July 20 Livestream Recap

“Making haks and tlk's easier to download will probably be the biggest change in NWN since Hordes of the Underdark” ~ Trent

During today’s livestream Beamdog CEO Trent Oster and Studio Director Phillip Daigle shared the latest studio news and updates on Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition and Infinity Engine games. Bernhard Stöckner (niv), Technical Director on the NWN:EE core team at Beamdog, joined the stream to review the latest changes on the Roadmap Trello board for Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition.

Missed the stream ? It's on YouTube and Twitch! Here's a quick summary of the highlights:

• On September, 1 Beamdog will do a special announcement panel at PAX West. Tune on Twitch in for news about a game we haven’t announced yet! More news soon!
• Sign up for the Beamdog newsletter! No spam, we promise, - only the most important news and updates! One of our next newsletters will feature details about the Android version of Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition!
• Come meet us at Edmonton Expo in September!
• Start adventuring in the Forgotten Realms with the Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition Digital Deluxe bundle and Baldur’s Gate: The Complete Saga! Both collections are on a fantastic sale at Fanatical for the next few days!
• If you’re a programmer, a technical artist, or a web developer, come work at Beamdog! Check out our current openings.

“NWN:EE plays smoothly on Android, and we want to make the buttons bigger” ~ Phil

• The smoke test (a broad spectrum of quick tests by our QA team) for the 2.5 patch for Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition is finished, the 2.5 patch for Baldur’s Gate: Siege of Dragonspear will go through the same testing next week. Both patches will be released at the same time.
• After Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition and Baldur’s Gate: Siege of Dragonspear are patched, we’ll do one final update for Icewind Dale: Enhanced Edition, bringing more bug and localization fixes, and adding a new test feature.
• The next development build for Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition will be huge! Among other features, it will bring "NWSync” - an auto hak and tlk's downloader, and 64-bit compatibility.
• The “NWSync” feature will let you go to the server list in Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition, choose a server, and it will download automatically required files needed to connect to the server.
• We have rewritten a lot of code for the 64-bit compatibility, so we expect there will be bugs. We’ll start with a development branch to introduce this compatibility, and will work on improving it based on community feedback.

“Weather is one of the most important things in the game. Take advantage of new graphics and new shaders - what do you want to do with weather? Snow? Hurricanes?” ~ niv

• There were a few important changes on the Roadmap Trello board for Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition this week, go check them out!
• RFC builtin database replacement, more scalable NWN:EE UI, GOG Galaxy support are now in development.
• Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition on GOG is getting closer. We have to work out how CD Keys will be handled.
• There are 3 features we want to get community feedback on: full party control in NWN:EE, improving weather effects, and new emote animations. If you have suggestions about these features, share them on our forums.
• What Phil means by the full party control is that we want to control henchmen better. We don’t want a free camera, it will be more like KotOR than like Neverwinter Nights II. Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition is a single person game, it’s about you being the character on the character sheet. We want to make henchmen more responsible, which will let you continue being the character you play.
• We’ll be bringing more people from the community to talk to during our livestreams. Stay tuned!

Excited for what’s next? Come and join the next livestream next Friday!