So I wasn't entirely idle on my honeymoon, I did have some spare time when my sweety got forty winks during the day and I booted up a number of things including the Neverwinter Nights 2 map editor. I'm an old hand at the first one's map editor so I knew the potential might be there for making a world or something and I was pleasantly surprised in some ways and upset in others. First of all, I forgot to bring my mouse and apparently you can only mostly navigate with a traditional mouse and not the touch pad most laptops come with. Zooming out was impossible.Those difficulties aside, along with the fact that figuring out how to make rooms took me 2 hours, I can say it compares favorably with the original map editor. You can now make world maps and connect areas in that way too. Although it uses some funny file format that nobody has ever heard of for the images. You can also edit and play around with the 3D frames for the monsters and characters and create instances or templates for new ones. The waypoint system seems to be better done and the whole thing is quite obviously done in Visual Basic this time rather than C/C++ for Neverwinter Nights 1 which is both better and worse. Better for user friendliness, worse for low level map hacking.
Anyways It looks like I need to give this some solid time and make a dungeon from which no Anton can ever escape. Unless he has a truly awesome Rogue anyways.
4 comments:
Meh, it sucked, just like NWN2 did in comparison to NWN1. The NWN1 editor let even non-artistic non-programming noobs like me make perfectly competent (and sometimes even inspired) areas, places, and adventures. The NWN2 one, on the other hand, is opaque to your average pootler, extremely hard to pick up, and evil in resource requirements and that's a fail right there.
Not to mention the overall fail of NWN2, whose makers somehow made themselves believe that people played NWN1 for the single-player experience. Riiiiight.
As you can tell, I was a big fan of NWN1 (or as Werit would correct me, the 2002 NWN1) and absolutely despise NWN2 as a bloated, buggy, mess of a pretend multiplayer experience. In terms of the wider community, 1,000 people able to make adventures that don't look *quite* as good >>> 10 people who can make stuff that looks marvellous.
Well, maybe I haven't played with it enough so far and stuff. I agree that NWN2 is much harder to get into than NWN1. And I did have to get a better computer before it ran well, so that does count against it. However, I haven't given up yet on hoping for something good out of the advances.
I'm playing NWN1 now...Only I'm not a rogue--I tend towards benevolent Paladins or wise-cracking sorcerers.
I totally agree with Ysh, NWN2 was awful compared to NWN1. I waited up all night to finally get a copy of NWN2 and was completely let down. I much prefer to play NWN1, which is still my favorite LAN game.
I'm looking forward to Dragon Age, which appears to have a pretty damn cool map editor.
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