Bioware: "Gaming's moved on from Neverwinter Nights, we've moved on from Baldur's Gate."

I read an article interviewing Cameron Lee, producer of Dragon Age: Inquisition.  It's a year old, but it was recently linked in a topic on the Neverwinter Nights 2 forum.  Due to its provocative content, I thought it would be better to comment on it here, rather than on Bioware's own forum.

"Gaming's moved on from Neverwinter Nights, we've moved on from Baldur's Gate."

This quote jumped out at me, even before I saw that the article author pulled it out to highlight it later in the article.  It confirms what they had been avoiding saying for many years, that they've abandoned much of the audience that they attracted with their earlier games.  "Moving on," as if one of the best games they ever made were a bitter, failed marriage, or at best a death of a loved one, much as the article's author opines in the text leading up to the quote.

Showing the quote in a little more context, the most relevant part says:

Inquisition allows me to move into a tactical camera view and control my party from overhead, but BioWare prefers to show the game from its third-person view. [...] But I also suspect that BioWare wants to distance itself from the games of its past--Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights, namely--and be mentioned in the same breath as Elder Scrolls. Lee's words reinforce this notion. "Gaming's moved on from Neverwinter Nights, we've moved on from Baldur's Gate," he says.

I do remember a much earlier interview in Wired magazine that supported the author's suspicion, specifically in regard to Skyrim.  Commenting on the poor reception of Dragon Age 2, Ray Muzyka was speaking of plans for improving what would become Inquisition, saying:

“We’re checking [Skyrim] out aggressively. We like it. We’re big admirers of [Bethesda] and the product,” he said. “We think we can do some wonderful things.”

More like admirers of the product's financial success, I'd wager.  And so Inquisition features a zoomed-in perspective and a seamless open world, both noticeable features of the Elder Scrolls games.  At least they didn't copy the Elder Scrolls' solo, one-man-army gameplay style.  But, then, Bioware's Neverwinter Nights didn't have the controllable party that Baldur's Gate and Dragon Age: Origins had.  Obsidian gave us that proper party system in Neverwinter Nights 2.

Back to the more recent interview, producer Lee continues after mentioning NWN:

"Neverwinter Nights, when you think about that is a transition point from Baldur's Gate, being 3D at that point. So that would have had a similar question, just from the change in perspective, and the change in the pacing. So it's more of an evolution in being immersed in the world, and I think that this kind of freeform movement to the world, giving you a massive place to explore, is just an evolution of the world."

What is he talking about here?  This, combined with the first part above, is the entirety of the quote.  Perhaps it would have helped if the author had mentioned what the "similar question" was referring to, but he didn't mention it because he found the bit about NWN and BG more interesting.  Is he talking solely about graphics or style, and not the game?  That their games have "moved on", first away from 2D, then away from a long-view party-focused gameplay to an Elder Scrolls-style up-close single character gameplay?  If so, it's hardly saying anything.

But, then, he didn't just say that Bioware was moving on.  He claimed that gaming, as a whole, had moved on from Neverwinter Nights, and by extension from Baldur's Gate as well, which lends itself to the way that I and the article author took it: that gaming as a whole has moved on from that sort of game.

I have to say that I disagree with that statement, given the renaissance of RPGs of a class similar to Baldur's Gate starting a few years ago and continuing today, with games like Divinity: Original Sin, Wasteland 2, Shadowrun Returns, Pillars of Eternity, and more still in production, not to mention the successful re-releases of the Baldur's Gate games in "enhanced editions".  To me, it looks more like gaming had a period of famine caused by the big publishers' lack of interest in serving the needs of that customer base, which was finally relieved by crowdfunding and other similar means.

Thanks to this renaissance, it's been a while since I (and others in this particular audience) have had to "settle" for the smaller and smaller scraps the larger publishers deigned to throw us.

I have not yet played Bioware's latest offering because of how much I hated the Dragon Age 2 demo.  From videos and demonstrations of it, though, it looked like it was closer to DA:O than DA2 was.  I was willing to see how it came out.  It seemed that they were no longer quite so confident that it would be more profitable to abandon the fans of the original in pursuit of a newer, presumably larger audience.

However, when one of my relatives happened to get DA:I as a X-mas gift, I watched him play it, and I determined that it still had strayed too far away from the kind of game I want to play.

They had it right before.  They don't now, and that's fine.  Others do.

The Black Scourge of Candle Cove released

An adventure module for characters around level 10
Download pages, with screenshots:

• Nexus Mods
• Neverwintervault.org

A notorious sea hag pirate has been terrorising the port town of Candle Cove with her crew of ogres, plundering ships and sending men, women, and children to a watery grave.  Now she's gone even further, and seized control of the local lighthouse, preventing any ships from coming or going at all!

You and your party of adventurers have just come into town.  Can you do what it takes to defeat the pirates and free Candle Cove?

This campaign is for a party of up to 5 members, and features a range of recruitable companions of seven different classes around town, in addition to allowing you to import or create your own party.  SoZ party chat will allow your own created party members to chip in their unique perspectives in conversations, as well as the recruitable companions' unique dialogue.  Play whatever class you like as your main character, and build a well-balanced party to deal with a variety of situations, both in combat and in social situations.

Characters should be around level 10 to play this module.  You can import a character of an appropriate range, or select options within the starting area to level a new character within a range of easier or harder levels, with a level-appropriate amount of gold to use to purchase equipment from the well-stocked vendors around town.

Go diving!  Sailing!  Sandbox questing in town and around it!  And when you're strong enough, face the larger challenges!  Have fun, and play it as you like.

Neverwinter Nights 2 module update

Although I've been rather quiet on this blog, I've been steadily posting updates on my progress on my adventure module for Neverwinter Nights 2 on the forums of the Neverwinter Nexus and the Bioware Social Network, where by now I've posted somewhere around 150 updates about it.  I don't think I said much about it here, actually, although I've posted several videos from it on my Youtube channel.

The summary of it is that it's approaching completion, and it's large.

After this module's completion, I can get back to more frequent updates here -- which is certainly not to say there won't be anything here until then.

What I've learned

I've learned an unbelieveable amount about modding and making games from this experience, far beyond my previous modding in other games.  My module for Dragon Age: Origins was a dipping of my toe, and this has turned out to be swimming in a vast ocean.

I've become comfortable with fairly complicated programming/scripting, which turned out to be not only a basic necessity, but a creative opening of the doors that allow me to make any kind of quest I can imagine.  I've also learned the value of writing detailed comments in my scripts, to document what I'm doing and why, and how it affects other scripts, or is affected by them, and where I'm storing variables and other information.

I've recently expanded my asset-creation knowledge from my existing forte of texturing, to learning how to make custom models, and creating new UV/UVW maps for them, using Gmax (a sort of "lite" version of 3DS Max, if I understand correctly).  I've created a number of new placeables for this project, first by simply retexturing existing models and by texturing the models supplied by others, and later by making the meshes in Gmax.

I also learned how to use other tools to import custom music and sound effects, and performed mass extraction and conversion of the game's sound assets so that I can more conveniently browse through them and pick appropriate sounds for my module's situations.  The built in "sound objects" that can be placed in the game are convenient for many purposes, but they don't include anywhere near the entirety of the assets available in the game files.

Before that, of course, I had also learned about how to made the graphic user interface elements in XML, and I used my graphic design experience to make them look nice at HD resolution.

I'll have to make a post to showcase the new placeables at some point, and ultimately I'll be releasing them as a pack separately from the module that I made them for.  I'd like to showcase the scripting systems, too, but code doesn't lend itself well to showcasing in that manner, despite being very interesting in other ways.

Lighting in this engine is another thing I've been learning about.  I can see that there were some mistakes in how the original campaigns were lit, and unfortunately those mistakes are what prompted me (and no doubt many others) to disable point light shadows.  And the poor engine optimisation caused many others to eschew even medium-level shadows.  A great shame, since with full shadows enabled, and a module with properly adjusted lights, the lighting can be very beautiful in this game.

I don't use these cinematic cutscenes, preferring the text box for its much longer capacity for each line (and perhaps more importantly, how it gives the user the ability to absolutely control the pace of the dialogue), but if I were to use the cinematic cutscenes, I would certainly use a classic studio 3-point lighting setup, and specifically chosen camera angles (rather than the default random angles) to create an appealing and dramatic scene.  Lighting is often not given the attention it should be, though it plays a very important role.  Some conversations I've experienced in some modules have taken place entirely in the dark, and not for any artistic reason that I could tell!

Likewise, I have come to believe that the washed-out look that I'd noted in some areas and objects in my original playthrough of the original NWN2 campaign is due to the fact that those assets were intentionally designed with a low colour saturation so that they could be tinted as needed.  And some level artists apparently didn't tint them.

One of the first things I learned was how to handle the game's two-dimensional array files (2DA).  Understanding those is really the first step in using almost any custom content.  I can clearly recall how foreign and mystifying they were when I first attempted to use one, which was the restsys_wm_tables.2da file used to select random wandering monster encounters for the resting system that was added in Mask of the Betrayer.

For that matter, learning to create a campaign and to import systems added by the expansions was a very valuable experience.  Creating a campaign was thankfully simple enough, since there is a very good tutorial for it by Kaldor Silverwand.  Importing the other systems, on the other hand, involved a lot of reading through scripts and examining settings in the official campaigns.

And of course, several mishaps underscored the importance of backing up your work often.  Fortunately, my backups have been frequent enough as to prevent the loss of more than a day's work.  If you're reading this, and you haven't backed up your current work in more than a day, take a break from reading and do it now, just in case.

Ways of learning more

Since there are no intermediate-to-advanced tutorials for creating modules that I could find, I think there's nothing better that you can do than to open up the default scripts and read them.  Especially the include files, and the scripts for special events and encounters in the campaigns.  Many of them have decent documentation that teaches you a great deal, and since these scripts were written over a period of years, and also by different people, there are a lot of different approaches shown in them.  In the few months I've been working on this, I myself have used multiple approaches for the same tasks, based on different factors, such as directness, extensibility, reusability, elegance, brevity, ease for other people to understand it, and others, so it's no surprise to see so many methods on display in the core scripts, especially those left over from NWN1.

In addition to just reading the scripts, it's extremely helpful to just play through the official campaigns, and take note of when the game has you performing a particular task that's similar to something you want to have in your module as well.  You can open up that file and see how they did it, and then use that knowledge to make your own version.

Anyway, I've really been enjoying this process of learning and discovery (aside from a few annoying things like working with the walkmesh).  So back to work for me!