Neverwinter Nights 2: Mysteries of Westgate Q&A

WarCry had the opportunity to quiz Ossian Studios’ Alan Miranda about their soon-to-be-released Neverwinter Nights 2: Mysteries of Westgate adventure pack and the company as a whole.

WarCry: How did Ossian Studios come up with the idea for Mysteries of Westgate or was the decision for the location of the adventure pack made by Atari?

Alan Miranda: Ossian was the one that decided to do a game located in Westgate, although ultimately, it’s up to Atari and WotC to approve the idea. It was Luke Scull, our lead designer on MoW (and well known for his AL series of Hall of Fame NWN1 mods, one of which was to have been a premium mod), who came up with the idea of setting a game in the city of Westgate.

From my experience at BioWare and working with Rob Bartel on the premium mod program when we were doing Daggerford, I knew that city adventures were a lot tougher to do versus rural adventures. This is because so many people and buildings are packed together in a city, that you have to design more quests to fit in that smaller space (call it quest density). If you don’t have a high quest density, then your bustling city will be devoid of interaction and feel completely empty.

So doing a city adventure was going to be a lot more difficult, and I was initially hesitant because I thought that we might be biting off more than we could chew (something we’d had far too much of on Daggerford). But, in the end, we felt that the location was the ideal one out of our list of locations, and we had expanded our team since Daggerford, so we decided we were up to the challenge.