Neverwinter Nights 2

E3 2006 First Look Preview

Fans of RPG games won’t have long to wait for a PC fix that is certain to please. If you thoroughly enjoyed BioWare’s Neverwinter Nights (and its expansions), get ready for Obsidian’s Neverwinter Nights 2.

Ok, before you go too far with the ‘Obsidian? Never heard of them’ line, let’s short-circuit that quickly. Who is Obsidian? Those who have some history in playing role-playing games on the PC likely lamented when Black Isle Studios (Icewind Dale) closed. Guess where core members went? Hey, isn’t obsidian a black rock??? Are we on the same page now?

Obsidian began working on NWN 2 in August of 2004 and the fruits of those labors will be unveiled when the game ships in September. Atari gave a first look at the title at a Pre-E3 event held in San Francisco on April 19.

The game begins with a sorcerer battling otherwordly creatures. The fight comes to an end with a huge explosion – and that is where the game begins. Western Harbor is the starting town and creatures invade the town, killing and generally being less than hospitable. As the star of this tale, you will find out that these monsters were looking for you. The question that will be answered during the course of the game, through its explorations and battles, is why.

New features to the game include character backgrounds – who you were up to where the game begins. This will affect how NPCs react to you at the game’s start. Also players will be able to play in the traditional isometric view or direct-drive view, close to the action. The tilesets are bigger and because team members play such a big part in the game, you can take control of them.

The game works off the D&D 3.5 ruleset and features the core races and sub-races, plus core classes and a new class, the warlock. The game also features an-easy-to-access player interface, with pop-ups that provide quick access to spells. Driving the game is a matter of keyboard or point and click. Alignments do play a big role in the game and the whole skills and feats packages have been configured for players new to the game and genre to jump in and play without a lot of dumbfounded looks or head scratching.

Obsidian completely rewrote the Aurora Toolset, trying to make it as easy as possible to enable even those not extremely computer savvy to create content not in the game.

Graphically the game is very nice indeed with unique effects for the various spells, and great texture and lighting effects. Multiplayer includes co-op modes of play and players can indulge in player-versus-player, if they so wish, but as the dev members stated, that is not the point of the game.

With about 40 hours of gameplay in the main quest-campaign thread, NWN 2 is one of the titles that everyone who likes solid, well-designed RPGs should have on their list. The wait is not that long, some tweaking still needs to be done, but this is definitely a title worth checking out.

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