WarCry's NWN2 E3 Preview

While at E3, I had the chance to sit down with some of the Obsidian Gang specifically Feargus and Ryan for a preview of Neverwinter Nights 2. Ryan was first up to give us a tour of the game. So we headed out to the arcade to hop on Neverwinter Nights 2, and when I say arcade I really mean that. Atari had set up all there game titles in an old fashion arcade style. Now granted Ryan still had a keyboard for NW2, but it was pretty neat to play the game in an arcade game case.

Our first stop was the character creator. The amount of options was amazing. Besides the basics of designing your characters look, which is greatly enhanced over NWN1. You have your skills, feats, and stats to work with. Using the point system you are able to set your basic stats such as Strength, Dexterity, and Intelligence. Next was the skill selection. One nice feature I saw here was the recommend feature. So if you are new to D&D as a whole you can just get the recommended skills. This was also available on the stats and feats screens. So after checking out all the feats we had available we finished up and went straight into the game.

The tutorial is where the game begins and it helps new players get used to the controls. A feature they added that makes life much easier for those of us that come from the MMORPG world is the WASD movement keys. So you can use keyboard movement or the familiar mouse movement from NWN1. Another interesting piece here was the fact that if you wanted to skip the tutorial you could and head straight on into the game.

Game play is very smooth and the graphics are excellent. So Ryan gets us moving with our new character and a few henchmen type characters. We go up and get our first quest. Immediately the game goes into a cinematic dialog with the NPC. Ryan points out that as mod developer we can add this ability to our conversations. So now those important conversations can be enhanced. Very cool feature indeed. Well we get our quest and head on into trying out our character's abilities. We made a Warlock to see what it can do.

Well our first task is basically to impress the kids with our magic ability. So Ryan pulls up the new magic interface. All the spells are in a small toolbar by level on the screen. No more dragging them to the hotbar if you don't want to. He then proceeds to cast enlarge person on one of our party members. It was awesome. This guy grew to the size of the Jolly Green Giant, I tell you. Then taking control of the guy, we go running through town. Ryan was trying to get to a certain fight before our spell wore off. It was great. We continued on our tour of different areas in the game to see fighting mechanics, landscape designs and so forth.

After thanking Ryan for our tour of the game, I proceeded to go back for a chat with Feargus. Feargus made sure that I had seen the features of the game and opened up the new toolset. I only can say it is awesome. Having worked with the NWN1 toolset for years, the features and enhancements are going to make mod development easier and more productive. The reason I say this is because of tabbed design of the toolset, the ability to select and de-select types of objects. For example, you only want to deal with placeable objects in the area. You turn off the ability to select landscape, npcs, and so forth. Also the landscape tools are greatly enhanced, more on this in a second. Lastly, the ability to have multiple tasks running at once, such as multiple areas open and a conversation, as well as a script editor open. All of this can be open at the same time. So no more open areas, working on one thing then closing the area to go back to where you were.

The landscape editor had some great features such as working with terrains like water. You can set the height of the water to get a better lake effect, change the tint of the terrain so you can have that blood red looking mountain cliff overlooking the lake. Simple enhancements like colorizing the area box to let you know you are working with a water terrain or a grass terrain helped improve the use of the tool.

The toolset itself was designed in a more modal way so that you can open windows with different tasks running, if you don't want them in a tab. Locking property windows and more. The toolset has become a very strong IDE. The ability to launch areas for testing with a camera view versus having to run through the game to test one spot really makes debugging easier.

Lastly, are the enhancements made to the placeable and item objects. You can change properties such as tint color or size. Tint color gives you the ability to set 3 different palettes on most objects. So taking the example Feargus displayed you have a wall with a trimmed border around it. We were able to change the wall using colors to display a nice red wall with a light color border trim and a green box look (imagine a picture frame look). We even made the wall become one solid color instead of with colored frames. And size, well you remember the guy we put enlarge person on earlier? Well he needs a new chair, so Feargus grabbed a chair object and proceeded to widen the width and length of the chair and increase the height of the chair so our poor guy would have a place to sit down.

All and all the game is looking fabulous and will most definitely carry on the tradition of NWN1 of being a great game with strong community mods and scripts. Now to go pre-order my copy.