Neverwinter Nights Put Out To Pasture
Right on the heels of the announcement of a new infinite dungeons module, via Broken Toys comes word that Atari has completely pulled support from the first Neverwinter Nights game. From the article: "There hasn't been any official word on all this yet but some of the most credible factors, that have been thrown around, include; the financial stability of Atari, and that they didn't want horses for NWN1 to come out officially before NWN2. This also appears to have affected other premium modules that were in production with other teams and there is probably no chance that Witches Wake 2 will ever get produced. It's hard to expect a publisher like Atari to keep on supporting patches forever, and in fact most games are lucky if they can get a few done. The NWN community has been very lucky to have had so many patches with so much free content. We shouldn't lose sight of that. However killing the premium module program makes no sense."
Atari's involvement with ongoing support for NWN was minimal, basically all the patch support for NWN for the last year was BioWare driven and funded and had little Atari involvement. The premium modules program was used to fund continued support for NWN, including the recent 1.67 patch which added a large amount of new functionality and content to the game.
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However, the focus of this discussion should not be on the patch support (which we planned to stop sometime this year anyway), but on the fact that several premium modules developed by very hard working groups of the community were cancelled litterally weeks before the finish line, robbing these people of their chance to get professional credit and reward for projects they had worked on for years in some cases.
Some more info:
http://nwn.bioware.com/forums/viewtopic.html?topi
Georg,
BioWare