On Day 2 of E3, I had the privilege of being part of a Neverwinter Nights session held by the Bioware Team. Four Stratics members (including Den Dragon. Yes he exists!) along with 2 other attendees were players while Tom Ohle, a Bioware person, held a DM session for us. Our party of six included the classic mix of Fighter, Paladin, Rogue, Sorcerer, Cleric, and Wizard. It was a simple quest delving into a three level dungeon. Among the monsters we fought were skeletons, wraiths, mummies, bone golems, water elementals, and umber hulks. The umber hulks look much better than the many movies they've been previously shown in and they're also much larger. Our characters were level 18, so we had access to a lot of higher-level abilities. The wizard was able to cast Weird, one of the most powerful spells in the game, which causes an incredibly large tentacled monster to appear on the screen that literally scares everything to death. The other spell effects for such spells as Cone of Cold and Prismatic Spray were just breathtaking. Even the simple Paladin's Bless spell causes yellow runes to briefly float around the screen in its entire area of effect.
After we beat the small quest, we were allowed to play with the DM client. All six of us were DM's at one time, so the screen was total havoc. We summoned every type of dragon, elemental, daemon, and giant you could think of for about 10 minutes straight. Surprisingly the frame-rate never perceptively decreased and the client was very stable. Tom, "the Bioware guy," said they'd had 24 dragons on the screen at one time (they're HUGE) and the client maintained a 25 fps rate. Granted this was running a 2.4 GHz processor with a GF4 4400, but it's still quite impressive. I'll have screenshots of our DM'ing experience up in the next day or two for everyone to see.
Lastly, we were shown the level editor. Once again, Tom whipped out a fully playable level with several encounters in about 5 minutes. He showed us how easily monsters were just picked from a simple Windows Explorer type menu and dropped right onto the world. A simple right-click to bring up the properties menu allowed the creatures and items to be fully customized to the DM's liking.
Later that day, Trent Oster held a demo session at the public Infogrames booth to give everyone at E3 the NWN experience. One of the dev. team members quickly built a large dungeon linked from a pre-made town and then he and another dev. member played that level. Pictures from this event will be posted soon also.
I was able to speak with Trent later and he talked a bit about the single-player game for a little. He said that when they were first developing it, they were shooting for at least 60 hours of gameplay. The single-player game now officially has over 100 hours of playtime if all the quests are pursued. One of the questions I had for him was how to use a team of people to develop a large module. He said the key to a successful team would be to have one central person assigning sections of the module and that central person also putting it all together into one large module. Without a good team leader, the large modules that many people are planning will just fall apart after a while.
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