Engine #3

ok, so here's a wild idea that I'm sure will find the bottom side of the carpet quickly but...

I'm not sure how many here have played Neverwinter Nights. The game has simply defined community content for RPGs since its release in early June of 2002. Two and a half years later, it's getting its fourteenth patch, after two expansion packs, and it continues to be a high-volume seller.

It wouldn't take any talking around here to convince everyone that community content is a good thing. What I'm wondering is, is such an idea feasible for Total War-style strategy gaming?

The Aurora toolset and NWscript can be termed nothing short of brilliant. Ensemble attempted such a toolset on a very limited scale with Age of Mythology -- however, it's about as open-ended as funnel (i.e. take your big idea and squash it down into something that will fit the toolset).

A toolset with the open-endedness that NWN allows would probably (big word) come to dominate the strategy market in the same way that NWN has been dominating the RPG market. Try Aurora out and you'll know what I mean.

Err, that's it. Just a thought...

Of course it is feasible and would make an excellent base for nearly endless strategy gaming goodness. Just look what the people of this community did with semi-hardcoded, undocumented, occasionally poorly interfaced game engine such as MTW, I can just image what these people would do with a toolkit built from the grounds up to support the modding community and amateur gaming developers.

I was under the impression that the RTW engine would be closer to that than what it now appears to be but creating and publishing a good SDK or toolset is a complex task and requires an investment and commitment from the developers. I can see why a publisher can chose to not completely open their engine, creating an expansion or two and moving on to the next title without the hassle of officially supporting a demanding crowd of modders.

- barvaz

Actually, I think that almost the only thing we miss right now is the nice GUI, almost anything else is moddable in Rome, just like NWN is (okay, it has more options, but it's an RPG, so it needs a lot of scripting to even be able to produce good modules). I think R;TW community is definately going into the same direction as the NWN community, it might take another TW title, but I'll think we get there.

And I do think that is the future, with the newly pay-for-extra-official-content system they recently implemented (will be operational soon, check the nwn site) being the next type in the gaming business. You could make anything you want, but official content will probably be better, and with a reasonable price, keep the money for the develper flowing to make extremely nice patches.

Bioware is definately my favorite developer at the moment, they seem to genuinely listen and interact to their community, and produce fabulous results.
CA is getting there, and I hope they can manage to become equally good. At least they have the right spirit so far:
a lot of moddability, interaction with the community, even though the official forums are kind of .. well.. bad. EZ board as official forums don't look very professional IMO.
Both communities feature at least a user group which is capable of understanding the value of a good community and want to work on it. Some communities are less 'mature' (both literally and abstractly).

There seems to be conflicting opinion regarding exactly how moddable RTW is. But indeed, just look at the Napoleonic: Total War mod to see what the community is capable of nonetheless.

There's also an interesting Three Kingdoms fantasy mod being worked on for RTW right now. They seem to be making good progress already, despite the concerns over how hard it is to actually mod for RTW. From what I've heard, modding RTW is tricky, unintuitive and unsupported at present, but it's clearly doable. I guess we've some really talented fans :)