Interview with Obsidian's Feargus Urquhart

Urquhart talks about the upcoming Neverwinter Nights 2, and gives his thoughts on Fallout 3.

We recently had the pleasure of interviewing Obsidian Entertainment CEO Feargus Urquhart, an industry veteran well known for developing Fallout 1 & 2 as well as Baldur's Gate on PC. Following the recent announcement of Neverwinter Nights 2, Urquhart talks about the ideas and concepts behind the sequel to the critically acclaimed RPG.

Gamepro: How far are you in development?

Feargus Urquhart: In the beginning we were having a lot of talks with Atari, and we've pretty much started out with the larger team on July 1st, so about six weeks. Before that we've had the technology from Bioware for awhile, and we had a smaller team with about 3 or 4 people working on it in their off time and some putting in little bits of time.

GP: Are there any particular gameplay changes you're planning for Neverwinter Nights 2?

FU: You know, it's a tough thing. NWN is a great game in of itself--it's a single player game, it's a multiplayer game, it's a toolset for mods, so a lot of this game will capture the spirit of Neverwinter Nights. We don't want to try to screw that up by doing something radically different, where it's not those three things. But we definitely want to refine those things. In the gameplay, we really want to make a strong single player game, and so there's going to a large focus on that for the development of the game.

From a technical engine perspective, the game looked good when it came out in 2002--but it can't look that way when it comes out in 2006, so we'll be ripping out all the graphics and replacing not only the graphics but also the code and engine.

On the multiplayer perspective, when we reacquainted ourselves with the first Neverwinter, we found that you just didn't seem to get access to all the things you wanted to do fast enough. Your characters could do all these cool things, get new feats as you go up in levels, but you just couldn't get access to them--it was always like you had to hotkey everything and use multiple function keys. So we're trying come up with key mechanisms to give players direct access to the feats they want to use. An example that I was kind of using was instead of point-and-click, a more third-person view than isometric, using the "WASD" keyboard to control the character in the world. When they're facing a monster and double click the forward key (W) that will do like a power attack. Some people will criticize that and say, "You're making it more like an action game." But we're not making it more into an action game; it's something it already does, but you now have better access to it. And so we want to have things like that. Also, because a lot of us play MMOs, we're looking at targeting things, so you can kinda run around targeting that creature--that'll great for a spell caster--you wouldn't have to worry about constantly clicking. You could just fireball where you were previously targeting so it leaves you free to move around and combat better. I guess they make sense in single player as well but it's more useful for multiplayer because people aren't pausing the game and there's a lot more going on.

As for the toolset, whatever new features we do we'll put it in the toolset. We know a lot of people asked for the ability to tell better stories and use the camera better, which they did more in Hordes of the Underdark with the in-game sequences, so we want to have better controls for cameras and things like that in the toolset, so the community has access to it.

GP: Speaking about the toolset, there was some feedback from the less computer-savvy people that it was hard to use--will it still have a learning curve to pick up?

FU: You know, I think there will still be somewhat of a learning curve, and we're going to stick with a tile system for the backgrounds. Not too sure at this point, it's not going to be just tiles anymore, but how an area is put together will still be the same. We still think tiles make it easier to put areas in. As for scripting and dialogue, some of it is just the way it is, and we don't know how to make it easier. However, we are thinking of doing a wizard as in Microsoft Word of Exel that tells you how to do something more complicated. And so we're thinking of making a wizard for modules, say for example an action module, where I can say I want to make seven areas, a city and a sewer, and it kind of builds the module for you. Then you can play that module right away or go and tweak it. If there's a base to work with it becomes much easier. Often times people can download a module off the internet and not know where to start or look.

GP: Will the single player campaign continue where the first game left off, with the same characters and universe?

FU: No, I think it's going to still be based in Neverwinter, but our own version. We will still be basing it off the D&D books, and the important people in Neverwinter according to the Forgotten Realms will be in the game. One of the things we want to do is to make the game more about [the city of] Neverwinter so the people in there are interesting. We're going to have less characters than we had in previous games--I don't mean not like four--but we plan to bring the edges in a little bit and trim out those who only had 10 nodes and a couple lines of dialogue. A lot of the characters will be inside the city of Neverwinter and be important throughout the game. It's going to be more like the city where you come back to for the whole game. Eventually you'll start to talk to the people who run the city, and you interact with them for the rest the game. And we feel that makes it more alive, if it's not just leapfrogging, going to area A, then area B, and so on. It'll probably still have a chapter system, but more for story, and it's only going to lock out the stuff that makes sense to lock out. There might be some places in the wilderness that you can't go back to, say dungeons you've already cleared out. Speaking of dungeons, we're also pondering whether or not to have spawning--with spawning people can level up their characters to fight in harder areas.

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