NWN 2 Adventure Pack Interview at RPG Watch

RPG Watch has an interview posted with the Ossian Studios developers. Mysteries of Westgate is the first "adventure pack" (premium module) in development for Neverwinter Nights 2.

Specifically discussion the adventure pack concept, here's a portion of the interview:

RPGWatch: The Adventure Pack concept has been promoted as an evolution of the Premium Mod program - what sort of improvements can players expect over the previous generation?

Alan Miranda (CEO of Ossian Studios): The NWN1 premium mods ranged from about 2-15 hours of gameplay, so what we wanted to do with the adventure packs was to set their gameplay length baseline as starting from the premium mods' upper limit. We felt that 15 hours would be a sizeable campaign when compared to the 20-25 hour MotB expansion pack. Actually, one of our beta testers played everything in Mysteries of Westgate and it took him 22 hours, but then people's play speeds can vary (some slower, some faster).

Our goal was to also make the new adventure pack experience more elaborate, such as having different branches and endings along the main storyline, as well as adding complex sidequests. The sidequests we did in Darkness over Daggerford (our former NWN1 premium module) were a big hit, so we wanted to make sure that we included those kinds of optional adventures and that players were given a lot of alignment and moral choices, skill-based paths, etc. in Mysteries of Westgate.

We very much considered MoW to be a small game instead of a traditional module, in terms of the great lengths we went to develop content for it, as well as balance and polish it. We wanted to set the perfect ambience for the city of Westgate, and even with audio, we went the whole hog by adding more than 25 minutes of music to the game, which is more than what we did for the BGII: Throne of Bhaal expansion back when I was the producer on that at BioWare.

It's a very good interview so be sure to go read it.

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