NWN2 - Mysteries of Westgate Forum Tidbits

Also from Lucky Day is a couple of snips from Ossian's Alan Miranda on Mysteries of Westgate from the official forums. First, Alan addresses Atari:

The news post about Atari’s CEO stepping down and pulling back on internal development does not affect MoW or NWN2 for that matter. Those issues are with Atari Inc. Keep in mind that there is a difference between Atari Inc. and Atari Interactive Inc. (check out wikipedia for more details). Anyhow, we developed MoW internally at Ossian, so this wouldn’t have been affected regardless.

As for an exact release date, there are always a number of factors to consider. We’ll let you know when we have a more firm date.

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...and on using assets from MoW in the toolset:

The areas from MoW wouldn’t be available to use elsewhere (i.e., opening MoW up in the toolset and exporting them as erfs). The BioWare premium mods were encrypted, if that’s any indication. Other more easily distributable content from the game would be made available to the community, which is what both Ossian and Atari would like to do.

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More information.

Sorry, but my NWN2 interest is now approaching zero. I loved NWN1 and played it for many years (right up until the start of this year in fact)... and that longevity was founded on a constant supply of excellent free modules, and excellent MP.

NWN2 has neither of those. Sure, there's a few good modules out there, and the odd MP thing worth investigating, but it's a poor shadow of what NWN1 offered. I played the expansion and quite frankly I just have no interest in going back to the game. I'm done. The Witcher and other new offerings have my interest now.... all this is too little too late.

I don't know why they think that encryptying premium content is something that they have to do and I think it is the most idiotic thing in the world. They don't encrypt the original game so that you can't use it's content for mods and they don't do that for expansions. If they think that it's because it's downloadable the original game is downloadable along with the expansion pack.

They are a buch of idiots that do useless things by making the content unusable by modders.

I don't know about everybody else but I liked NWN2 and the expansion pack. If they want to sell extra content or "premium content" then cool I'll get it if I want to continue playing. I have no idea what the encrypting content thing means nor do I care, as long as when I get it and I'm able to play it then I'm happy.

Where there is problems with NWN2 (I might start a thread) compared to NWN1 I'm not so heated. There are many things that 2 does right over 1 and its a lot prettier.

MoW is a welcome expansion and even though Alan says now that content won't be available for the Toolset that may just be temporary as it was with 1. The patches have slowly added Premium Mod content in 1 and this will be the same for 1.69 when its released sometime in 2011.

Truth is though, I'm so spoiled that I can run full settings with NWN1 I can't bring myself to play 2 at lower settings. This is really a good thing as obviously the graphics are greatly improved. If they didn't, it probably would have only sold to the hardcore NWN fans.

That said, I'm curious about what Dragon Age gives us in the form of multiplayer and toolsets and with Witcher's announcement of a toolset that's piqued me too in spite of my problems with that games content.

Why is it that NWN 1 was so much more popular than NWN 2 even though 2 was about 10 times better?

NWN1 has only recently had good press. The first three years it received a lot of flack mostly from FPS reviewers, particularly about the OC. Few people even bothered to mention the Toolset or the multiplayer capabilities of it. Other audiences it had trouble winning over were Action Gamers which Bio went after from the start and d20 fans who couldn't stand the altered system. It has taken the longevity of the support on it and the PW/Custom Content/Hardcore RPGers still playing the thing to get its reputation turned around. That's the way i see it anyway.

Lucky Day said:

NWN1 has only recently had good press.

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Eh? NWN1 got obscenely overrated reviews when it was reviewed. It is one of the most overrated games of all time. The shitty OC was a problem completely ignored by major review sites like Gamespot, ign, etc.