Neverwinter Nights 2 Forum News (Dec. 14, 04)

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Here are today's Neverwinter Nights 2 forum highlights, collected by NWVault from Obsidian Forums. Please take into account that these are only single parts of various threads and should not be taken out of context. Bear in mind also that the posts presented here are copied as-is, and that any bad spelling and grammar does not get corrected on our end.

Ferret, Developer

The Story
Sort of a philosophical post here - paraphrasing someone else's wisdom, a general idea can sound lame but its execution is everything. The old Oliver Reed and Richard Chamerlain version of the The Three Musketeers, for example, featured the Musketeer equivalent of the Academy and those scenes felt vibrant, alive, and cool. With that in mind, though, we have no plans of having an Academy or something like it play a central part (perhaps any part) of the story.

Our story does have the player starting from a modest origin, and then events eventually envelopes the player. Personally, I like stories that start with someone of no real importance who has the potential to become a hero (like LotR). If you climb from being a nobody to being a somebody, it feels more meaningful and satisfying.

Right now we have the blueprint of the story, and its execution will determine how cool our game will be. But I really like our blueprint, and I am extremely excited that the same people that made KotOR2 are rolling onto this project. Our goal is to knock your socks off and blow your minds. In 2006 you'll have to let us know whether we succeeded.

Quickslot Keys
We have plans for quickslot keys. Expect more of them. 'Nuff said.

Erik Novales, Programmer

Warcraft III Toolset Trigger
Having worked on a game whose editor used a visual logic system (Secret Weapons Over Normandy), I can say that when you have a well-defined, small set of functionality that needs to be exposed, a visual logic editor/trigger system works very well. If there is anything that NWN is not, however, it's "a small set of functionality". original.gif The price of being able to do many more complex and interesting things is a corresponding decrease in the amount of specialized tools with which to do it (or a corresponding increase in the amount of effort required to provide said tools).

That being said, we are very interested in making the scripting system easier to use by having a library of flexible, parameterized scripts built into the game. (This benefits us, too.) The ideal situation, for a module that isn't doing too many things out of the ordinary, is that no custom scripts would need to be written.