Interview NWN2 intervoo at Firing Squad

[Bradylama]

"seeing as how there were practically no roleplaying elements"

Stop lying.

Oh right, I forgot about the arbitrary good/evil choices with no appreciable consequences.

Unless you're talking about choosing a class, which I don't consider to be a more significant "roleplaying element" than deciding whether I want Tifa or Cid in my FF7 party.

 

[dojoteef]

Look at Blizzard's strategy. They will create entire games and scrap them, only to restart from scratch because the game turns out not to be fun. Yet they are considered one of the most successful game developers.

Just because developing a shitty game and eating it is better than dumping it on the public, doesn't mean it's something to be proud about. I'm sure the people at Blizzard consider ghost, or whatever game you're speaking about as failure, and modified their development processes to lessen the chance of it happening again.

I was actually refering to most of their games. Starcraft for example went through a few iterations. It started out as "Warcraft in Space". They did not like it so they scrapped it and started from scratch.


One issue I have with your argument is your exclusion of outside factors such as budget and time constraints given by the people funding the game. Many, many games are underbudgeted, understaffed, and given too little time for the requirements demanded of them by those funding the development. I am working on a game right now with a four month dev cycle. FOUR MONTHS. Even though the technology for the game is already in place that gives very little time to create the content, let alone ensure fun. The seemingly smallest changes can affect someone's perception of fun. Take control scheme, difficulty level, time between game events, etc. These are the sorts of things that need to be tweaked and those things need time. You can have the best foundational game mechanics in the entire world, yet if you screw these aspects up most people will be too fed up with the game to notice. Just look at the difference between one D&D game and the next.

Telling a developer that they should ask for more time is futile. If they had the option every single developer would choose it in a heartbeat. That is where the line between business and gameplay really screws most devs.

I can imagine what happened with NWN2. Atari was banking on the game being a smash success (monetarily) like the original NWN. They likely told Obsidian that they wanted the best game possible and it had to have a new graphics engine (I can not imagine any publisher that would not make that request due to the amount of time that passed between NWN and NWN2.). Obisidian told them that it would take more time than Atari first planned, yet Atari said they were only willing to fund for a certain amount of time. Obsidian neared the end of the dev cycle and could have likely released the game, but it would not have been fully "complete". Atari saw the potential of the game because of all the features/gameplay Obsidian did and decided that they were willing to bank more time and money into the game in order to make NWN2 a must have. Once again, it is really the business side of things taking over. Only the truly independent video game developers (those that do not rely on outside funding) can afford to put off the business side, at least for a short while (or in the case of 3D Realms, forever ).