NWN2 - Interview @ Mania

A number of Obsidian developers have spoken to Mania.com in a NWN2 post-release interview.  Here's the first question:

Captain Gordon:] What would you say is the most innovative addition to the game over the last? 

[Eric Fenstermaker] Two changes, I think, really separate this title.  The first is the party system.  In the previous game, the player either adventured alone or with a single companion.  In Neverwinter Nights 2, the player brings along an entire party, which completely changes the feel of the game.  Your companions develop as they travel with you, and they make friends and have conflicts with one another as well.  Most games of this genre, of late, are relatively lonely experiences – one lone hero against the world, quietly trotting along the road en route to some evil place to kill some monster.  With a party, the player becomes a lot more emotionally invested in the story.  Players will come to love some of their party members and despise others, but ultimately their involvement will increase drastically as their companions make great sacrifices or commit heinous acts of treachery along the way.  And of course combat becomes much more strategic as the player has to decide who to bring with him and what sort of role they’ll fulfill in the party. 

The other is the toolset, which we rebuilt from the ground up.  It provides a dramatically large set of new features with which our online community can create new content.   It’s become a lot more powerful across the board, and the content we’re seeing out of the modding community is already pretty spectacular.  Aside from our new terrain editing capability, of particular interest is our new cinematic cutscene system, which puts builders in a role not unlike that of a film director.  They’ll set up camera angles, block out their characters’ movement and animations, assign them dialogue, create and place special effects, and then watch their scene play out letterboxed in-game, telling their story with a degree of precision and detail that would’ve been prohibitively time-consuming in the original.