SWTOR Developer talks about using Neverwinter Nights to prototype SWTOR during original developement

This is a tweet from a former SWTOR developer. Neverwinter Nights is a third-person role-playing video game developed by BioWare from 2002 (SWTOR released 2011.)

“Still really enjoying revisiting SWTOR after all these years (this time as a tourist!). Fun fact you might not know—we actually prototyped the first act of each class story in the Neverwinter Nights toolset while we were getting the tech stack for the actual game up to speed.

It allowed us to test our hypotheses around multiplayer conversations (after some creative rearrangement of the NWN engine code), and unblocked the writing team from testing conversation and quest flow.

Combat prototyping all took place later in the actual engine, but the quest flow, rudimentary level design, and narrative proofing all took place in NWN. When I play some of the early quests, I still think of them in that world.”

– William Wallace, former Bioware/SWTOR staff

https://twitter.com/wwallace/status/1281348482494795785