As for when NWN2 is due out? Well, the official company line at Obsidian and Atari is "2nd quarter 2006". Does that mean it will be released in June, 2006? Well, yes, maybe it does.
Will they miss their ship date and be forced to delay until later in 2006? Quite possibly. Well, yes, maybe they will.
Generally, I am quite pessimistic about anyone's announced release date that has not changed since the project was announced. They may well meet their targets - and they may well not. The overwhelming tendency in the PC Games industry is to miss ship dates.
As for whether or not that will happen in this specific instance is anyone’s guess. We do know that Atari was quite insistent on shipping Return to the Temple of EE on its target date and would not fund further development on the title past its ship. The game suffered horribly as a result and the developer has since gone under after releasing Vampire: Bloodlines.
There's a big lesson to be learned by Atari with the results from RttToEE - but Atari has significant financial difficulties and I am not at all convinced that those in charge of Atari care enough about PC Games to not force the same RttToEE style release again with NWN2.
Personally, I'm expecting NWN2 to ship in November of 2006. If it's released any time prior to that, I'll be pleasantly surprised. I really don't think they'll miss a Xmas ship date though, so US Thanksgiving in November 2006 is pretty much a commercial "drop dead" date. It may well be before that, of course.
As for whether or not NWN1 makes sense right now - damn right it does. There is still a lot of NWN1 development going on behind closed doors. In fact, the most significant content releases since Hordes of the Underdark can be expected probably before this Christmas - so you would be well served by dusting off your NWN1.
As far as portability of code is concerned - scripts and dialog from NWN1 can - for the most part - be imported into NWN2. The compatibility stops there though. There is no module area import or art compatibility between the two games at all.
If you have a hankering to get into development for NWN2, my advice would be to prototype your design in NWN1 and get cracking on it now. These things take vast amounts of time to complete. By the time NWN2 is released, you will be well on the way to your killer mod for the game as a consequence.
Re: Dragonshard: Not a console game. A PC RTS game based on D&D. I have it and I like it. It has a very interesting world editor as well with some real uses in PnP map building. But it isn't D&D and it surely isn't Neverwinter.
