Official Neverwinter Nights Update

Remove all ads!

(Originally posted by Darien)

Bioware has updated the Official Neverwinter Nights page with some comments by Trent Oster, Producer.

Neverwinter Nights Project Update for March and April 2001

We are well underway with our preparations for one of the most exiting events on the game industry calendar. Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), in sunny Los Angeles, gives us a first-hand look at what our colleagues in the industry have been up to. It also gives us the opportunity to show off a bit and give everyone get a peek at what we've been working on over the past year. For our fans, this means a new deluge of press coverage, screenshots, and previously unreleased info. In short, it's an exciting time and one where everyone wins.

Programming
Our programmers have been working tirelessly to add new features to the game and integrate an ever-growing number of the 3rd Edition D&D rules. When we started Neverwinter, we knew that the rules system would be a time-consuming task. Well, the task is everything we imagined and more. =) Every day, I'm amazed all over again by the sheer number of criteria that have to be taken into account to run a single round of combat. Combat requires weapons, for example, and creating one within the toolset can involve as many as 60 different effects - everything from bonuses to hit and damage, to different forms of damage immunities, to level draining and electrical damage. In short, we're committed to making Neverwinter Nights one of the most in-depth Dungeons & Dragons experiences possible on your home computer.

Art
As always, the artists on the project are hard at work creating the stuff you see in every screenshot, desktop theme, and concept sketch. The response to our release of the various desktop themes has been very positive - so much so that we plan to release a series of exciting new ones over the coming months. As for game content, the modeling, texturing, and animating of creatures have been coming along nicely. Our current target is about 175 monsters and variants for Neverwinter Nights and we are well on our way towards reaching that goal. Work on the various interfaces has also been progressing smoothly and the spell effects system has been worked out in detail.

Design
The designers have finally begun item creation in earnest and have templates and descriptions for most of the magical and non-magical weapons and armor in the game. There's plenty of them, of course, as we want each player to have the leeway to play the kind of character that they want. Significant work has also gone into designing, mapping, and scripting our E3 demo and it's been a good way to prototype some of what we want to see happening in the actual game. Various storyline refinements to the official campaign have also been taking place and after E3, we'll be beginning implementation in earnest.

Summary
Neverwinter Nights is moving along well: the rules are going in and the systems are taking shape. The team is very proud of what we have been able to accomplish so far, and we're looking forward to all of the excitement surrounding E3. As always, it is a great experience to be working with this many talented people on a project of such great potential.

Until next month,

Trent Oster
Producer
Neverwinter Nights
Bioware Corp.