Sunday, April 14, 2013

Patching

It's virtually inevitable that there will be bugs found in any release, and naturally Crimmor was not immune to that. I followed the good practice of included a patch hak. What I've done is make the odd number patches via the patch hak, to allow updates for people that have already started and have savegames, and the even number a full update that addresses the things that can't be patched, map changes and such. Version 1.04 should be up at the Vault/Nexus today.

Thursday, April 4, 2013

Crimmor is released!

Vault link.

Now to cross my fingers and hope no one finds any gamebreaking bugs. :-)

Crimmor is a module for solo rogues of level 8 (you can level up and receive appropriate gold ingame). Use skills and rogue abilities as a Shadow Thief in the streets of the Amnian city of Crimmor.

You may like this module, you may not. Crimmor is experimental and is focused primarily on the urban environment and providing the "feel" of a city, as well as rogue focused non-combat gameplay. If you are all about combat, this is probably not the module for you.

Crimmor pushes the NWN2 toolset's hard limit on objects in the external city areas, additionally, there are numerous npcs in the city. I recommend a modern pc. You've been warned.

Crimmor takes many things, from food, street, shop, and npc names, to the unusual relationship of the Shadow Thieves to the city, from Ed Greenwood's article on the city in Dragon Magazine issue 334. Thank you Ed. Some things I had to change in the interest of gameplay.

Characters without rogue levels are unsupported, though bards will probably work fine as well. You are not required to have levels in the Shadow Thief of Amn prestige class. You are not required to be evil.

Magic levels are low, there are few +2 items. Don't worry about that, Crimmor isn't a module about "powering up". You can reach up to level 14 in Crimmor. There are four possible endings, not all of which are good for the pc, and it is possible to end the game via decisions you make before the "end".

Among other things, Crimmor uses a custom lockpicking system (courtesy of RWS), all custom sound in the environment (courtesy freesound.org). It has custom weapon and item classes, and pseudo prestige classes (Crimmor does not change any 2das except for the loadscreens and trees.2das, so it works with any custom content that does not alter these, including class packs). Finally, the thieves speak cant. A pdf guide has been provided that goes over gameplay things, and includes a dictionary of the cant used as well as some background on Crimmor.

The module is completable without killing anything. There's no secret achievement or bonus for doing so. No xp is awarded for combat, only quest completion and exploration. There are approximately 10 hours of content.

There's a lot going on behind the scenes with things, and some things are pretty complicated. As with any 1.0 release, there are bound to be some bugs that managed to slip by, but there are two I am aware of:
Lockpicking does not consume lockpicks (yay for you, freebie!). Lights do not affect the hide skill though the DM will tell you it does, as there were seemingly unsolvable problems with this (I hope to get this fixed via patch). These have minimal game effect and were significantly delaying release, so I chose to go ahead and release.

Thanks to my testers: Arkalezth, PJ156, GFallen01.