Shadows of Undrentide Interview at GameSpy

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(Originally posted by Mollusken)

Producer/project director Trent Oster and assistant producer Darcy Pajak, both from BioWare, answer questions about the first expansion pack for Neverwinter Nights.

How difficult was it to make the Harper Scout since, like you said, it involves so much of the Forgotten Realms mythos. So how do you go about making that accessible to newcomers?

Trent Oster: I think the whole introduction of the Harper and the Harper Scout class was actually pretty difficult. One of the problems is in Neverwinter Nights, somebody can come in who hasn't had exposure to any of the Forgotten Realms lore, the background, the whole Harper structure, and they don't know what the organization is about. So in our initial dialogue with one of the characters, Aaliyah, she basically explains who the Harpers are, what they are about, and hopefully get you up to speed. In terms of the actual implementation, some of the abilities were a little on the challenging side to implement and as well as tying the Harper into the story line. What we tried to do a lot of in Shadows of Undrentide is give optional quests based on specialty classes, like the Harper Scout. There will be some things open to you as a Harper Scout which other characters will never see. Same thing's true for the Black Guard and so on.

It's great you should check it out. Can you talk a bit about the new Bigby's spells? I got to see them on the screen and they look really cool, so tell our readers about them.

Trent Oster: The Bigby spells go back in D&D a long way. I can't even remember when I first started with them. The whole idea was that you had this archmage, Bigby, who would come up with this whole line of spells, most of them for some reason dealing with disembodied hands. There's really something odd in Bigby's past. You've got Bigby's Interposing Hand, which is basically a hand that literally just serves as a barricade. The hand will stop enemies from coming. You've got his Crushing Hand which you grab characters and do a bunch of damage with. There's a whole bunch of Bigby spells. It's just part of the Dungeons and Dragons universe, the idea of some sorcerer, or some magic-user, who's developed these spells. It just adds to the mythology. And the Bigby's are kind of like money spells for longterm D&D fans. They want Bigby's spells, you want Mordenkainen's Disjunction, you want all the main spells that you remember so well. So we're really happy that we could put the Bigby stuff in.

Darcy Pajak: And like you said, they look very well visually, seeing this hand floating across the screen, grabbing guys and squeezing them. It's really cool.

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