Had a little time to catch up on threads here, flying on my
second third cup of strong coffee this morning, thought I'd toss in my two coppers in response to some of the ideas in the thread:
Making a new NWN is just not going to happen anytime soon. I once was as optimistic as anyone that it was possible but the reality of what it would take to come up with a real replacement eventually disabused me of that idea. Despite its age, the NWN game creation system is an extremely complex and robust product.
A
flawed masterpiece, which will not likely be seen from a major gaming studio anytime soon and whose
70+ developers' 160 man-years of work will not likely be reproduced by a community effort, either. BTW Funky, you might want to check out page 2 on that first link. You guys at HG got a nice bump on page 2.
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More existentially, IMO the overall psychological health of the NWN community appears to be higher than just about any time in the game's history. One unexpected benefit of the austerity of such an old game is that many (but not all) of the griefers, trolls, narcissists and other troublemakers are at an all-time low on the forums. The game of
vendetta is not so popular anymore. Turned out there is no crown that's mailed to you when you achieve King of Neverwinter status and so most of them drifted away to greener-eyed pastures...or self-destructed or whatever that personality type does.
While questions may go unanswered in the CC, Module Making or Scripting forums, they are far less likely to be responded to derisively or discouragingly. Same with submissions to the Vault. This is a
very good thing.
Nitpicky conflagrations of the variety such as D20's initial posting to the Modules section of the Vault or the question of who had the
authority to include Wemics in their project simply aren't happening as much, if at all, anymore. In the last two years I've seen a couple of people try to gin up a controversy only to have their ass handed to them by everyone else.
Not because they were right or wrong but because most all of the regulars can spot the difference between two authorities disagreeing on a matter and old-fashioned trolling- and seem to have little patience for the latter nowadays.
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I think there are still a lot of possibilities to draw in more players which haven't been fuly explored. One of my favorite things about the Forrestwolf's Firefly System and D20 in general is the ability to coax people into trying NWN who otherwise might not have. Innovations like Enki/Goudea's
space combat system, for instance, could be re-applied to other situations (driving, sailing, for instance) genres to make wildly different environments in this old game.
There are still niche communities hungry to create and play games in the world they favor. Post-apocalyptic genre comes to mind. Or the Lego-style/Minecraft "look" or sandbox. I'm sure there are many others. It would be an amazing thing to hook up a community like that to Neverwinter and provide enough of a bridge to bring them in and get them started. After seeing what's available in the way of 3D model packs for games and the hourly rates of professional lowpoly 3D modelers, if I had about 2-3 grand I could afford to part with to get standardized base meshes made and four-six months or so of free time, I'd probably do it just to see how it would pan out.
The lack of support in so many areas also means less restrictions. While it still definitely has its limitations, I believe this game creation system is usable to create a lot more than most people think, and to tell stories in environments a lot more varied than it generally has been tasked with.
Meh. That's my fantasy for this winter, anyway.
Modifié par OldTimeRadio, 08 mai 2013 - 06:04 .
