Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask Of The Betrayer

Arguably the biggest challenge facing Obsidian also comes from the material. It's an Epic level campaign, meaning that everyone is throwing around phenomenally powerful magics right from the start. How much harder is this to design or balance?

"An epic level campaign is much more challenging to put together than one for lower levels," Feargus agrees, "Not that a low level campaign doesn't have its own challenges, but you don't have to worry about what kinds of creatures you can send at the player to keep it interesting. In an epic level campaign, you can't just continually send bigger and bigger kobolds at the player with bigger and bigger knives.

It just gets boring. So, what the designers have to do is to craft battles and enemies that challenge the abilities of the player's character and the player himself. What this usually means is focusing a fair amount on the spells that enemies can cast and making the player have to react to them."

Inevitably, this can swiftly become a balancing nightmare. "One design decision we made was to overall make the game easy enough for the new player or a non-optimum character to be able to complete it," Feargus explains a way around the issue, "But we also are designing some specific combats to be extremely challenging. These are generally fights that have other possible solutions to them. So the hardcore players will find some great combat challenges, but the more casual gamers won't be overwhelmed by the game's difficulty. Overall, our goal is simply to ensure that everyone can have fun with the game."

While you can transfer your character over from Neverwinter Nights 2, the game actually stands alone, allowing you to generate a suitably puissant new character at the start. Which leads to an interesting issue. If you look back at Neverwinter Nights 1, its two add-on packs were generally concerned to be superior experiences. People played them who never actually worked their way through the mothergame. Do Obsidian actively plan to help newcomers?

"The start of pretty much every Neverwinter game really helps players that are new to the games," Feargus argues, "Since you generally start with just yourself or yourself and one companion, even with all of the abilities that characters have at close to 20th level, you aren't trying to digest the abilities of your eventual four character party right from the start. Even with that, the beginning of the game is still a challenge. We don't want veteran NWN players to be bored with the opening, but we don't want to scare away new players by throwing too much at them too quickly.

An Add-on pack gives a developer a chance to reconsider where they went wrong in the original game. While some stuff can be sorted in a patch - which they have done - there's still some regrets which Obsidian plan to rectify. "I think the largest regret that I had about the original NWN2 was the overall look of our levels," Feargus laments, "We put a lot of time and effort into the new graphics engine and into the look of our levels, but we just didn't get a few things right. And of those few things, I think lighting was a big part of our levels not being what they could have been. So, on top of some of the things we've done in updates for graphics, like renovating every tree in the game, we are making sure in the expansion that we are spending the time we need to get the lighting right. Since we are spending so much time on it, we are also putting things in the toolset to make using lighting easier for modders."

Which is an interesting thing. Part of Neverwinter Nights' ethos is that it's not just a thing you consume, but something including the tools for you to make your own adventures. So their expansion pack is both an expansion of what tools the players have to make their own content and an example of the potential of the tools. There's some pressure there, clearly.

"Neverwinter is not just about the shipped campaigns but about what players can do with the toolset and that is at the top of our thoughts all of the time," Feargus notes, "We really want the toolset to get easier and easier to use and so we made the decision a while ago to never hold up a new feature or refinement in the toolset for the release of the expansion. Also, as you pointed out, what we use the toolset to create is an example of what it can do. So, there is some pressure to make sure that we show the best of what the toolset is capable of doing. However, I think what we get the most enjoyment out of is when we see things that the community has done with the toolset that we never thought of. It's great to see them make it their own."

Since the community is such a key part of NWN, it leads you to wonder what they've made which have impressed Obsidian specifically ? "There has been so much great stuff out there that I would hate to single someone out at the expense of someone else," says Feargus somewhat diplomatically, "I think the area that I've been most impressed with though is the community's work on the interface, toolset, and spell mods and refinements that you can find up on nwvault.ign.com. We even incorporated some of the work from rpgplayer1 (spell fixes) and evenflw (AI improvements) into updates."