Neverwinter Nights: Hordes of the Underdark Wrap Report

Faerun is a domain of high magic, great cities, ancient ruins, terrifying monsters and amazing treasures, a realm that stretches across lush forests, inhospitable wastes and somber marshes to the soaring Spine of the World mountains and beyond. As vast as it might seem, there's more. Below the surface lies a sunless world even more sinister than it is gloomy. Some call it the Lightless Lands, others the Realms Below, the Night Below or even Deepearth. For most however, it's known as the Underdark. The name itself is enough to provoke instant fear among even the mightiest of adventurers. Accordingly, only a few driven or foolish souls ever enter. Almost none return. Those who do bring reports of an enormous territory with races like the deadly dark elven drow, unknown enchantments and horrifying creatures so strange as to defy description.

In Neverwinter Nights: Hordes of the Underdark, the developers at BioWare took us on a journey into this dominion of shadows and gloom, charging us to prevent an almost unthinkable evil from achieving its malevolent aims. At the same time, the widely applauded expansion pack implemented an impressive assortment of features and elements. Among the most notable are epic level gameplay allowing characters to advance as high as level 40, six new prestige classes and over 50 feats. Of course, there are also additional creatures, spells, weapons, tilesets and more, with all the new content available to the game's highly active and enthusiastic mod community. To complement the many positive reviews we've seen, including our own, we recently called upon Producer Trent Oster, Assistant Producer Darcy Pajak and Public Relations Lead Tom Ohle for the team's post-release viewpoint.

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The Project Trent Oster: The Hordes of the Underdark expansion came about as part of a two-expansion plan we enacted following the release of Neverwinter Nights. We planned to outsource the first expansion while we worked on the second one internally. The goal with the Hordes expansion was to truly demonstrate what could be accomplished by a small team of BioWare personnel working on a project with which we were intimately familiar. We wanted to make an epic expansion with a strong storyline and support for epic level characters.

Looking at the finished project, I think we hit our goals right on the money. If I had to summarize the Hordes of the Underdark expansion I'd have to say one word, epic. Actually, I'd say it three times with a high squeaky-voiced Kobold.

The Team Darcy Pajak: Brent Knowles led the design team for both expansion packs. David Gaider, Drew Karpyshyn and Rob Bartel were the writers; and Yaron Jakobs, Keith Warner, Georg Zoeller and Brad Prince were the designers. Noel Borstad lead the programming team, which consisted of him, Ross Gardner, Paul Roffel, Brenon Holmes and Derek Beland, who was new to BioWare for Hordes. On the art side, we had Sung Kim as the art lead, with his team of Mike Leonard and Nolan Cunningham creating most of the in-game art, and Carmen Cheung and Jim Jagger handling animation duties. Adding all the new toolset features and making sure it all still worked was Sydney Tang. David Chan and Steve Sim did all the sound. Jon Epp and his team QA'd the whole thing to boot, along with help from our publisher, Atari.

Apart from this core group, we had many people add new visual elements and bug fixes. For example, Trent Oster, while producing, added the robes to the game, and Alex Scott added the new visual effects. Most everyone except for Derek Beland had worked on both the original Neverwinter Nights and/or Shadows of Undrentide, so we had a very experienced team. Even so, we contracted one of the lead artists from the original game who had moved to Vancouver to create all 50 new heads in Hordes. We used FloodGate Entertainment (who helped develop Shadows of Undrentide) to make the introduction video, and of course, we had Jeremy Soule add his excellent music to the game.

High-Level Goals Trent Oster: Our major goal when we started work on the Hordes of the Underdark expansion was to make a great story first and foremost. Our secondary goal was to broaden the game in terms of character options and content creation options. With the support for epic level characters came a great deal of new character options and abilities, which really broadened the Neverwinter Nights gameplay experience.

Development Timeline Trent Oster: The Hordes of the Underdark project began in late fall, 2002. Our original target date was mid-2003. When it became obvious we needed to move most of our people over to help out on the Shadows of Undrentide expansion, we moved our target date for Hordes of the Underdark target out to fall 2003. With this new target in mind, we completed the first expansion and moved our efforts back to the second. With a great deal of hard work and careful planning, we managed to ship within a week of our target date.

We hit a number of roadblocks and delays along the way, but we managed to get back in line and make up for the delays. Key to us hitting so near our date was careful feature rationing. We wanted to add everything into the expansion, but given a small team and a fixed timeline, we had to focus on large payoff, low-cost features. We also only publicly discussed features to which we had completely committed. Any feature we weren't sure we could complete in time was never mentioned publicly until it was "in the bag". The goal was to deliver a high quality, full-featured, epic expansion pack in time, and I think we hit on all counts.