May 12, 2006 - We never pass up a chance to see the gang at Obsidian and get a look at what they're working on. At E3 this year, we grabbed a quiet room, a few cold drinks and a copy of Neverwinter Nights 2. As an added treat, Obsidian's Feargus Urquhart came along for the ride.
PC gamers should be more than familiar enough with the original Neverwinter Nights but, in case you're one of the unfortunate few who know nothing about the title, it's a massive D&D roleplaying game that combines an epic single player campaign with some sociable online play and a robust editor. The sequel preserves all these qualities but significantly ups the ante in nearly every area.
Feargus fired up the character creator to walk us through the process of making your in-game persona. D&D fans may already have an idea of what kind of character they want to play and how they'd like to tweak them but there's a handy "recommended" option for newer players who would like the game to design a character for them. The game's not using the Face Gen technology found in Oblivion but there are like a dozen different heads for each race as well as options for hair, skin and eye color.
The game follows the D&D alignment conventions and tracks your morality through the game. As you perform good or bad actions, your relations with those around you will gradually shift. This is especially significant where the members of your party are concerned. There's also an influence system like the one in Knights of the Old Republic 2, so you can gradually redeem or corrupt your party members by your actions.
The companion system is in place now so you'll be able to grab two extra NPCs to carry around with you and help you in your quests. Unlike the original Neverwinter Nights, you can actually control these NPCs directly rather than simply issuing orders to them. The Infinity-era pause and unpause order system is in place here for folks who would prefer to direct their followers that way.
Fans of the original game won't see many changes to the combat system. The basic commands and controls are still the same as you remember which isn't such a bad thing considering how solid they were the first time around. What has changed is that critical hits are much cooler now. The first game merely threw a little critical hit tag up in the air; the new game will indicate critical hits with cool weapon trails and neat blood splatters.
Where most games include some sort of arbitrary tutorial, Neverwinter Nights 2 tries to make learning how to play a part of the actual story. Beginning as a relative unknown, you'll find yourself celebrating the harvest in your home town of West Harbor. There's a harvest festival competition comprised of four challenges -- melee, ranged, magic and stealth. Through the course of the festival, you'll learn how to manage all four activities in the game.
Feargus jumped ahead later towards the end of the second of the game's three acts. Venturing through the Temple of Seasons, Feargus showed off a wide range of effects. Color grading allows the team to shift the atmosphere of each and every room in the game. A large ice room glows a cold blue, while a tree-lined room has a greenish cast. As Feargus makes his way through the rooms, he's searching for four different books. Without spoiling the ending, the whole experience leads up to a cool plot twist and a massive battle that sets up the third and final act.
After giving us a good look at the single player campaign, Feargus took some time to talk about multiplayer. We had some fun playing the original game online but were sometimes frustrated by the lack of communication between players. Obsidian hopes to address this by adding tons of new emotes and making all the spell effects very clear and distinct.
Right now the team is two weeks away from completing the engine and locking that down. After that, it's largely a matter of finding and fixing bugs and optimizing things for a wide range of machines. Feargus admits that the variety of technologies being used and the flexibility of the quest system requires a fair amount of testing before they'll feel confident in releasing the game.
