The player's character is finely detailed, caught by dynamic lights and shadow as he stalks, branches clawing the air as they sway, mist churning over the surface of a stream bridged by creaking timber where NWN's tilesets were largely pre-set, NWN2 will allow you to place individual objects on the tiles - as have the designers, and then some. This being more of a toolset tour, I didn't get to explore that side of it fully - but what was apparent was the detail of the environment, through worlds of trolls, bone spiders, demonic, normal-mapped pit fiends and, more importantly, a next generation vision of Neverwinter. NWN2 is built on the D&D 3.5 rules, and players will be able to bring along up to three NPC companions, and switch to them to queue up actions - Baudoin tells me these are the basic changes to the dynamic.
Far more than a level.īefore I kick on with that though, let's cover some basics.
Making your own 3d environments is often hard NWN2 can't boil it down to child's play, exactly, but it certainly looks like I could figure it out. Whereas NWN always sounded clever to me but a bit clunky, witnessing the NWN2 toolset first-hand pumps elixir into that little bit of my heart reserved for things like TrackMania, RollerCoaster Tycoon, and Far Cry Instincts' level editor. But, sitting in a rather plain office at the back end of Atari's Lyon headquarters, watching Obsidian Entertainment's Ferret Baudoin go from playing a very pretty, fully 3d PC RPG, to an interface that allowed him to toss houses around, blend them together, insert demons and then spawn them 300-foot high, piqued my interest. I never experienced Bioware's Neverwinter Nights in its full splendour - I was probably busy jumping on the heads of turtles.
What in the name of all the dice that have more than six sides, then, you're wondering, am I doing writing about Neverwinter Nights 2? I dabbled in Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance, but that's about the extent of it, and not exactly a badge of honour in the dark recesses of the Internet to which this link's likely to propagate. Those who read me regularly will know that while I support goblins, elves, magi and whatnot and uphold them fully, there's little record of the words 'Dungeons' and 'Dragons' ever being thrust firmly enough together that I've been gaily trapped in their midst for any length of time.
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