Rediscovering the NWN community

I'm continuing to plug away at Cave of Songs, and will post my comments on it once I'm done. They will likely be glowing.

I've also been rooting around trying to figure out what has happened to the community in my time away. Obviously it has contracted substantially. But despite my initial fears, it's not even close to dead. Thanks to VBJ at the largely silent Reviewer's Forums, I learned that the Bioware forums have been relocated to social.bioware.com. So I've created a profile there (wish they still had my old red dragon disciple image), and have started lurking around the nwn1/nwn2 modules forums.

I've also seen that the Neverwinter Nights Podcast is still going strong. I've added them to my iTunes and will give this month's episode a listen soon.

Finally, and most importantly, modules continue to be posted and updated. NWN1, to my surprise, has seen 24 new modules posted in the past year, and 25 modules updated in the past month. NWN2, on the other hand, has 25 new modules in the past year, and 15 modules updated in the past month.

I expected NWN2 to be going a bit better than NWN1, but by those numbers (at least) they're pretty evenly split. In my limited experiences with the two toolsets, I have to say that I liked NWN2's a lot better from a usability standpoint. But at the same time, it's probably the case that I could do a lot more with NWN1's toolset in a short amount of time, mostly because area construction was SO much quicker. This is something that a lot of folks warned us about, and I generally ignored as NWN2 came about. With the incredible flexibility also came incredible time demands, and I am sure that this is part of why NWN2 never saw the sort of incredible number of modules than NWN1 did.

I do see a terrific variety of prefab areas available on the vault, however. And most are far better than anything I could hope put together. I think that if I were ever to try to make another module--and I'm almost certainly not going to try to do this--that would be a resource that I would mine heavily.

That said, there certainly are a lot of modules for NWN2. I sort of missed out on what was probably the peak of them by leaving the community when I did. I don't have either expansion pack, but I see that I can buy the whole kit and kaboodle on Steam for $20. That'd easily be worth it. So, I'm thinking about it. That said, logistically it is much tougher to use the computer that can run nwn2 and not alienate the family than it is to hack away on my little laptop. So I might just play with NWN1 for now.