" instead of "whose blood," and so on.

This may seem to be a pretty harsh review for a game that I like and recommend, but believe me, it deserves the criticism as much as it deserves the praise. There's a brilliant, shining game under the grime of its bugs, and I only wish I had a way to scrub that grime away. The game system is expansive and very flexible, and (companion AI issues aside) fun to play. Even the official campaign is a fun ride. I've already begun downloading user-made story/quest modules, though, which I expect to also enjoy. I'm beginning with highly-rated, spotlighted, and award-winning modules on the Neverwinter Vault, which I think will have to suffice in lieu of personal recommendations. I'll have to look for some module reviews somewhere, too.

Trouble in Rainesfere, my first quest mod

Making a mod for Dragon Age: Origins was a very spur-of-the-moment decision -- a decision which I made shortly after successfully building a pleasant landscape in the toolset after following one of Mikemike37's video tutorials on Youtube. I documented the whole process over two weeks on the Nexus forum and the Bioware Social Network, so there's no need to retread that ground here, but if you're interested in a behind the scenes look at the process of making a mod in the Dragon Age toolset, you might enjoy the read. There are plenty of screenshots there, too.

Download either on Nexus or BSN.

I'm generally satisfied with how it came out, with the adage in mind that "the perfect is the enemy of the good." Users can expect a relatively small download and a short questline that doesn't take itself too seriously, in brand-new locales.

I imposed time restrictions upon myself for it, to ensure I would get it finished and available for people to play while I still had the free time to spend on it. I know that if I left it as an open, unplanned schedule, it could have become one of the countless abandoned entries littering the "Projects" section of BSN with high hopes and broken promises.

Early on in this process, I was taken by how easy it was to create new landscapes (much like in Oblivion), with the sculpting and texturing of land. The placement of vegetation was also fairly simple, though it wasn't very intelligent about the height at which the scatter tool placed them. I had to adjust the height of every shrub, grass, and tree so it wouldn't be floating above the land (and then of course there was a strange export problem right at the end that resulted in extra floating trees anyway).

I thought the ease of new landscape creation was a strong argument against the reuse of areas in the Dragon Age games (especially in the second game), and in some senses it still is, despite my troubles with other aspects of it -- namely the light mapping. Since we modders didn't get the same lighting software Bioware used, one would expect that Bioware employees didn't have quite the same problems as I did with the rendering of the light maps after the design of the land was done.

The necessity of rendering baked lighting with EclipseRay made the experience excruciatingly slow and full of problems I didn't understand. It's enough to make me want to avoid any future mod that would involve that process. So I could probably fill my new lands up with new side quests and characters, but not make more lands, unless I could pass them off to someone else to render the light maps. The dialogue and quest/plot system is actually very nice, and a positive first experience for me in quest modding.

Anyone examining the code and dialogue trees in my mod (if they can do such a thing with the files I released) might find numerous tangential story elements that did not make it into the mod as released. I "commented out" those elements (by setting conditions that couldn't be fulfilled) because of problems getting them to work correctly or because it would have required too much more alternate story development for too little justification. There are still some unresolved bugs in conversations which I can't figure out, in regard to party members, but since they didn't interfere with the gameplay, I considered it an acceptable flaw for the sake of people having something to to play. There's also some "ghost" code in various scripts where I wanted something to happen, but nothing did, and I just left the code in without even commenting it out.

When faced with such problems in the code, I devised workarounds so that I essentially got the desired effect, albeit through different means.

A good taste, but an appetiser for something more?

"The depth of the Dragon Age toolset, with Bioware's long history of community innovation, will ensure that the Dragon Age community is a thriving centre of creativity and content for years to come."

--Jay Watamaniuk, Bioware Community Manager

I wasn't aware until I started this mod that the toolset was no longer receiving support from Bioware, but I suppose that should have been obvious by the fact that they ceased further DLC or expansions of DA:O long before the time that they promised at the outset that they'd do so. I pre-ordered the game partially due to their promotion of it as a platform for gaming, with its powerful toolset and the promise of expansions for years to come, as it was promoted in the beginning. "The future of gaming mods", they called it in their promotional video. While perhaps true, that future didn't last long before the company moved on. The abrupt abandonment of that "platform" and the quick release of a sequel shifted it away from that concept, and the cessation of expansions means that it will not receive any new official assets that can be used in modding.

In my catch-up feast of old forum posts on the topic of Neverwinter Nights 2 (a game which I had previously overlooked due to my dislike of its forerunner), I've recently seen that many of the names I got to know from Dragon Age modding had originally been prolific or otherwise well-respected modders for NWN2, and I see that they moved to Dragon Age with the understanding that it would be as long-supported and expanded-upon as the NWN games had been. With that promise broken, and compared to NWN2's sheer variety of creatures, spells, placeables, and the rich and detailed lore to draw upon, I can see now that the paucity of Dragon Age's bestiary and sundries makes it a far more restrictive system to work with for telling the variety of stories one can tell in NWN2. Perhaps, like me, others might notice this, and take another look at Neverwinter Nights 2 as a modding platform, as these experiences (and my subsequent playing of NWN2) have led me to revise my previous opinion that Dragon Age: Origins is the best modern game engine to create Baldur's Gate-style adventures.

My next post will be about Neverwinter Nights 2.