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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dark Jezter" data-source="post: 1705906" data-attributes="member: 1015"><a href="http://www.gamespot.com/news/2004/08/11/news_6104565.html" target="_blank">Gamespot</a> has posted an interview with Feargus Urquhart, the founder of Obsidian Entertainment.  In the interview, they discuss Neverwinter Nights 2, Knights of the Old Republic 2, Fallout 3, and PC RPGs versus Console RPGs.Here are the NWN2-related parts of the interview:GS: In what direction do you plan on taking NWN2, story- and gameplay-wise? FU: It's hard to say exactly at this point, since we still need to get our story approved by Wizards of the Coast. What I can say is that we are focusing a great deal on Neverwinter. We want the city to be a place that you really "play" around in and return to for almost the whole game. To do that we need to have it feel like the city evolves and that the people you meet in it are interesting and remain interesting. GS: What elements of the first Neverwinter Nights are you retaining? FU: The best way I can say this is that we are keeping the spirit of the game. The focus of Neverwinter was to provide a single-player experience, a great multiplayer experience, and a toolset that allowed people to make D&D modules themselves. We want to keep all of those goals as priorities as we make the sequel. GS: What were your favorite aspects of the original NWN? FU: I really enjoyed the fact that the toolset opened up the making of professional-looking RPGs to everyone. While it wasn't officially endorsed, I think it was really cool that people could go back and re-create the old D&D modules like Keep on the Borderlands in the engine. GS: You mentioned NWN2 will have "a massive single-player campaign." How massive are we talking? FU: We haven't really set on how "massive" the single-player campaign is going to be, but it will definitely keep people busy for a while. If I had to pick a goal at this point, I would say that the campaign should take between 40 and 60 hours; 40 hours if the player is just trying to crush their way through it, and more than 60 if they are stopping to smell the flowers. We have a lot of experience here at Obsidian at making rich single-player RPGs, and we are going to apply every ounce of that to NWN2. GS: The official release date for NWN2 is 2006--why the long wait? Is it just because you're too busy with KOTOR II? FU: Actually, there is an entirely different team at Obsidian working on NWN2 right now. It probably wouldn't help to add more people to that team; they are still figuring out what they are going to do and how they are going to do it. The long wait is because we really want to take the time to do this project right and upgrade as much of the engine as possible. GS: You mentioned that you are planning to make "many new upgrades and enhancements" to the BioWare-developed NWN engine and the Aurora Toolset. I assume that means NWN will run on the same engine--is that true? FU: Actually, no. We are going to be changing a lot of how the art assets work in the engine, so this will break the usage of the original NWN's art assets. However, we are going to be retaining a lot of how other things work, so things like scripts and dialogs (and many other types of content) will most likely run in the engine after an import process in the toolset. GS: What upgrades and enhancements are you planning? FU: A lot. We are going over almost every inch of the engine to add new features and refine things that are going to stay the same. From a graphics standpoint, we are updating most of the graphics engine to support new graphical features like normal mapping.</blockquote>

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