NWN2: Mask of the Betrayer - Interview @ Joystiq

Joystiq talks to Obsidian's Nathan Davis, discussing Mask of the Betrayer mostly by comparison to NWN2:

Now this is a design choice, but another issue that some longterm Baldur's Gate/NWN fans had with Neverwinter Nights 2 was the fact that you moved away from attractive high quality 2D portraits for your characters and instead got a zoomed-in look at their 3D model's head instead. And honestly, it looked like crap.

Haha, well we've actually made it now so that players can customize their portraits with their own pictures and also increased the quality of the provided portraits for your NPC teammates. That's one of those things - we get a lot of feedback from the community and we respond to that.

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Some people will be disappointed with this especially those who play PW's.

The endless sea of unseen portraits can be a real pain and the flexibility of unique and even even repeated portraits makes it difficult sometimes to know who you are talking to in NWN1.

I few people think this was an excellent design decision by OE and now they are backtracking.

I prefer unique and custom portraits myself especially with all the potential for duplication in NWN2 but I dislike not being able to see one for another player.

A number of PW's have gotten to the point to only use OC portraits for the sake of other players. Its almost, but not quite, taboo to use a custom one.