Great Trent Oster interview, including his thoughts on Overhauling NWN 1

[Legacy_OldTimeRadio]

               LISTEN-->Racketboy Podcast #42 – Trent Oster

If you're a fan of NWN you should give a listen to Trent Oster's interview on the Racketboy Podcast about the upcoming release of Baldur's Gate Enhanced Edition.  

28:10 Is when the question about Overhauling Neverwinter Nights formally comes up, though Trent references NWN off and on during the rest of the interview.  Short answer is he'd love to revisit it in the long term, after BGEE and BG2EE ship.

Unlike most interviews where the developer just focuses on talking about their game, Trent covers a lot of different topics including Neverwinter and what he calls the "Democratization of Gaming": Including a toolset so anyone can be an indie game developer.

Great quote from the interview:

There's been a huge rise in indie developers.  And to me...I love that.  With Neverwinter, the whole concept of the democratization of game design was 'I want to poison a bunch of people....with this horrible poison of making a game.  Because once you've had it...it just screws up the rest of your life'.  (laughter) Because once you build a game you realize 'Hey, I can make this amazing experience' and, you know what?  Before you even finish talking about an idea you've already thought of three ways on how to make it better.  So, the idea of tons of indie developers springing up I think it's awesome.   Because indie developers can explore games at a much smaller scale for a much smaller potential audience so they can go crazy deep on a subject that interests them.  And they can make the coolest title in the world...for like a thousand people.  And for those thousand people that is the best game for them that they could ever imagine.  And there's no way a AAA publisher could chase that.

Worth a listen!


               
               

               

                     Modifié par OldTimeRadio, 11 août 2012 - 06:41 .
                     
                  

            

[Legacy_ffbj]

               Yeah, that's about as insightful as it gets.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_NWN_baba yaga]

               Was listening to it yesterday. The most interesting part is about NWN, where he said he´s somewhat over his fatigue of it... so a NWN EE would be awesome. But not w/o us guys!
               
               

               

                     Modifié par NWN_baba yaga, 11 août 2012 - 04:41 .
                     
                  

            

[Legacy_PlasmaJohn]

               That's an awesome quote.  Personally I'd rather an engine that was system agnostic than another one tied to D&D.  Hasbro aside, an engine that gives us the tools to define our own system by necessity must avoid the hardcoding that makes life difficult in NWN.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Carcerian]

               Great Stuff!

Bioware should have gone the Doom I to Doom II route, lol...

Keep the base mechanics and not immediatly try to re-invent the wheel...

Baldurs Gate I, II, + XPs, Icewind Dale I, II + XP, Fallout I, II, Planescape Torment, arcanum of steamworks and magick obscura, pools of radiance: myth drannor and Temple of Elemental Evil, all same engine, with more and more polish as they went along...

There would be no shame in a slight tech "rollback" if it meant modders could convert exsisting content easily '>

Less tech race = more older players buying new version as well, as opposed to having to buy new hardware for every new game.

Make nwn1 + nwn2 = nwn3, ie support the best content and technologies of both games '>
               
               

               

                     Modifié par Carcerian, 12 août 2012 - 05:33 .
                     
                  

            

[Legacy_WebShaman]

               

Make nwn1 + nwn2 = nwn3, ie support the best content and technologies of both games '>

Yessss...we are really on the same wavelength here!

Spot on!

Take the engine, and open it up, baby!  That is all we want.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_PlasmaJohn]

               

WebShaman wrote...

Take the engine, and open it up, baby!  That is all we want.

As has been mentioned before on several occassions this is so not happening.  The first hurdle is the political nightmare of coordinating between what is now calling itself Atari and EA.  The second one is the hardcoding issue that would require them to rip out enough of the guts to make it unusable to avoid stepping on Hasbro's toes.

The amount of effort it would take to bring OpenNWN back to operational form would be the same as adapting something existing like OpenMW or Worldforge.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_kamal_]

               

PlasmaJohn wrote...

WebShaman wrote...

Take the engine, and open it up, baby!  That is all we want.

As has been mentioned before on several occassions this is so not happening.  The first hurdle is the political nightmare of coordinating between what is now calling itself Atari and EA.  The second one is the hardcoding issue that would require them to rip out enough of the guts to make it unusable to avoid stepping on Hasbro's toes.

The amount of effort it would take to bring OpenNWN back to operational form would be the same as adapting something existing like OpenMW or Worldforge.

Well, someone's already making an open source implementation of Aurora.
social.bioware.com/forum/1/topic/199/index/13526970
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_WebShaman]

               Aaannd we may be getting a NWNee version.

So who knows?
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_PlasmaJohn]

               

WebShaman wrote...

Aaannd we may be getting a NWNee version.

So who knows?

The chasm standing between a former developer saying he'd love to work on it and actually getting all the necessary sign-off's and funding to do so is vast and deep.  I'll believe it when I see the press release and if it isn't multiplatform or doesn't support multiplayer then it holds very little interest for me.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_PlasmaJohn]

               

kamal_ wrote...

Well, someone's already making an open source implementation of Aurora.
social.bioware.com/forum/1/topic/199/index/13526970

ew, GPL3.  Pass.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_WebShaman]

               Hehe...yeah, I know the jaded response, because I share it as well.

But there is nothing like holding out hope here.  Such a great game, it surely tickles one's fancy to consider it might get a facelift.

Of course I know the hurdles - but seeing as they jumped over some of what I considered to be the hardest to do BGee (which I have pre-orded, btw), well, we might just see a NWNee.  

Of course, I think a NWNee would be on a margin of hard to do so much higher than BGee, that the mind boggles.  But...I still want it!
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_PlasmaJohn]

               I hadn't really poked around BGee much, but I I did a bit of digging last night.  Seems like they got Hasbro to agree to let them use 2nd Ed. rules.  *blinks* ok, maybe pigs do fly.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_OldTimeRadio]

               Basically, all the Conventional Wisdomâ„¢ (some of which I also subscribed to) about what Hasbro/WotC & Atari would allow turned out to be incorrect.  Trent's an incredibly candid guy and between the information in his interview and his Tweets over the last couple of months, what was reasonably considered "almost impossible" is, apparently, quite possible.

I'm still a little boggled by it all because some of it just seems counter-intuitive.  But here we are.  IMO, them getting the rights to remake BG1 & 2 (and possibly make BG3) was a far bigger, tougher, deal than for them to potentially get the rights to do a straight-up Overhaul on Neverwinter Diamond.  Thinking about it over the last couple of days, I think if he had his druthers he'd probably rather make BG3 with a toolset like NWN and kind of smoosh those two worlds together in a way they haven't been before: Isometric w/ NWN-style ease-of-use toolset.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_PlasmaJohn]

               They can pry my full 3d camera from my cold dead hands!

I'd think that isometric level design would be hard maybe even as hard as some people found NWN2's heightmaped exteriors.  Heck making some of the NWN tiles work is hard in an environment where the player client has full camera control.  Sure there's fading and transparency tricks they can incorporate into an engine but I find those irritating especially when the underying engine is 3d and I'm forced into an isometric view.

Isometric needs well defined areas.  It falls over in sandbox environments and that's been a key feature of the PW's I've played on.