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Planet Neverwinter has an interesting forum postung from Trent Oster about the speed of level progression in Neverwinter Nights:
We plan on the end user completing our story (60 hours) around level 12-14. The 60 hour play time is probably a little conservative, as you could easily spend a lot more time in our story. We have to re-work the advancement schedules a bit in NWN due to the nature of combat. Pen and Paper advancement is very fast, due to the fact it take an hour or so to play a combat. In NWN the same combat is over in 60 seconds. We are striving for fast advancement at the lower levels, tapering off as you get to be higher level. We aren't out to re-invent the pen and paper advancement sceme, but we do have to "interpret" the desired advancement vs the requirements of our game.
Treasure and XP: Treasure and XP division are huge issues in a multiplayer game. We are planning to deal with XP by sharing it among the party and giving a bonus multiplier for the number of people in the party. ie: soloing a monster you get 100% of 100%. A party of two players, each player gets 50% of 110%. (You would also get more creatures in the encounter, thus higher xp overall). We fought over this point for a long time and the key issue is: Does the cleric deserve fewer XP for healing the party and enhancing the stronger frontline characters than if he/she were fighting alongside. After a long "Discussion" we came to the conclusion there was no fair way to split XP without making the system so complex it became brittle and subject to bugs, so we came up with the sharing system.
As to treasure. The "discussions" on XP were mild compared to the treasure ones. After days of "calm", "Rational", "Discussion" we decided to leave it to the players. If the thief can't be found during the combat and the treasure just doesn't seem very good it might be time to hold the thief upside down and shake him/her for a bit. We are looking into the possibility of "snooping" in someone's inventory for this purpose.
Module Building Info: The sweet thing about NWN is the rapid turnaround. I can make a module and play it almost immediately. You fire up the toolset, make a few changes, save the file out, launch the game and load it up. Out of all the development tools I've worked with the toolset and game have a very fast revision loop. So, to answer your question, I'd have to say both. Building is really cool, you create a script, fire up the game and nothing happens like you expect. You fire up the tool, fix the obvious stupid thing you did and then launch the game and whammo, it works. Sometimes it even does exactly what you intended. I think a number of people will never touch the tools and NWN will still be great entertainment. I also believe some people will use the game only as a debugging and testing platform, concentrating soley on the tools. Either way it will be fun.
To Late for Great Ideas?: We are quite interested in adding as much functionality to the game as possible. The possible additions with NPC's are very interesting and we have discussed a great number of options. However, we are very tight on development time and we have to concentrate on the core systems to ensure a robust and enjoyable game. An expansion or sequel would be a great place to build on the solid base we are building in NWN. |
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Trent Oster (NWN) Forum tidbit
