Neverwinter Nights 2: WarCry at PAX: Part Uno

The first thing I would like to do in this article, is thank Shane DeFreest and Annie Carlson for their time and the great interview. Without developer support, communities like we have would not be possible.

For those of you that have been to PAX, you already know how crazed it is. Just for perspective, the exhibit hall, where all the various developers etc.. are set up is about the size of your typical high school gym. Packed into this room are a host of developers and about a billion screaming nerds, dorks, geeks, fanbois, and press. The level of noise is incredible and personal space is at a minimum.

Thus, getting a quiet, sit down interview with Shane and Annie would have been slightly more difficult than trying to build a working space shuttle out of Legos. The only reason I managed as much time as I did, besides being pushy, and the glares anyone who interrupted my chat got, was Ryan, diligently entertaining the host of geeks that were crawling all over the booth.

Now, my specialty and main area of interest in Neverwinter Nights 2 is in the realm of Persistent Worlds. Thus, the majority of my questions were centered on that aspect of the game. After the initial introductions, Shane introduced me to Annie Carlson, who proceeded to give me the rundown on the build they were showing. Very quickly, I explained that I wasn't really interested in the OC and began firing off question after question that myself and the various PW devs, conspiring at WarCry had prepared. In all fairness, Annie is a designer and I was asking things that were slightly out of her area of expertise. She started writing down questions for J.E Sawyer and crew and showing me various things in the game that gave me a much better understanding of the level of awesome we can expect in October.

One thing that gets under my skin is the level of support that Obsidian has obviously given to the MP/PW crowd and the absolute level of obliviousness of some of the community to it. Case in point, just the character creation process is incredibly open for mods. Annie pointed out a huge number of areas that we can modify the races, pantheon, racial color palettes, etc..

Yet, I look at the official forums and I see no one praising Obsidian for their obvious support of MP/PW functionality. I see panic about the DMC. The ability to replace or modify the pantheon, color palettes, etc.. in character creation serves no purpose in the OC. It's only purpose is to allow freedom of creation by the custom content community.

I freely admit, that my initial impression of NWN2 was that it was going to be primarily SP and there would be some token support for MP and little to no support for PWs. After this weekend, my opinion has drastically changed. Obsidian is most certainly supporting the MP/PW community and have been from the beginning. Actually, it seems to me, that this game was designed almost totally opposite to the norm. It looks as though they built the game to support MP first and as a byproduct to support a kick-arse SP campaign.

I challenge all those panicking, to take a step back and look over the reams of information provided by both Obsidian and the community. Block out the panic about the DMC and look at what Obsidian HAS done for us. Then ask yourself a simple question.

"Why would they do all of this for the MP/PW crowd, only to make it worthless to the community by not including a DMC?"

Stay tuned for the second part of this article. My email Q&A session with Shane DeFreest, which will cover the specific questions that simply couldn't be covered at PAX.

Lycius