11/20/03
I've finally
got to a point in my build that I can call A-1 Genesis of Evil final. I'm sure
there are some bugs, but nothing show-stopping. This is now version. 1.0. I'd
like to take this opportunity to thank many people. First off; my wife for her
support and suggestions, Tal Rasha for his help with some scripts, Alazander for
his suggestions, Maximus for a wonderful NWN site, BioWare for a fabulous game,
Lilac Soul for a fantastic script generator and all his personal help, and
finally big thanks to J'dai Voisin - the best darn bug chaser an author could
ever ask for! Thank you all! I hope you enjoy. Like always, I welcome any
constructive commments, bug reports or suggestions. Thank you. -Twigster
10/3/03
Well, it's been how long since my last post? I've finally got something for you all to look at and play with. Please go to the 'downloads' section and get the current build of my first module. It's in need of a lot of work All constructive comments and suggestions are indeed welcome.
9/6/02
Hey all! Long time no post. Sorry about that; been busy with getting the pics from Gen-Con done. Still not done yet- sorry. Life gets in the way of things sometimes. In the mean time however, take a look here. Just got back from Dragon-Con in Atlanta, GA. All the pictures are of costumes that ran about the con. I must say, for a smaller con, this one has higher quality and quantity of costume goers than anything I've ever seen at Gen-Con. Most Impressive. Also, you might notice a theme for the pictures. I was at the Dawn Costume Contest - hosted by Ted Raimi and Traci Lords. WOW!
CALLING ALL SCRIPTERS!!!!
I'm in a bit of bind right now. Please click here for the details. I'm stumped on this one boys and girls. This should work but doesn't! :( Any ideas or suggestions are welcome.
8/15/02
Hey all! I'm now in the process of getting down all the pictures I took at this year's Gen-Con. I have already posted my BioWare experience. The rest will take a little more time. I'm in the middle of refinancing my home and reviewing some 'mods' on 'The Vault'. Please be patient. As I did before, I will make an announcement on 'The Vault' when it is complete.
7/15/02
Welcome to the new site! After a lot of 'inbetween' time while playing NWN, I've finally given this site a new look. I hope you like it. I hope it works better for all my visitors - old and new.
It is my intent to use this site as a means for you to learn more about my world of Akadia; short stories, brief histories of people and places and such. Although not all my modules will be exclusive to Akadia, I will have other, 'one offs' if you will, modules to download. As of right now, I have a quickie little mod I put together based on Kevin Nunn's PnP module he'd done at Pacific-Con in 1981; Lara's Tower. You may check it out in the downloads section.
Please check back often as I'm re-doing a lot of the sections, ergo the 'non-clickable' links. :) Hopefully within a week or so, I'll have more for you to peruse.
Once again, Welcome!
7/3/02
It’s here! It’s here! Wednesday, June 19 2002; a day that I will remember like my wedding day, the days my daughters were born or the day I received my license to fly. The Versus ‘World Builder’ book and two copies of Neverwinter Nights, (my wife wanted to play too) are sitting next to me in the passenger seat of my truck and I still have a half-hour to get home. I’ve waited for this game for about 2 and a half to three years and I have just thirty minutes left until I can get home and run this puppy!
I’m finally home; I get my girls, who went with me, out of the truck and into the house. I fix them lunch first. Don’t let it be said I neglect my children’s basic needs for a game. But, oh what a game! I soak it all in; the cover art, the cloth map, the disks in what…paper sleeves? What about the wonderful jewel case of BG2? Well, that’s progress I suppose, gotta make it all fit in the little box.
Good, the kids are eating. I get install disk 1 and open my drive. I take out the play disk for Dungeon Siege. I toss it aside saying, “Don’t need you anymore!” I place gently the first install disk and begin the install. Error?! “You have installed on this computer Neverwinter Nights Beta toolkit. It is recommended to uninstall this first.” Oh yeah, oops, I forgot. Ok, after I remove the beta toolkit I begin the install of the game. I watch with an eager stare as the install progresses. “Hey!” I think to myself. “I could be using this time to do something constructive.” I get up and grab the other copy and fire up my wife’s machine. I begin the install and go back and check the install on my machine. ‘Disk Two’ and the ‘Play Disk’ install with flying colors- absolutely no problems. However, I go back to my wife’s and find a critical error that the install on ‘Disk Two’ was halted and aborted. Blast! This is not good. I’ll restart it, maybe the install just hiccupped. That happens sometimes. I re-enter the CD-key that is as long as my arm…viola! It works great. Thus begins my new BioWare adventures of the Forgotten Realms.
Notes to reader:
My System-
P3 700mhz
384 meg of ram cl3 100mhz bus
20 gig drive 5400 rpm
Soundblaster live 5.1
Plexwriter 12/10/32a CD burner
soyo mobo (can’t remember what type)
geforce2 mx 100/200 with 32meg of ram
Windows 2000 5.00.2195 service pack 2
My wife’s system
Athalon 900 mhz(yes, hers is faster.)
256 meg of ram cl3 133mhz bus
40 gig drive 5400 rpm
Soundblaster AWE 64 ISA
Generic DVD drive
Abit KT7-Raid
Geforce2 mx 100/200 with 32meg of ram
Windows 98SE 4.10.2222A
Single Player Game 96%
On my system, this game has run quite well. I noticed a little tittering here and there, frames were dropped, sound skipped once or twice. It was to be expected.
At this time of writing I have gotten into chapter 2 so there should not be many, if at all, spoilers for the game.
The game’s story has a definite BioWare flavor, with its simple story arc that progresses for the PC as evenly as the game does. By now, in chapter 2, the PC is deep into the story but still has more questions than answers. To this point, I’ve felt a sense of accomplishment by ridding the plague that Neverwinter was encompassed by and uncovering an evil agent not responsible for the outbreak itself but its prolonging. This of course leads to more questions for chapter 2.
One of the pleasant things I found about the SP was the henchmen. Understandably so it is extremely difficult to script an NPC to act intelligent but BioWare does an adequate enough job for me to enjoy and get to like my henchman, Tomi. Although with the wonky pathfinding, where I find myself getting stuck in places I either should not have been or got into and therefore should get out of, left me sometimes mildly frustrated when Tomi confidently exclaims, “Oh, I can pick that open easy!” But then suddenly forgets about it because I have not scampered out of his way.
Some of the implementations of some of the feats are awesome. In chapter 1, I’m fighting Drawl, one of the early bosses, and BAM! I’m on my butt! “He knocked me down!”, I exclaim surprisingly. I get back up and drink a potion from the whipping he just laid down on me then, before I know it, “Where’s my sword?” I zoom in. “Damn! He took out my weapon!” So, like a blind man groping for his cane, I bend down and pick it up and almost instantly I find myself looking at a menu asking my if I’d like to RESPAWN, LOAD or EXIT! Ok, I need to redo my thinking here. Very cool! Combat is no longer sit and trade blow for blow.
Bugs 70%
Surprisingly unlike BioWare, this game is replete with bugs. I looked on the cover to double check if indeed it was BioWare who’d done this game. Compared to the norm; it is run of mill, however, BioWare has set a standard for themselves that is far beyond ‘run of the mill’ where this game fails to live up to.
As mentioned before, the install alone is a hit or miss situation and the path finding needs help. I’ve lost track how many times where I’m running for my life from the likes of the Orc captain holed up in the caves outside of port Llast who’s only goal is to break something off in my posterior and I find myself stuck trying to get around a rock while MR. ORC “This is gonna feel a lot like sex” CAPTAIN is breathing down my neck. (Yes! I run sometimes. It’s a perfectly legit tactic. One never knows if the bad guy may lose interest in chasing me.)
On my wife’s machine, she also has a better monitor than mine so I felt a need to crank up the resolution on the game and take a look. To my chagrin, all keyboard commands go bye-bye and changing it back to the previous settings means editing .ini file. Also, the icon for the mouse moves about an inch every time I attempt to click on something, requiring me to sort of aim where the mouse will end up allowing me to check out skills, feats or grabbing an item out of the inventory.
Secondly, dealing with my wife who’s behind a firewall and getting a connection to the outside world through the use of my machine as a proxy server, she cannot get a connection to play on the internet. She keeps getting a, “Bad streff”, error. I thought the ‘dedicated connection’ choice in the ‘options’ menu would clear it up but, alas it has not. It did, however, clear up her problem getting the update to work properly.
DM Client 80%
Wow! This thing is cool! My cousin and I blew an entire Sunday from noon to about ten that night running characters ragged from evil Dragons and Balors to Archons and goodly Dragons. We had the war of ‘good vs. Evil’ (ah, now that was a fun show. I wonder why it never took off. Oh wait. I digress.) It wasn’t perfect, however.
This was lots of fun for combat-minded people but, if one were looking for the more subtle DM-like powers forget it. For one, there is no +/- good/evil or law/chaos. How many times, as a DM in PnP, has a character done something that transgressed his/her alignment? You had to wag your finger warningly and say no-no, or get really mid-evil and break out the guns of Navarone or light the Turbo TNT—(Sorry, sorry, had a ‘Pulp fiction’ moment.) You cant’ do that with DM client. I hope to see more diverse DM-like abilities brought into it as the product progresses.
Multiplayer 96%
Now for those of you on the BioWare forums, belly aching because the multiplayer is exactly the same as solo but just allows more characters- DUH! What were you expecting? They had said multiple times that this is the way it would be. They were just improving on the multiplayability of the official campaign. Where BG2 was somewhat painful to get through in multi, (You must gather your party before venturing forth!) NWN is much more refined as a multiplayer experience. Anyone could go anywhere, except new chapters, without having to have other PCs together in the same area. This is a lot closer to the PnP experience than before. I like it, a lot.
Documentation 35%
I’d love to talk about the documentation however; there really isn’t anything worth talking about. From the perspective of the guy who’d just open the box and want to learn how to make a module, it quite frankly blows chunks. If this were a college project where one were to write the documentation on a software package, I’d throw it away and consider expelling the student for not even putting forth a worthwhile effort. Publishing a total of 7 and a half pages on the toolset, a part of the package is arguably the only reason a majority of us were drooling over this game, is absolutely pathetic. Those seven and a half pages tell you nothing on how to make a module or dungeon for that matter. It defines a few simple terms. That’s it. In order for me to even get an encounter to work right I had to go out look at the 2002 E3 demo by Bob McCabe and Trent Oster. This simply is wrong! No one should have go out on the net ‘look up’ on how to do something as simple as an encounter! Oh sure, one can go out on the net and read up on third party “how to”s and get other documentation from BioWare soon after release but that doesn’t excuse the out of the box documentation that came with the package. I can’t review an intangible as what maybe put out on the net. I have to review what a customer would receive with his fifty plus dollar purchase and this, my friend, is woefully inadequate.
Toolset 94%
This is possibly the biggest and easiest to use tool I have ever seen as far as laying down terrain. The closest comparison I can make is the FRUA (Forgotten Realms Unlimited Adventures) editor by SSI that allowed you to make a ‘Gold box’ game back in the early nineties. Although the Toolset is by far light years ahead in capabilities and versatility of any editor I’ve ever looked at; Mechcommander 1 and 2, Arcanum, or Dungeon Siege to name a few. It does, in my opinion, have room for improving.
I think the wizards need to have more capabilities laid into it. For ‘Joe Shmoe’ off the streets making a decent adventure is impossible without some scripting or getting onto the net and looking it up. (And this gets back to my opinion on the lack of documentation) I’m not talking about making the next greatest adventure of all time, that would require scripting and that’s fine, but just a simple story based adventure. The only reason I knew how to add a conversation to an NPC was because I lurked and occasionally posted on the BioWare forums and got every bit of video/info I could get my hands on. The general gamer should not have to do that kind of foot work. In my opinion, there should have been a BioWarian standing next to the toolset programmers with paper and pen in hand writing down every function and every command that is used with examples of syntax to follow. Speaking of which, when one clicks on a function within the scripting editor and gets a definition of said function, which is nice, one should expect an example or two on how to use it i.e. syntax examples would’ve been just dandy.
I still give the toolset high marks for its potential in the CRPG community. Nothing has come closer to allowing anyone to make their own modules. With some more documentation and other help available on the net, this toolset could be the next greatest thing since the advent of the hex editor that allowed one to hack their own games.
All in all, I’d say this package is the best RPG to come out in the last twelve months, quite possibly ever. I say that with one abstention; I have not played Morrowind. Although, I wished BioWare had sat on it another month to tweek out some of the bugs, it is another fine example of BioWare’s greatness in the no holds barred computer game development arena. This package, with an add on or two will be another pinnacle to the computer gaming annals much like Pong, Pac-Man, Wolfenstein 3D and The Sims are now.