Well, I wanted to wait until Bioware released their next patch (1.25) but figured what the hell, go ahead and post now, because it may be another week or so before it’s released. You can get a beta of it in the meantime however. Moving on…

Neverwinter Nights is only four months old now since it became available for purchase to the general public, but since that time there has been an enormous amount of player-made content developed for the game… everything from complete modules to creatures, scripts, bug fixes, textures, new content… the list goes on and on. The best place to go to see all of this custom content is at the Neverwinter Vault. Players/builders can submit their content there for free and it will become available for public download wihin 24 hours after submission. The community can also comment on and vote a rating for the content in question. When I first started playing NWN and the single player campaign I enjoyed it thoroughly… but as time went on and I made it to the first of Chapter Three my interest began to wane, as I’m sure it did with a lot of other people. It was kinda like ‘well there’s a ton of potential here, but…’ and you could start going off your checklist on what features were missing and what bugs were present.

Soo… I took a fair amount of time one day and scanned over as much of the player made content at the Vault as I could, and from that inital search found a handful of scripts and hakpacks that make the game much more interesting than before. Here’s my list of must-haves, in no particular order (click on each title to download the script in question) –

Henchman inventory and battle AI mod – by Pausanias, this collection of scripts is an absolute must to have in playing ANY module. Not only can you control henchman/familiar/summoned creatures inventory and their actions, it improves upon their and also enemy monsters battle AI as well.

Camera angle hack – version F by BrandonW. This hack unlocks the main NWN executable, allowing you to have almost total control of your camera angle and zoom properties in-game. Has pretty much the same feel you’d be used to while playing games such as EQ or DAoC… you can even go into a first-person mode. If you use this hack, make damn sure to backup your nwmain.exe file first.

Spell bug fixes – by Kovi. This collection of scripts corrects several bugs with spells as they shipped, and also brings several others closer in-line with how they are described to be according to the official AD&D 3rd edition Players Handbook. These fixes will aid you, but they’ll aid any enemy spell casters as well, FYI ;-)

Inventory stackable hack – by yours truly ;-P This is a modified baseitems.2da file that allows many more small items in your inventory to become stackable, such as rings, amulets, trapkits, torches, etc. Also things like spell components and things for item creation are now stackable, like quartz crystals, fairy dust and so on. Highly recommended hack for all you pack-rats out there.

There’s much more content out there to be had, what I listed here is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. And there are more things in the way of bug fixes and content coming, and I believe some of these scripts and haks Bioware is starting to implement officially. Pretty damn cool I think… I can’t think of any other game that I’ve ever played to where the player community can actually make things to improve the game mechanics. Anyways… if NWN is still your thing, or you got tired of it and have been waiting for something to bring ya back into it, go to the Neverwinter Vault and take a look at what the community has to offer.

That’s it for my NWN speel ;-) before I wrap this up, I’ll point out some things I’ve added to the website here to increase it’s functionallity. The most noticable one is a ‘Recent msgboard topics’ plugin to the right. Everytime ya load up the page here, you’ll see the newest five topics being discussed on the msgboard here… you can even access each topic by clicking on the title. Also, I’ve added two new things to each news post title bar – an ’email this news post to a friend’ and a ‘comment on this news post’ link on the top right. Clicking on the email link opens up your email client with the subject already populated (you’ll need to change the To: address). Clicking on the comment icon takes you directly to the topic started about this news post on the msgboard here. Now, will these get used often? Probably not… but it’s kinda something I’ve always wanted to code into the site here and now I have. So enjoy!

Until next time…

K2