Neverwinter Nights 2: NWN 2: MotB: Gamespot Interviews Feargus Urquhart

Gamespot has an updated interview with Obsidian's CEO Feargus Urquhart. Covering prestige classes, the campaign story and companions, there are also some nifty screenshots. Here's a bit of the interview:

GS: What was some of the feedback that you got for the single-player campaign of NWN2, and are you adjusting the expansion in any way in response to that?

FU: A lot of the feedback we got about the single-player campaign came down to one of two things: How we implemented the D&D rules and the satisfaction that one got from the ending of the game. We're continually working on the game based on comments we get from people about how we've implemented the rules.

We also often pose questions to the community as to what they would like to see. As we get that feedback from them and from our own continual play of the game, we are adding in changes to update both NWN2 and the expansion. As for the ending, we want everyone to feel a sense of closure with the ending of Mask of the Betrayer--in a good way. We don't want them to have too many questions. So, we've already designed and implemented the ending of the expansion and have started to play through it. Based upon those play-throughs, we are going to make sure it's the ending that everyone would like to see for how they approached the rest of the game. There are, of course, multiple endings, and we're working hard to make each conclusion satisfying.

GS: We understand that you've made some artificial intelligence improvements in the patches, but the mod-making community has really made huge strides in improving the performance of your party members in the game. How do you balance what the mod-making community is coming up with in terms of general improvements to what Obsidian is doing?

FU: We have really tried to take a pragmatic approach to the whole thing. We break down things into three buckets: Features that only we can do, features the community has already put together, and features that the community could do. We then try to split our efforts between implementing things that only we can create, adding in features that let the community do more, and using things the community has already created.

We'd love to just take everything that has been made by the community, but we have to make sure that it works under every situation and doesn't somehow make the main campaign unplayable. With a game as complicated as NWN2, it often doesn't take much to confuse things and break a cutscene or combat that worked perfectly before. We did thoroughly test the AI improvements created by community members "evenflw" and incorporated them into one of the NWN2 updates. We've also incorporated "Zarathustra's" walkmesh helpers and "rpgplayer1's" spell fixes.

Mask of the Betrayer's lead programmer, Rich Taylor, keeps the Neverwinter channel of IRC open all the time and talks with the leaders of the community daily to see how they are doing. He is backed up by Rob McGinnis, who spends time in the IRC channels and the rest of his day up in the NWN forums. In the end, the balance is a hard one that we try to make easier by constantly communicating both internally here at Obsidian, and externally with the community.

Read the rest at the link above. It's a great interview with some really spectacular screenshots.