@Morez NwN 1 was always round based 1 round = 6 seconds or in NwN terms onHeartbeat(); but that is beside the point.
I am not arguring the superiority of Devinity itself in terms of ruleset and gameplay, I'm just saying the GM Mode is too restrictive. We are talking from two different perpectives. You are more the modder/artists where my point of view comes from a storyteller/designer. You are happy with a big bad powerfull toolset where you can sink hours into making one area that might be used for a story one day. Steril maps will never replace the flexibility of tilesets where I can use a certain astetic and style but mold it to needs of my story very quickly.
NWN 2 was a good example. Yes the modders and artists rejoiced, look I can set up to six layers of textures, I can put up to 9 dynamic light sources I can import greyscale maps, weee pretty looking mountains. All fine, but it took 10 times more time to get one area finished. Some, even most people are more intrested in telling a story or set up nice gameplay than creating an incredible looking scene, they might be impressed but they don't necessarily want to put 15-20 hours just for one area.
If you look at the most successfull mods for NWN 1 & 2 you will see there were all mods that made telling or creating a story easier.
I'm not going to talk about the PW communities where I spend most of my time ( and fyi no pause button there^^) but I'm going to talk about neverwinterconnections.com
A community set out to connect Game Masters with players. Huge success. Why? Because it took very little time in the toolset to make areas. Some Game Masters would play 3 to 4 different campaigns in a week. When NwN 2 was released it literally died because everything took too much time to set up. The Playerbase moved on, which was a shame.
Back to Devinity. The ruleset is better, the gameplay is better , the design is better and I love it. What Devinity needs, especially in regards of the GM Mode, is a social hub. Something to connect players with eachother. Something similar to the Social hub Gamespy had in NwN 1. I haven't logged in for awhile, does global chat work now?
What the GM Mode needs is chat bubbles a functioning chat window where not the profilenames but the characters names are displayed and the NPC Name the GM is possessing. There was a nifty mod for NwN 1 that would display everything you wrote between two * as an emote in a different color, that would be nice.
Why not use voicechat? Well, sometimes you don't get people who want to use voicechat because they are shy. Especially during EU TZ.
Beeing able to paint or place prescripted triggers (again an area where scripting gets quite important) for traps or puzzles I created in the Engine, but maybe I want to place them on the fly during my campaign.
Larian did everything for modders and artists now they have to focus a little more on storytellers. A multplayer feature only works if you actually have an active playerbase. If Devinity didn't have the GM Mode it wouldn't matter that much. People always browse their single player games to try out a mod. Uninstall it reinstall it after a couple of months, check the steamworkshop etc. With this mode you need more that one returing player and that makes it so difficult. I had wonderfull hours using the GM Mode, as a GM and as a player, but the shortcommings became quite obvious very soon and I fear they might loose the window of opportunity here.
Btw morez off topic:
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2017/11/21/neverwinter-nights-enhanced-edition-date/ I might get back into world building
