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Obsidian: 'Mod makers won't tolerate poor toolchains'
Ed Fear in Paris Jun 23 2008, 1:55pm
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Paris GDC: Lead designer Josh Sawyer on how Neverwinter Nights 2 changes angered the mod community
In a session at Paris GDC, Obsidian lead designer Joshua Sawyer discussed the problems the team faced when creating Neverwinter Nights 2, a game designed to be expanded and changed by users.
A sequel to Bioware's original Neverwinter Nights, NWN2 had to not only provide a better game than its predecessor but also to expand upon Bioware's hugely popular Aurora toolset to give users greater modding potential.
"BioWare's approach to the Neverwinter Nights toolset was to go for ease-of-use, so that people could get small things running quickly and then expand from there," said Sawyer. "Obsidian's approach was to cater for the hardcore, though - dramatically increase the level of control, meaning that more things could be altered. That would make the barrier to entry higher, but we thought that would similarly raise the quality of what was produced."
As such, Obsidian ditched the tile-based exterior sections for heightmapped terrain - which, while giving a lot more scope for variety and finely-designed areas, increased the construction time by ten times with artists having to hand-place trees and paint textures onto the terrain by hand.
"While this is bearable for people who are being paid to do it, many users are put off by the effort required," said Sawyer.
One thing that also limited end-user creativity was that the company didn't clear end-user use of RAD Tools' Granny animation middleware, which it had used on the product, meaning that users could not create custom animations.
While there were certainly aspects of the toolset that the team improved - in particular the conversation editor and the toolset's plug-in architecture - the overall response from the community at the beginning was poor - or, as Sawyer put it, users 'backlashing' over a more unfriendly toolkit.
And while it may seem that the company fluffed its chance with Neverwinter Nights 2, continual patches - and improvements brought about during the development of the game's expansion packs - have helped address some of the issues that disappointed the community at launch, and have helped shape the development of the next generation of Obsidian's tools now being used on both the un-named Aliens RPG and forthcoming espionage RPG Alpha Protocol.
Comments
“yup”
Posted by: jerry ku - Jun 24, 10:44am
NWN2's toolset made me cry when I first looked at it. It felt like that in nearly every way, making a mod and distributing it was made much, much harder than what we saw in NWN1. In NWN1, only the host player needed to have the mod file (and it could just be one) in order for people to start playing. Joining players didn't need to download anything. In NWN2... it's a whole 'nother story.
NWN2 was so much more complicated in so many ways. I also thought this turned away D&D fans who wanted to use NWN as a way to play D&D without having to crunch numbers, but still create their own worlds and DM games. NWN1, I thought, accomplished this nicely. Pretty much anyone can create a world, and using the DM client, create a D&D adventure to be proud of. NWN2.... not so much.
This all being said, I don't think either game made it easy for the average user to create a quality "automated DM" module.
“Junk”
Posted by: Not Allowed to Say - Jul 15, 6:43pm
The toolset was junk on release, its still junk. Many reported and semi-critical parts are STILL broke.
Obsidian seriously screwed up on this one. I can't think of any developer that would have used this tool willingly. They keep claiming that this is the same tool they built the OCs, to which I say BS. The time lost in destroyed modules, broken textures, failure of the game and toolset to see the same thing, etc would have been prohibitively expensive in development.
“Re: Junk”
Posted by: Agreed - Jul 15, 8:20pm
It took Obsidian 3 months to solve a serious texture problem that basically turned the terrain matte black. 3 months!
While it's nice that Josh finally admitted there were problems I'd rather see less talk and more action fixing the problems.