A Visit to BioWare

The Visit

Home, home on the range

When I first heard I was going to BioWare, I figured I'd better stock up for the long journey. After all, this would require a trip all the way across town. Yes indeed, my friends, there are advantages to living in Edmonton. Oh sure, there's the low cost of living, safe community, clean environment and beautiful city. But the real bonus to living here is being in the vicinity of BioWare, Edmonton's biggest geek attraction.

Awards, trophies and game boxes galore!

After a donut and a coffee, it was off to the races in morning rush hour. Fifteen minutes later, I was halfway across the city and ready to work, notebook in one hand, camera in the other, desperately trying to stifle the big grin on my face.

I was greeted by BioWare's Teresa Stevenson and given a quick tour around the ever-changing office landscape. After a small chat, I sat down with none other than Trent Oster, the Producer on Neverwinter Nights.

Trent 'Gnome Basher' Oster, producer of NWN

What can you tell me about NWN?

Trent has been working on Neverwinter Nights for four years now. The first year was full of brainstorming, cutting ideas, re-working others and making new ones - an overall design document. The development team grew from there, taking on steam as development proceeded. Currently, there are 46 people now working on Neverwinter Nights. This team has been working on the game for two and a half years.

A wall covered with the BG2 strategy guide

What have they been doing? Well, first they started off with taking apart the Omen engine. The Omen engine, if you don't recall, is the engine behind MDK2. It's a tight, efficient engine that was designed to only do a small number of tasks but do them very well. Obviously, such a small focus isn't enough to power a role-playing game, so the engine had to be rewritten.

The Omen engine has been expanded so it can handle the design demands of Neverwinter Nights. The end result is (going to be) the Aurora engine - similar to Omen but with a broader focus and greater capabilities. It can't run MDK2 any faster, but it can do much more. Let's take a look at how the game is progressing!

BioWare's three latest projects, and one Eeeeeeevil photocopier!