Sweet Vengeance

April 29, 2009 by Adam in NWN1

My adventures in Demon continue. Like before, it's been quite instructive to go back and play through my old modules. There are a lot of lessons learned buried in there.

First off, I ran into some bugs, a few that were serious. Sam became invulnerable after a cutscene, but fortunately returned to normal the next session. He also got stuck in the walkmesh of his spirit gem, but I was able to push him to freedom with a possessed familiar. Finally, a couple cutscenes didn't work with two players, so I ended up staying out of it. All of these could probably be fixed with more testing and effort, but it does point to the challenges of debugging something that is both multiplayer and large. With Dragon Age, I'm hoping that smaller, single-player games are easier to polish.

The other big thing I noticed was the sense of despair at the beginning of the module. I was once again very weak and all my equipment was taken away. This is a very frustrating place to put players in, and should be done carefully. What's interesting, though, is once I started gaining levels and getting my equipment back, there was a huge rush of excitement. I felt far more powerful than if I had simply remained a high level throughout.

Finally, the card game continues to be one of my bigger successes. Sam spent big chunks of our time playing the card game and earning jink. When I was broke and wanting every piece of gold, I got horribly excited when I'd win against the little girl.

We've started in on the main plot in Demon and will likely wrap things up in a week or so. It makes me a little sad to come to the end of an era.