Gamespy SOU interview

[Dreamer128]

Neverwinter Nights: Shadows of Undrentide Interview
GameSpy catched up with BioWare producers Trent Oster and Darcy Pajak.
By Raymond "Psylancer" Padilla | May 30, 2003

Neverwinter Nights was one of the biggest role-playing games (RPGs) of 2002. Crafted by BioWare -- renowned for its Baldur's Gate RPGs -- the game offered yet another sterling BioWare single-player adventure, but this time extensive multiplayer and creation tools were included as well. The first expansion, Shadows of Undrentide, is scheduled for a June release. This add-on will offer a deeper solo experience and even more creation goodies. I caught up with BioWare producer/project director Trent Oster and assistant producer Darcy Pajak to get more information on Shadows of Undrentide.

GameSpy: What can Neverwinter Nights fans expect from Shadows of Undrentide?
Trent Oster: Buying Shadows of Undrentide as a Neverwinter player you can expect a great story from scratch -- something we were lacking a little at the start of the original Neverwinter. Chapter one in the initial game didn't start quite as fast or get you quite as involved as we would have liked. As a result, some people never manage to go on and complete Chapter two and see some of the really great moments there or Chapter three with the time travel dungeon and the creation of the golems. So, really this time around we focused a lot more on "let's tighten up the start of the story, let's make it more engaging." We've also added in a fair amount of support to the game engine in terms of in-game cutscenes being a lot easier to do now, as well as the addition of the prestige classes, and a couple new feats, some new spells -- especially the Bigby's Hand stuff. There are some cool spells to play with. It should be a fun experience -- a little more story oriented than the previous one.
Advertisement
Darcy Pajak: Whatever Trent said (laughs). All the new things that we're putting into Shadows for this expansion pack will be available in the toolset for users to make their own modules based on the new desert, ruin, and winter tilesets as well as all the new monsters we're putting in. They can take advantage of the prestige classes and build them into their campaigns or adventures.
GameSpy: Please tell our readers a bit about the prestige classes. What kind of players would enjoy playing these classes?
Trent Oster: The prestige classes pretty much break down to about half good and half not so good, which is hard with five (laughs). We've got the Black Guard, who is of course essentially the anti-paladin -- the evil dark knight. That would apply to pretty much any player who really wants to go through the game on a different path and see what it's like to play as an evil character who is truly self serving and willing to do whatever it takes to get what they want. The Assassin, very similar. The other character classes, the Arcane Archer, which I think will be a lot of fun. It's basically almost like being Legolas from the Two Towers.
GameSpy: Without the shield surfing though?
Trent Oster: No shield surfing! (laughs) You get to run around. You get to do some incredible things with your bow. You shoot magical arrows. You can shoot a whole volley of arrows. You can do a seeker arrow. All really neat stuff.

Darcy Pajak: And we also have the Shadow Dancer and the Harper Scout. Now, the Shadow Dancer is this real cool spy -- kind of get in there, find out what you can, infiltrate, and if you get caught, get out. Being able to hide in shadows right when somebody is attacking you is pretty slick. Someone's like swinging a sword at you, you just go "Whoop! I'm in the shadow. Bye-bye!"

Trent Oster: The hide in plain site ability is really cool.

Darcy Pajak: Yeah. That's a really cool one. I have a lot of fun playing the Shadow Dancer. The Harper Scout is a great prestige class to build up if you're taking a bard through the game and you want to have a little bit more spells like invisibility or cat's grace. We even gave the Harper Scout the ability to make his own potions. He can make cat's grace or....

Trent Oster: Owl's Cunning?

Darcy Pajak: Owl's Cunning, yeah. So he can make his potions at any time. It costs a little bit of gold and some experience points, but not a lot.

Trent Oster: The Harper Scout really ties into the Forgotten Realms mythos, the idea of the Harpers, essentially being an almost underground force for good. They travel around trying to engineer stability in governments and under cover any evil plots that are underfoot. So it really offers a good opportunity to go in, role-play, and just be a part of the Forgotten Realms mythos.

GameSpy: How difficult was it to make the Harper Scout since, like you said, it involves so much of the Forgotten Realms mythos. So how do you go about making that accessible to newcomers?
Trent Oster: I think the whole introduction of the Harper and the Harper Scout class was actually pretty difficult. One of the problems is in Neverwinter Nights, somebody can come in who hasn't had exposure to any of the Forgotten Realms lore, the background, the whole Harper structure, and they don't know what the organization is about. So in our initial dialogue with one of the characters, Aaliyah, she basically explains who the Harpers are, what they are about, and hopefully get you up to speed. In terms of the actual implementation, some of the abilities were a little on the challenging side to implement and as well as tying the Harper into the story line. What we tried to do a lot of in Shadows of Undrentide is give optional quests based on specialty classes, like the Harper Scout. There will be some things open to you as a Harper Scout which other characters will never see. Same thing's true for the Black Guard and so on.
GameSpy: You guys seem very excited about the Arcane Archer. What were some of the challenges of implementing that class into the game and making him more than just an overblown ranger?
Darcy Pajak: Well, one of the things about the Arcane Archer in the Player's Handbook they can cast spells on their arrows and shoot them and then that spell takes effect of where that arrow was shot to. Other than that, putting it into the game mechanics was a little bit challenging, so we instead gave the player a lot of spells that they can cast through their arrows. It is a feat that we have implemented so when they click on the feat and click on the target, it will shoot the arrow that way. We've already built in options for them and their spells. Trent was saying earlier, the best one that I think is the most visually stunning is the Hail of Arrows. You click on that and it shoots one arrow at every single enemy on the screen. Anybody you can see gets an arrow.

GameSpy: Were you guys influenced at all by anything Snowblind did with the Arcane Archer in Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance?
Trent Oster: We tried to really kind of stay away from outside reference and just stay really close to what the descriptions were in the PHB and the rest of the source material.

Darcy Pajak: I didn't even know that there was one in Dark Alliance. I've never played that game.
GameSpy: It's great you should check it out. Can you talk a bit about the new Bigby's spells? I got to see them on the screen and they look really cool, so tell our readers about them.
Trent Oster: The Bigby spells go back in D&D a long way. I can't even remember when I first started with them. The whole idea was that you had this archmage, Bigby, who would come up with this whole line of spells, most of them for some reason dealing with disembodied hands. There's really something odd in Bigby's past. You've got Bigby's Interposing Hand, which is basically a hand that literally just serves as a barricade. The hand will stop enemies from coming. You've got his Crushing Hand which you grab characters and do a bunch of damage with. There's a whole bunch of Bigby spells. It's just part of the Dungeons and Dragons universe, the idea of some sorcerer, or some magic-user, who's developed these spells. It just adds to the mythology. And the Bigby's are kind of like money spells for longterm D&D fans. They want Bigby's spells, you want Mordenkainen's Disjunction, you want all the main spells that you remember so well. So we're really happy that we could put the Bigby stuff in.

Darcy Pajak: And like you said, they look very well visually, seeing this hand floating across the screen, grabbing guys and squeezing them. It's really cool.
GameSpy: What are some of the new tilesets in XP1?
Darcy Pajak: Well, we have three new tilesets we're putting in, one based on the rural that we used in the original campaign which is a winter modification. It's the same thing with a big dump of snow on it. Like a big snowfall. There was one here last weekend. Same thing.

Trent Oster: That's where we get our inspiration.

Darcy Pajak: Yeah, look out the window.

Trent Oster: Thank you, Canada.

Darcy Pajak: We also have a desert one which is really visually cool -- the adobe houses, the wind-blown dunes. We also have a ruins one. When we actually were designing the tileset, it was all based on the story and where we wanted to take the user, so we had to make the sets. It starts in the Silver Marshes where, you know, met in the mountains and it's snowing and so we start it there, then we take you to the Anarok Desert. So we had to do a desert tileset and desert scenario. And then of course to Undrentide and so there will be ruins with that as well.

Trent Oster: At the same time we were listening to the fan community. They've been telling us off and on what tilesets they wanted us to do. It's almost hard to keep up with demand. At the same time, they're building their own tilesets and some of them are awesome. It's one of the things we do in the office, periodically Tom or somebody else will send out an email on what one group is working on. It's pretty cool.

GameSpy: Speaking of the community, how much of an influence have they had on XP1? Are there any ideas you've seen in modules that you've implemented?
Trent Oster: Yeah. One of the big thing was the whole idea of lootable corpses. That's something that the fans had implemented and then we had basically borrowed it back, cleaned it up a bit, changed a couple of things, and reimplemented it. A lot of the negative feedback on stuff that they were telling us, they wanted more story, they wanted to be more involved, they wanted more subplots, more character- or alignment-specific stuff. We felt we've really done a good job going in that direction.

Darcy Pajak: The inventory control.

Trent Oster: Ah yes, the idea of being able to control your henchman's inventory. That was a huge fan request. They actually had built a system that was done through dialog to go in and manipulate your henchman's inventory. We had looked at doing a similar solution which would almost be entirely scripting based and we decided we shouldn't even bother taking the half-step. We should just do it all out, let's go through in code and let's add support for it. So in the expansion build, you would be able to go in, open your henchman's inventory, control what they have in their inventory, essentially use them as a pack mule if you want, control what weapons they have equipped. If you want them to use ranged weapons, they you just pop up their inventory, take the melee weapon out of their hand, swap the ranged weapon in, and they'll begin using it.

GameSpy: What are some of the new feats that players will find in the game?
Darcy Pajak: Oh we've got quite a few. I think we put in thirty plus new feats in there. We split them up to take care of all different types of classes. For the fighter, they get Greater Cleave, which improves upon the Cleave feat, which attacks somebody right away when you knock somebody down, when you kill somebody, and then you can take another attack. But Greater Cleaves keeps on attacking. A high level Barbarian with a great axe surrounded by kobolds, it's like watching a blender going. It's great. We also have some magic protection feats for the wizards and spellcasters. We have tumble for the theify guys and Shadow Dancer types where they can tumble in and out of combat without worrying about attacks of opportunity.

Trent Oster: Tumble is exceptionally useful.

Darcy Pajak: Yes. Everybody take tumble, all you people at home.

Trent Oster: It's the skill I put serious points into.
GameSpy: Important safety tips. That's great. One new feature is the grenade-like weapons. That's something that looks really different. How did you implemented that?
Trent Oster: The grenade-like weapons were a lot of fun. One of the things we came up with was the idea that it would be a projectile that you throw and it would bounce. Basically you pick your end target and your guy kinda lobs it. It'll bounce across the ground and then trigger. Probably my favorite, I would have to say probably are the caltrips. I think they're just cool. You basically whip sharp little objects, they land on the floor, and as long as you're standing in the area, you're taking damage. The first time I saw that working I was like "Wow! That's cool." And we've also got the other stuff like alchemist's fire, acid flasks -- a lot of fun stuff.

Darcy Pajak: I don't need to mention the tactics that are used in game. But the Arcane Archer, or any archer, a lot of people will throw down tangle fangs, and have their opponents stuck so they can shoot them with arrows from a distance while they're sitting there.

GameSpy: So with all these new features, how easy is it gonna be for module makers to implement all the new stuff?
Trent Oster: It should be pretty trivial. Everything that we've done is pretty much imported in the toolset. Again, our modules are going to ship out in the .mod format. People will be able to open them up in the toolset, take a look and see what we've done. If they want to rip off stuff that we've done it's cool. By all means, do. We reserve the right to do the same to other people (laughs). If there's something really cool, we'll definitely want to take look at it.

GameSpy: From the considerable mod-maker community out there, what are the features that they seem to be excited about?
Trent Oster: So far we haven't a whole ton of discussion on the features for Shadows and what the community is really interested in. My personal belief is that the henchman inventory will be huge. People will really like that. It feels almost like a part of the original game idea that was missing has now been put in place. Other things, I think the add on of a couple of tilesets will really add to it. There's a lot of user-made tilesets, but there's also a lot of confusion about them. I think when we ship it out on a CD, it's just accessible to that many more people. A lot of people who have played Neverwinter just haven't gone out and downloaded tilesets. This will offer them three new tilesets to play with. And I also think that they will also enjoy the story. I think the little campaign we come with, although reasonably short, is engaging. It's more engaging than some of the stuff we've done historically. I'm pretty happy with it.
GameSpy: Cool. You collaborated with a thid-party on the story this time around, correct?
Trent Oster: The story is somewhat of a collaboration between Floodgate Entertainment and BioWare. We had started off with Floodgate handling most of the early writing. As it went on, we basically started collaborating more and more. The last four or five months, we've just been tweaking on the story concepts, nailing down what we wanted to do and how we wanted to do it.

GameSpy: The single player game also seems to have more puzzles in it than the original. What are some of these puzzles like?
Trent Oster: Part of the design of the puzzles of the expansion pack had actually come from the personnel who were working on the expansion pack. We've got a couple who joined the company from the community. We basically found a few designers who applied to us who had what we thought were exceptional skills. They came and joined the company. In a couple cases, it was make a dungeon and make a couple puzzles. So they would go out and implement like ten different ideas. Then we'd go through and pick out the best and implement that. Other cases, it was a lot more plot oriented. It was really just having a bunch of good people working at it at the right time. Some of the puzzles that I particularly liked, actually, I'm a big fan of the elven tomb. You've got a little gas trap that you can trigger off. If you basically complete a subplot, an ancient ghost will tell you how to set off the trap. And it basically makes a really difficult encounter possible. It's very cool.

Darcy Pajak: In addition, another one that I liked is in the bottom of some kobold caves where one of the scripters was able to change just the way that our engine works so we can actually see things that you never would have seen in the original campaign. I think when people see that, they'll go, "How did they do that?" I asked them, and I still don't know.
GameSpy: Without giving too much away, what can you tell our readers about the story?
Trent Oster: The story has you starting off as a new adventurer. The timeline is roughly parallel to the events in the original campaign. While things are ongoing in Neverwinter, you start out in the small village of Hilltop. You are a student at a magic-user school. Drogan, he's basically teaching young, sometimes hopeless recruits how to be an adventurer. Hopeless in the case of Misha, one of the other students you meet at the start. She's young, hopefully she goes somewhere. You basically start off, anxious to learn about adventuring, anxious to become a hero. You've got a couple classmates at the school. Dorna Trapspringer, she's a dwarven thief, and we've got Xanos, who's a half-orc sorceror, which is kind of an odd combination. But Xanos is actually one of my favorite characters in the expansion because he's an arrogant ass (laughs). He's well done for an arrogant ass, though. So you start off as an adventurer and early in the story, suddenly, the entire school is under attack by a swarm of kobolds. Nobody is quite sure what is going on and your master, Master Drogan, he's wailaid. And that's how the story starts.

And the adventure begins. The henchmen seems to have more personality, more interactivity with them, not just in terms of controlling their inventory, but they just seem more like a bigger part of the story this time around. This was one thing were really happy about as well. By focusing on a smaller scale story and not trying to do so much and focusing on just doing a few henchmen, we were able to do a lot more depth, a lot more interaction with our henchmen, and in a couple cases, a lot more interesting henchmen. Off the start you meet Zanos and Dorna, but down the road you'll actually meet another character who's actually pretty interesting.

GameSpy: So each of you have five words to tell gamers why they should buy XP1.
Trent Oster: Oh, five words, that's hard.

Darcy Pajak: Hmm, is that ten words between us?
GameSpy: You each get five.
Trent Oster: You go first Darcy.

Darcy Pajak: Toolset. Story. Bigby's Spells. Fun.

Trent Oster: Tighter story. Henchmen Inventory. Blackguard.
GameSpy: Awesome. That's a wrap then. •


I'm afraid I don't have a link to the original interview, because I was reading it through hotmail. Sorry

[SpiritWarrior]

I can hear Larry already [img]smile.gif[/img] . Try posting this on the SOU thread above as he's wanting to keep sou discussuions to that thread only .

[Larry_OHF]

Sorry if it appears that I am being rude, guys. I really do not want to be!

It is my understanding that multiple threads of the same subject, especially when they are announcements such as this, would be contained in only one thread...since this is the NWN forum, and we will have our own SoU forum to keep all material separated...I thought it best to go ahead and start the separation, so as to not clog this forum down with more posts about the expansion than for the real NWN basic game. Therefore, eliminating the confusion to whatever newbie would stumble in here to sift through pages to find an answer to something. A member has already challenged my reasoning for this, and I have asked either Memnoch or Ziroc to step in and decide...as I may be wrong in my assumption. We'll see. If I am wrong, then I will apologize and will unlock these threads I locked about the announcement of SoU going Gold and this one. Then you all can kick my ass.

Thanks for your patience.

[Larry_OHF]

Okay. The answer is in and the result is that I lose.

You guys are permitted to post news on the expansion on the condition that you label the thread appropriately, as to not cause confusion. I have also decided to drop the sticky at the top, since nobody cares that it is there.

When the expansion's forum is created, no further discussion of SoU will be permitted here, and they will be forwarded to the appropriate location.

Gracias!

[Granamere]

Thanks for reopening the topic Larry! Everyone give a round of he is a jolly good fellow to Larry!! [img]smile.gif[/img]

Here is the link to the GameSpy interview.

http://www.gamespy.com/interviews/may03/trentdarcy/

Dreamer128 I liked your posting of the article it is easier to read than the gamespy one. Yours you do noy have to go skipping through the pages but you left out the pretty pictures.

I found the link on Futuremark's site. Weird place to find it. [img]smile.gif[/img]

Granamere

[ 06-03-2003, 12:58 AM: Message edited by: Granamere ]

[SpiritWarrior]

Course Larry, you're only doing your best in making this forum accesible for everyone. I doubt anyone is getting angry when a moderator tries to keep things in order - I know I ain't. Keep up the good work, man [img]smile.gif[/img] .

[Dreamer128]

Thanks for posting that link, Granamere. And thanks to you for re-opening this thread, Larry.

Hm.. it seems I have alot of people to thank today