Neverwinter Nights Q&A

BioWare’s community manager, Jay Watamaniuk, has posted another Q&A on the official Neverwinter Nights forums. There are a total of 10 questions, all answered by Ray Muzyka, Greg Zeschuk, or Trent Oster. Here’s a snippet:

Q: I realize that any answer you give me will undoubtedly change before the release, but in the current build of NWN, how many Monster Animal Models are there? How many separate NPC models that are not just PC models? I also realize that you can use PC models for NPC’s which will give us a lot of variations.

A: If you’re specifically looking for the number of creatures in the ‘Animal’ category (we describe them as woodland beasts and similar creatures), after firing up the toolset I count 11 completely different woodland beast models. There are another 10 or so that are more than just texture changes – they are true geometry shape variations (for a running total of 21). Beyond those, there are another 10 or so that are texture variations (for a total of around 30). There are a lot of other creatures that arguably could be considered ‘Animal’ that aren’t included in this total. There are a ridiculously large number of monster and animal models in the game.

For NPCs – if you’re talking the main D&D races we do build them out of the same models as the PCs. Because of the part-swapping method we employ in making humanoids there is functionally an unlimited number of possible combinations (I’ve been told over 4 Trillion different model combinations). That doesn’t mean they all look good – there are probably only a couple billion of those…