Obsidian's CEO Feargus Urquhart answers more questions about Neverwinter Nights 2 at HomeLAN Fed. If you've read any of the other interviews with Urquhart lately, you've probably seen most of these questions before.

What hints can you give us about the improvements being made to Neverwinter Nights 2' graphics compared to the first game?

Well to start, we are pretty much rewriting the entire graphics system and putting in the latest effects and technology. For instance, we have normal mapping in today and it is looking amazing. One of our artists, Aaron Brown, created a 500,000 polygon house that we then bake to a much lower polygon model of the same house. The result gives us a normal map which the engine uses to display incredibly high detail shadowing without the massive amount of geometry in memory. Our current female test character is at about 400,000 polys - which means were are going to get amazing detail in our characters as well.

What can we expect in terms of new and improved gameplay?

There are a whole bunch of things that we are focusing on when it comes to gameplay, however the two areas that we are going to spend the most time on are companion control and the interface. We want to have your companions not only react more intelligently in combat, but really have them play a part in the story of the game, much in the way party members affected the game in Baldur's Gate 2. For the more hardcore D&D fan, we're bringing the game to the 3.5 edition rules, plus a whole lot more that we just can't talk about quite yet!

You can read everything here (http://www.homelanfed.com/index.php?id=25591).

We want to have your companions not only react more intelligently in combat, but really have them play a part in the story of the game, much in the way party members affected the game in Baldur's Gate 2. Now this is good news in my opinion. I'm a single player so this is indeed good news for me.

Feargus talks a lot about the graphical improvements of the Aurora engine, but I don't think I'm the only one who has doubts about the results. BioWare and Black Isle started working with the ideas on Neverwinter Nights back in 1997, and NWN 2 is scheduled for release 9 years later (though the Aurora engine itself hopefully isn't that old). I remember that I thought the graphics and much else in the NWN engine seemed old and outdated two years ago, and after all it's much harder to make a 3D game look good.

I understand that up to date PC game graphics today is pretty much what I've seen in Doom 3 and Half Life 2 trailers. In two years, NWN 2 will not be anywhere near those two in graphics and dynamics, so this game better have a hell of a gameplay.

Mollusken, I heard that SW:KotOR uses a slightly adapted aurora engine, meaning it doesn't have to suck and look old. The reason nwn looked bad was because they had to use tiles, which are automatically more repetitive than if you create entire environments. Of course, in kotor, that was possible since it was not intended for players to create custom content.

Apeman, depending on how you interpret that sentence, it can also be negative. They say the npcs will react more intelligently and to me that suggest that you will have no control over them, which imho is bad. That was actually one of the major flaws of nwn, since if you have no control over npcs, tactical combat is impossible, and that is a major flaw if you use the d&d rules, since those are made to use tactical combat.

Apeman, depending on how you interpret that sentence, it can also be negative. They say the npcs will react more intelligently and to me that suggest that you will have no control over them, which imho is bad. That was actually one of the major flaws of nwn, since if you have no control over npcs, tactical combat is impossible, and that is a major flaw if you use the d&d rules, since those are made to use tactical combat. I already gave up that you do not have control of your party members so it's no big surprise. At least it's no fallout 1 with a certain npc shooting you in the back with an smg.

Considering NWN2 will be tile based as well, I hope they manage to make the surroundings more interesting than in NWN, where everything looked the same.