Neverwinter Nights 2 Sundren Persistent World Interview at Sorcerer's Place

[Urithrand]

A new interview has been conducted and posted with Saulus: the omnipresent authority figure responsible for creating the Neverwinter Nights 2 persistent world named "Sundren" right here at Sorcerer's Place. Well over a year since release, we thought we'd catch up and see how things are going. Oh yes, there's also some stunning screenies for anyone curious about the game. Here's a clip:

3. SP: It's generally accepted (and demanded) within Sundren that a high level of RP is required. What ways have you developed to implement this requirement, and deter the undesirables?

Saulus: Sundren is not for everyone, people looking for a casual easy game should look elsewhere. I firmly believe that by challenging the player with more difficult rule sets and slower progressions that you make each accomplishment that much more satisfying. I think the best quote to go with this is “Desperation breeds determination”. We tend to lean somewhere between challenging and hardcore, and fully encourage party-play (which in many cases is mandatory to complete a quest). People who are intent on reaching level 20 in a week will find very quickly that it’s just not going to happen. While we do have a high level of RP in Sundren, we also have a very mature community; we do not intend to foster any kind of elitist environment where your RP measures your worth. We’ve had many people come to Sundren who have never role-played at all, but their willingness to learn allowed them to have a lot of fun and meet a few friends in the process.

4. SP: How have you developed ways to avoid thousands of the same popular classes walking around? How did you choose which races/classes were allowed?

Saulus: When planning out the world, we wanted to create a realistic environment (but not so realistic as to be boring), early on it became an issue that people were going to want to play rare races and classes in large numbers. The biggest problem in our eyes (which tied into people levelling too quickly) was people becoming used to demi-god like PCs of some rare offshoot race just casually hanging around a campfire while no one else takes any notice of something odd taking place.

Drow are evil, yet when left unchecked other players of opposing races normally won’t hesitate at all to mingle with them. We firmly believe this ruins the kind of immersive environment we want to provide, so we had to impose scripted limitations on what races/classes people could play. We tried to only pick things that would seriously ruin immersion, like having 20 warlocks running around. We now have a system in place for the role player of the month award, whereby a player’s peers can judge their effort in RP and their contributions to the community, the winners get a token which gives them access to create a character of a restricted race. We thoroughly document this setup on our wiki and our players have reacted positively to it so far.

You can read up on the whole interview right here at Sorcerer's Place.

[Taluntain]

Very nice interview!

[Urithrand]

Thanks chev helped out with a question or two