Your points are well taken but then again you condradict yourself. What you are saying about the DM Mode can be said about the technology between NwN1 and Devinity. Yes, Devinity GM Mode is aimed to bring back the PnP expierence but so was the DM Mode in NwN 1 and it could do more.
If I look back I know it started quite soon witht the DMFI Mods and the first version of NWNX, which basically kicked of PWs.
The restriction to Tileset was a curse and a blessing. Curse if you saw yourself as an artists and modder since you had to use 3rd Party Programms like 3DMax but then again the Toolset had an API for it from the get go.
A blessing if you were a storyteller. Needed a city, baam you got a city, needed a forrest, baam you got a forrest. It was up to the storyteller to decide where the cave entrance is, how the forrest is layed out etc. The Toolset in Devinity is certainly nice and I am enjoying building my stand alone adventure. However, it is too big and complicated to be really used dynamically by most users.
If I play PnP live I can get minatures, I can build a whole set and paint it, I can sculp a castle or I just use my Pen and Paper, scrible the layout of the dungeon on it. I think that is where the GM Tool fails. On the one hand it is easy to use on the other hand the infrastructure behind is too stiff.
I wished instead of sences we had to some sort of system where we could connect dungeons parts together into one scene, corridor with t-section etc. Or a forrest tileset where I can paint the path myself, something along the lines.
The Devinity GM Mode is very good in simluating PnP Session but it lacks the advantages of actually beeing a computer game. It could use more dynamic usage, more interaction for the other players to do.
If you play PnP live and you try to solve a situation with one player, other players talk to each other. Make jokes, eat, play with their dice, make doodles and show it to the player sitting next to them etc. All they can do in a Devinity is run arround, spin their characters. They can't talk to each other because of voicechat technology.
That is where scripting becomes a factor. In NwN 1 I could implement a dice game, I could use triggers to make little side activities while I played out the plot for one character. I could let players roam, let them split up and let them explore something by themselfs and they would suddenly shout out! "Hey , I found something here." In Devinity you have to stop the action describe everything if one players finds something and the others have to hold their action.
Devinity GM mode is the closest a videogame ever came to simulate a PnP expierence but they forgot the activity that happends arround the table while playing live.
Last edited by Fandarin; 20/11/17 06:11 PM.
