It's funny, because to to Beamdog haters on GOG I appear to be "the most vociferous NWN:EE advocate", whereas to Beamdog supporters on their own forum I was considered a Beamdog skeptic to say the least, because I engaged in lengthy discussions on why Beamdog should definitely not remove the old NWN from the GOG's store and how it was a very bad idea to do so in regards to the BG and IWD series.

And the fact of the matter is, I'm neither a hater nor fanboy of Beamdog. In fact, I had a similar (though perhaps a bit softer) opinion on Beamdog to you before and a while after NWN:EE's announcement. My feelings and expectations when the EE was announced were almost exclusively negative. I thought: "Given how much NWN relies on its community and history of custom content, there's no way any company can make its rebirth right, yet alone a company like Beamdog".

Slowly, but steadily, I've come to realize they took, to my surprise, the only possible approach to this - and that is, listening to feedback from the community, not breaking backward compatibility (I find complaining about the video conversion issues to be nitpicking). I never said the EE is the best thing to happen to NWN - the heap of custom content is - but NWN:EE is simply the same game with restored support.

I've been to both sides of this conflict and my current stance does not come from mindless slurping of anything NWN-related, but from the game itself and the approach taken in its development being a pleasant surprise and breaking my negative expectations I had earlier.

You can not see the worth in NWN:EE and I don't mind it. In fact, I'm fully aware that NWN:EE does not offer much more than NWN:DE to a casual player who's going to play a campaign and perhaps two extra modules. I believe such players will find the game worthwhile only when the graphical overhaul is released and performance is increased.

That's all I have to say.

Are you implying that only casual players don't see value in EE? We aren't worthy enough to see the awesomeness of EE?

NWN has never been off my computers since 2002, I have well over 1000 hours of play time, playing all the official campaigns multiple times, and somewhere in the neighborhood of 50+ community modules, and I have played on a persistent world for a couple of months.

To me the greatest damage NWN:EE does to NWN, is splitting the community.

Now NWN is two factions that are incompatible in multiplayer. NWN:EE can't play on regular NWN persistent worlds and vice-versa, so it is like two separate games.

Modules made with the NWN:EE toolset don't work on regular NWN.

And finally people like you and I, who were on the same side previously, part of one NWN community, are now polar opposites in long running arguments about NWN:EE.

Yes, Beamdud has generated some buzz -- [sarcasm]Oh joy, the community will be revived!!![/sarcasm] -- but as Peter correctly noted, the Steam Workshop will ultimately divide what's left of the community, which may well end up killing it. If you pulled your head out of your ass and wiped the shit out of your eyes you'd probably see a lot more clearly -- assuming that you really do care about the old community.

Why do you peeps keep beating the Beamdog bongo for a game that is mostly about mods, on a site that doesn't have a mod workshop? What the hell sense does that make?

The Neverwinter Nights community is https://neverwintervault.org/, and leeching traffic over to Steam will unquestionably weaken it.

"Community" refers to the people that *contribute*, not the ones that exist only to enjoy the fruits of other people's labor, and making things easy-peasy for leechers does jack shit for it.

I thought the EE was supposed to attract a new generation of fans.

So you actually had new information relevant to the topic, and instead you chose to trot out your same old arguments. What are they actually doing? When is this going to be finished? As far as I'm concerned, that is one critical feature that will keep the game off of gog, so the ETA for this working may well be a better indicator of when the EE comes to gog than some "likes" or "it's in gog's hands" tweets.

I hope those leeches at Beamdog won't find Icewind Dale 2's source code.

NWN:DE works "fine", that's it.

Just tell me what's better from NWN:DE, as right now the EE just surpasses it on everything but the price (and it's not like it goes $60, just +$9.99).

EE fixed shadow crashes, optimized the code, will support 64bits, has normal/specular maps, added shader support, Ossian Studios had the opportunity of launch Darkness over Daggerford (most of their bugs fixed), object scaling and rotation support, increased the limit of ppl beign able to join servers, added a new master list, has community ppl working on it (You know the Ravenloft server? Well, that guy made all the fancy shaders that are shipping with every patch), amour parts have their own color channel id, instanced areas, and many more fixes.

And about workshop thing? What is all that fuzz about? You know that if you want you can just link people to the vault and that's it?

If you already bought it, why keep spaming that they will take it away? NWN:DE should just die and everybody migrate to the Enhanced Edition as all had to do before with the expansion packs. Besides, if you look at the 1.69 server list you'll have fewer servers running than EE, so...

Don't compare real Bioware Expansions to NWN:EE, as it will only highlight what a poor value NWN:EE is.The real expansion packs gave us a lot more than a slight window dressing of EE.

Real expansion pack:
New Campaign: We got a whole new 30-40 hour high quality, full sized voiced, campaign (Shadows of Undrentide, Hordes of the Underdark). Basically a whole new games worth of story to play.
New Classes.
New Feats.
New Spells.
New Skills.
New monsters.
New Tile Sets.
Usually a new patch with fixes, though these were free on an ongoing basis.

NWN:EE
A new patch, to an already extremely solid game (these were free in the past)
Some very lame post process effects (making the graphics oversaturated and cartoonish, or blurry).

NWN:EE is window dressing at high charge.

Nothing like the great value a BIoware Expansion delivered, that gave pretty much whole new games worth of play.

Mods uploaded to the workshop cannot be downloaded by non-Steam users, as of the last time I tried. How does "linking people to the vault", whatever that means, solve this?

There's any workshop exclusive mod? No.

If you really think that NWN 1.69 is a very solid game that needs no patches keep playing 1.69 and let the community move forward. Beamdog is adding a lot of customization that was hardcoded or you had to make a plugin with NWNX and, in my world, that's amazing.

If we take on account that Beamdog only has 5-8 persons working on NWN:EE and it was released only four months ago, what we have right now is a lot of work. They even worked with Intel to solve all the notebooks issues that 1.69 has too.

NWN:EE isn't BG:EE, a game released broken and fixed over two years.

Oh look, another beamdud shill has come to preach the gospel of St. Trent! o.O

Well isn't this surprising, the beamdud community has been uploading other people's content to the Steam Workshop without bothering to ask permission. Leechers gonna leech, t'would seem. o.O

https://forum.neverwintervault.org/t/vault-content-appearing-on-steam/672

Update:
Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition on GOG is getting closer. We have to work out how CD Keys will be handled.
http://blog.beamdog.com/2018/07/july-20-livestream-recap.html

Too bad the community here are so hard-on each other.

This is good news for people who wants the game. And for those who don't want it, you know it's coming, so buy it now! Because after that, you'll get it when you pay more for the new version