Lazarus Magni wrote...
You seem to think I was saying Aventia alone has more content than WOW? No, what I actually said is NWN 1 does. When you take the original game, all the single player mods, and PWs, it’s not even close.
What I said:
Side note here: If you add up the number of hours per server and multiply by the average number of alts you play, you can probably get thousands of hours of gameplay, and NWN is very very good value for money because of that. But If you're looking to spend that thousands of hours on a single server with a single character, I don't think that's possible unless you have a very high tolerance for tedium and repetition.
And what you said:
No doubt every game has an end point, however with NWN, and specifically in my own experience with Aventia 3 Merged- Unlimited Levels, the end point thus far is exclusively defined by what we as Av3 community members contribute to the mod. Currently we have 1300+ areas from level 5-600+ and if we get more high lvl players we could easily add more content, if people were interested in doing so. Hence… It is unlimited (even with a 2000 cap, given no one has even reached half this, it is essentially unlimited for the time being.)
“Less Content than a commercial MMO”??? Your joking right? Or maybe disillusioned… With community contributed content (not just for Av3, but NWN 1 in general) we, the players, can churn out way more content than a team of 20ish paid programmers (sorry WOW, but it’s true, there is strength in numbers, and in this case the numbers come from us, the players.)
The qualifier you used was "not just for Av3", which implies just Av3 alone is enough. Now you say " No, what I actually said is NWN 1 does", which is what I've been saying all along, so no, that is not what you actually said.
You also seem to think I am claiming 100+ different people are currently working on Aventia. What I said was over the nearly 10 years of it’s existence (through 3 different generations of owners) 100+ people have
worked on the mod in that time.
I did note that most contributors would likely not be present for the full 10 years, i.e. they come and go. But their net contribution over 10 years is still quantifiable, which is what I was getting at.
As far as the “ceiling” with CEP 2.3 which Av3 uses, there are 41 different tilesets, and you can configure each of those 100 different ways. And creatures… I have no idea how many… 1000’s each can also be configured a number of different ways. We have almost 3000 custom creatures, and haven't even come close to using all the different ones. Of course with 100+ different people having worked on a mod separately over nearly 10 years, there is bound to be some overlap of content (especially considering a good chunk was built years ago, before all the additional stuff we have now, was available), but actually in the year + I have been the owner, one of the things I have done, is update areas that had such overlap of content (same creature skins for example, changed to different ones.) We absolutely have not hit any kind of artistic ceiling.
Same goes for customizations. There is a 100 different ways you can alter the game mechanics (e.g. 100 different ways you can alter a spell.) I would guess, 90% of our spells have been modified, most classes modified, and many feat and ability changes. And then there is our post 40 system. And this is just 1 PW, out of thousands that have existed over the years.
And sure there will be overlap between servers too. When Funky released HGLL a number of servers adopted it. But as time went on, a number of them also modified it to be unique to their worlds.
The potential for unique content is enormous.
I count approximately 2500 possible skins in CEP2.4's appearance.2da, including rescales and palette swaps, but excluding the invisible creatures and VFXes that apparently account for over 1000 lines in there, and CEP has a LOT of rescales and palette swaps. For the average dungeon spanning 3 areas + 1 small boss room area, I tend to use around 10 skins:
1 for the weak grunts
1 for the strong grunts
1 for the ranged
1 for the stealther
1 for the healer/support caster
1 for the offensive caster
Sometimes 1 more miscellaneous
At least 1 for the mid boss and its elites
At least 1 for the end boss and its elites
Granted, my skin count is probably on the high side. But a lot of servers I've been to copy paste the same encounter of 3 identical mobs across an entire cave, put a boss at the end and call it a dungeon, and of course the lack of quality shows. So I'd say in general a dungeon should use around 5: 1 melee, 1 ranged, 1 caster, 1 end boss and 1 more misc.
In a mod with 1300 maps, that would be approximately 300 dungeons with the rest being fluff areas, shops, cities etc, and they'll need 5 skins each, so that's 1500. CEP with its 2500 appearances on paper will still run into recycling issues, because of all the palette swaps, animation swaps, rescales and other copy pastes in there, as well as the impractical skins.
By impractical skins, I mean I don't use kittens or cows or ponies as mobs, neither do I use the skins with serious issues like the tiny rats and bugs that are almost impossible to click on, or horses that cause some players to freeze and crash when they load. I also don't make my oozes Time Stop or my floating chairs shoot IGMS. 'course, I probably wouldn't use floating chairs in the first place. Realistically, I'd estimate there's about 800 unique, usable skins in NWN1 + CEP before you start going into palette swap/equipment swap/rescale territory. If you start going for a certain theme for your server like Science Fantasy or Lovecraftian Horror, that number drops even more. And if you don't have a theme, it's hard to stand out in the server list.
As for mechanics, yes, your spells can be modified in many ways, but it doesn't make a meaningful difference - in many cases what people do when modifying is just power creep, like:
At level 10 players have 100HP. A mob with ILMS hits them for 35 damage.
At level 17 players have 170HP. A mob with Maximized ILMS hits them for 60 damage.
At level 40 players have 400HP. A mob with IGMS hits them for 140 damage.
On Server A at level 50 a player hits say, 500HP. A modded IGMS hits them for 175 damage.
On Server B at god level 10 a player hits say, 2000HP. A modded IGMS hits them for 700 damage
Is that really a meaningful difference? Some players may like seeing bigger numbers, but ultimately I don't think there's an evolution in gameplay there.
I am not sure what you mean about Aventia being dead most of the time. Aventia is an old server. At it’s peak, back in 2003-2005 there were 30 different people on Av1 at any given time. Interest tapered off, and dwindled down to a much smaller, but steady active player base, which was maintained through Av2 (the server vault contains over 3000 player folders, a good 500 or so have been from the year and a half I have been the owner.) On Av3, I have tried hard to rekindle some interest in old players, and promote it to gain the interest of new players. We are no where near the 2003-2005 peak, and prolly never will be, but I have been quite proud of the interest we have fueled, especially considering how old the game is, how much smaller the community is these days, and the fact that players often get attached to their “home worlds” and seldom branch out, and explore others.
Didn't notice there were 2 Aventias being hosted right now. It looked like one was just a hub server like Higher Ground's setup - that one happened to be yours. The other one was dead - 0 players. Now that I know, I'll check Av3 out.
And what I took offense to was this:
You basically are calling people, such as me, who play action servers a bunch of alcoholic losers. Or at least that's how it seemed to me.
Just to be very sure, an ALToholic is an enthusiast player who makes a lot of alt characters. Any causation relationship between alcohol consumption and NWN gaming patterns would likely be completely implausible, or farfetched at best.
Modifié par Aelis Eine, 08 novembre 2012 - 04:16 .
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