Neverwinter Nights 3
Trakor
Member Posts: 25
I understand that you don't want to reboot Neverwinter Night 2, maybe because you don't own the rights. but why are you not doing neverwinter night 3?
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There's probably loads of other reasons too.
TR
Problems around the licensing/markets:
It seems like a lot of the problems are down to licensing of D&D but I'm wondering if Pathfinder could be used as that has a similar system mechanically from what I remember to DND 3.5ed (not sure if its evolved much now), and also there are existing games using the Pathfinder name.
Also I would want to mention that while the original NWN game sales/user metrics seemed to indicate that most people played the SP campaign than the MP/PW aspect of it, I think times have changed and in a way NWN PW was way ahead of its time. Gaming is a lot more mainstream than it was back when NWN came out, and community based content is a lot more popular these days than it used to be, as historically there wasnt much else to compare the aurora toolkit too as it was more than a level editor but not as in depth as writing your own mods for games.
We also have a lot more buzz around DMing and PNP games these days than in earlier years, look at twitch for people streaming their sessions, or the amount of online tools being made in this space and with quite a high user count, so there would be a feed in market from there to some extent too.
Problems around dev effort/resources required:
Game dev as a whole has moved on quite a bit since the days of NWN, so while it was mentioned that there may not be a huge team at Beamdog, there has been a huge surge in 3rd party assets for game development from asset stores like Unity, Epic and other 3rd parties.
There are HUGE amounts of modular tilesets out the box which look pretty good, and yes I know people dislike seeing off the shelf tilesets, but this genre is more about the setting/content, not the visuals as such. So relying upon pre-made content for handling the 3d models and in game content would save loads of time and also give a way to reduce effort required by the devs and let them focus on the mechanics/networking aspect of it.
Also we have far better internet connections these days and a lot more advanced approaches to handling larger multiplayer settings, so while that doesn't mean its as simple as getting an off the shelf solution, there is far more wiggle room architecturally in terms of how the net code is done. Also given the popularity of MMOs and multiplayer community driven games, a lot of what was unsolved and pioneering back in the days of NWN is now a semi common occurrence so lots of information to draw upon.
Wrap up
There has yet to be something like NWN PW, and it feels like an untapped part of the market and every year or two I take a look to see if there are any indie games trying to fill this niche or anything else which is focusing on community driven worlds with player DMs etc.
I found MMOs kind of scratched a part of the itch, but you log in and you know what to expect as there is no player DM creating dynamic events or pushing the overall game/character narrative forward, which is what NWN gave us. Every time I logged in I never knew what was going to be happening, sometimes nothing and I would do some quests and meet up and chat with others, sometimes the entire city would be in ruins filled with orcs, but ultimately it had longevity through the community and player control which no other game has really done.
Best of luck to Beamdog whatever they choose to do next