Firstly, I’d like to say thanks for your excellent work. That was absolutely fascinating to read and I’ve read it straight from the beginning to the end. And sorry for my bad English as it’s not my primary language.
I’d like to comment about what you said about Neverwinter Nights (Bioware’s one). It seems that you failed to see what NWN really is. You wrote that "BioWare also included a toolset to let players easily create their own Neverwinter Nights campaign." That’s a lot more than that: Bioware *precisely* created NWN to let players create their own campaign. What was often said was that most of the development time was dedicated to the development of the toolset rather than the campaign, and that the campaign was just an example of what the toolset is capable of. Indeed, most of the fans argue that the original campaign is pretty weak in comparison of what the players made. I’ve myself played a lot more hours with fan-created module (=adventures) than official campaigns.
The fact that it is players who create their own adventures rather than a money, time and editor-bound developer brings a huge liberty of creation.
Players have of course created a great number of simple hack’n’slash, dungeon-crawling adventures or epic quest of monster bashing, treasure hunting and evil villain ass-kicking (my pick: the Shadowlords, Dreamcatcher and Demon campaigns by Adam Miller) but I’ve also played the role of an opensource (sic) wizard in a magicpunk world (the HeX coda, Stefan Gagne), a ninjette in a medieval asian-looking world (Kunoichi, ADK), a royal bastard of an imaginary country located between a medieval France and Burgondy that have a lot more dragon and magic than history book says (The Bastard of Kosigan, Fabien Cerutti)... and I’ve even played an orc tribesman (Orcs, Akkei) !
You should really have a look at Neverwinter Nights Vault, the official non-official website that stores pretty much everything that was made for NWN, and particularly its Hall of Fame: it has countless quality modules.
... but that isn't over ! I’ve only covered the single player part of the game. There’s two popular thing with multiplayers game in NWN: the first one is the persistant worlds (or PWs), which are nothing else than MMORPG created with NWN toolset. They emulate pretty well the “real” MMORPG, including their crafting systems. The other one is dungeon master assisted game. Yes, dungeons master, like those who can be bribed or manipulated with a substantial amount of beer in those good old pen’n’paper games ! Well, there aren’t as omnipotent as in the PnP game (they can’t technically create new areas), but they do pretty much the thing. I unfortunately couldn’t experience how it was to play such a game (although animator created adventures in PW are very similar), but a nice website regularly organize games.
I would be tempt to say that the future of CRPG would have been there, in player-created content, but alas the NWN sequel seems to not meet the same success as its older brother did: six month after its release, there is still no module as good as it was six month after the release of NWN1. I could find excuses in the fact that NWN2 requires a very powerful PC to run it combined by a controversial use of an anti-piracy tool (that, as some says, decrease the framerate by at least 50%...) or the fact that the toolset is so much detailed that it has become too difficult to use it or that the expectancy in terms of quality of players has become very high after the countless pearls that NWN gave.
But I’m still optimistic about the future: maybe the recently announced extension will correct the numerous flaws of NWN2, or that a new game will follow that way. Or perhaps I'm totally wring.
This comment is becoming way too long, I think I’ll stop it here :). I hope that this will be read and thanks again for your articles !
PetitPrince (I'm also a die hard fan of Tetris, funny isn't it ?)
Bonus Post-Scriptum: Needless to say, modules are still being released nowadays. Some especially talented modder or group of modders have been hired by Bioware, or have been offered to release their module as "premium module" (read: not free, but they got paid for thier work). Atari (NWNs' publisher) actually forbade one of the premium module to be released, fearing that it would hurt NWN2 sales (it was nevertheless released some time after NWN2 was released... a bizarre Atari move).
Post-Scriptum deux: Oh, and you didn't talk about the excellent but bug-infested Vampire: The Mascarade - Bloodlines, a brilliant representation of White Wolf's Vampire: The Mascarade universe and Troika's last game before it went bankrupt. Fortunately, fans are still developping patches to fix the numerous bug that exist within the game
Post-Scriptum trois: And Planescape: Torment have such a deep and somewhat moving storyline that it is a crime for any CRPG fan to not play it (I'd rather say "experience it"). (I think I will force myself to stop adding post-scriptum from now on)
Hi Matt,
Firstly, I’d like to say thanks for your excellent work. That was absolutely fascinating to read and I’ve read it straight from the beginning to the end. And sorry for my bad English as it’s not my primary language.
I’d like to comment about what you said about Neverwinter Nights (Bioware’s one). It seems that you failed to see what NWN really is. You wrote that "BioWare also included a toolset to let players easily create their own Neverwinter Nights campaign." That’s a lot more than that: Bioware *precisely* created NWN to let players create their own campaign. What was often said was that most of the development time was dedicated to the development of the toolset rather than the campaign, and that the campaign was just an example of what the toolset is capable of. Indeed, most of the fans argue that the original campaign is pretty weak in comparison of what the players made. I’ve myself played a lot more hours with fan-created module (=adventures) than official campaigns.
The fact that it is players who create their own adventures rather than a money, time and editor-bound developer brings a huge liberty of creation.
Players have of course created a great number of simple hack’n’slash, dungeon-crawling adventures or epic quest of monster bashing, treasure hunting and evil villain ass-kicking (my pick: the Shadowlords, Dreamcatcher and Demon campaigns by Adam Miller) but I’ve also played the role of an opensource (sic) wizard in a magicpunk world (the HeX coda, Stefan Gagne), a ninjette in a medieval asian-looking world (Kunoichi, ADK), a royal bastard of an imaginary country located between a medieval France and Burgondy that have a lot more dragon and magic than history book says (The Bastard of Kosigan, Fabien Cerutti)... and I’ve even played an orc tribesman (Orcs, Akkei) !
You should really have a look at Neverwinter Nights Vault, the official non-official website that stores pretty much everything that was made for NWN, and particularly its Hall of Fame: it has countless quality modules.
... but that isn't over ! I’ve only covered the single player part of the game. There’s two popular thing with multiplayers game in NWN: the first one is the persistant worlds (or PWs), which are nothing else than MMORPG created with NWN toolset. They emulate pretty well the “real” MMORPG, including their crafting systems. The other one is dungeon master assisted game. Yes, dungeons master, like those who can be bribed or manipulated with a substantial amount of beer in those good old pen’n’paper games ! Well, there aren’t as omnipotent as in the PnP game (they can’t technically create new areas), but they do pretty much the thing. I unfortunately couldn’t experience how it was to play such a game (although animator created adventures in PW are very similar), but a nice website regularly organize games.
I would be tempt to say that the future of CRPG would have been there, in player-created content, but alas the NWN sequel seems to not meet the same success as its older brother did: six month after its release, there is still no module as good as it was six month after the release of NWN1. I could find excuses in the fact that NWN2 requires a very powerful PC to run it combined by a controversial use of an anti-piracy tool (that, as some says, decrease the framerate by at least 50%...) or the fact that the toolset is so much detailed that it has become too difficult to use it or that the expectancy in terms of quality of players has become very high after the countless pearls that NWN gave.
But I’m still optimistic about the future: maybe the recently announced extension will correct the numerous flaws of NWN2, or that a new game will follow that way. Or perhaps I'm totally wring.
This comment is becoming way too long, I think I’ll stop it here :). I hope that this will be read and thanks again for your articles !
PetitPrince (I'm also a die hard fan of Tetris, funny isn't it ?)
Bonus Post-Scriptum: Needless to say, modules are still being released nowadays. Some especially talented modder or group of modders have been hired by Bioware, or have been offered to release their module as "premium module" (read: not free, but they got paid for thier work). Atari (NWNs' publisher) actually forbade one of the premium module to be released, fearing that it would hurt NWN2 sales (it was nevertheless released some time after NWN2 was released... a bizarre Atari move).
Post-Scriptum deux: Oh, and you didn't talk about the excellent but bug-infested Vampire: The Mascarade - Bloodlines, a brilliant representation of White Wolf's Vampire: The Mascarade universe and Troika's last game before it went bankrupt. Fortunately, fans are still developping patches to fix the numerous bug that exist within the game
Post-Scriptum trois: And Planescape: Torment have such a deep and somewhat moving storyline that it is a crime for any CRPG fan to not play it (I'd rather say "experience it"). (I think I will force myself to stop adding post-scriptum from now on)