Neverwinter Nights 2 Interview (con't)

FiringSquad: How hard was it to take the original Aurora graphics engine and updated it to suit your purposes?

Feargus Urquhart: In some ways it wasn't hard, because we didn't really update it - we just completely ripped it out. Aurora is a great rendering engine, however with the changes we needed to make with normal maps, animation and height mapped terrain it seemed like the better choice was to replace it rather than update it.


FiringSquad: How much support will Obsidian give to mod makers for the game and are there any plans for your team or Atari to launch any official mod web sites for the game?

Feargus Urquhart: We are hoping to support the product once it ships and we will do as much as we can. However, some of how the product can be supported relies on Atari, since they are the ones that pay the bills.

FiringSquad: Will there be an official demo for Neverwinter Nights 2 and if so what will it contain?

Feargus Urquhart: I don't think so. After launch we might re-visit this, but as far as I know today we are not going to be doing one. I've always felt that RPG demo's are a tough thing to do. If you use the first area of the game, then people can get bored because they feel a demo should "wow" them with big flashy things and show them a lot of what the game can do. If you use a later area, it often takes a lot of patching to get to work, because so much of what happens in later areas is dependent on what has happened previously in the game. This is probably all coming off as me whining (which it is a bit), but why I'm going into this is to explain that we made the decision a while ago to put all of our time into polishing and tuning the main game rather than taking away a not inconsequential amount of time to make a demo. [End of Whining]


FiringSquad: Can you give us an overall status report on the game's progress and if so when is the current scheduled release date?

Feargus Urquhart: The whole team is pretty much in bug fixing and polishing mode and we are coming up on Beta as I type this. As for a date, Atari just announced that the game will be coming out on October 20th of this year.


FiringSquad: Obsidian recently signed a new deal with Sega to create an all new RPG franchise. What can you tell us about the game at this point and how does it feel to be working on an original creation?

Feargus Urquhart: It's both exciting and somewhat intimidating to be working on our own thing for a change. It's great because we have a ton of freedom to do what we think is best, which Sega is incredible about supporting. However, since there is no license or game system to base things on we could start getting rapidly off track with nothing to really double check our insanity against. So with the opportunity comes the need to be responsible about what we are making - ok that sounded a little too much like Uncle Ben, but it's true. :)


FiringSquad: Finally is there anything else you wish to say about Neverwinter Nights 2 and Obisidan in general?

Feargus Urquhart: Well first I would like to publicly thank Firing Squad for putting up with me not getting to this review for an incredibly long time. I really appreciate your patience John.
After that, I just wanted to let everyone here know that if they are interested in working on games and looking for a great place to work, and on RPGs no less, that Obsidian is hiring. Our jobs list can be found at http://www.obsidianent.com/jobs/. But if you can't find something that fits you there, just e-mail us at jobs@obsidian.net and we'll see if you fit other positions that maybe just haven't made there way up on our website yet