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Neverwinter Nights 2 Forum News

Discussion in 'Game/SP News & Comments' started by chevalier, Aug 8, 2004.

  1. chevalier

    chevalier Knight of Everfull Chalice ★ SPS Account Holder Veteran

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    Here are today's Neverwinter Nights 2 forum highlights, collected by NWVault from Obsidian Forums. Please take into account that these are only single parts of various threads and should not be taken out of context. Bear in mind also that the posts presented here are copied as-is, and that any bad spelling and grammar does not get corrected on our end.

    Feargus Urquhart, CEO

    Henchmen System
    It'll be a multiple henchmen system.

    Why so Early?
    Well pretty much everyone is right, even Grommie - dammit... The publisher really decides when a game is announed - not the developer. There are some exceptions to that of course, but it's a good rule to follow. In the case of Kotor2, we would have liked to announce a little earlier than we did, but I think it worked out great. As for NWN2, it was nice to be able to announce as early as we have, since we will be able to talk on the boards with everyone and have it affect what we do with the game.

    SP game "as rich as the first game"
    This is not one of those quotes of mine to pick a part. We are planning to make a great single player game in the same vein as other games we have made in the past like Torment and the Fallouts. As for Diablo 2 being a great CRPG - it is. Would I say it's a great story driven CRPG, no. Just like I wouldn't say that Torment was a great combat driven CRPG.

    More : Well a key part of our third project will be our rapidly emerging Hyper Crate Technology 2.0. So, I'm sure we'll live up to all your expectations of crates and maybe, if we are lucky and I don't want to get ahead of myself here....barrels.

    An Old School NWN Follower's Personal Wish List...
    I'll throw my opinion in here.

    On Rules, I agree that the rules should be kept to as closely as possible. For me, as a game developer, the reason for that is balancing. The rules system is fairly balanced, so if we stick with it then the game should be fairly balanced. I do think you can go too far with rules though and be so careful about implementing them exactly that you can make the game a chore to play. Plus, I think there are rules that are fine to interpret a little bit, an example would be monster stats. There are rules for making the stats of a monster more or less powerful, but sometimes that doesn't work exactly the way you need it to. My belief is that as long as what you are doing with the stats of creature make sense for the creature then it's fine to modify the stats within reason.

    As for the art. I want the creature and classes to be immediately recognizable to people playing the game, however I think the game needs to have a look. That is not to say that it needs to be cell shaded or some other look that is miles away from normal. I just mean that a look needs to be defined and all of the art in the game needs to follow it. This might mean that some creatures might look somewhat different than they do in whatever M&M or other source book you are flipping through, but they will still be instanly recognizable as what they are.

    About the NWN2 engine...
    We are starting with HOTU with upgrades, a bunch of the code, particularly on the graphics side, has already been changed.

    Speculation on dev angle
    On the engine issue.

    1) KOTOR is an updated version of the Aurora engine with a number of changes such as lightmaps instead of 100% dynamic lighting.

    2) The one thing that wasn't taken into account in the criticism of my point about Doom3 having aspects of the orginal Quake engine in it was that both graphics technology and general graphics programming knowledge have made huge strides forward since Quake. So, if someone were to start with Quake today it would not take seven or eight years to get Doom3.

    We are spending a lot of effort on re-writing aspects of the engine to make sure they are competative with products coming out in 2006. If we did just minor changes to the graphics engine that wouldn't happen, so of course we are making a lot of changes. Plus, we are very familiar with the engine already, because of KOTOR2, which means we know what we are doing when we change things.

    We are going to keep some things the same. I'm not going to list them all, but they are things that should logically remain the same. Will the Toolset be completely re-written? No, since it works and people are familiar with it. But, it will be updated.

    The funny thing is that while a bunch of people here are all down and depressed about how horrible the game is going to look, we are actually completely jazzed here at Obsidian. We are actually getting the time for once to make most if not all of the changes to an engine that we want to make which will really make the graphics and gameplay amazing.

    Adam Brennecke, Programmer

    Obsidian working on NeverWinter Nights 2
    There are two teams working on both games. The NWN2 team is the much smaller team right now, but they will absorb people from the KOTOR team once that project is 100% done.

    FrankK, Programmer

    About the NWN2 engine...

    I doubt that Obsidians changes will be anywhere near what witcher did.
    The Witcher is more like the KotOR engine. Levels made in MAX, lit in MAX and loaded straight into the game. We will not do that in the interest of supporting end-user content. That doesn't mean we aren't taking things in a different direction from the original--there will be things we can do that the Witcher won't be able to in terms of how the graphics interact with the player, but we won't have the pixel-perfect shadows a pre-rendered scene can generate. Lightmapping has it's plusses, but it isn't without some sacrifice. I'm sure that once the screenshots of NWN2 appear, people will understand the engine isn't going to be the same-ole same-ole. It will probably be several months before that point, so sit tight and know that there are programmers dedicated to improving the graphical fidelity of the game from now until ship.

    Sticky: Gamespot and IGN articles

    The only think I can imagine is that they will try to implement something like in Fallout II where you can influence the basic battle behaviour but it is still no replacement for a fully controllable party.
    We've drawn inspiration for the party mechanics from some unusual sources. We wouldn't have made the decision to go with henchmen without discussing how it could be improved.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Jan 3, 2018
    chevalier, Aug 8, 2004
    #1
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