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Neverwinter Nights 2 Officially Announced
An anonymous reader writes "Looks like Atari has just announced Neverwinter Nights 2, to be developed by Obsidian Entertainment, the same ex-Black Isle folks who are making Star Wars: Knights Of The Old Republic 2 in conjunction with BioWare. However, it's 'scheduled for release in 2006', so we've got a while to wait." A post on the Obsidian forums has a single piece of concept art, and it's confirmed that "[Original developers] BioWare will provide tools, technology, and game assets from the original Neverwinter Nights as well as lend creative input and oversight to the development process."
I feel the same way. The scripting language sucked, support for other media too. Even the D20 engine was broken (trap detection, pick locking, etc). The campaign story felt too much like "go fetch" (compared to, lets say, KOtoR, that was more smooth). Oh, and the TONS of bugs that it shipped with that made DM almost unplayable. I was very dissapointed, I was hoping more from the guys that created Baldur's Gate.
"There is no teacher but the enemy."-Mazer Rackham
You have a good point. The community *did* take a really long time to build modules. But the great thing is, the community *built* modules. These days not nearly enough games give the end users the tools they need to create their own expansions/modules to the game. NWN gave the end user the same tools that the game designers used to build the modules and its expansion pack.
I think NWN is one of the best games to come out in years, because of its replay value. There aren't many games I buy (and I buy way too many) that I finish, and of the ones I finish, I almost never replay them. Neverwinter Nights is the exception, because I wanted to play though it with every different class (melee, vs divine magine, vs arcane magic, vs rogue) for several different modules. I would send Atari my check right now for NWN2 if I could.
...will NWN2 support the pen and paper D&D 3.5 edition changes? (Of course, by then pen and paper will be up to 4.0, so NWN2 will still be behind!) :)
Personally, the only things I really miss when I'm using NWScript are arrays and function pointers. Aside from that, it's an extremely capable language that's dumbed down just enough that non-programmers can still make some impressive things with a little work.
So.. yeah. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. I'd have liked a few more things added into it, but I'm really glad it didn't end up as some gimped thing targetted at the lowest common denominator.
I have to disagree. While I liked the game well enough, it was no Fallout 2, or Planscape: Torment for that matter.
I rather liked playing nonpersistant worlds with two or three friends. Small party adventures and the like -- no other game I've played has had that before. The real problem with NWN was that its hard to make content for RPGs. At least if you're making a FPS mod, the difficulties are largely technical (modeling, coding). The specifics of the rules for the mod can usually be adjusted easily. For an RPG, there's lots and lots of writing to do. You need good dialog (very hard), a good story (medium hard), and a proper anticipation of the player's response (virtually impossible). Technical problems usually yield to incremental approaches, creative problems have no such strategy. Ultimately, I think this is why there were so few good player mods of NWN.
Use the Firehose to mod down Second Life stories!
I hadn't played NWN in a while (my copy is out on loan for months now) so I hadn't been visiting the great Bioware forums,and hadn't heard of DA. I had heard they were going to do there own thing. Good for them. Never liked them having to clear everything through the Wotc and having Atari as a distrubuter. Atari really didn't seem to care about customers at all.
As big a DnD fan as I am, I am a bigger fan of Bioware. These guys rock IMO. Go DA go!
And that's one of the big reasons why I'm instantly a bit hostile towards NWN2 -- no Bioware, plenty of Hasbro. I'm very liable to be declared a Bioware fanboy (they DID give me the computer I'm typing on) but their support of the community in general is nothing short of phenominal. They're making their next game with community in mind, and they're doing it free of the shackles that were binding them before. At WORST it'll be on par with NWN1's support, including some of its faults; at best it'll get even better.
On the other hand, what do we have? Hasbro and Atari and WotC lording over the IP as usual. Obsidian, who I have no doubt will make an excellent single player adventure, just like they're going to do with KOTOR2. But they're the contractor here, taking not only IP from someone else, but IP based on other's IP. I have a doubt that they'd be that committed to modding. It won't be a simple transition of the community from NWN1 to NWN2, who is in charge is what matters more for community support -- if Half-Life 2 was being done by a small hungarian developer contracted by Sierra, I doubt its modding community would thrive either.
Now, I'm making a LOT of conjecture here. A lot of assumptions. I'll admit that up front. But way I see it, they're ones with some basis in reality, and until they're disproven I'm going to remain a skeptic. I'd love to see them disproven, frankly... see NWN2 be a great platform.
But for the time being I'm sticking by the devil I know rather than the devil I don't.