Early Access Impressions - 14/09/17 06:41 PM
Since folks will be waiting another day or so before seeing the toolset for themselves, I figured I would just say a couple of words about my early access experience.
First of all, my hat’s off to the toolset team. What a hard working, humble, and conscientious group! There were times when they were answering questions at 1 or 3AM their local time. Despite many of us being scattered over the globe, the timeliness of their feedback and help was remarkable. They took every bit of feedback seriously and really seem to love seeing what the community will do with their tools.
I went to Ghent in early August and spent a week in the studio and then we were given an early access branch a couple of weeks later to continue from home. Nimue_de and I worked together in collaboration as a team. Our goal was to create a simple, standalone campaign with a single quest line and incorporate as many typical quest components as possible. We wanted to focus on how the editor performed under collaboration while creating a typical campaign. Larian provided a spreadsheet for us to note bugs, improvements, and general impressions. As I mentioned earlier, they were very attentive to our feedback. So our experience is couched in this context. It was not our goal at this point to push the editor to its limits, we had the "average modder" in mind who wants to tell a story. I come from a NWN2 and DragonAge background so thought in terms of those kinds of adventures. Thankfully, there are other talented modders doing CrAzY things.
As someone who evaluated the first editor and put it down after a couple of months, I will say that I am quite happy and motivated to create the campaign that has been in my head for some years now. We were able to do pretty much everything we wanted to do in a quest and all from within the editor. I can't think of anything that was innately really difficult to do. The hardest part would often be trying to figure out where to start or sometimes what all of our options were. The good thing here is that documentation can solve the lion's share of those issues and Larian are working on documenting themselves and giving us a solid platform to have community driven contributions to it. Over time, I think you will see a nice library of the most commonly faced issues so that even those intimidated by scripting or having less modding experience can navigate through the technical aspects given the inclination to do so.
I'm hesitant to say toooo much more about my personal opinions because I don't want to set expectations too far in one direction or the other. It might be best if I just answer whatever questions folks may have. I'm by no means an expert but I'll answer what I can. Hopefully some of the other EA modders here will chime in, they are a great and talented group.
First of all, my hat’s off to the toolset team. What a hard working, humble, and conscientious group! There were times when they were answering questions at 1 or 3AM their local time. Despite many of us being scattered over the globe, the timeliness of their feedback and help was remarkable. They took every bit of feedback seriously and really seem to love seeing what the community will do with their tools.
I went to Ghent in early August and spent a week in the studio and then we were given an early access branch a couple of weeks later to continue from home. Nimue_de and I worked together in collaboration as a team. Our goal was to create a simple, standalone campaign with a single quest line and incorporate as many typical quest components as possible. We wanted to focus on how the editor performed under collaboration while creating a typical campaign. Larian provided a spreadsheet for us to note bugs, improvements, and general impressions. As I mentioned earlier, they were very attentive to our feedback. So our experience is couched in this context. It was not our goal at this point to push the editor to its limits, we had the "average modder" in mind who wants to tell a story. I come from a NWN2 and DragonAge background so thought in terms of those kinds of adventures. Thankfully, there are other talented modders doing CrAzY things.
As someone who evaluated the first editor and put it down after a couple of months, I will say that I am quite happy and motivated to create the campaign that has been in my head for some years now. We were able to do pretty much everything we wanted to do in a quest and all from within the editor. I can't think of anything that was innately really difficult to do. The hardest part would often be trying to figure out where to start or sometimes what all of our options were. The good thing here is that documentation can solve the lion's share of those issues and Larian are working on documenting themselves and giving us a solid platform to have community driven contributions to it. Over time, I think you will see a nice library of the most commonly faced issues so that even those intimidated by scripting or having less modding experience can navigate through the technical aspects given the inclination to do so.
I'm hesitant to say toooo much more about my personal opinions because I don't want to set expectations too far in one direction or the other. It might be best if I just answer whatever questions folks may have. I'm by no means an expert but I'll answer what I can. Hopefully some of the other EA modders here will chime in, they are a great and talented group.