Neverwinter Nights 2 Interview

ComputerAndVideoGames.com has conducted an interview with Obsidian Entertainment’s Feargus Urquhart, quizzing the CEO about their ambitious RPG sequel, Neverwinter Nights 2. A quick teaser:

Q: What kind of enhancements are you making in the multiplayer arena? What lessons have you learned in this area looking at the first game?

A: If there’s any area of the game where we haven’t tried to make leaps and bounds differences it would be multiplayer. One, because it worked fine, at least in terms of connectivity and being able to play with people it worked fine. When we actually played Neverwinter 1’s multiplayer ourselves, we felt that it was kind of hard to communicate sometimes and keep track of where people were.

So I’d say the enhancements that we’ve done would be to increase knowledge of what the other people you’re playing with are doing and just increase ways in which to communicate with them – like adding emotes like /cry so you can show this stuff in the game. Also you can bring up player lists and there’s going to be more information about ‘who, what, where, when’ type of things with the players. With the spell effects as well, when you cast a spell effect people will know what they are, they wont have to read something to find out what you just cast – they’ll know what you cast so that they can react to it and know what to do about it. So it’s more just refinements when it comes to multiplayer.