Neverwinter Nights 2: "Where to From Here?" & Adam Miller

This is a thread title on the official forums. The original poster, chaosprism, queries the community about its thoughts on the future of NWN/NWN 2 now that the game is nearing code "lockdown". Adam Miller gave his impressions here.

There's a lot of ways to answer that question.

What's going to happen to the D&D license?
Right now Atari has it, though there's questions about whether or not they'll be around in the near future. It may be that everything will be smooth sailing, in which case Atari will be watching to see how NWN2 goes. If sales are good, there will likely be expansions and possibly a NWN3 down the road.

If Atari goes under or the license changes hands, all bets are off. Because of this, the Neverwinter Nights name may fade away, much like Baldur's Gate.

There's also a question about how Atari wants to position D&D Online and NWN2, as there's potentially some overlap (especially with NWN2 PWs). The rumors are that DDO isn't doing so well, so perhaps Atari will be pinning their hopes on NWN2.

What's going to happen to the technology?

From a technical standpoint, there's lots of ways to envision a "new and improved" NWN. All the features that got cut could show up in an expansion - horses, parallax mapping, new creatures, and so on. I'm hoping they open up the game to modders, as that was key to growing a community around NWN. Everyone loves free stuff.

What's going to happen with the story?

This is extremely speculative, but my guess is that if NWN2 sells well, the story will continue with your main character. It'll be high level (20+), familiar characters will return, and so on. I think players weren't happy with the NWN expansions not being a clear continuation of their first game.

What's going to happen to the community?

There's a lot of us "old timers" still hanging about, plus the casual players who will happily pick up NWN2 and play free modules. The first six months or so will determine how well the NWN2 community forms. If we have good developer support, good modules, and a large install base, I think we're good to go.

The biggest advantage is that NWN has already trained up a ton of module developers. All the skills we've honed over the years can be applied to NWN2. The scripts that people slaved over can hopefully be ported over without too much trouble.

Not to hammer the custom content angle, but I'm very much hoping that we get some developer support here. My Shadowlords modules did relatively well, but once I was able to use new tilesets, creatures, and placeables, people got very excited and Dreamcatcher was very well received.

Anyway, just my normal "too much coffee" rambling.

Thanks, Adam! As always, Adam's words are sage and sound.