BioWare seems to have been laser focused on multiplayer and user-made content.
Gaming YouTube channel Noclip continues to release rare, archival videogame footage on its secondary preservation channel. Last week, NoClip made good on a prior promise and dropped nearly an hour of never before seen Neverwinter Nights footage from E3s 2000 and 2001. Their presenter isn’t identified, but it sounds like Trent Oster, NwN’s project director who would later found prolific RPG remasterer Beamdog.
The in-progress Neverwinter Nights is immediately way more familiar than KotOR’s bizarro world early version also preserved by NoClip. The tilesets, portraits, and character models here mostly resemble the final game, though the UI and character animations are noticeably different. Amusingly, it sounds like these builds used the spellcasting audio from Baldur’s Gate 2 as a placeholder.
What really stood out to me is the focus of the presentations: Oster spends most of the E3 2000 video talking about NwN from a multiplayer perspective, while in 2001, the video was all about how the game’s Aurora toolset could be used to quickly and easily craft custom levels. There isn’t really any mention of the original campaign BioWare was cooking up.
