Obsidian’s CEO talks about Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer

Obsidian’s Neverwinter Nights 2 has been considered a commercial success by a lot of people. It has also spawned an expansion called Mask of the Betrayer. This expansion offers quite a lot of features that were sorely missed by the more hard-core players of the game such as epic levels.

Obsidian Entertainment CEO Feargus Urquhart had quite a lot to say about the development of the expansion and what they tried to deliver. One of the topics that were discussed was death.

As most know, you can always retry the game if you die in battle. You can also pay some gold to resurrect your henchman just in case he died too. Anyway, the mechanics of death in the game were heavily discussed in Eurogamer’s interview with Urquhart.

Initially, there was talk about having death be more permanent than it was in NWN2, but there were concerns about what would have to change in gameplay and in the engine and whether that was worth it. So, the focus moved to how to make death still matter to the player.

This turned into an entirely new mechanic that makes time much more critical to the player. Certain areas change as day goes to night and while you can rest in most places, there are going to be other things to consider as you use up that time.

Urquhart also discussed the decision of adding new classes, both base and prestige. The developers decided to add these to cater to multiple playing styles. He noted that prestige classes were easier to add since it essentially just meant “breaking down the different paths that each of the base classes could take.”

The interview delves into other topics such as Obsidian’s plans to create their own feats and not just simply stick with the wealth of information available to them already. The full interview is available through the read link below.

Obsidian’s Neverwinter Nights 2 has been considered a commercial success by a lot of people. It has also spawned an expansion called Mask of the Betrayer. This expansion offers quite a lot of features that were sorely missed by the more hard-core players of the game such as epic levels.

Obsidian Entertainment CEO Feargus Urquhart had quite a lot to say about the development of the expansion and what they tried to deliver. One of the topics that were discussed was death.

As most know, you can always retry the game if you die in battle. You can also pay some gold to resurrect your henchman just in case he died too. Anyway, the mechanics of death in the game were heavily discussed in Eurogamer’s interview with Urquhart.

Initially, there was talk about having death be more permanent than it was in NWN2, but there were concerns about what would have to change in gameplay and in the engine and whether that was worth it. So, the focus moved to how to make death still matter to the player.

This turned into an entirely new mechanic that makes time much more critical to the player. Certain areas change as day goes to night and while you can rest in most places, there are going to be other things to consider as you use up that time.

Urquhart also discussed the decision of adding new classes, both base and prestige. The developers decided to add these to cater to multiple playing styles. He noted that prestige classes were easier to add since it essentially just meant “breaking down the different paths that each of the base classes could take.”

The interview delves into other topics such as Obsidian’s plans to create their own feats and not just simply stick with the wealth of information available to them already. The full interview is available through the read link below.