Rock, Paper, Shotgun

We’ve written a little about the Neverwinter Nights 2 adventure pack the Mysteries of Westgate before. But not enough. We grasped the chance to talk to Ossian’s Ex-Bioware head man Alan Miranda about all things to do with the Mysteries of Westgate. Candid and expansive, he expounds about the long route from Darkness over Daggerford, the DRM situation which delayed Mysteries of Westgate’s release for getting on for well over a year, the problems of creating RPGs as a small team, their love for the genre and how audiences differ from country to country. And it all starts below…
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This was something of a saga. Ossian studios, a team of modders gone pro, were making the first Neverwinter Nights 2 add-on pack. It’s now available to buy from Atari’s shop in the US for ten dollars and from DLGamer for everyone else for just shy of ten quid. Which is pretty atrocious, but not why the game’s already somewhat infamous. Go read Wikipedia for the full story. The game seems to have been finished towards the end of 2007 and ever since then has been delayed for mysterious reasons. Initially it was claimed that they were waiting for a security system to be put in place but… really? Eighteen months to patch in some DRM. Crikey. Anyway, it’s out now and you’ll find its trailer beneath the cut.
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Yes, fantasy RPG sequels are inbound. It’s pretty much a dead cert that Bioware won’t be involved, as they’re busy being owned by EA these days, and Atari seem to have clung on the Dungeons & Dragons license without ‘em. Infogrames-in-disguise are definitely planning to revisit these two seminal roleplaying names however, though a developer’s not been announced. Neither has a release date. Maybe not next year, according to Atari’s Phil Harrison, but soon, and for the rest of your life. Or at least as long as Wizards of the Coast keep on letting ‘em make D&D games, anyway.
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We didn’t talk much about RPGs last year, but they keep on cropping up recently. Elf-cravings are biennial, presumably. Due soon is a new Neverwinter Nights 2 premium module/expansion, Mysteries of Westgate. Scoundrel port Westgate is of course one of the Forgotten Realms’ most notorious cities, and also the name of an air conditioning-bereft open-plan office I spent two sweaty years of my life in. My Mysteries of Westgate were more along the lines of which bastard drank all the coffee or left urine-sodden toilet paper all over the bathroom floor.

Er… Anyway! New video beneath the cut.
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No sooner than we heard that Obsidian were at work on another NWN2 add-on, with a more party-customisation adventuring approach, we dropped ‘em a line. NWN2: Storm of Zehir’s producer, Kevin Saunders, took a few minutes from measuring the merit of monsters to answer our questions. Below the cut you’ll find a little about what Storm of Zehir’s approach allows (And what’s lost), his memories of playing early D&D games, what the overland map allows and how the fifteen-hour-main story perhaps isn’t everything…
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There’s a new NWN2 expansion on the way, though you’d have to polish up your cross-language dictionary as well as your broadsword +4 against scarabs to be sure. NWN vault noticed that the splendid-named Spanish site Neverwinteros brings news of a new Expansion entitled “Neverwinter Nights 2: Storm of Zehir”. The Vault actually translates the news, revealing that the game seems to be the Icewind Dale approach to the genre – in that it gives you the ability to design a whole party from scratch, then go forth and persecute kobolds for their gold. “Trading and economic manipulation” are promised, which sounds exciting, even through the translation. It also features a conflict with “the evil, shapeshifting, serpentine Yuan-Ti”, which we welcome, as we are completely racist about the bloody Yuan-Ti. They’re complete shits.

You wait for ages for a Neverwinter 2 add-on pack, and then you get run over by a bus, meaning you can’t play either of them. Someone get the cleric with the Resurrect sharpish.

Anyway, following on from the recent Mask of the Betrayer, Atari have announced that there’s a digital download module-pack incoming. It’s Neverwinter Nights 2: Mysteries of Westgate and it’s by Ossian Studios, who you may remember from the NWN premium-mod-turned-fan-favourite and IGF winner Darkness over Daggerford. It offers fifteen hours of adventure and – we speculate wildly – features more Kobolds than you could shake a +2 stick at. Download only, it’s to be released in Autumn 2007 which is now, so they better get a move on.

(Story via NWN vault.)

Glorious corporate paymasters Eurogamer have published my review of the first add on pack for the second Neverwinter Nights game.

I have to give Mask of the Betrayer this: its qualities were enough to make me decide to restart the original Neverwinter Nights 2, so I could go all the way through the game and into the expansion pack in an enormous fantasy quest. This says something. It’s a big fantasy PC videogame quest like Grandma used to make.

Assuming your Grandma worked at Black Isle, obviously.

The rest is here.

Not joking about that either, meaning that I’d expect some NWN2 blogging here sooner or later. It’s an interesting experience to go back to the start of NWN2 after being in the expansion pack because it’s so vanilla. I mean, I like it, because I’m a big dirty geek, but it’s merely well-executed utterly derivative fantasy. More another time, I suspect.