No Neverwinter Nights 2 'til October

During its publicity buildup to E3 this year, Atari announced that Neverwinter Nights 2, the sequel to its popular PC role-playing game, would ship worldwide in September 2006. The news was welcome to fans who had long awaited the sequel to the BioWare-developed, Dungeons & Dragons-inspired Neverwinter Nights. This time around, development duties were being handled by Obsidian Entertainment, the independent studio founded by a group of former Interplay and Black Isle notables, including Feargus Urquhart (Fallout 2, Icewind Dale).

Today, though, Atari announced that Neverwinter Nights 2 will be missing its September ship date--slightly. "Given the sheer size and scope of Neverwinter Nights 2 and its 50 to 60-hour single player campaign, it was decided to move the global release date of Neverwinter Nights 2 out a month to late October," the France-based publisher said in a statement. "This extra time is invaluable as it allows fine tuning and polishing of both the single and multiplayer experiences."

Neverwinter Nights 2 aims to both emulate and expand upon the original, which offered a huge single-player adventure, online capability, and tools to create levels. The new toolkit will include all-new texture sets for new environment types, as well as implementation of the SpeedTree middleware, which lets the game render large clumps of trees and other vegetation quickly. The game itself will include a new party system that will let players build a bona fide adventuring party with up to four characters. GameSpot's previous coverage has more details on the game.