Chronicles of Neverwinter Interview the Creator of Night Howls in Nestlehaven

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The Chronicles of Neverwinter site has published an interview with jackyo123, creator of the NWVault Hall of Fame module "Night Howls in Nestlehaven". He discusses his work as well as the difficulties involved in working with the NWN2 toolset.

Congratulations for your module "Night Howls in Nestlehaven". Can you talk about it?

Yes, certainly. Night Howls in Nestlehaven is loosely based on a novel I started writing when I was finishing up high-school. I've written about 600 or so pages, but I don't think I will ever finish it. So I decided that I could adapt it to NWN2, and took the plunge.

The story is basically a political intrigue mystery. You (the player (PC)) are a tired, somewhat out-of-shape mercenary who lives fairly well in a comfortable estate about a few day's ride from the city of Yartar, in the Forgotten Realms. You receive a message from the Constable of Nestlehaven to come to their aid - they are offering a sizeable sum of money, Knighthood, and titular rights and holdings, to whomever can solve their current crisis.

When you arrive, you find a city on the brink of a civil war. The two Noble families, who have shared power for the past two centuries, are feuding with each other, each blaming the other one for a series of grisly murders that recently occurred. The player needs to tread through this tangle of lies and deceit, uncover who is really behind the killings, and why, and earn their promised reward. Along the way, you will add other mercenaries to your group - some good, some not so good - but all focused on the reward and the fame to be gained by solving the mystery.

The module allows for a wide-variety of side-missions, and is completely non-linear in the middle section (the first hour and the last hour are completely linear). Total play-time is anywhere from 6-10 hours, depending upon how fast you choose to play through the main story. There are over 15 side-encounters/missions, most with a boss battle, so there is a lot to do outside of the main story. Part 2 of the series will have the player having to decide which faction in the conflict to join - there will be four of them, so there will be a lot of replayability.

Which were the most hard times in the planning of the module with the NWN2 toolset? How much time did it took?

My biggest problem with the toolset - and still is - is its instability. I wasted at least 100 hours, perhaps as many as 200, fighting corruption problems, bugs, trashed areas, conversations with broken links, etc. Very very frustrating. I hope Obsidian is working on this, as it is causing many people to shelve work on their modules until stability is restored.

I spent maybe 3 1/2 months doing the module, and maybe 1 month testing with a dedicated group of people who helped me iron out the bugs and polish the module to a fine finish. They are all mentioned in the release notes, and several of them are mentioned as 'mercenaries' in the in-game dialogues. Two of them will actually appear as mercenaries, in-game, in part 2.

The toolset is a wonderful, powerful piece of software - but it is not really what I would consider 'ready' for prime-time. Its sort of a 'mid-term' beta. Many buttons don't do anything (such as 'pristine', 'merge') and many others. Its a memory hog, and crashes quite often when baking, saving, or - most frequently of all - loading of areas.

I believe, as do many - that the main problem with the toolset is memory management. For example - I use an Intel Core2 Duo machine - and yet, when the Toolset loads, it loads up the AMDXP memory manager!!! (the game engine does not - it uses the correct manager - and the game has always been stable for me). I've tried renaming and switching the dll files, which does work - but it didnt improve stability.

So, if Obsidian can crack the 'big' bugs - such as the frequent crashing - I can easily overlook missing features and buttons that dont do anything. I lost over a week at one point, where I discovered that the toolset has a very nasty habit of overwriting OLD saves - yes, you read correctly - making a save every few minutes doesnt always help - the toolset sometimes writes to the wrong file/directory, and can thus corrupt old files you thought were safe. The only fix for this is to manually move the directory that the toolset uses to another location. I do this every ten minutes. So, I estimate that, for each hour of productive work I do, I spend 15 minutes dealing with saves, crashes, and reloads.

It needs to improve if we are going to increase the flow of modules to the community. Nestlehaven would have been out over a month earlier had I not had all these issues, including a week lost in late april due to the problems mentioned above.

This might all sound very negative - and it is, to some extent - but I am still here, modding - so I still believe in the toolset, and with patience it can produce stunning results.

The rest of the interview, once again in a choice of English or Italian, can be found here, and you can download the module at NWVault.