Greetings and well met to everybody, it's my first post here, but considering that 40% of the reasons behind my backing of D:OS2 on kickstarter was GM mode (the other 60% was that the first title was very enjoyable), I feel it is fitting to begin my activities on this forum with this thread. I am (or rather, was) a very affectionate fan of NWN1 and 2, spent years playing on roleplay servers, did a lot of mapping on NWN1's toolset and some scripting. As an avid fan of everything roleplay, AD&D and NWN1/2 related, well, as much as I hate parroting other people's ideas, I do agree that the ability of creating persistent worlds would not only allow genre aficionados such as myself to unleash their creativity and passion for online roleplay once more, thus making the game a lot more enjoyable (admittedly than it already is), but also substantially extend the lifespawn of D:OS2. I mean, there are still fully functional NWN1 servers after almost 17 years since the game's release (even if those servers are slowly dying out), and both games gave life to a very solid, active and skilled modding community.
Without adding much else, I'm just gonna enunciate what I feel would not only be awesome, but also draw even more players to this masterpiece of a game in making:
1 - Easy-to-use (or RELATIVELY easy to use) toolset so that you won't need a degree in quantum physics to learn its ropes, as it sadly happened to NWN2. 2 - Ability to support mid-to-high player count, if at all possible (I'd say between 30 and 60 players online at the same time. 40 would already be a lot). 3 - Differentiated channels. Before somebody tells me "we already have them!", I mean a chat channel dedicated to normal talk (in a system similar to interactions between npcs in the single player campaign thus far: text floating over their heads for a few secs and such) which supports: Talk (intended as a "talking at normal volume"), audible in X radius. YELL (Intended as "shouting"), audible in X * Y radius [i]whisper[/i] (you guess it), autible in X / Y radius, for very shady stuff. 4 - Chat log. That way you don't need to have an eidetic memory to remember what was told to you 5 minutes before the GM got angry with everyone's forgetfulness and decided to solve things his own way - by spawning Chuck Norris in front of the party and having Him roundhouse-kick the unfortunate, forgetful players into oblivion. 5 - Ability to write a short description of one's character, that will pop up the moment someone will right-click on said character and click on "examine". I swear that some descriptions I've had the honor of reading in the past years spent playing NWN1 and 2 were beautiful. Others... not so much, true, but still! 6 - Ability to hide things like resistances, hit points, magic armor and magic shield to avoid metagaming (it's a pet peeve of mine, I admit) 7 - Ability to control monsters/characters, it'd be great for final-boss-style battles or adding a more immersive touch to a session. 8 - Ability to create items, as well as their description, on the spot. Saves time by avoiding the need to create them via toolset and then add them to the game, and is also a gold mine when it comes to quest creativity. 9 - Ability to change names of npcs and monsters, and even their skills and equipment. I've lost track of all the times I had to deal with Linu La'neral while pretending that she was someone else because she was the only appropriately-geared elven cleric available to the dm's spawner. 10 - Quality over time: GM mode doesn't have to be released alongside the "main" portion of the game if that would compromise the final result. I'm sure the single player campaign will be of enough quality as to keep ourselves rather busy for a long while until you've got it completely in shape and running.
As for the (rather concrete) concerns I've heard about too many players attending to the same event being at great risk of causing a big, bogged mess: it's true, but it's not that heavily-attended dm events on nwn1 and 2 weren't clean or easy to understand, either: a pvp between 2 groups of 10 peoples each always resulted in a massive framerate drop and nobody actually understanding what was going on, same for a fight between 6 players and 20+ dm spawns. I believe that simply allowing a server to enforce a time limit for each player to plan their moves and act on those plans before their turn is automatically forfeit, akin to the already present option in arena mode, would already solve a lot of issues.
Well, that's it for now. I do recognize that I'm suggesting a lot of things so don't worry, my feet are still solidly grounded and I won't take it badly if not all of them will be implemented, but hey, if even half of these points I (and many others before me) suggested are ever going to be implemented, with the other half having the possibility of being done via user-generated scripts and modding, I can safely say that I won't be playing anything else past GM mode's release for a loooooong time.
In the meantime, you guys keep on the good work with single player, I'm really enjoying it so far. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to my 7th playthrough of the first chapter. :horsey:
