Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition is now officially out with day-1 Linux support

I wonder what delayed their GOG release. They didn't have problems with their other games in the past.

Curios when that editor comes out.
Never did play with it in the initial game which was Win only.
Truth be told , NWN was the first D&D experience I had and by far sucked at the most.

Long Live DEEKIN!!!

For those that never played... Deekin is a NPC... a kobold Bard. He has the best lines in the game if you let him join your party.

Bought, together with "Wywern Crown" & "Pirates" DLC. However, I think I´ll wait a bit with playing since my cursor got a little displaced after I enlarged the gui and changed a few graphical settings.

I´m also currently having a surprisingly good time with "Vendetta-Curse of Raven Cry". Bought it very cheaply on sale with minimal expectations, but to my surprise the missing 1.10 patch had been added to linux and the game has been rather fun as well as bug & crash free for 5-6 hours now.

I will just leave this here from Beamdog CEO:

Happy to support a great OS

[Here's what they said about GOG.](https://youtu.be/S-NA55IW4ZM?t=7m53s)

Bought it. For full price, which I normally don't do. In return, I -really- hope to see the Toolset on Linux on day!

Curios when that editor comes out.
Never did play with it in the initial game which was Win only.
Truth be told , NWN was the first D&D experience I had and by far sucked at the most.

Using the editor was quite a nice experience; relatively easy to learn, and did what it needed to.

The biggest problem was that NWN1 mods were based on assembling playing areas from pre-existing rectangular tile sets, for both interior and exterior scenes, which could be quite limiting even 15 years ago. It produces OK interiors, as one is generally accustomed to rectilinear architecture, but creating good exterior areas is challenging.

You would definitely want to trawl through the community content to find additional tile sets, since exterior features like buildings, city walls, cliffs and so on have to be part of a tile - you can't just drop a wall or building onto a flat piece of ground as you might expect.

Other limitations I recall were a fairly small area size limit ( 32x32 tiles I think ), and no proper Z axis ( you can have height variation, but there is a single "walk-mesh" surface that can only have one Z value for any given X and Y ( so if you have a tile containing a bridge, it will either be one you can walk over or one you can walk under, but not both). The "walk-mesh" is created as part of a tile, so it is not something a toolset user needs to worry about.

Creating new tile-sets and other model content is NOT part of the toolset as far as I recall, and is obviously more complex.

Tried to buy the game directly from their Beamdog client, but you end up buying from their site. Any idea if they track Linux sales this way?

The biggest problem was that NWN1 mods were based on assembling playing areas from pre-existing rectangular tile sets, for both interior and exterior scenes, which could be quite limiting even 15 years ago. It produces OK interiors, as one is generally accustomed to rectilinear architecture, but creating good exterior areas is challenging.

The simplicity allowed single creators to rapidly make a large numbers of areas though, which I believe had no small part in drawing in so many creators. NWN2's area editor was more powerful, but also much more tedious to use. I don't believe it's a coincidence that NWN2 had dramatically fewer games made with it than NWN. And both editors don't remotely compare to full-blown game engines, where you can't even build a garden shed in any reasonable amount of time.

Personally, I think the trade-off was very acceptable and a smart move by NWN devs.

I'll hold out for the GOG version. I'd love to see a nice loyalty discount too - I own all of the BeamDog games on GOG.

Tried to buy the game directly from their Beamdog client, but you end up buying from their site. Any idea if they track Linux sales this way?

They go by install numbers, as they told me in one of my Linux sales statistics articles.

For those that don't know, the original Neverwinter Nights actually did have a Linux version, although it wasn't officially supported and needed some manual tinkering to get working properly,

Well, it was official enough to have the Tux logo on the game box. They did officially support it; the main limitation was that the editor was never made available.

ps. The two "Penultima" campaigns by Stefan Gagne is still the single best thing I played on Neverwinter Nights, and one of the best computer RPGs I've played, period. No idea if you can still find and download them, or if they work on this new release though.


Last edited by Janne on 27 Mar 2018 at 11:50 pm UTC

will there be mobile version? anybody knows?

I'm buying the game right now.

Tried to buy the game directly from their Beamdog client, but you end up buying from their site. Any idea if they track Linux sales this way?

They track linux usage after purchase, so no worries regarding getting counted as a linux sale.

For those that don't know, the original Neverwinter Nights actually did have a Linux version, although it wasn't officially supported and needed some manual tinkering to get working properly,

Well, it was official enough to have the Tux logo on the game box. They did officially support it; the main limitation was that the editor was never made available.

Hmm maybe a later edition of the game had the tux logo. I don't remember that the original NWN release box art *didn't* have it, but I doubt it, since they talked up linux support up til falling silent 3-4 weeks prior to launch and then linux support was nowhere to be seen on launch day (sounds somewhat familiar these days).

I lost my $h!t all over the Bioware forums since I had preordered based on the supposed linux support until finally a nice user there offered to pay full price for my copy. It was about six months later that linux support launched, and it was kind of treated like a red-headed stepchild from Bioware. People like me probably soured them on ever considering linux support again, but damnit guys, communicate with your customers.

Bad news (at least for those of us using 4k screens) - the Linux version has a severe UI scaling issue that makes your mouse clicks mismatch the pointer position.

Good news - they are working on it.

For those that don't know, the original Neverwinter Nights actually did have a Linux version, although it wasn't officially supported and needed some manual tinkering to get working properly,

Well, it was official enough to have the Tux logo on the game box. They did officially support it; the main limitation was that the editor was never made available.

ps. The two "Penultima" campaigns by Stefan Gagne is still the single best thing I played on Neverwinter Nights, and one of the best computer RPGs I've played, period. No idea if you can still find and download them, or if they work on this new release though.

Did not hear of them.
Seems the dude still has them up on his site :
http://stefangagne.com/penultima/modules.html

The biggest problem was that NWN1 mods were based on assembling playing areas from pre-existing rectangular tile sets, for both interior and exterior scenes, which could be quite limiting even 15 years ago. It produces OK interiors, as one is generally accustomed to rectilinear architecture, but creating good exterior areas is challenging.

The simplicity allowed single creators to rapidly make a large numbers of areas though, which I believe had no small part in drawing in so many creators. NWN2's area editor was more powerful, but also much more tedious to use. I don't believe it's a coincidence that NWN2 had dramatically fewer games made with it than NWN. And both editors don't remotely compare to full-blown game engines, where you can't even build a garden shed in any reasonable amount of time.

Personally, I think the trade-off was very acceptable and a smart move by NWN devs.

That's true; custom content was also simpler to produce ( except tile sets ), but I think it was less to do with dev choice, and more to do with limited capabilities of PCs when NWN1 came out.

I think there are probably a lot of people that have story ideas that don't have all the other skills ( and patience ) needed to produce content in more recent games. It's not just the exterior editor, but the advent of cut-scenes, an increasing use of voice-acting, and a much higher custom-content level of detail that is now needed.

NWN1 was, I think, just a particular point-in-time that allowed almost anyone to get involved; but from a personal point of view, I much preferred the NWN2 tool-set, particularly for exterior areas.