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But now, Beamdog's announcement and upcoming release of Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition means everyone will become aware of the game again, and all its wonderful mods, campaigns and persistent worlds. And it is the ardent desire of many that the community experiences a rebirth as a result.
The team at Beamdog have been gracious enough to agree to answer questions put forth by esteemed members of the community (neverwintervault.org), and myself (lilura1.blogspot.com). So let's get on with it, shall we?
• Hi to Trent Oster and the Beamdog team, and thank you for agreeing to this interview on your upcoming Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition. Thank you for bringing NWN back, too; the community needed a wave not a ripple! Just how busy have you guys been over the past year? Burning the midnight oil, I would imagine?
Beamdog CEO, Trent Oster - We've been busy. As a policy we try to avoid overtime whenever possible, so no midnight oil was burned, but we have been putting in a lot of work on a number of fronts.
• There has been a flurry of activity on the Beamdog forums with the announcement of NWN:EE, and the persistent worlds are abuzz. How do you regard the public response to your announcement?
Trent - We were excited by the response, the community came out in force and it was a good announcement. Since we rolled the concept out early to bring in feedback from the community there was a limit to the high-visibility improvements we could make in the announce timeline. We're looking forward to rolling out new features as we get further into development.
• Speculation of an Enhanced Edition has come up on occasion but then died back down to the point that - even up until just recently - many in the community held only a faint glimmer of hope that an EE would ever come to fruition. Thus, the announcement was a big surprise to everyone. Can you tell us how NWN:EE finally got the go-ahead?
Trent - We had gone back and forth on the concept for quite a while. We finally reached a contract point where the project made sense to us and to our partners. It took a great deal of thinking about the potential of NWN:EE to make it happen.
• Broadly speaking, what will NWN:EE offer to fans aside from resolving the compatibility issues that plague owners of the original NWN - which I would think is its prime selling-point?
Trent - NWN:EE is a live, evolving platform for the creation of your own adventures or persistent worlds. That is the prime selling point. We've opened up the graphics engine side for improvement by moving to a shader-based system, we've added support for screens up to 4K, added in UI scaling so the font is readable in those larger resolutions. We've taken some good steps along a long road.
• What is a rough ETA on the x64 version and multi-core support? Will there be Linux x64 in addition to the confirmed Windows and Mac?
Trent - We haven't committed to anything publically as we're still thinking about what is possible and what is the most important to the game. 64 bit support makes sense we are interested, but we don't have a committed timeline.
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