Obsidian CEO Urquhart Fears Lack of Originality in Offline RPGs

I like these pictures, puts more of a human element in these articles, being able to attach a face to a story :P Good to see the shack helping the hopelessly geeky in the audience at least have some connection to the real world on the side for a change lol.

Shacknews officially looks like a year book from 1982.

Damn. So much hate for NWN2 in here. Rawr!

These comments are making me feel like I'm the only person in the world that actually loved playing through NWN2 (twice, even... so far). :\

Could Obsidian please fire Chris Avellone so he can get a job at a better company?

Seriously, good writing is the only fucking thing Obsidian has delivered, and I'd rather it come attached to a finished, polished game, than the messes they've given us.

Lets start by not making RPGs in a fantasy setting.

except that if NWN2 shows the direction this stuff is going... I'd rather play an MMO. I think they're going the wrong way.

NWN2 had these endless ENDLESS dialog scenes... OK, I'm a Paladin... how do I influence the world around me? Associatae says X, I have a choice of a Good, Neutral, or Evil answer. I pick the Good answer. If Associate is Good, I just gained influence.

This is clockwork stuff. I am not influencing the world around me, I am following a script based on my original choice of alignment and class. That's the only choice I really get.

Plus, back to the dialog scenes... man, you go through this stuff for ages, it's drawn out and 50% of the time nothing is learned, nothing is affected, you just wasted a whole lot of time watching an NPC talk, and your choice of three responses doesn't even alter what they were saying.

It's just for your benefit, to make you feel like you actually did something.

The biggest and most shameful thing NWN2 did was to give you a Keep in the third part. You have to keep travelling back and forth through different parts of this keep. Conversation, change locale... wait a minute for it to load, conversation, change locale... load.

Again, the player is supposed to be "affecting his world" ... building up an army for the keep, staffing it, building the fortifications.

This costs you a CRAPLOAD of gold. I sacrificed a lot of nice toys I could otherwise have bought... and what *effect* this this have on the world by the end? I was expecting some kind of incredible battle that this keep was going to be important in.... and it had ZERO effect.

I wasted HOURS on these stupid fucking dialogs, blew cash that I'd rather have spent on toys, because of this partial vision.

I got to go on two raids that lasted 15 minutes and was given a handful of soldiers, I guess maybe they were equipped with the stuff I so painstakingly bought them.... but these soldiers *replaced* my NPC buddies. So I got Joe Loser Footman with his chain mail and sword in place of my Level 18 sorcerer with Meteor Storm.

Tell me, what is more effective for me? These losers that came along with me, I didn't babysit them, that's annoying... by the end of the raid they were all dead.

Did they kill anything? Not that I'm aware of. Did it affect me that they died? Not that I'm aware of. Was it an annoying waste of time? Yes, especially since I could have soloed the whole frickin thing.

NWN2 was the worst RPG that this unit ever put out. I loved BG, BG2, IWD, IWD2, and NWN1. NWN2 was beautiful looking, but incredibly flawed.

Go back to the roots, give us a fun game... spend less time on voice acting "plot development" dialogs that don't develop the plot or offer anything new... the whole thing is on tracks anyway, I just click through the damn things and then check my journal for the 3 sentence version that gives me the info I need instead of the 20 minute blah fest. If you want to do these things, make them useful somehow.

Obsidian I think just has to go back to the drawing board and re-figure this stuff out.

Then why did NWN2 suck Feargus?

Now go rip off Mass Effect so I can have a gorgeous game like that, with that sort of gameplay, on the PC, but with good writing from Avellone.

Why play that game now if you could just play an MMO?

Maybe you like that kind of game and you're stuck with dialup?

NWN2 was a damn fine game, although the ending kinda blew ass. Too bad they had to fuck it all up by making people download a walkmesh for multiplayer, half the fun of the first game was server hopping looking at all the cool shit people made. I'm not going to exit the game, download some additional files, and then load the game back up just to check out one server.

Here's a thought, why don't you make an expansion for NWN2, and put in some major PW support, with an autodownloader for all the stupid little files you need to play on the server? And while you're at it, make everything else in the game modular so you don't need a CS degree to add new classes and spells and whatnot.

Give the community the tools and you'll see some wicked shit.

I hated Neverwinter Nights 2. I wanted to set every single major female character on fire, as well as a few of the minor characters, male and female. They were that irritating. I've never wanted NPCs in a game to drink a nice barrel of shut-the-fuck-up more. That, coupled with the retarded bugs (it took me over an hour just to figure out how to get around the retarded patcher!), and I was very, very unpleased.

Oh, yeah, and NWN2 didn't appear to even be particularly original or innovative. It's another game in the vein of Baldur's Gate. At least, that's all it was as far as I got before I returned it.

Want to create some real innovation? Let the player do horrible things to make the NPC shut up (or talk, if necessary). Give the player some evil options more interesting than killing people and taking their stuff, or petty lying, cheating, and stealing.

I don't know about going in a new direction. I think with single player RPG's it still about the story, characters, setting, etc. They can add whatever cool new game ideas they have to that, but if the game has a sucky story and characters, I don't want to play it. Also, MMORPGs are still pretty mediocre right now to.

I was thinking this since I was 12 playing Black Gate. I thought it would be cool to see Paw Paw rebuilt later in the game.

"You can't pirate WoW. You cannot pirate an MMO. Period."

No way he can be that naive. Can he? I think all the major MMOs have pirate clients connecting to pirate servers.

Hey Nick, I don't get this: "Obsidian Entertainment, which has seen the release of several episodes in the Icewind Dale and Neverwinter Nights franchises. "

Obsidian has made KotOR2 and NWN2.

I'd say that's fair comment. There is so much room for offline single player experiences to grow and centre around the individual player and their impact on the world far more than an MMO with hundreds of shards and thousands of players could ever do.

He's absolutely correct: Other RPG developers should follow obsidian's example and start shipping half finished games, like kotor2 or nwn2. just to throw off people's expectations.

Somehow I find myself disagreeing with valid points simply because the perma-grins people display in these pictures irk me.