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Shadows of Undrentide Interview
GameSpy has a new Q&A up with Trent Oster and Darcy Pajak, the producer/project director and assistant producer of Shadows of Undrentide, the upcoming expansion to Neverwinter Nights. The new features of SoU, which we first mentioned a while back are touched on, including a more engrossing plot, prestige classes, new tilesets (snow! finally!), new feats, henchman inventory control, and more.
It's good to see that they are adding back in the ability to manage your henchman's inventory and lootable corpses a la Baldur's Gate Series Games.
Neverwinter Nights lost some of the verisimilitude that the Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale games had. It's also nice that Bioware has admitted that NWN was a bit lacking in the story department. The later chapters were decent, but Chapter One was way too slow.
A lot of the feats look good and I like the idea of Prestige classes being added. I hope the implementation goes well for these as I look forward to the Arcane Archer Class.
As an aside, I would like to say "Please fix your Page layout GameSpy! It looks like crap in a Gecko based Browser!"
Yep, with SoU (and technically with the normal 1.30 patch for regular NWN) we're going to get persistent data storage. Just the thing for an online world to be more and more MUDlike, or for a single player campaign to store data inbetween modules -- lord knows I could've used that with Penultima, instead of the cheap inventory hacks I did...
NWN has been growing and maturing ever since release. If anybody gave up on it because of the fairly weak single player campaign it shipped with, you may want another look -- a 'game' like this lives or dies by its community, and the community's living quite well. Even if all you want is singleplayer, that's provided for by the community... and SoU looks like it'll have a good SP experience too.
(Yes, the Linux and Max clients aren't fully prepared yet, and no, they didn't ship with the box. But the game is still one of the most complete community development driven RPG experiences you will ever find.)