Poor NWN

And the wait is almost over.

So I'm going to take this opportunity to piss in everyone's soup.

I'm a crotchety old curmudgeon, and I'm going to put my money where my mouth is and tell you what's going to disappoint everyone when they get their hands on NWN.

Gameplay

There's a lot of die-hard D&D fanatics out there, and they're going to start gretching and moaning about this and that rules tweak, ignored skill, or complete rewrite of the skill set. There are some things that computers still can't do, and the game code has to take that into consideration for certain aspects of the play. The climbing, swimming and riding skills are completely ignored since the game just simply couldn't crowbar everything in the world in before shipping.

Style over Substance

D&D players have been making due with little or no visual aids for almost three decades now. Sure, some groups use miniatures... but they're the same miniatures every week, and some of those miniatures are very crudely painted. Unfortunately it seems that Bioware spent a huge amount of their development effort in making the game seem really snazzy and visually appealing. This is time I think would have been better spent adding extra features for a more dynamic play.

Flatworld

The world of NWN is very flat. Sure, there are hills and walls and houses and all the things you wouldn't find in a completely 2D world, but the game relies on some of the same rending/pathing/computation short-cuts as the original Quake game did. You can't have two paths go over each other. No bridges that you can both walk across, and under. No caves that wind under and around themselves. You can simulate it by having the over and under sections in different zones... but you can't have the two interact.

Smallworld

Every adventure that the players go on will have to be divided into very small subsections. I suspect that the players will quickly start to feel cramped when running about the NWN landscape, constantly having to bolt through one doorway to zone into another room, or the field just West of where they once were.

Scripting

One of the brilliant things about MUDs is you can make just about anything in the world happen in them if you have the time and the programming know-how. Unfortunately my 1000 yard view of the coding engine NWN has put out makes me think that Bioware has distanced the code-writer from the power that they could have. I can see why Bioware wanted to do this... They wanted to be able to provide the power of a scripting language to everyday users, in what they thought was an easy to use GUI with plug-and-play style code. I think what they got was the worst of both worlds -- any adventure short of a hack-n-slash fest will require quite a bit of work by a reasonable coder working through a limiting GUI to produce adventure code that covers maybe 20% of what the DM could think up.

Dialog

All dialog in NWN is based, it seems, off a simple tree structure. You pick an opening statement by an NPC, which connects to possible responses by the players, which each connect to their own unique counter-responses, and so on. As you can see, any complex dialog will rapidly expand into a huge tree. There is no looping back to the start (or other key nodes) -- the module author would have to fit every possibly dialog combination into it's own node-path. Why not implement dialogs as DAGs instead? It's beyond me.

Don't get me wrong, I've already reserved my copy of NWN at the local game store, and I'm anxiously awaiting it. I'm just bracing myself for the worst of all possible games, while hoping for the best.

i,jasona