Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer Interview: Eurogamer

Eurogamer, not on holiday today, has posted an interview with Obsidian Entertainment's CEO Feargus Urquhart. The article focuses on the upcoming NWN 2 expansion, Mask of the Betrayer. Much of the article focuses on the difficulties involved with developing an epic-level campaign:

Arguably the biggest challenge facing Obsidian also comes from the material. It's an Epic level campaign, meaning that everyone is throwing around phenomenally powerful magics right from the start. How much harder is this to design or balance?

"An epic level campaign is much more challenging to put together than one for lower levels," Feargus agrees, "Not that a low level campaign doesn't have its own challenges, but you don't have to worry about what kinds of creatures you can send at the player to keep it interesting. In an epic level campaign, you can't just continually send bigger and bigger kobolds at the player with bigger and bigger knives.

It just gets boring. So, what the designers have to do is to craft battles and enemies that challenge the abilities of the player's character and the player himself. What this usually means is focusing a fair amount on the spells that enemies can cast and making the player have to react to them."

Inevitably, this can swiftly become a balancing nightmare. "One design decision we made was to overall make the game easy enough for the new player or a non-optimum character to be able to complete it," Feargus explains a way around the issue, "But we also are designing some specific combats to be extremely challenging. These are generally fights that have other possible solutions to them. So the hardcore players will find some great combat challenges, but the more casual gamers won't be overwhelmed by the game's difficulty. Overall, our goal is simply to ensure that everyone can have fun with the game."

A Dungeon. A Dragon will be along shortly. (A Cave, surely? - Geology Ed)