NWN1 v NWN2

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oldgrayrogue
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NWN1 v NWN2

Post by oldgrayrogue »

So I was very skeptical about playing on NWN1 WD. I did not have fond memories of NWN1 that many others seem to have. I also really dislike the clunky gameplay and even clunkier graphics, the limited camera and lots of other features. But, we have seen mostly empty NWN2 servers and an extremely vibrant resurrection of NWN1 WD. Why? I am curious why folks won't play on the NWN2 servers but are flocking to NWN1 and WD.

I'll start. People. Plain and Simple. I want to play with other people, not alone. NWN2 is lonely and boring. NWN1 has lots of players and active DMs. Other than Arianna -- who deserves tons of credit for keeping things going to the extent she can -- NWN2 is a ghost town. I will say that I wish Ayergo, Rick and all the others on WD/NWN1 would play on NWN2 because I prefer that platform. But you cannot beat having players and DMs to play with. I think we all really need to ask ourselves some hard questions -- starting with Admin -- about why folks are willing to play on NWN1 but not on NWN2. The whole "its an old game" reason does not appear to be valid.
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dergon darkhelm
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Re: NWN1 v NWN2

Post by dergon darkhelm »

There was never full buy-in to the NWN2 platform back in 2008.

A lot of the people that you are seeing playing on WD/DF right now are people who never really played on NWN2.
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Re: NWN1 v NWN2

Post by Arianna »

I left ALFA for quite sometime when we changed to NWN2

At the change over the platform was clunky . . took ALOT of work to even get it to the simple level that NWN1 was currently at at the time.

The NWN2 toolset has a VERY steep learning curve where as the NWN1 toolset is very user friendly and you can lego a dungeon together in less than an hour, where the same dungeon in NWN2 even for someone like me that has alot of building experience now, would take probably 4-6 hours

The Graphics are a bit nicer in NWN2 over the blocky ones of NWN1

The DM client for NWN1 is much simpler to learn though the NWN2 DM client via the CE has much nicer tools just takes much longer to learn them.

NWN1 currently is focused in a ONE town/servers with its various dungeons and troubles, one to two DMs can provide that group in that single space ALOT of coveted DM coverage. There is a second NWN1 server up with another in the works to get it back into working order. NWN2 currently has 3 working servers with one active DM

NWN1 has had twice the creature models that NWN2 has had, still has way more even with the new content I am delivering to NWN2 soon.

NWN2 can contain 5X as much content in a single server than NWN1 can . . . . WD is a very fat server .. stuff has to leave in order to add more things to it .
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Re: NWN1 v NWN2

Post by Wild Wombat »

I have a PC from 4+ years ago that is still available on NWN2. I have logged in to TSM a couple of times and I couldn't even figure out how to explore the city. The 3Dish graphics really don't work for me, I couldn't even navigate through the town. I kept getting the camera directly under the toon! And I couldn't zoom out enough. (I'd figure it out eventually, but it sure wasn't intuitive to me.)

And, yes, it is people. ALFA is all about DMs interacting with players. In my case, I poked my head back in December and there was a PM from Ayergo from June, saying, "Waterdeep needs another Croaker." Ayergo was my first DM, so I was intrigued and convinced two of my RL friends to give it a try again as well. Now, Arianna was somebody I played with quite a bit back in the day, so seeing that she is now Queen of ALFA ( 8) ) also piqued my interest.

I guess in the end it was random for me. If the PM had been from Arianna instead of Ayergo, I could easily be playing on NWN2 right now. But NWN1 is easier for me to play.
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Re: NWN1 v NWN2

Post by Rick7475 »

ALFA HR wouldn't let me DM on TSM, which sucks since I built a good portion of it.

But the reality is that there are more people still playing NWN1 than NWN2, by a ratio of 4 - 5 to one. We have actually recruited several more members to ALFA through NWN1.

I have been beta testing Legends of Aria, and it still has a very long way to go, at least a year or more.
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Re: NWN1 v NWN2

Post by joshmad75 »

Been seeing the release notes to NWN1Enhanced Edition’s updates for the HeadStart crowd and I don’t know why anyone would look into gaming on another platform for Forgotten Realms DnD. There’s so much capability with NWN1 and it looks to get even better with the EE.
Your guys’ Waterdeep is one of the best big city PWs there ever was. Right now there’s two amazing DMs and a wonderful group of players to game with. I hope it grows!
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Re: NWN1 v NWN2

Post by Rumple C »

OGR has it right. It's the people. There are other factors. NWN2 has just been awkward, both as a player and as a DM. The scale of nwn2 also bugged me as well. SM contained in 2 map tiles? BG contained in 4? 10 times that would have been awesome.

But back to the people. In my opinion ALFA1 feels rejuvenated. ALFA2 feels stagnated, and upon which i have burned out upon a long time ago.

The WD players are great. And i'll say this about Ayergo. I've has the pleasure of being DM'd by dozens of different dm's over the years. Some of the all time greats. For whatever reason Ayergo hits my sweet spot ( :shock: ); he continues to take my idea of who my pc is, and show me a new perspective on who they could be, all the while riding a bear on a surfboard. He is number 1 on my list.
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Re: NWN1 v NWN2

Post by Rick7475 »

Silverymoon was rushed. Indio did the layout and then I took over. I had to redo the walls and a bunch of other stuff when he left. Heck, Daggerford, a town of 600 was 4 NWN1 tiles. The city is too hilly and too crowded together, it would have been better on 6 - 8 areas. But the pressure was on and politics was piling on, too. What we got was streets that were too narrow and hilly that obstructed the view and made playing there tough. We also couldn't agree on what area would be the "Adventurer's Quarters" that ended up being Rivermoot where Indio built the first few statics and areas and that was great stuff. Others helped with the Mage College statics, and many others. I did a lot of the mail runs statics and silver Knights and milita quests and lots of others. But the politics, just burned me out so I quit building and just played. I DM'd for a while but left for other things. I wish we could redo Silverymoon and make it much better.
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Re: NWN1 v NWN2

Post by ayergo »

Appreciate the love!

I think there is room for both, they are different games. My original plan building BG was to DM in NWN2 and play in NWN1, but NWN1 got shut down and RL reared its head.

NWN1 has more players though, even outside of ALFA. Why? In my opinion it is because it is easier and faster to build in NWN1 than 2. That's a major advantage as a DM because you can make the world respond quickly. In the case of ALFA though I would argue that we regulated ourselves into a corner with stagnation. WD is free of those bonds (because you're all dirty PGers!). Some people really like the protected sandbox though with strict rules about how fast you level and that sort of thing. So they've got that there for them.
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Re: NWN1 v NWN2

Post by Rick7475 »

The players on Waterdeep are great. People want to be there to play, they know the rules, and want to have fun. There are NWN1 servers like Arabel that are stronger than ever. The thing is, there are no DnD games out there like NWN1/2. The closest thing to pen and paper you can get.
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Re: NWN1 v NWN2

Post by Veilan »

I agree with most of the points raised. I privately opposed the move to NWN 2, at least with the very quick timescale that was decided, but at the time I was a DMA staffer and soldiered along.

NWN 2 cost us a lot of players who never really came back. Hardware is probably no more issue now, but when it was new, NWN 2 was an atrocious ressource hog that priced out a vast amount of our players, and in my mind, it never delivered - the graphics may be "improved" over NWN 1, but NWN 1 graphics I could get as functional even if not great. Whereas NWN 2 is not pretty but tried to be. It also plays and reacts much more clunky (yes, NWN 1 is the smoother game to play for me) and feels overall like it was a tad too ambitious, making it even more obvious where it failed to deliver.

Of course, NWN 1 now profits from the forced fresh start - maybe NWN 1 would have become as stale by now, but I doubt it.

NWN 1's biggest draw, for me, was that it allowed the most participation from our best ressource: laymen volunteers. Due to NWN 1's relative simplicity, everybody could build a decent-looking area. Servers were sprawling as a result (remember the RAM limitations in NWN 2's beginning?), since they took up little space and it was absolutely acceptable to build a forest grid by copy-pasting areas and then spending a couple of hours prettyfying and altering, where in NWN 2 you spend a couple of hours on a single area. In NWN 2 it is a science only the dedicated can manage, that along with the people drain made it feel small and unmouldable. In my opinion it is not the right platform for our project, even if I prefer it's full 3.5 approach.

To prove my point, just look at the community content for the two games. I am still playing the occasional great NWN 1 module with friends, in NWN 2 it is tough to even find a decent one. They do exist I hear, but it is much harder to deliver a low-bug, well-crafted, multiplayer experience there.

Of course, WD profits, as has been rightly pointed out, a lot from a great, unshackled DM, and the other thing I have been harping on about since time immemorial: Concentration. With only one server that has a decent population, critical mass for adventuring is much easier to achieve. It is the one good argument against having a pallette of options - different options of course have their own set of great advantages, too, and in the end you cannot tell / force people where to play, so we might have a net gain from offering both. No idea.

Thus I am not sure what would be the best path going forward - whether we should drop or downsize one platform and focus on the other - but I do think that NWN 1 is the game better suited for what we are doing. Player numbers seem to agree with me, and the EE might actually bring out some more folks curious to see how it ended up.

Anyway, yeah, I am not surprised - as a matter of personal preference, I prefer NWN 1 gameplay and building wise and am even less weirded out by its very basic graphics.
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Re: NWN1 v NWN2

Post by FoamBats4All »

For me it was all about user input. NWN2 isn't an example of a 100% polished UI experience, but it was a huge improvement from NWN1. It made the game playable, from my perspective. The context menus, general UI elements, and whole method of interacting with NWN1 just felt... bad. I mucked around with the first couple of districts in the game, then dropped it and played other games. What little PW play I've done on NWN1 didn't last long either -- for similar reasons. Unless NWN1:EE completely redoes the entire UI and method of input, I doubt I'll be picking it up.

I'm happy there's some overlap, but it does seem to be pretty decisive -- plenty of folks like me who don't want to fumble around the old NWN1 engine, and plenty of folks who don't like the newer one.

My money/hopes are still on Legends of Aria, but that's going to be even more divisive. You'll still have your NWN1 people not wanting to play the newer games, you'll have some stubborn NWN2 people that won't want to move on, and then you'll have to survive on new blood in LoA to support it. I just wish that they had done a NWN2:EE instead of a NWN1:EE to try to address the issues people had with the game, instead of polishing a fundamentally undesirable to interface with engine.
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Re: NWN1 v NWN2

Post by ayergo »

Veilan wrote:

and the other thing I have been harping on about since time immemorial: Concentration. With only one server that has a decent population, critical mass for adventuring is much easier to achieve. It is the one good argument against having a pallette of options..
Minor correction, 2 servers with a potential 3rd on the way. :)
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Re: NWN1 v NWN2

Post by Stormbringer »

ayergo wrote: Minor correction, 2 servers with a potential 3rd on the way. :)
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Re: NWN1 v NWN2

Post by Akivaria »

NWN1 is better in nearly every way except graphics. It has a better toolset, player content, DM client, and (in general) gameplay.

It just annoys me that ALFA nerfed pickpocketing, because my PC is borderline useless. :D
Last edited by Akivaria on Thu Mar 01, 2018 7:54 pm, edited 3 times in total.
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