Obsidian's Urquhart On NWN2, Fallout 3

Posted by simoniker on Thursday August 12, 2004 @04:27AM from the playing-a-role dept.

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.")

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NWN's dated engine by Anonymous Coward · 2004-08-12 04:56 · Score: 5, Interesting

I think Obsidian has its work cut out for it on the NWN engine which was outdated before it even left the gate. The game's development was so awkward because they built the tools before the game. This means they had no idea what they actually needed at the most critical design phases. So too much time was spent on unnecessary features while critical features were not discovered until after they started on the content. Constantly returning to the code base to alter very mature code put Bioware significantly behind schedule and at a distinct disadvantage when it cane time to make needed updates.

Ultimately, the NWN engine is a textbook example of how not to develop a game. It is so backwards and kludgy I'm surprised Obsidian has agreed to subject itself to untangling the spaghetti. They have all my respect if they are able to do so, but I think they could find better ways to dedicate their resources than on this lost cause. Why do you think Bioware is writing a new Dragon Age engine after only one game instead of releasing two or three like with the Infinity Engine games?