NWN Mac
Okay, so Neverwinter Nights is finally gonna come out on the Mac soon, and it's time for me to rant about shit I can't rant about in Macworld or on MacCentral -- the toolset, and Mac users' attitude towards it.
In case you live in a cave, Neverwinter Nights is this phenomenally kick-ass role playing game that Bioware has spent much of their collective existence working on. These guys known D&D games, these guys live and breathe D&D games, having already brought some of the best D&D games in existence to life on the computer.
Neverwinter Nights came out for the PC last year, and one of the reasons it's so huge for those of us that dig this genre is because the developers released a toolset thar lets the folks who buy the game create their own modules. It's a throwback to the old days of D&D -- dungeon masters, dice and the whole nine yards, only much cooler, since it's all in 3D and on the computer.
Mac users don't get those tools. And I say, who really gives a shit?
Mac gamers -- all seven of them -- have been bitching up a storm since last month when MacSoft's Al Schilling announced that the toolset wasn't going to come to the Mac. Mac users are getting shortchanged, they said. This is why games suck on the Mac. Want some cheese with your whine?
The way I see it, The Omni Group overestimated their ability to port the toolset, and got MacSoft in trouble for overpromising too soon. Hey, it's an honest, albeit unprofessional mistake that under ideal circumstances wouldn't have happened. Water under the bridge, though -- acknowledge and move on, I say.
As Al explained it to me when I saw him last month, MacSoft could had waited -- a year or more, by the way -- for the tools to finally get released for OS X, and paid The Omni Group for their time. But given the number of boxes that MacSoft will sell for NWN, it would have been the same as if they had just stuffed a $100 bill in each box. The economics just don't make any sense.
None of this changes the fact that the game itself is coming to the Mac. What's more, the data structure of NWN is identical from Mac to Windows, which means that Mac users will be able to play the modules that PC makers create. The only hairball Mac users might run into is with PC-centric installers, but Bioware's aware of that and hopes to make the mod community aware of it too.
Mac gamers are a small minority of Mac users. And even in the PC realm, the number of gamers who actually use editing tools comprise a tiny minority of the overall population. One can easily extrapolate that the number of actual Mac gamers who are going to be put out by the lack of tools is infinitesimal -- literally, probably able to be counted on a couple of hands. Having tooled with the excellent world editor included with Warcraft III, I can safely say that this shit ain't for the faint of heart, baby. It takes a more creative and better organized mind than mine to make sense of this stuff and to do something real and good and useful with it.
Unfortunately, it's about perception. And with each added complaint dropped in the collective cesspool of human retardation and misery that is places like MacGamer.com's discussion boards and GameRanger, people who can't think for themselves and don't know any better are left with the presumption that Mac users are really getting screwed this time, and that Macs are bad for gaming.
But that's a different rant for a different day.
Comments
This couldn't be a more perfect summary of the situation.
I could say more about how I've seen the stupid people of the world try to wage war on those who are, in fact, trying to help them over microscopic and irrelevant details while entire-city-blocks-worth of vitally important stuff floats over their heads as unnoticed as wisps of cloud. I could say more about how the largest cesspool of misinformation about the business of games as well as the technology of how they're made is collected in the minds of the youth who will never get out of their parents' rec room, and they bring their special-ed brand of indignation to the public forums of the internet with hopes that they can put off, if only for a few more minutes, facing the terrible reality that their lives are rocketing past without so much as a single accomplishment to distinguish them.
I could say so much, but... this thing about the Neverwinter Nights toolset which Peter has said pretty much says it all. Not going to buy the game because of the missing toolset as your bold stand against The Man? Forgive me if I yawn.
Posted by: Corey | February 5, 2003 11:59 AM
I'd also like to add that I like it when Dan posts comments.
Posted by: Corey | February 5, 2003 12:05 PM
Well, with praise like that...
First, to get the little bit of bitch in me out - I do understand where the people bitching are coming from, because the game was highly advertised as being a "you make this" sort of thing, not as a "oh, here's an rpg with an editor thrown on the side". And given how much I hear how much the shipping scenarios suck...well, yeah. Coldstone looks like a better option - how sad is that?
But then you get into the warped sense of justice of all the Mac gaming idiots, and now EVERYTHING revolves around NWN. Macsoft is getting bought out by Destineer? "Great, maybe they'll get the toolset ported now!" Omni Group released another version of OmniWeb? "Great, maybe they have more time to port the toolset now!" Nate had a whole Subway 12-foot party sub for lunch? "Great, maybe they'll get the toolset ported now!" It's pavlovian, and it's ridiculous.
Of course, we're talking about the same group of people who:
-Said they were going to boycott Aspyr because Activision were being idiots about approving RTCW patches.
-Think Ambrosia can do no wrong, although still ignore the repeated statements that there's no way for them to add networking to EV and keep the gameplay the same.
-Think OmniGroup is the greatest thing ever.
-Think that Cocoa provides you with huge performance gains over Carbon.
-Think Halflife may still be ported.
There's a reason I stopped doing news and going on GameRanger.
Posted by: Dan Dickinson | February 5, 2003 01:00 PM