NWN Designer Diary

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(Originally posted by Darien)

In this article at NWVault, Trent Oster talks about some of the unpredictable occurences during the development of Neverwinter Nights. Here's one:

The other bizarre side effect I had the joy of witnessing was the macabre Full Monty of the Dead. When a character dies, the game spawns a container to hold whatever had been in the character's inventory. The problem we had was one of timing. You would expect a character to receive the killing blow, fall to the ground, and fade out with the container appearing quickly thereafter. Instead, characters who received their death blow dropped their inventory container immediately, before they even had the chance to play their death animation. This resulted in the character removing all of the equipment he or she had equipped, armor and clothing included. It was the strangest thing - you'd be engaged in mortal combat with a dangerous foe but, on your final blow, they would instantly be stripped naked and fall down dead. Talk about getting caught with your pants down! While we all had a chuckle at this unplanned 'feature,' we decided it diverged a little too much from the expected gameplay and revised the timing accordingly.