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Not being a techie, I don't understand why the Infinity engine is now "obsolete". SOA/TOB is a huge, complex and visually beautiful game with detailed backgrounds, realistic characters and critters and what seems to me to be a good combat system.

Neverwinter Nights and Morrowind, while developed with a supposedly "new and improved" game engine, had virtually none of these characteristics. If these are representative examples of what lies ahead, let's go back to the Infinity engine!!

I realize that time and technology march on but the ONLY improvement that I could see was the ability to pivot the viewing "camera"; everything else was the same or worse.

Sad thing, isn't it?

There have been a good few discussions on this in various places... sadly, I think we're in the minority in agreeing that the IE is still a great engine

My 2 gold worth...

For my money, content & playability >> whizzo graphics any day. I've dragged out truly ancient games for replay like Final Fantasy 1 (NES) - truly abysmal graphics, but incredible play value.

But that being said, the capabilities of the Infinity engine are limited, and I don't see a lot of future commercial prospects. I think it's a pity that there is no true three-D engine like Infinity out there.

What the single player/small group RPG game market really needs is a new semi-open source language like Infinity.... Ideally, the vendors would be competing on content, rather than engine and hobbyists could easily make mods and tweaks.

Cheers!

Originally posted by nephtu
What the single player/small group RPG game market really needs is a new semi-open source language like Infinity.... Ideally, the vendors would be competing on content, rather than engine and hobbyists could easily make mods and tweaks.

I think that is exactly what the Aurora engine is intended to be, though it may take a few iterations to get it right. NWN was never hyped for the single player campaign. I look at it as a sort of training ground.

Improvements to the engine may give us what we are looking for. Shadows of Undrentide has already added some new features.

We have a soccer motto here, sounds like "don't modify a winning formation"...
The point IMHO is that the Infinity Engine was perfect for its purposes.
People who play these games are not interested in a vectorial graphic or whatever,
they want a carefully picted world with cute graphics, of course, but the rest
is useless, if not deviant.
The important things are the combat system and NPC interactions, which reach top
quality in BG2.

They already had the perfect engine

another good thing about an older engine is that the community of modders is larger for older engines...older engines means it is well understood, and advanced tools already exists to create mods in it...

i mean we all still play it, right???

The scripting engine leaves a lot to be desired... for more detail on that you can look up posts by various guys like Weimer, where people ask "Why didn't Monster X do this?" and the answer is "because it's impossible."

Still, I think it's pretty clear that there's nothing in the world close to the Infinity Engine for party-based D&D.

While the scripting engine isn't perfect, I don't think it's as bad as people often make out. True, there are some things that aren't possible, or would be extremely messy to implement; however, many things can be worked around in a fairly satisfactory way.

Originally posted by SimDing0
While the scripting engine isn't perfect, I don't think it's as bad as people often make out. True, there are some things that aren't possible, or would be extremely messy to implement; however, many things can be worked around in a fairly satisfactory way.

This is where NWN is superior to BG2 IMO. Teh fact that you can easily create any kind of world in there using HakPaks and such...... the actual downloading files for using many Haks si however huge..... but look at TDD...... it's huge..... Besides what you realy should be looking to is KoTOR..... this is what the Bioware crew really see as a revoltonary engine...