Bitmob Debrief: Obsidian and Neverwinter Nights 2

My favorite games combine an interesting story, sharp design, and the ability for players to make their own tales. Obsidian Entertainment’s role-playing game Neverwinter Nights 2 allows players to do that, giving them an excellent story in its first expansion, Mask of the Betrayer; flexibility to explore world in its second expansion, Storm of Zehir; and a toolset to create their own heroes, villains, gear, and adventures.

A number of Obsidian’s games designers, such as CEO Feargus Urquhart, Creative Director Chris Avellone, Former Producer and Community Manager Rob McGinnis, Lead Programmer Richard Taylor, Senior Designer George Zeits, and Technical Designer Scott Everts, shared their thoughts on making the series. RPGs are in Obsidian’s DNA — a number of their employees worked at Black Isle Studios, helping create RPG greats such as Fallout, Icewind Dale, Planescape: Torment, and Shattered Steel, and aiding BioWare with Baldur’s Gate.

The Obsidian crew discusses the development and history of NWN2, the challenges that come from working on games with community toolsets, the evolution of the crafting and party systems, the series’ successes and regrets, and how the lessons of NWN2 carry over to Obsidian’s next RPG, the upcoming Alpha Protocol.

Bitmob: Neverwinter Nights 2 is Obsidian Entertainment’s second game, and it’s the developer’s first series. What led the company to believe that it was ready to develop a series?

Feargus Urquhart: I guess we felt that with our experience from Black Isle Studios that we understood what was expected from a sequel to a popular RPG. We were doing pretty well with KOTOR2 at the time, since we signed NWN2 about the time that KOTOR2 was being shown at E3. And the fears the press had about us developing KOTOR2 were really put aside by what we showed.

As for a series of games beyond that of just NWN2 itself, again, we had some experience with planning and shipping a series of games at Black Isle. We even thought of many games as being just the start of a series. For instance, very early on the development of Baldur’s Gate — before it was called Baldur’s Gate, actually — I had asked BioWare to put together a story that would encompass three games. I guess that’s what makes RPGs a little easier to handle form the standpoint of series — they are story driven, and stories lend themselves to having a next chapter.

Bitmob: With a number of veterans from Black Isle Studios, it’s easy to see why Obsidian pursued NWN2. What other reasons factored into the decision to develop the game for Atari?

FU: I had worked on the original Neverwinter Nights before it was Neverwinter Nights. The project actually started out as a sequel to Shattered Steel, and after Interplay decided that it didn’t want to create a sequel to Shattered Steel, [BioWare’s] Greg Zeschuk, Ray Muzyka, Trent Oster, and I sat down to come up with what we were going to do. Out of that came Neverwinter.

However, Interplay sold the project to Atari 6 months before it was done, so we didn’t get to finish it. So one of the great things about doing NWN2 was being able to work on the series and actually ship one.

We were also very comfortable working with D&D and had a great relationship with Wizards of the Coast. Plus, it gave us an opportunity to develop our own technology on top of BioWare’s Aurora engine.

Bitmob: Obsidian produced a full game and two ambitious expansions. What other material does Obsidian have in store for NWN2?

Rob McGinnis: The just-released 1.23 patch adds a whole host of expanded capabilities for the Persistent World crowd, including a custom content autodownloader, a multiserver portal system that will allow players to seamlessly travel between game servers, and the ability to load custom content before character creation, thereby allowing for truly customized persistent worlds.

Bitmob: What were the most significant challenges that Obsidian encountered when producing the original campaign and the expansions?

Richard Taylor: In order to produce the original campaign, we had a lot of hurdles to overcome on the technology-development front. We wanted the more cinematic conversation experience introduced by Knights of the Old Republic. We also wanted to improve upon NWN’s exteriors by using height-mapped terrain, which required changing various support systems as well, such as pathfinding. We were completely replacing the User Interface with a XML-driven, customizable system.

On top of all this, we were rewriting the entire toolset from scratch. All of these factors lead to a challenge of trying to generate campaign content at the same time we were engineering the new technology for NWN2. This lead to conflicts where design or art would be depending on a feature that would break due to work being done on another feature, among other problems.

None of these problems happened with the expansions. With the expansions we had a mostly finished engine to work with, aside from ongoing maintenance. This meant that we could focus more on the content itself and gameplay-level features such as new classes, epic level content, and more.

The only challenge with the expansions was figuring how much cool stuff we could pack in during their comparatively shorter development cycles.

Bitmob: Did anyone on the design team have experience with developing toolsets?

FU: I think there were a variety of experience levels involved in developing toolsets.  For instance, a number of us were involved in the development of the editor for the first two Fallout games, and Chris Jones, one of Obsidian’s other owners, worked at Troika on Arcanum and was familiar with the toolset that was created for that game.

Bitmob: What was the most difficult aspect of designing the toolset?

FU: The difficulty had a lot to do with the more advanced graphics engine in NWN2, which created a necessity that we rewrite the editor. Plus, the original editor was written in an older development system, and so we couldn’t just take parts of the code over and start working with them.

On top of that, we needed to support two entirely different terrain systems — tiles and a height-map system. We then started adding new features to make the tools more usable — features that were not in the original NWN editor. Things like multiple windows and tabs, which gives the user the ability to have multiple creatures, maps, dialog, scripts, effects, etc., open all at once, compared to only have one thing open in the NWN editor.

This was a great feature, but it made building the tools more complicated. And as the tools became more complicated, it began to take longer, and we started to run into problems delivering pieces of the campaign.

So on top of having the pressure to get the tool done, since it was an important part of the product, there was also a huge amount of pressure to get things working so we could make the game. It was definitely a challenge, but we learned a lot from putting it together. And by we, I mean the principle programmer who developed the toolset, Erik Novales.

Bitmob: The story in the original Neverwinter Nights wasn’t very interesting, and while many thought that the story was better in NWN2, Obsidian took some hits for what some considered to be a lackluster plot in NWN2. Who came up with the NWN2’s principal villain, the King of Shadows? Was it part of existing Forgotten Realms lore, or did Obsidian create him?

Chris Avellone: The original storyline, including the King of Shadows, was developed largely by Ferret Baudoin, who’s now at BioWare working on Dragon Age. While he served the role as the principal foe in the game, Tony Evans, Josh Sawyer, and George Zeits, Mask of the Betrayer’s principal narrative designer, all contributed to giving the King of Shadows much more history and influence in the game.

Bitmob: Mask of the Betrayer’s story drew a great deal of praise. What was different between the story development of the original campaign and the first expansion?

George Zeits: For one thing, MOTB was a lot shorter, and we had a much better sense of how much work we could actually get done in the time that we had. I wasn’t at Obsidian during the initial story development for NWN2, but I think the game suffered a great deal from overambition — the original storyline was massive, and a huge amount of material had to be cut from the final game. As a result, the final product was less polished and the storyline was messier than they should have been.

By the time we started MOTB, though, we were veterans. In fact, three of the four core content designers on MOTB — Jeff Husges, Eric Fenstermaker, and me — were NWN2’s Act 2 team, and we’d all worked in the same office. I was able to write a story for MOTB that had a much more realistic scope, given our schedule and rate of content creation.

We still had to cut some content, but not so much that the core storyline had to be gutted or rewritten.

RT: In Mask of the Betrayer, we had a dedicated story writer on the team. He took ownership over the story and the major characters, taking care to write a lot of their dialogues and review the dialogues written by others to make sure that the characters were consistently portrayed.

On the original campaign, the responsibility for the overall story was just one of many responsibilities resting on the shoulders of the lead designer, which meant that it didn’t get as much focused attention as we were able to give it on Mask of the Betrayer. We were happy with [how] having a dedicated story designer worked out on Mask of the Betrayer.

Bitmob: Storm of Zehir incorporated a number of additions to the mechanics, such as the party system and the overland map. Were any of these ideas originally intended for the original campaign? Or were they all designed for SOZ?

RT: Both the party-conversation system and the overland-map system had come up during discussions while developing the original campaign for NWN2.

During the original campaign’s development, the party-conversation system got dropped as being too low priority for where the project was.

The overland-map concept that we had for the original campaign had many of the features that made their way into the Storm of Zehir implementation, but we had not figured out how we were going to implement them at the time.

The idea for using a standard module with a fixed camera didn’t come along until well after the full-featured overland map had been cut from the original campaign. By the time we arrived at figuring out what we wanted to do for Storm of Zehir, we had discussed using a module for the overland map and had a working prototype internally that made us confident it would be a viable approach.

Since one of the early features we planned on for Storm of Zehir was the ability for the player to make their own party from scratch, we felt it was time to bring back the party-conversation system that we had discussed during the original campaign’s development to better take advantage of the various party configurations that players might come up with.

Bitmob: The crafting system evolved from expansion to expansion. Was this because the studio wasn’t happy with the system and continued to tweak it, or was it based off the community’s input? Or was its evolution a combination of both?

RT: A combination of both. The crafting system changed from campaign to campaign because we were never quite satisfied with how it was turning out each time. In our eyes, it was too confusing for the player to use, too complicated to maintain and evolve, or just too unintuitive.

Trying a new iteration of the crafting system had not originally been a planned feature for Storm of Zehir. However, during development, we came up with what we felt was a more intuitive, clearer crafting implementation compared to the prior two iterations and decided to go forward with the third incarnation of NWN2 crafting.

Bitmob: Did any NWN/NWN2 modders earn jobs at Obsidian based on their work on user-generated content?

RM: I can think of two, offhand: Monty Markland and Bobby Null. We also contracted with GrinningFool, a community member, to make numerous improvements to NWN2 in the 1.23 patch.

Bitmob: What’s the level of D&D interest at Obsidian? Do you have regular D&D games? Or do any of the developers play?

RM: There’s usually at least one game happening each week.

RT: Interest in D&D was high during the development of NWN2 and the two expansions. Many of the developers on the projects had already been D&D players, and some devs became D&D players as a result of working on NWN2.

During the development of the original campaign and Mask of the Betrayer, we had a regular, full-fledged D&D game going. This tapered off some during Storm of Zehir, but we still had single-session one-off D&D games run from time to time that focused more on emulating the party conversation system as we felt it was going to play out in the actual game.

Bitmob: What lessons from NWN2’s development has Obsidian been able to apply to its upcoming game, Alpha Protocol?

CA: The influence system has evolved from Knights of the Old Republic 2: The Sith Lords, to the Neverwinter Nights series, and then to Alpha Protocol, where it’s become more of a “reputation” system.

The evolution, however, is that while we had characters intended to always respond positively to at least one playstyle — for example, being full-on aggressive would always earn favor with Mandalore but not so much other characters — having a positive or negative reputation in Alpha Protocol is intended to have different benefits no matter how low or high you go. For example, earning the respect of a villain can have benefits, just as pissing them off repeatedly can — and both have obvious effects in the game.

In addition, we tried to insure that how you play a level in Alpha Protocol could also affect the reputation with certain characters — some respect a stealthy approach, while others delight in seeing you going in with guns blazing.

Bitmob: What’s been the most rewarding aspect of NWN2?

RT: Different developers will cite different aspects of NWN2 as being the most rewarding. For me the most rewarding thing was finding out what the community was doing with it. I enjoyed seeing amazing modules, UI packs, script packs, and other utilities that the community engineered and designed to enhance their ability to create awesome content with the NWN2 toolset and game.

Putting time into adding features to the UI to make it more flexible and powerful, then watching to see what the community would go and do with these features, is just an example of the kind of rewarding experiences working on NWN2 offered me.

SE: For me I enjoyed working on a toolset that was so flexible. I loved doing the various exterior environments. The exterior toolset was quite powerful, especially with the additions we added in MOTB.

Also, designing the look for the overland maps for Storm was quite fun. We went through various ideas until we came up with something that everyone agreed worked. I designed many of the terrain props, like the tree canopies and new ground textures, which was a challenge since we had to make everything scale to the smaller size. Plus it was purposely stylized with richer colors.

Originally, we tried using subdued colors, but when we pushed the colors to extremes, it looked much more interesting. [Artist] Jay Bakke created the special edge border art for the overland map to help differentiate the map from the normal game.

Storm of Zehir is my favorite expansion of the series since it was very open-ended and allowed you to build your entire team and explore at your own pace. It was designed to feel like an old-school D&D adventure, and I think we succeeded.

Bitmob: How many community tweaks to the NWN2 system did you incorporate into the expansions?

RT: It would be impossible for me to cite all of the community tweaks that made it in. But we definitely did incorporate a fair number of them, especially on the scripting level. Significant A.I. improvements, spell script fixes, 2DA fixes, and other tweaks from the community were incorporated as long as we were able to get in touch with the author, had time to review the fixes, and decided that they fit or improved upon the original intent of our own stuff.

Bitmob: What are some of Obsidian’s regrets about NWN2? Were there any storylines or concepts left out that could find themselves into future expansions or other Obsidian products?

GZ: In MOTB, I wish we could have done more with the main town/hub, Mulsantir. I had written a design document for that module that was, like, 100 pages long, which is ridiculous, in retrospect, but…I really liked that town and the whole Elizabethan theater-troupe setting at the Veil.

We had originally planned to include a lot more quest content dealing with the conflict between the two competing theater troupes, Veil vs. Sloop. I think some info about this eventually made it onto the Web — the main quest was going to be called Patron of the Arts, with the player in the central role as patron of one of the two theaters. Our idea for the culmination of that quest would have been pretty neat, and I think that it could find its way into a future project…so I’d better not say any more about it.

Probably my biggest regret was the same as most players — namely, that the [player] couldn’t ultimately bring down the Wall of the Faithless. That situation arose because of the general [Wizards of the Coast] rule that CRPGs can’t make major changes to the Realms. But since the Realms changed significantly in [D&D] 4.0 and the Wall is now gone, I wish we’d talked more to WOTC about that. I have a feeling that they may have allowed us to kill the Wall, since they already knew what was in store for the Realms.

Of course, I could be wrong…and at the time, I had no way of knowing that the world was going to change so drastically…but it would have been worth a shot.

SE: Time is always our biggest enemy. The original game had a big team, and it was a big game. When it came time to do the first expansion, we had a much smaller group. This is normal for expansions, and we made sure to have a very careful schedule since we couldn’t afford any delays.

The game focused on a tighter story and fewer maps that were done at a higher quality level. We were very conservative on our goals since we wanted plenty of polish time.  Even with the inevitable delays, we got it done on time and with a level of polish we were proud of.

When it became time to design Storm, we were less conservative on the design but also had an even smaller team. We wanted to add several new systems to the game plus go in a new direction. Management was happy with our proposal, so we started work. But it was certainly tougher since our new design was very ambitious.

The team worked very hard, and we pushed the art to an even higher standard, plus created two new overland maps with a totally new art style. But you can always use more time and we had less flexibility on Storm for changes then we had on Mask.

Looking back, we probably made Storm too different then our other games. People missed the companions and stronger story we had before. I think the overland map was cool, but it took a tremendous amount of extra time to implement. I’ve found over the years from working on many games that fans don’t like radical departures from the normal game in their expansions.

If we had focused on a strong story and dialogue-heavy companions, the expansion might have been better received.

Bitmob: How does Obsidian feel about the NWN2 experience? Would you be willing to produce another game with such community ties again? Would you be interested in doing more D&D-licensed games?

GZ: Well, I can’t speak for Obsidian as a whole, but I’d love to work on another D&D title. Over the course of NWN2 and MOTB, I learned far more about the Forgotten Realms than I care to admit in casual conversation, and it’d be a shame not to put that knowledge to use again….