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Obsidian's Urquhart On NWN2, Fallout 3
Thanks to GameSpot for its interview with Obsidian Entertainment's Feargus Urquhart, as the ex-Black Isle founder talks about the formation of the Star Wars: KOTOR II developers ("I must have been at least an OK boss, or it was just Interplay almost going out of business, but of the 36 people working here at Obsidian, 18 of them are from Black Isle"), regarding updates to BioWare's engine for the 2006-due Neverwinter Nights 2 ("We are going over almost every inch of the engine to add new features and refine things that are going to stay the same. From a graphics standpoint, we are updating most of the graphics engine to support new graphical features like normal mapping"), and discusses the fate of the Fallout 3 license ("I think the team at Bethesda has their work cut out for them. This is mostly because there is almost nothing that they can do that will make the Fallout fans happy.")
Urqhart is right.
There is a classic example of what Bethestha might face.
Ultima 7 and its followers. In the early nineties Origin released the Ultima7s (now can be played via exult
Well in its original state the game was almost unplayable due to heavy machine requirements and bugs. Over time Origin fixed the bugs, and the game began to shine. After a few years people remembered the game better than it really was (not that it was bad it was a classic indeed) from that point on and from the point origin released the Underworlds which also connected to U7, Origin was destined to fail. First they released Ultima 8 which was quite good, but it was not another Ultima 7. They got a heavy beating, then year after year another delay. Ultima 7 became more and more nostalgic, and Origin/EA simply had to face a giant which they could not beat. Then U9 came out, buggy rushed, it got a deserved beating, although the game concepts itself were amazing and later games showed that the design can really work (The two Gothics come to my mind), Origin ran into the problem, a) that they again released a buggy game
b) that the fans expectations were so high that they never could have fullfilled it with the hardware back then or a totally different design.
The funny thing is Garriot basically was right with his design decisions, it was just the hardware and the bugs which crippled the game, together with a fan community which had over the top expectations.
I wish Bethesta good luck but if they are unlucky, they run into another U7 fiasco.
While I have no doubt they will take a few good ideas here and there along with a healthy dose of experience, all indications point to a complete rewrite for Dragon Age with only high level borrowing from NWN.
As for using the same engine in KOTOR and Jade Empires this is patently false. KOTOR is developed by a completely separate team and has nothing to do with NWN. Jade Empires is even a different engine than KOTOR. KOTOR was designed to be compatible with the PC and Xbox while Jade Empires' engine is designed from the ground up for the Xbox with no PC compatability. That KOTOR and Jade Empires shares a common code base is a common misconception but to think KOTOR runs on the NWN engine is just plain ludicrous.
If you'd like, there is a postmortem available for the NWN multiplayer client/server and the game and toolset on Gamasutra . Free registration is required. I think they quite plainly admit the NWN development was backwards at best.
There is no doubt code can always be salvaged, but you are incorrect in thinking they would morph a PC only multiplayer swiss army knife like NWN into an Xbox only single player game like Jade Empires.