NS5 is closing it's doors...

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Flailer
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NS5 is closing it's doors...

Post by Flailer »

Well folks, I'll preface this by saying that this is not an April Fool's joke. :wink:

The Neversummer 5 development staff has decided to make the difficult choice of ceasing development on NS5.

This brings us a lot of sadness - I couldn't begin to tell you how many hours over the last 4 years we've spent planning and developing the NS5 content. All of us wish we could have launched this baby and had a server full of 40-50 players enjoying all that we've worked on...

The reasons for doing so? Well, there's a lot and they're different for many of us.

Lack of Developers:
Even starting back a few years ago when we lost the very talented Joran, we began to suffer from a lack of people willing and able to work on NS5. Developing something as complicated as a PW is a very time consuming business. Apart from a core group of us, we never retained a consistent development staff that had the same vision and enthusiasm that we did. And it certainly wasn't for the lack of asking or looking. If you've been part of the Neversummer community for more than a few months, we probably have approached you at some point to see if you'd be interested in helping out. :) And, I probably recruited dozens of people inside and outside our community to pitch in. And, many did help - but none stayed for very long. The tools and talent needed to do NWN2 development was just too high for most. Which brings me to point 2...

The Scale of NWN2 Development:
Compared to NWN2, developing content for NWN1 was a snap. Especially when it comes to exterior areas. You can create some absolutely beautiful exteriors with the NWN2 toolset, but they come at a high cost of time. And, maybe we were too picky, but our standards for area design were too high to just slap stuff together. If we could go back and do it again, perhaps we wouldn't have been so exacting. In addition, other content like creatures and items offer a lot more customization in NWN2, but that also comes at the price of time invested. And, we wanted NS5 to be fresh and use some new ideas, so that forced us to redesign many of the scripting components on the backend. Now, observe the cycle of this point coupled with point one. :)

NWN2 Itself:
Sadly, NWN2 just didn't have the legs that NWN1 had/has. There's a lot of reasons for this.
  • NWN2 just flat out didn't sell as well as NWN1 did. For persistent worlds, that's an almost impossible cycle to break out of unless you got out of the gate very early. Fewer players, less resources devoted to the game from the publisher, smaller development pool of people to draw from, etc.
  • Support from Obsidian. Unfortunately, support for PW's was not high on the priority list for Obsidian. Which, they have their economic reasons for, so I can't blame them. But, the necessary infrastructure for PW's was too little, too late. Ironically, the state of PW support has never been better for NWN2, so it's a cruel time to decide to stop development. The final patch for NWN2 incorporated a lot of great features for NWN2 support, and there continues to be a lot of serverside and clientside tools released by the NWN2 community developers that are adding some amazing new capabilities to the game. If all of these would have been available 2 years ago, I think we'd be in a different place now.
  • NWN2 got a bad rap early on from the players perspective. A lot of the problems it had were addressed with later patches, but it never quite shook the stigma that was associated with it.
  • When NWN1 hit, it was a truly novel experience. PW creation was a bit of a hack (at best) at first, but eventually evolved into something that hadn't been seen before on that level of sophistication. When NWN2 was released, it was under a lot more competition from MMORGs and other single player games that offered similar themes.
Life Changes:
All of the developers lives are way different now than they were 7 (?!) years ago when we first got involved with NWN1 development. Marriages, job changes, kids, mortgages, etc all have led to increased pressure on our development time. So, at the end of the day, as fun as developing a PW is, it can't get ahead of all the other things in life that are more important.

So, it's with great sadness that we feel it's time to close this chapter in Neversummer development.

It's a pity because we're not likely to see for a long time (if ever) the release of a toolset of this sophistication that allows a community to develop a persistent world of this complexity. NWN2 is likely to be the best choice for a PW development for a long time - it's unfortunate that we weren't able to take full advantage of it.

I'd like to take a moment to personally thank a few of the developers that have been with us since the beginning. Fangorn has been part of the team since day one and has been a faithful contributor of beautiful areas and great ideas. Shield has been an extremely talented scripting and server/database developer on our team and has contributed a lot of great systems I'm very sorry we won't be taking full advantage of. And Cely has been our jack of all trades developer, excelling in every new area he's tackled. He's particularly been our workhorse these last 6+ months as it seems the rest of us have had life overtake us a bit.

All of these guys I've arguably spent more time with than my real life friends over the past few years and have thoroughly enjoyed our time together. I'll miss a lot of great laughs we've had in our IRC development channel... We've also had other very talented developers trickle through over the years as well that it's been an honor to work alongside with.

And, sorry to let you, the players, down by not making available all the hard work we've put into NS5. But, alas, I just don't see how things could continue.

We may be making some of the things we've developed available on the Neverwinter Vault so, who knows, if you're playing on a NWN2 server some day, you might encounter bits of NS5 after all. :)
Flailer
NS Developer

None of us is as dumb as all of us.

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