Atari pulls plug on Neverwinter Nights 1

Posted on May 27, 2006 by Scott Jennings| 21 Comments

One of the stories coming back from E3 isn’t a very good one; apparently Atari didn’t want any further competition for the (non-Bioware) Neverwinter Nights 2, so ordered Bioware to cut all further live team support for NWN1.

Up until this point Bioware had made a fairly decent business model out of supporting a years-old game by paying the best community module developers to create “premium modules” for resale. The latest, a Nethack-type dungeon crawl, just came out, and a huge one set in Dragonlance was set to be released soon. To quote its developer;

I got the news from Rob Bartel at BioWare that Atari and Hasbro had just advised BioWare that they would not be giving any more approvals for any further premium modules \’e2\’80\ldblquote or indeed \’e2\’80\ldblquote anything more for Neverwinter Nights 1.

After just shy of 4 years \’e2\’80\ldblquote on the Friday before E3 when most senior business contacts at BioWare were out of the office and getting ready to head to LA, NWN had been quietly killed with a phone call to Darcy Pajak. Not only that \’e2\’80\ldblquote they had killed it just as our finish line was in plain view and we had only one lap left to go. And I suspect that they knew that full well, too.

Bioware has already said that one more patch is set to come out to fix a bug introduced in the previous version, and of course unofficial modules will continue to be released by fans. Still, it’s hard to see how Atari is helping themselves or Obsidian, the developers of NWN2 who I’d wager had nothing to do with this decision, by pissing off the mod community – the very people that they’ll need to attract to make NWN2 a long term commercial success.

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  • Big Gulp

    “Atari” making a bad business decision? That’s unpossible!

  • http://hgamer.blogspot.com Heartless Gamer

    While it sucks I can understand this…. err well the selling premium modules part.

    But NWN never truly survived on the pay for modules and I always suspected a large chunk of community was lost as more of the good modules became pay for modules. There is still tons of free content out there so I don’t see NWN1 officially dieing.

    I just don’t see how they can cut off patch support and so forth… that is just wrong.

    Now if NWN2 bombs… you’re going to see a revolt :P

  • Toastrider

    NWN2 had better run faster and jump higher, or as Heartless Gamer says, you probably WILL see a revolt.

    And that single-player campaign had better not suck either.

    –Dave

  • Toastrider

    And of course I post and use my actual first name.

    Lordy, I’m tired :)

    –TR

  • imweasel

    This is unsuprising. Atari is prone to make bonehead decisions.

  • Evangolis

    So I guess the question to ask Atari is if they see NWN2 as a one shot product, to be supplanted by NWN3, rather than maintained over time? Based on this, I’d say they are going with the older ‘single-release’ model, rather than the ongoing revenue stream model.

    NWN had it’s weaknesses, but it’s a sad end for a idea that had potential.

  • LanTheWarder

    Ok since I obviously don’t pay attention.

    Why isn’t Bioware doing NWN2?

    Who is Obsidian? Have the made anything of note?

    What the hell is Bioware up to?

  • Elistor

    Obsidian Ent. Made KoTOR2, the game that would have been great. That is if they had been allowed too,you know, finish it. Yes i know about the fan hack that lets you paly alot of the cut stuff, not the same.

  • http://uticensis.blogspot.com Troy Goodfellow

    This is terrible news, and if done because they don’t want NWN2 to be overshadowed by a DL mod (which is one of the rumors…) then that doesn’t bode well for the final Obsidian product.

    The DL mod will be released for free, which has my wife a little excited since it means she can give horses to her weekly campaign players. And not many of the premium modules were actually very good – the best recent mod, Hex Coda, was intended to be a premium release but was pushed into the gratis column because it wasn’t Forgotten Realms.

    But a lot people have been doing a lot of work in the premium mod division and may not get paid – I’ve heard that Bioware is owed quite a pile of money from Atari at the moment. To release your magnum opus in the expectation of payment and not to get it? That has to be a little annoying.

  • http://www.damnedvulpine.com J.

    Obsidian is run by Feargus Urquhart, Chris Parker, Darren Monahan, Chris Avellone and Chris Jones, among the best and brightest from Black Isle Entertainment just before Interplay hit the skids and fired everyone. So these are some of the same people who did the Icewind Dales and Fallouts.

    Bioware also successfully sued Interplay before they shut down over lost Baldur’s Gate monies. Atari has also been teetering on the edge of bankruptcy for the past year at least, and just sold off at least three of the dev studios they owned.

    I’m sure that patch will still get out, somehow. Unofficially.

  • HitNRun

    You would think that simply releasing a sequel four years more advanced than its predecessor would make cutting support for the first game redundant. The market should take care of that with ease as people begin using the newer, cooler toy.

    Unless NWN2 is looking to be so bad that Atari fears many will prefer to use NWN1.

    And considering how uninspired NWN1 turned out to be, that’s a pretty pessimistic view by Atari.

  • Octopaganini

    The Obsidian bunch was also mainly responsible for the highly lauded and often mentioned Planescape: Torment. At this point I think it would behoove the industry entire if Atarinfogrames would die in a fire.

  • Ironwood

    Lum, What are you doing to me ?

    From that Site :

    “Put that all together and there is every reason – *every reason* – to expect that NWN2 will turn out to be ToEE all over again despite Obsidian’s best efforts. The stench in the air is palpable.”

    Arg…..

  • Donny

    I believe the premium modules were a thorn in Atari’s side. Yes, they got some money from them, at least that’s likely as they are the owner of the NWN IP, but after Oblivion and the 2$ horse armor business model, they probably decided to kill the Premium Modules which offered about 1 to 2 hours of gameplay (even more for Infinite Dungeons) per $1, a much better value for the customer.

    Killing the premium modules is probably necessary if they want to go for Oblivion style micropayments without getting their ass kicked by gamers used to getting value for their $ from BioWare, and given their financial situation, it is doubtful they could resist getting greedy.

    There are some interesting theories on why Granny3D is used for NWN2 development (effectively shutting out third party custom content creators from creating creatures and other types of content)…

  • Larast

    Really, is there such a thing as a “good” PC Game publisher? None of them really seem to care what people think of them. Maybe it should be a bit more scary that these decisions don’t have a larger impact on sales.

  • http://ve3d.ign.com/ Apache

    Im shocked Atari even matters in the equation. BioWare > Atari :p

  • Rube

    Bioware got smart and bailed on Atari by NOT agreeing to do NWN2. Bioware is working on their own IP called Dragon Age (which unfortunately won’t be out til late 2007 at the earliest.) Unfortunately, Atari owns the rights to publish D&D based games and can do this kind of crap. While the premium mods released so far were not top-notch, the goodies released with them in the follow up patches were what the community really looked forward to. FYI, the Dragonlance mod is actually a Forgotten Realms mod, done by a group that was originally doing a DL mod but got hired on to do FR instead.

  • http://www.bynkii.com/ John C. Welch

    One of the big issues with NWN2 is that it kills a major draw of NWN1, namely cross platform play. There’s a lot of NWN1 players that will just start playing WoW or something else, but aren’t going to buy Windows just to play a game.

    Atari seems determined to shoot themselves in the head here.

  • http:///www.corpnews.com Andrew Crystall

    Shrug, there goes my interest in NWN2.

    (Although I should add that Dragon Age NEVER really grabbed me as a concept)

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