NWN2: Mysteries of Westgate Ossian Interview
By Shawn on Tuesday, December 4th, 2007 at 5:13 PM PST In Bioware, Computer, Game Companies, Game Platforms, Games
Ossian Studios team sat in for an interview with RPGWatch on the first Adventure Pack for Neverwinter Nights 2; Mysteries of Westgate.
MoW is part of the expanded successor to the Premium Mod program for NWN1. Alan Miranda, CEO of Ossian Studios, Producer and Co-Lead Designer; Luke Scull, Lead Designer and Mat Jobe, Writer on Mysteries of Westgate talk about bringing the Adventure pack to life, as well as how the new format differs from the old Premium Mod program.
In this excerpt from the interview, Luke Scull explains how alignment will be handled differently in MoW:
An “evil” player gets cast into the role of rude jerk because rude jerks might inappropriately ask for more gold to solve a kingdom’s problems. A “real” evil character might use the political instability in the region to stab everyone in the back and wrest power for themselves, thus securing more gold and power than the previous rulers of said kingdom could ever bribe the jerk with.
Of course, implementing the options for the “real” evil character means a ton more work on the developer’s part for ever-diminishing returns. Or it means the same amount of work with other aspects of the game suffering, because there are only so many zots to go around. This is the dilemma we faced while designing Mysteries of Westgate. Fortunately, due to a rare coming together of various factors, it actually became feasible for us to give players the chance to role-play a real evil character without any loss of quality in any other aspect of the game. So that’s what we’ve done. I’m proud of us for sticking our necks out.
For more on the NWN2: Mysteries of Westgate Adventure Pack, read the entire article on RPGWatch.
