Neverwinter Nights 2: IGN Interviews Josh Sawyer

IGN-Australia has posted an interview with Obsidian Entertainment lead designer Josh Sawyer. Apparently on a visit to Australia (lucky guy!), he stopped in at the IGN-AU offices for a visit.

IGN: All of the prestige classes from the original game have been included in NWN2, with the exception of the Shifter class. Why is this?

The Shifter class relies entirely on polymorph effects, which were complex to implement and often broken during the development process. Also, all but one of the old Shifter's forms from the original game were absent from NWN2. We would have had to replace every form, rebalance them, and debug them. However, our polymorphing issues have been worked out, so I'm confident such a class could be implemented in the future -- whether by us or the community.

IGN: The original Dungeon Master client was a great feature in NWN and has recently been announced for the sequel. How will the client differ, if at all, from the first?

We're rebuilding a lot of core functionality first, with the intention of building in additional features over time. The first release of the DM client is not as advanced as the one that's currently in NWN 1.67, but we feel it's a good starting platform that gives DMs the basic tools they need to DM games.

Read the rest at the link above.