I’ve been procrastinating about making and announcing a final decision regarding when and where to build “Sanctum of the Archmage 3: The Miracle Worker, Act II” for a while now. So far I’ve had what I thought were good reasons for the delay. There was my discovery of one more (unexpected) requirement for the Master’s degree that I’ve been working on, which prevented me from graduating in May; some health problems (nothing serious, but which I do need to deal with, and at least partly by taking the time to get more exercise instead of sitting in front of my computer all the time); some changes and new responsibilities at work; another potential new project (which I can’t say any more about just yet); the AME 2007 awards cycle; and a desire to actually spend some more time with my wife. In short, real life has been intruding, big time, on my desire to get started in earnest on building the next chapter.

I’m not willing to delay my writing and building any longer, though, and I’ve been thinking a bit about how to do them while still managing all of these other competing demands on my time. So for these and other reasons, I’ve decided to finish “Sanctum of the Archmage: The Miracle Worker” in NWN1 after all.

As I said, part of my motive in coming to that decision is because of the schedule constraints that I described above. It is unquestionably faster and easier to build in NWN1 than in NWN2, especially for someone who is already as familiar with NWN1 building as I am. There is little chance that I could finish the next chapter this year if I switch to NWN2 now, and I don’t want to disappoint my players and start to lose my audience by delaying it too much longer.

But some of my other reasons for deciding to do at least one more module in NWN1 have to do with the incredible new content that’s becoming available with the 1.69 patch, which went final last week. Here’s just a partial list of new 1.69-based content that I should be able to include in Sanctum 3:

• The Community Expansion Pack, v2.1 (CEP 2.1), which is now released;
• The Seasonal Forest Tileset by Lord of Worms, which just won the AME’s NWN1 “Best Tileset” award for 2007 despite still being in extended Beta. Take a look at the stunning images captured by Estelindis for the AME Awards Video (starting about 11:30), and I think you’ll see why I’m excited about the prospect of building scenes with it.
• Romantic Animations by Ninjaweaselman. This is a variation on his “Intimate Animations” suite (which won the AME’s Best Custom Content award for 2007), to include kissing, hugging, and even dancing animations of extraordinarily high quality. It’s currently in a closed beta (in which I’m participating). I’ll be able to integrate the romantic animations into Sanctum 2 and any later modules that I do in NWN1. And the dancing animations will allow me to realistically script some upcoming scenes in the saga that I had very much wanted to include, but that I had previously resigned myself to having to do without.
• Ridable Pegasi. For more on this, see my previous blog post. I’ve already replaced the existing pegasi in Sanctum 2 with the new models, and if a ridable version is ready in time, I’ll include those as well.

There are a number of other new custom content projects in the works for NWN1 that I’ve learned about recently, such as plans to develop high-poly head and body models. I’ll blog more about these when they become a bit more public. But these discoveries have definitely given me confidence that NWN1 still has a good bit of life left in it, as a game and as an ever-extending environment for CRPG modding. The fact that other top-notch CC and module builders like Fester Pot, Savant, Lord Rosenkrantz, Ninjaweaselman and others are still building in NWN1 only reinforces that thought.

I want to emphasize that this doesn’t mean that I’ve set aside my plan to begin building in NWN2 at some point. My intent right now is that the last part of the saga, “Sanctum of the Archmage: The Alliance,” will definitely be developed in NWN2, or perhaps even co-developed for both games, if my schedule ever frees up enough to allow it (*crosses fingers*).