Ah�.E3. From jaw-dropping disappointments to heart-stopping grand unveilings, this is where the video game world lays it out every year. The noise, the parties, the hype and the hip meet in one big, chaotic mingling of technobabble and gamespeak. ALFA would like to thank Feargus Urquhart, CEO of Obsidian, and Anthony Davis, developer on the NWN2 project, for taking time out of their crazy E3 schedules to answer some of our questions. We hope the NWN community finds answers of interest to the questions posed by our man at E3, Kevin Faust, in the MP3s linked below this story.
In the interviews, Kevin pushes a lot of hot-button issues, including memory requirements in NWN2 and DM client release schedule. On the latter, Anthony Davis has this to say: "The DM client is currently undergoing a heavy review and a heavy rewrite and we're taking a lot of input from the community on how they want to use it and what's the best way for them to use it and the features they would like to see in it." Reassuring news, and much appreciated to know that they're reading the many, many posts about the DM client and other critical areas of interest for persistent worlds and the whole community. As for the memory requirements, Feargus dropped a hint of exploring memory saving means, interesting to a PW of multiple servers running multi-hundred area modules. "We are looking into a way to possibly shut areas within a module off," he said. "In essence turn the mod on and off dynamically, depending on where characters are going to be�to save memory and save CPU." He couldn't guarantee it, but nonetheless it can be seen as an encouraging indication that PWs or large modules anywhere haven't fallen off the radar.
For the rest of the interviews, I'll just let you listen by clicking on the links below, and leave you with the encouraging words of Anthony Davis when asked about how complete he would consider the game itself at this stage. "It is due for a September release and I think we're waaay on track." Here's to being 'way on track.'
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