Dungeon Siege 3 - Interviews @ Mods Reloaded, CVG

Dhruin said:

Yeah, but would that have worked years later? I suspect Obsidian was damned either way and the success of NWN was a moment in time. If NWN2 hadn't introduced height-maps, which made it take longer to build locations, it would have been slammed for being ugly. It's also hard to estimate how many people felt they had "been there, done that" and just plain moved on from NWN modding.

I'm not trying to take away from BioWare's success or excuse Obsidian any mistakes but I think it was inevitable.

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I think an upgraded simplistic tile paradigm would work, and they could have made height maps and the other upgrades "more optional" - as in reserved for those who wanted to use them, and had the necessary skillset.

I tried making maps in both editors - and I honestly don't recall the details, except that I had a VERY hard time doing anything in the NWN2 toolset. I just couldn't make things look right. I don't remember if it was possible to generate "normal" NWN1 tile-maps - but I don't think it was laid out to facilitate that.

Another issue was the performance upon release, which was very poor. I remember having a very powerful machine, and the game still ran extremely slow. I almost gave up playing it entirely, but it was fixed relatively soon after.

I understand why they did what they did, but I really don't think they did it well. If they wanted the average modder to make maps using advanced tools and graphics, they should have done much more to make that manageable. I think the modding community speaks for itself, actually.

NWN wasn't very pretty even when released, but it worked well as a toolset and "adventure construction set" - and most players accepted the weaknesses - because they could finally play something resembling a real D&D table session.

DArtagnan said:

There's nothing wrong with making the toolset powerful. There's something wrong with making it much harder to produce satisfactory content.

NWN succeeded so well in this way, BECAUSE it was idiot proof. The more people who're able to be creative - the better.

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This is also my opinion.

In my opinion, the creative parts come from those who are rather *not* "techies" … And vice versa.

So, this means, in my (personal) opinion, that the hrder it is to mod something - which means the more tech knowledge is needed - the less the creatives get o work with it, but rather the techies - which - in my opinion - results in very, very good technical quality of a mod - but in the orst case a total lack of content in term of storytelling.

And I think I remember a member of Obsidian saying in an interview posted here somewhere saying that they actually wanted to increase the technical quality of the mods … And the reverse of it means that they weren't interested in better quality in terms of storytelling …

But this is only my personal opinion.