Every once in a while, I have the opportunity to get an interview from top companies around the world. I look forward to each and every one of them, because each is a different experience. Sometimes they read a bit like a press release, which can get a little boring. Then there are times like these, where they make it an entertaining experience. I was able to strike an interview with Obsidian Entertainment, developers of the released Atari game Neverwinter Nights 2. I hope you enjoy reading the interview as much as I had talking to them.
[Captain Gordon:] What would you say is the most innovative addition to the game over the last?
[Eric Fenstermaker] Two changes, I think, really separate this title. The first is the party system. In the previous game, the player either adventured alone or with a single companion. In Neverwinter Nights 2, the player brings along an entire party, which completely changes the feel of the game. Your companions develop as they travel with you, and they make friends and have conflicts with one another as well. Most games of this genre, of late, are relatively lonely experiences – one lone hero against the world, quietly trotting along the road en route to some evil place to kill some monster. With a party, the player becomes a lot more emotionally invested in the story. Players will come to love some of their party members and despise others, but ultimately their involvement will increase drastically as their companions make great sacrifices or commit heinous acts of treachery along the way. And of course combat becomes much more strategic as the player has to decide who to bring with him and what sort of role they’ll fulfill in the party.
The other is the toolset, which we rebuilt from the ground up. It provides a dramatically large set of new features with which our online community can create new content. It’s become a lot more powerful across the board, and the content we’re seeing out of the modding community is already pretty spectacular. Aside from our new terrain editing capability, of particular interest is our new cinematic cutscene system, which puts builders in a role not unlike that of a film director. They’ll set up camera angles, block out their characters’ movement and animations, assign them dialogue, create and place special effects, and then watch their scene play out letterboxed in-game, telling their story with a degree of precision and detail that would’ve been prohibitively time-consuming in the original.
[Captain Gordon:] What classes of character are new? Will there be an option to create your own class?
[Jeff Husges] In addition to all the classes and prestige classes from the original game, Neverwinter Nights 2 adds one new base class, the Warlock, and seven new prestige classes – Arcane Trickster, Duelist, Neverwinter Nine, Shadow Thief of Amn, Eldritch Knight, Frenzied Berserker, and Warpriest. No option to create your own class exists at this time, but given the size of the modding community, it probably won’t be long before someone makes it an option.
[Captain Gordon:] Would you say moving the sequel to a different company has helped it?
[Tony Evans] Absolutely! I must admit I am pretty biased in favor of Obsidian Entertainment (which I think generates more magic per capita than Disneyland), but I don’t think there is an RPG studio out there that could have done more justice to the sequel to Neverwinter Nights, unless they somehow managed to hire each and every one of the talented individuals responsible for making Neverwinter Nights 2.
[Captain Gordon:] Can you describe what the storyline of the game is about?
[Jeff Husges] The player begins the game as a citizen of West Harbor, a small but tough swamp village which has recently held its annual Harvest Fair. Strange, mysterious enemies assault the village during the night, apparently searching for something. The player and his fellow Harbormen drive back the attackers, but many lives are lost and the village is badly damaged. The player’s foster father - a rather cold, aloof elf – believes the attackers were after the silver shard, a relic from a great battle fought in West Harbor many years ago. The player retrieves the shard from its hiding place in the nearby swamp ruins and is given the task of taking it to Neverwinter City to find out more about the shard - and why anyone would kill for it. Before long, the player finds himself uncovering dark conspiracies and battling ancient, powerful enemies.
[Captain Gordon:] Is there a user-friendlier scripting engine? Possibly similar to the Macro Express interface, if you are familiar with it, where you can choose from script commands on a sidebar and have an option window pop up with further options that can be done with that script command.
[Ben Ma] The NWN2 toolset doesn’t come with a wizard interface for script generation, but I do believe a solution could be available in the future. One of my favorite features in this toolset is the ability to extend functionality through the use of plug-ins. I’ve played with some fantastic add-ons (created by the talented NWN2 fans :) that assist building anywhere from area generation to inventory management!
As for conversation scripting, NWN2 adds support for parameters and includes a fairly extensive global script library that new and experienced builders can leverage. Actions can now be executed by attaching a generic script and providing the appropriate parameters to a dialog node (e.g. attaching “ga_open_store” and inputting the tag of a store object to open will do what you probably expect!). This natural evolution in conversation scripting is very usable and also a great way to learn about scripting.
[Captain Gordon:] Is the terrain more 'malleable" in the world editor? Is it easier to customize individual land tiles or play around with elevation? In the first one, there were like 4-5 different types of terrain tiles for any given tile set, and messing around with elevation could get annoying due to map size limitations.
[Adam Brennecke] Neverwinter Nights 2 features height-mapped terrain for exterior areas instead of using the tile system from the first game. The toolset allows you to paint a variety of different textures down like grass, sand, rocks and dirt much like paint program. There aren’t any limitations on elevation and users will be able to mold and carve hills and valleys with a number of different tools such as raise, lower, and smooth.
[Captain Gordon:] One of the unfortunate aspects of the parry skill in NWN 1, is that it was not as versatile as it is in pen and paper D&D. I am wondering if you carried the parry skill over to NWN 2, and if so, what improvements did you make to its functionality so that it's a useful skill to invest in? Likewise what other skills have been improved?
[Brandon Adler]The parry skill was carried over from Neverwinter Nights 1 and it has very similar functionality. Parry has become much more useful with the addition of prestige classes that cast in the middle of combat, such as the Eldrich Knight. Turning the skill on in the new mode bar allows you to easy cast spells while parrying attacks in between your spellcasting.
You will also notice that we tried to put an increased focus on options while in conversations. For that reason we introduced the Diplomacy skill into Neverwinter Nights 2. You now have even more versatility when it comes to talking your way out of a bad situation or into a good one.
Another big addition is the new Craft Alchemy skill which allows you to create Alchemist's Fire, acid, and poisons. You are also able to extract magical essences which are used to enchant items, weapons, and armor with powerful magics.
The biggest departure skill-wise from Neverwinter Nights 1 was probably the removal of the Discipline skill. This was done to facilitate an experience much closer to pencil and paper Dungeons and Dragons. Feats that used Discipline, such as Knockdown, now do opposed strength checks to determine success or failure.
[Captain Gordon:] Has Obsidian Entertainment considered making any persistent world servers that are capable of hosting a moderate amount of players? While NWN 1 persistent world servers were tremendously fun, player-hosted servers could only handle so much traffic, usually 25 players, before a server started lagging fairly heavily. This made it hard to balance the line between enough content in a persistent world to keep people happy, and having so much content and maps that players never even run into each other on roads/towns.
[Ryan Rucinski] Rather than setting up a team to run a PW we feel that the cost and overhead would be better served creating additional content to what already exists and making fixes or needed changes to the code.
Besides, we want to make more stuff for the players and creators in NWN2.
[Captain Gordon:] What are the new exciting prestige character classes? What are also the new sub-races?
[Tony Evans] There are seven new prestige classes in Neverwinter Nights 2: Arcane Trickster, Duelist, Eldritch Knight, Frenzied Berserker, Neverwinter Nine, Shadow Thief of Amn, and Warpriest. In addition, we’ve also added a new base class, the Warlock.
The new sub-races include Drow, Sun Elf, Wood Elf, Aasimar, Tiefling, Gold Dwarf, Duergar (Gray Dwarf), Svirfneblin (Deep Gnome) and Strongheart Halfling.
[Captain Gordon:] Will the game feature body dismemberment, or body part specific damage?
[Tony Evans] Neverwinter Nights 2 is a game for the whole family, which means that demons and devils from the Hells get to keep their limbs and bodily fluids when you strike them down. And you can’t kick them in the jimmy either. That would be just mean…
[Captain Gordon:] Of the features added, what are you most excited about?
[Constant Gaw] There are a number of good new features, but the most dramatic are the new terrain formation tools. Although tile-based approaches give you the ability to generate areas quickly, our terrain sculpting approach gives modders unprecedented levels of control and detail. This is an exciting feature for me because I can’t wait to see what kinds of areas the community will develop. Enormous bluffs along a coast, castle cities sloped along the side of a mountain, enormous canyon mazes – there are so many possibilities, it’s ridiculous.
This summed up the questions that I asked the company, and everything in their game seems to be in order. I am personally trying out the game now as well, and it is a great experience. The game is out now, I recommend picking it up immediately. Also stay tuned for a video game review. All and all, this is Captain Gordon signing off.
Questions? Comments? Suggestions? CaptainGordonEdward@Gmail.com
LOGIN
REGISTER
RSS
HOME
