How does it feel and look?

[Amoenotep]

Now that NS5 in its rough draft begining stages is open of public alpha testing by our players, how does it look and feel? Is it what you expected, Is it better, Do you wish they would have stopped at NS4.. .

Give the devs your feedback on how you feel about their work so far.

[Wolfarus]

Rather an odd question, given that its only alpha so there's naturally a [censored]-ton of tweaking and polishing to be done.

But ill bite..

So far, it feels rather empty. But (for me) thats mainly because i started a screen away from the 1st down, and its a rather dinky little pitstop of a village, compared to the factional cities we started out in, with NS4. I assume the "narrow" pathways you can take on the various maps are only there for the beta, and the individual area's will open up further once we get moving along? Otherwise, travling from point A to point B seems kind of railroaded and rushed.

[frogofpeace]

Looks really good, actually - several of the exterior maps are quite gorgeous (one of the random meadow maps was very nice).

The accessible areas of the maps do seem very limited, but I noticed that in the OC as well. Much more of a 3D feel than NWN1, but you can't go everywhere.

I don't quite have the hang of the area map or world map features, but I assume that's just a matter of getting acclimated. I miss being able to tab to highlight stuff as well.

It was noted in the glitches thread, I think, but a shopping feature like in NS4 would be very nice - buying, selling, id'ing is very slow, one item at a time.

[Nyeleni]

You can change the highlight to tab again. If you don't want to, just hit Z.

[Dr_Fangorn]

And everyone please remember that this is an ALPHA release.

[frogofpeace]

The interiors look good, too - the temple, city hall, and inn.

[mining]

One thing I find irksome is the huge time it took to download the PW files, 2.5 hours here.

But hey, unavoidable and it looks damn nice

1.75 hours 'til I can make my Eldritch Knight. ECL 0 of course.

Up to 55 kb/s now, is that normal?

[frogofpeace]

I was going to mention that a s well, although it only took me about 20 minutes. Went smoothly though.

[Amoenotep]

the server crashed during my update and i had to download it twice....4+hrs total for me. just remember that next time they update something it won't take as long to do the whole update to your files

[mining]

the server crashed during my update and i had to download it twice....4+hrs total for me. just remember that next time they update something it won't take as long to do the whole update to your files

Phew, I was worried about the next bugfix

[frogofpeace]

The initial update was 450+ Mb, I think.

[mining]

The initial update was 450+ Mb, I think.

486 or something like that.

Crashed for me too, but started again at 10 mins to go

I loved the initial voices.

[Amoenotep]

the first cutscences with the initial voice overs are custom....they were done with some of our own resources.....might be something cool to have your own char in ns5 with your very own personal voice tag

[mining]

Hehe, all of my wizards died very quickly.

Apparently Tep hates me more than anyone else in the whole world :p

Early on so far 3 characters- cleric which I have no comment on
Fighter, easy to level, can solo anywhere. Sometime dies, but easy enough.
Wizard, going Swashy > Eldritch knight ASoCK. Damn well impossible to level .
Currently working on a gnomish warlock with 20 con and 16 dex. (or something like that). The AC is nice, and the HP is needed.

[cely]

So far, it feels rather empty. But (for me) thats mainly because i started a screen away from the 1st down, and its a rather dinky little pitstop of a village, compared to the factional cities we started out in, with NS4. I assume the "narrow" pathways you can take on the various maps are only there for the beta, and the individual area's will open up further once we get moving along? Otherwise, travling from point A to point B seems kind of railroaded and rushed.

This was a design decision we had to make due to the massive amount of RAM that exterior areas take up in NWN2. Fleshing out the entire world where areas match up with each other 1:1 like in NS4 is simply not feasible. There is a hard limit of 2GB of addressable memory because nwn2server.exe is a 32 bit program and NS5 right now takes up ~980MB of RAM on the server and only about 40% of the planned areas are built (which doesn't even include planar areas). Some options were/are:

We could split NS5 amongst multiple servers (provided we had the resources), but that would be a monumental undertaking.

The Overland Map which was introduced with the Storm of Zehir expansion was looked at, but we decided that it kind of breaks up the feeling of immersion we want in a PW.

Make most of the world out of interior areas (tile based dungeon type stuff like in NWN1).

So unless we want nearly *everything* to be an interior area, we're going to have to live with the "areas of interest interconnected with random encounters" solution. That being said, a lot of the exterior areas were built while our mappers were still getting used to the toolset which has a fairly steep learning curve so some are not as fully fleshed out and expansive as some latter areas are. Random encounter areas are designed to be small and tight so we can 1) have a lot of them so there will be lots of variety and 2) so you can quickly run from one side to the other and be on your way if you're not interested in the creatures within them.