PAX 07: Joystiq Interviews Obsidian's Nathan Davis about NWN2: Mask of the Betrayer

Filed under: PC, RPGs, Interviews

One of the many games being shown off at this year's Penny Arcade Expo was the expansion to one of the biggest RPGs from last year, Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer. Obsidian's Nathan Davis, the Assistant Producer for the title, was on hand to tell us a bit about the highly anticipated expansion. Read on to see what he says on how they've fixed some of the lingering problems from NWN2 and details on some the cool stuff they've added.

Early on one of the major complaints with Neverwinter Nights 2 was with the camera system. Have you guys worked on making it better in the expansion?

We have improved our camera system quite a bit. So we have two new modes now including a character camera mode that is similar to the one in World of Warcraft and also a new strategy camera mode that is more reminiscent of what you would see in Baldur's Gate or Icewind Dale. The character mode is great for exploration and general activities, while the strategy mode is great for big combat scenarios where you want to have a good feeling for where all your teammates and enemies are.

One of the other problems with Neverwinter Nights 2 initially, was poor system performance. It was helped a bit by later patches, but you still needed a fairly powerful machine to run it. Have you been able to optimize this at all for the expansion?

Yeah, we've done a lot to improve that, we brought in programmers specifically work on performance issues and to fine tune everything. So we've gotten a better and more responsive game engine now. We're really trying to reach for a much improved graphical look to the game without creating a heavy draw on systems. We've tested the expansion on a number of different systems and it's running reasonably well. In general I think it's running better than the original NWN2.

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[via] Joystiq