Chris Avellone Interview, Parts Two and Three
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"I am never going to do an Empire Strikes Back ending again in a game, even if they put branding irons to my feet." Why not? What sort of Will save do you need to successfully resist the branding irons, anyway?
You can never guarantee a publisher will want to do a sequel, and if they do, there's no guarantee that a development team will remain stable for the next game. For example, for NX1: Mask of the Betrayer (and this isn't a bad thing), the NX1 team did not wish to continue the NWN2 narrative. For Knights 2, we didn't have Knights 3 lined up. For Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance 1 we didn't have the same team for Dark Alliance 2, and unfortunately for the second team, they felt the need to explain the ending for Dark Alliance 1, which I didn't feel was necessary in the first place.
So, in short, I guess the cautionary tale is not to present any sort of ending that doesn't resolve itself, because anything that follows is so uncertain that you can't guarantee you'll have a shot at continuing the story.
