Tsyr said:
Genuine First Person was an issue some people complained about with Dungeon Siege, but the same thing applies. You don't really want it, as the game is made right now. I'm sure Bioware could crank out a hack in 10 minutes to give you genuine FPP, but remember... there is no sky... there is not top to trees in the forest... there is no roof to caves...
Of course I really want it!! I want sky and treetops and forest! I *loved* flying and taking pot shots at land bound creatures whilst playing the later "Might and Magic" games (once I'd acquired the power of flying). The 3D engine had very little realism by today''s standards, but the flexibility for gameplay was awesome!
A very good point about sky, though, which makes me think that there will *never* be a FPP.
The fact that you are always "looking down at your feet" is actually a very clever approach to providing a consistent and easy approach to smooth 3D animation. This *hugely* reduces the amount of total possible floor coverage viewed, and hence guarantees you a minimal (at least manageable) polygon count for realistic 3D animation.
I've played with a tool called City OverSeer 3D, which lets you wander through a 3D world automatically generated from Campiagn Cartographer 2 files.
When I stand outside a city containing hundreds of buildings, and spin around on the spot, I get a very inconsistent animation rate. Basically, as I turn away from the city, I spin quite fast. As I spin the city into view, animation drops down to a couple of frames a second. This is because I can see an effectively huge floor space, and even a GeForce graphics card has trouble with the thousands and thousands of polygons that have to be processed. As I look at the city, I see the tops of hundreds of buildings, which can never happen in NWN.
Thinking back to what I know of 3D engine optimizations made of games like Doom, DoomII, and all those engines (massive amounts of pre-rendered calculations, requiring a *lot* of time to pre-process back at the factory, before the level is saved and ready to play), I should have expected this.
Bioware's approach was, unfortunately, definitely the best decision. Trying to get smart, and precalculate polygon optimization to support fully free camera movement (as with FPP), would make modules very slow to load (calculated as needed), or make them too large to distribute over the internet effectively for multi-player games (if compiled by the toolset).
Decisions not to support things like climbing and flying become more transparent. You really need to have everyone on the same level. There's a vague illusion of higher and lower ground when wandering around outside, but it's not really that real. I'd be pretty disappointed about being attacked from high above whilst I'm busy looking at my feet !!
There are definitely ways to design module areas to minimise polygon count problems without massive pre-rendering calculations, but they would have made the toolset harder to work with and impose restrictions on layout.
It's the old argument of trade-offs. Bioware could have gone for true "6 degrees of freedom" flexibility, but they would have got caned by the gaming public for either the jerky animation, or for sacrificing graphics realism (love the way that tall grass waves in the wind!!!).
For someone who enjoys creating worlds, designing adventures, etc NWN is well worth the price (even at the $100 I had to pay here in Australia). The tileset is a little limited at the moment, but already there are some custom tilesets appearing on the net and I image there will be an expansion pack somewhere in the future with more tilesets, monsters, etc. Even the current limitations can be worked around, and with a few added visual effects and encounters you can create a really neat looking map.
