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Filthy barbarians, sneaky assassins, and surly Dwarven paladins are all available to you in Neverwinter Nights.
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The new AD&D 3rd edition ruleset is being implemented in Neverwinter Nights. Yay! (That's a good thing). Included in NWN will be all of the normal races and classes you're used to, as well as a new "Half Orc" race and several new character classes: Sorceror, barbarian, assassin, and monks. Also, you can now play any class as any race, so Paladins, for instance, won't be limited to humans anymore. It's kind of hard to imagine a hairy footed, plump halfling fighting in the name of justice as a Paladin, but hey… if that's what you dig, go for it.
You can also import characters from Baldur's Gate into the game, and they will be modified slightly to adhere to the new ruleset. There are three ways to have characters, however… and depending on what you choose, you may be better off designing a whole new character. The most prestigious of characters you can create is a "Vault Certified Character." This character will be stored in a character vault on BioWare's matching service, and make for the most limited character possible (not as bad as it sounds, read on). If you import someone from Baldur's Gate as a Vault Certified character you lose all experience and items, but with one great advantage. Since the Character Vault makes sure characters don't get far more experience than they should in a certain amount of time (or gather too many powerful items at once), people won't be able to hack or cheat their way to power. This basically means that if you're a high level "Vault Certified" character then you earned all of the experience you got.
Servers can limit the types of characters that can play on their server, and since Vault certified characters are likely not to have cheated to get where they are, they will no doubt be allowed to more servers than the others. The next type of character is a server character, which is stored on a server where you use that character. How your Baldur's Gate character is imported and what the character gets to keep, as well as how much experience is attainable in a certain period of time is all specified by the server or DM. Lastly, there are local characters which are the easiest by far to "hack." According to Trent Oster of BioWare, you can even use the included Solstice Toolset to hack these characters, but for a price… you can only play them on servers that allow local characters. Who wants to play with an unreasonably powerful, cocky 13 year-old who learned to h4x0r his character? Not I. And we aren't discriminatory towards age; we wouldn't want to play against cocky 12 year-olds either.
A lot of thought has been put into hacked characters, and that's why BioWare set things up the way they did. They also put thought into player killing and have decided to leave it up to individual servers whether or not it will be allowed. That information is available to the player before joining a server, and since servers can connect to each other through portals, you can view a given server's information before traveling through a portal to it.
One of Baldur's Gate's biggest complaints was the experience (XP) cap. While it was there for a reason, there will be no such cap in Neverwinter Nights. Instead, there will be a level cap at the 20th level. That may not sound too high if you know little about AD&D, but becoming a certified 20th level mage means you're one badass dude, to say the least… It's good to see BioWare is taking into consideration the complete losers (mostly me) that spend countless hours playing games like this and get ticked with a low exp. cap.
You can expect a whole lot of spells and monsters in this game… and even magical items. There will be in excess of 200 spells in the game, all closely following the AD&D 3rd edition rules. And while there will only be 50 different monster models (as if that weren't enough), there will be 200 monsters in all. The differences will be in the textures and abilities of these creatures, and the differences will be enough for you to distinguish between more enemies than just the 50 base models. Yes folks, that means they're doing more to the monsters then just coloring them different shades of pink. Or purple. Whatever.
Since magical weapons can be created in a variety of ways, they can't be used on every server. If they're created with the basic item effects they can be used on most servers, unless a server specifies they may not be used. There can also be items customized for certain actions, but if you go to a different server it needs to have that custom script for it to work. Finally, if you go on a server that doesn't allow a certain weapon, it's simply placed in your inventory and can not be used. That ain't so bad, and I'd rather have that then someone with an unreasonably powerful customized weapon go around killing everything and having all the fun.
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