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We're in bad need of a pun, so here: We think BioWare's use of their Omen engine is a good omen.
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The biggest problem with online games, from my less-than-speedy-28.8-connection perspective, is incredible amounts of lag. In Quake, I'd be the guy who everyone would laugh at because no matter how hard I hit the "A" key to strafe left to avoid a rocket, it'd smack me in the face long before the server recognized I pressed a key. Ah, those were the days. But after looking at the incredible 3D graphics in Neverwinter Nights, one has to wonder… how will people be able to play it well online?
We went straight to the source to get some answers on that, and after talking to BioWare's Trent Oster we're pretty sure we've got it figured out. Actually we have no idea what he means, but we're good enough with words to pretend we do.
Ok, here goes:
The system requirements to run the game are fairly low, and while the graphics may not look as great… but this game is trying to recreate the pen and paper feel online so you can play with people around the world. So let's just use our imaginations and pretend even on your now "low end" computer, the graphics kick as much ass as a 9 year old with attention deficit disorder on speed. You'll still need a PII 266 or higher with a 3D card that's pretty decent… Oster said maybe a TNT or a Voodoo 2. You'll only need 32 MB RAM, but they suggest a 56k modem for around 4-8 players. They're also trying to support up to 64 players for the higher connections. Now… the reason the game's graphics can kick so much ass and still run well online isn't just because BioWare is using their very own Omen engine made for MDK 2, but because of the "tiling" system. When you go on a server to play a module, the module is loaded only on the server and what's loaded for the players is kept to a minimum (your surroundings). This "tiling" system makes for something strange, and well… I'll let Oster explain:
"This framework leads to an interesting phenomenon: NWN will run better as a multiplayer client than as a single-player client. This is because the latter must keep a version of the server running in the background."
So there you have it. A game being designed for online play that will actually work online, with minimal lag and great graphics. I have faith in BioWare, and I think that they can make this work.
The next biggest problem is bound to be replay value, since NWN isn't being designed to be a persistent online world, its focus is on groups of adventurers. As if it wasn't enough that BioWare will be releasing additional modules past the game's initial release, the aforementioned "Solstice Toolset" will be powerful enough for players to design their own modules with ease. We were a little apprehensive about how easily the average gamer could put something together with this toolset, so we were sure to ask Oster about that too. As we mentioned before, he told us my grandma should be able to put together a dungeon crawl in about an hour. What he doesn't realize is my grandma is far too scared of computers to ever get close enough to them to try and make a dungeon crawl, even though she had some RPG interest and loved the Zelda series. Moving on, after the grandma statement Oster went on to explain (as he does better than us) what making that dungeon crawl would entail:
"This would include painting down terrain, placing creatures and items, and defining a few fundamental parameters (starting locations, victory conditions, etc) through our user-friendly 'wizards.' If you want to start adding dialog and plots, that will start getting a little more complex and time-consuming but there will be a number of wizards and templates to help in that, as well. More advanced users will be able to peel back this user-friendly exoskeleton and really sink their teeth into NWScript, our powerful scripting language. They will have access to every aspect of Solstice, just like we do in-house. Even better, they will be able to tear apart the official NWN campaign to figure out how every last bit of it functions and to modify it to their own needs. You folks at 3DGN should do just fine."
His soothing words were enough to quell our rising fear, and we may even be brave enough to actually make our own levels. I'm thinking we'll get our artists to throw together some really mean looking monkeys and our writers to put together a complex background story about how these monkeys came to inhabit a cursed island. It would be fun to release an official 3DGN module called, "The Curse of Monkey Island." Yeah, that sounds like a name that hasn't been used before.
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