Dave Arneson Speaks in Favour of Neverwinter Nights

Remove all ads!

(Originally posted by chevalier)

Dave Arneson, the father of D&D roleplaying together with Gary Gygax, has been interviewed by Digital News. He reveals that Neverwinter Nights is one of the three games he has installed on his computers and speaks appreciatively about BioWare's work. Here's a snip:

If you could jump on a development team and direct a project, who would you join?

Oh, I'd probably like work with the Neverwinter Nights people at some point. They seem to have a good notion about what to do. I'm sure some of the things they don't do are their decisions, machine decisions, etc. I've learned enough about computers and programming from this school to understand this better over the last four and a half years. It's easy to say "Oh, they're not doing it right." But, could they do it any other way? Well, the answer is probably no, at this point. Also, you've got to get the game done in a couple of years.

You get these teams, they've been together for a while. Maybe they don't have a lot of new ideas, but they know each other. But that's the problem, you have a 30 to 40 percent turn-over rate on projects, It's hard to keep an act together because you're still talking about a couple dozen people. You know, we've got the old core team from 4D Interactive systems (a company Arneson founded in the early 80's). That's eight guys. They've been working together for 25 years. It's kinda spooky to watch them. They don't seem to talk to each other. I think it's a telepathic link between them all. But that's an old team. They know what to do, they know who's doing what. They're not afraid to ask each other questions. Get a new team, and somebody new on the team. Is he going to squeak and say something to someone who's been doing it for five years? Probably not.

Read the whole thing at Digital News.