Neverwinter Nights 2 Community Update #1.5

Obsidian’s public relations manager Shane DeFreest once again stopped by the official Neverwinter Nights 2 forums to add a couple more questions and answers to the game’s first community update. From the sounds of it, we can expect a four-question Q&A every week. The full post:

So your probably wondering why there is another community update being put out in less than a day. Well as it happens we were only initially planning on releasing two questions a week. Well after having received literally HUNDREDS of questions just on classes it occurred to me that perhaps releasing only two questions a week is a bit thin. That may be enough for another game but given the enthusiasm of this community its obviously not enough.

We know the community is starved for information. Which is a good thing because it tells us “hey we’re excited” so with that in mind we’re going to go ahead and up the Q&A answers per week to five.

So with that in mind please be patient. We know the community loves to have any member the team here on the forums as much as possible. Just know that even if you dont see us all the time with the same frequency you might be used to does not mean your voices are not heard.

Lastly, (while this may seem like a no brainer) not every answer we are going to give you is going to be an answer everyone wants to hear. There will always be varying points of view and we welcome the various opinions and feedback. Seriously, we want to hear what you have to say. However, lets keep the discussion civil and the rants to a minimum.

Thanks for your time, continued support, and enjoy the expanded Q&A.

-Shane

1) In NWN1 when a palladin stops being lawful good his class feats are still working (aka palladin/blackguard powerbuild). Is there any easy way to distable class feats of specific class on the specific PC (without removing them)?

Ferret: The big penalty for a paladin drifting from Lawful Good is he can no longer pick up paladin levels. His abilities do not retroactively get turned off it works like original Neverwinter Nights. Maybe an expansion or patch? I can see the appeal, but we have a lot we want to do and only so much time. We’re adding a bunch of new features and refining some of the old ones over here at Obsidian, so you may not get everything but man, the community is going to get a lot. 

2) Will there be a hardcoded penalty to being an evil subrace? I think it would make sense to give drow and duergar a penalty to appraise/diplomacy/bluff/intimidate when dealing with surface races, especially when dealing with drow vs. elves (even more animosity there). I know, it is better for modders to do this themselves, but we all know that they won’t. Far better to make it opt out than opt in. I just think it’s pretty farsical for the game mechanics to treat drow exactly the same as moon elves in this regard. I think it would make playing one of these subraces more interesting and immersive.

Ferret: It’s been discussed before but we’re focusing our reactivity efforts on players’ choices they make during gameplay, not character creation. That being said something like this is doable and we’ll look into it. No promises, but it’s now on the Listâ„¢.

3) Will I be able to really get into the character like I could pre-NWN and KoTOR? In Fallout, BG, and to a certain extent PS:T you really got involved with your characters, i.e., you “cared” about what was happening and if one died, or there were multiple ones that you enjoyed playing, it was difficult to decide which ones to use.

Ferret: Chris Avellone is writing our companions and many prominent characters and he’s a wiz at exactly that. Making interesting, involving characters that you can develop a connection to. I really think that players are going to have tough choices of which 3 people to bring with you in your journeys, because there will be enough people you really like to fill 2 parties (or more). That opens the door to replayability, though. Our goal is to deliver on this front in spades.

4) Will there be some restriction on the colour palette of the races/subraces? Will module builders be able to impose such?

Ferret: Yes, there are restrictions to the color palette based off of race and subrace. It wouldn’t mean much to be a Drow if your avatar had a California tan and brown hair. Some subraces have more hair and color choices than others we tried to make sure that at least one race type has almost human-like choices. There will be a lot of permutations for creating your character.

5) Will clerics be able to choose a god and have that determine their Domain options? If they don’t choose a god will they get the correct alignment based restrictions on their domains? Will servers/modules be able to design and implement their own gods and affect character creation with them?

Ferret: The domain system works almost identically to the original Neverwinter Nights. We are adding options for modders that can affect things they couldn’t in the original game, but I’ll make no promises on this one.