Neverwinter Nights 2: NWN 2 Josh Sawyer Interview at RPG Codex

The folks at RPG Codex had a chance to ask a few questions of NWN 2 lead designer, Josh Sawyer. The interview begins with questions about Sawyer's ascension to the head of NWN 2 development and his thoughts post-release:

4. How would you evaluate the finished product? Any lessons learned there? What worked well, what worked ... uh, not so well? What was the game's biggest strength/weakness?

I think the game as released is a high 7, low 8 title. To be honest, the major issues are due to a lack of polish. There's certainly a lot of stuff in the game, but none of it really looks or feels great. At best, the controls and features feel good, at worst they feel terrible.

For example, the camera. Programming got the camera in and fixed a number of its glaring problems, but for all the various camera modes you could run in, it was hard to find one that felt good. The toolset is also an appropriate example: highly functional, very powerful, not enjoyable or fast to use for many tasks.

The biggest problems during development were an unrealistic scope and a lack of focus on quality/fun from the beginning. It's arguable that the former resulted in the latter. With D&D games, it's easy to become consumed by the idea of adding every feat, class, and race you can find in various books.

8. The crafting system vs the generously supplied loot. What are your thoughts on that? Also, the upcoming expansion will feature a less complicated crafting system. Was this decision based on some feedback you've received?

The crafting system makes better equipment than available drops if you bother to focus on it. On my playthrough, I had customized multi-effect greatswords for every occasion. It took a huge amount of time to process all of the materials required, but once I had the finished product, it was worth it.

You might have to ask Kevin for specific changes and reasons for changing crafting in Mask of the Betrayer. I gave a lot of feedback on the crafting system, mostly that it was tedious. There's not really any "difficulty" in crafting, but the entire process is this weird sort of inductive system that runs contrary to what is found in some other games.

The one advantage to the inductive system is that you can have hidden formulas that the player finds through experimentation, but I'm not sure it's really worth it when the basic system is so convoluted that 90% of players won't use it.