Neverwinter Nights 2: More Multiplayer & McGinnis

In the same forum post as this newsbit, Rob McGinnis had even more to say on the subject of multiplayer and NWN 2:

Singleplayer, multiplayer, Persistent Worlds, Dungeon Masters, Custom Content Developers, toolset users, Rules Purists. These are the factions that make up the NWN community.

Everyone wants their issues fixed and they want them fixed now. If we focus on only one of those factions, the others are offended. If we focus on all at once, we aren't doing enough.

Someone mentioned we shouldn't have worked on voice commands first. I would bet the people that demanded we implement the V menu would disagree.

Some people say we should have put all of our effort into getting the autodownload running. I would bet that after you had your PWC file streamed to you but couldn't connect to a server or those servers you could connect to crashed you would have said something different.

Right now, we are receiving requests from all sides. Should we neglect the Custom Content Community that gave you all the CEP to focus on multiplayer?

When you build a house, do you start with the roof or the foundation? That is exactly what we have been doing, working on the foundation. Sure, we have done a few small fixes at the same time, but without working on the core foundation of the game, everything we do for multiplayer, the toolset or persistent worlds is for little benefit. What good is a multiplayer game that can't start on your computer? What good is a multiplayer game that doesn't allow you to create characters - or communicate?

I have also said in the past that many of the things required for multiplayer and other areas require much more effort and time than many of the fixes we have implemented. If it takes 40 hours to implement multi-select for the DM client, and only 2 hours to implement the Voice Chat menu, which do you think will get done first?

We cannot make everyone happy all at once, but we can, and do, put effort into each faction's issues.