Neverwinter Nights Forum News
Posted Wednesday, December 24, 2003 - 16:28 CET by chevalier

Here are today's Neverwinter Nights forum highlights. Please take into account that these are only single parts of various threads and should not be taken out of context. Bear in mind also that the posts presented here are copied as-is, and that any bad spelling and grammar does not get corrected on our end.

Georg Zoeller, Designer

The community: As for your questions, of course we are learning from our games and of course we will use that knowledge in our next games, one or another way . As for the reasons you are suggesting why HotU is better: I guess most of them played a role.

- The community acted as "competition" in a way, driving us to do things that haven't been done before.
- After such a long time with the toolset, most of us have mastered it pretty well
- We had feedback from the OC and another expansion pack we could build on, find out what people liked, see what worked out and what not.

Rob? Who is Rob? Ahh I remember, that crazy guy who is working on WW2 ...

David Gaider, Designer

HotU campaign: The expansion is a sequel to Shadows of Undrentide. Just because you bring in your character from the official campaign does not mean that suddenly we are going to re-write everything to make it possible for you to be the Hero of Neverwinter... or a "I'm a nobody" option. I understand that sometimes players like to imagine a whole background for their characters, but just like in PnP there will be some adventures that are compatible with that and some that establish a certain background for you. I certainly wish there was some way in NWN for us to do that with a module... have giant flashing letters that leap out and say "THIS MODULE CONTINUES SHADOWS OF UNDRENTIDE ONLY! HEAR THAT? ONLY!! IF YOU BRING IN OTHER CHARACTERS THEY WILL BE TREATED AS THE PC FROM UNDRENTIDE, WHETHER YOU PLAYED IT OR NOT!!". Chances are, some folks still wouldn't get it. As for Deekin, we don't assume that you took him with you as a henchman. If you don't bother with him in Shadows of Undrentide, remember that you still have to deal with him extensively in Chapter 1 and he still travels with the halfling caravan, so would have heard a lot about what you were doing then.

Further:
It wasn't my intent to be harsh, Jackhammer. All I'm saying is that we wrote Shadows of Undrentide (yes, Bioware did that campaign, though Floodgate did the tilesets and creatures for the first expansion) and intended for Hordes of the Underdark to be its sequel... the work to make the sequel somehow work either generically or for the original campaign character are more than significant, as has been pointed out. If I seem harsh, it's perhaps just that I don't understand the assumption being made by some folks such as yourself. In retrospect, it seems that we should have gone to greater efforts to make the nature of the campaign more obvious.