Obsidian to develop Neverwinter Nights 2

Not sure if you guys care but Gamespy had an interview with Feargus about NWN 2. Here's a bit:

GameSpy: Where are you drawing inspiration from? Are you looking to any classics?
Urquhart: We've been talking a lot lately about older games and how games have evolved since then. We have particularly been looking at some of the Ultimas -- how they really made the world almost a character in the game. When you played games like Ultima IV, you got to really know the world and you had things you wanted to do in it that weren't just making your next level. We'd really like to return to a bit of that in Neverwinter 2.
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They offered a release date of 2006 for this one. Looks like it will get a longer dev time than KOTOR 2.
 
Its probably getting a longer dev time because they're going to make a new engine.

As beneficial as the NWN engine was to the mod community, its probably the most significant reason why the game itself sucked.

I hate it when companies keep making new engines to keep up with new technologies. Unless your last game engine is 4 years out of date, stop spending all your time coding something new from scratch and use it making a game that's worth buying.
 
Yes, its basically Aurora, with all the improvements up to Hordes of the Underdark. Obsidian also has the code, so anything that was hardcoded and might've caused problems can now be worked around.
 
Yes, its basically Aurora, with all the improvements up to Hordes of the Underdark. Obsidian also has the code, so anything that was hardcoded and might've caused problems can now be worked around.
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That probably won't work, for several reasons. The first reason being that "anything that was hardcoded and might've caused problems" was basically the entire engine. Damn that thing sucked. And Bioware continues to fuck it up even further with each patch. "We fixed this bug but created five new ones in the process!"

The second reason being that it's really really annoying to work with other people's code and understand it. Unless the comments have been done very well, and there is a lot of documentation, fixing anything in the engine will require figuring out what everything does, why it does what it does, why it actually works, and why the hell it was coded in that particular way.
I hate it when companies keep making new engines to keep up with new technologies. Unless your last game engine is 4 years out of date, stop spending all your time coding something new from scratch and use it making a game that's worth buying.
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Well, I'd normally agree here, but not in the case of NWN. That engine is so incredibly fucked up that spending the time to make a new one will not be lost time.
 
Well, I'd normally agree here, but not in the case of NWN. That engine is so incredibly fucked up that spending the time to make a new one will not be lost time.
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I wasn't aware that Aurora had so many problems. I stopped having anything to do with NWN as soon as it was revealed that the Ancients were fucking lizardmen. AND THEY'RE BACK TO GET US WAH LOOK OUT!
 
Sander said:
That probably won't work, for several reasons. The first reason being that "anything that was hardcoded and might've caused problems" was basically the entire engine.
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Things that are hardcoded would be a problem if Obsidian didn't had the full code... but they do. Meaning, any change to the base code can be made without much problems, because they aren't tied to working with a fixed build; they can change the code as they see fit to suit their needs.
 
Things that are hardcoded would be a problem if Obsidian didn't had the full code... but they do. Meaning, any change to the base code can be made without much problems, because they aren't tied to working with a fixed build; they can change the code as they see fit to suit their needs.
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Yes, I know that. What I was saying was that doing that is really really hard because it's really hard to understand the code. Often small things are changed in codes without adding commentary as to why it was changed, small changes often make the difference between a crash and a succesful run and figuring out why everything goes where is not only frustrating but also extremely slow. Having to make changes to an engine that was built by other people is hard because you didn't make the code.
It's easiest to compare reading the code made by other people to reading another language which is similar to yours. For Dutch people, understanding German isn't all that difficult, but knowing how to write in it flawlessly and, more importantly, knowing why everything goes where it goes and why something is written in that way is extremely difficult. The same can probably be said for Italian/SPanish/Portuguese.
 
True enough, Sander.

Although i assume that the engine and code have some similarities with past Bioware engines, and given that some Obsidian folks have worked with them, it might lessen the burden. Also, Obsidian will have plently of time to work around with it, and their hiring of several programmers might be an advantage as well.
 
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