Neverwinter Nights (2002 video game)
Neverwinter Nights (NWN), produced by BioWare and Infogrames Entertainment (now Atari), is a third-person perspective computer role-playing game that uses the Third Edition of the Dungeons & Dragons rules (with minor changes). It was released on June 18, 2002.
Description
The game centers around the player, who through the development of his character, becomes the ultimate hero of the story. The player is single-handedly responsible for defeating a powerful cult, stopping an insatiable plague, thwarting an attack on the city of Neverwinter, and many other side quests.
Most of the story in the official campaign deals with the city of Neverwinter itself, but certain story sections require the player to venture into the countryside. Neverwinter is a city on the Sword Coast on Faerûn. It is part of the Forgotten Realms campaign setting. In Shadows of Undrentide (SoU), the story begins in the Silver Marches, eventually moving toward Anauroch and the Netherese city of Undrentide. Hordes of the Underdark (HotU) is a continuation of SoU, and as the name implies, most of the story takes place underground in the vast subterranean world known as the Underdark.
Gameplay
Since the game is based on the Dungeons & Dragons rule set, the first thing a player must do is create his character. One can choose the character's gender, race, class, alignment, stats (strength, dexterity, etc.), abilities (skills, spells, feats, etc.), appearance, and name. There is a great deal of customization involved - one can be, for example, a marksman (Ranger class), healer (Cleric class), and choose the skills and feats that would help them the most (a marksman might want Point Blank Shot, for example, while a healer would probably choose Bless and the Healing spells).
The actual game is rather lengthy (original NWN has three CDs, while the expansions each add one CD). There are five "chapters" in the original game, with each chapter consisting of a general storyline (the first chapter, for example, deals with a mysterious plague in the city of Neverwinter), and within each chapter, there are many quests, subquests, and mini-storylines. The game's actual mechanics are based on the Dungeons & Dragons rule set – most important actions (fighting, persuasion, etc.) are based on a die roll. For example, when a fighter attacks, he might use a 1d6 short sword (meaning that one roll of a six-sided die determines the outcome).
Multiplayer
The meat of the game itself would be its online capabilities, as there are many servers for players to choose from. Some servers run as playerworlds, while others are arenas or even simply social gatherings. The campaign included with the game can be played with friends, for example, or simply people who wander into the server looking for a game. The modules servers run vary as well; they can be a player-created one or an official one, many servers running their own module.
Editor
In addition to the game, the Aurora toolset is included, allowing players the opportunity to craft their own adventures and share them with others, allowing the possibility of creating a module (the term used to describe a game made in the toolkit) even more advanced than the campaign included with the game. Many modules are available to download, each of varying quality depending on the skills and creativity of their creator(s).
Aside from using the supplied Aurora toolset, aspiring game developers can create custom "Haks" using third party tools such as 3DS Max, and create their own music files and intro movies with appropriate software as well. A massive online library of custom scripts, haks, and modules are available for download at NWVault (link listed below).
One of the most widely used and supported haks by independent developers is the NWNX2/APS package, which allows persistent storage of game server information. By interfacing with MySQL technology, builders can script persistence of character and other object's inventories, states, and so forth. This in turn allows for a more functional "persistent world" structure to be implemented than the base game would normally allow.
Another commonly used package is the HCR ("Hardcore Rules"), designed to bring the flavor and difficulty of the game closer to the original "Pen and Paper" form of Dungeons & Dragons, 3rd edition.
Both of these independently developed supplements to the game have inspired entire communities of amateur scripters to develop additional tools, haks and expansions that build off of the original supplements (standing on the shoulders of giants, as it were.)
Expansions
In June 2003, the Shadows of Undrentide expansion was released. It adds 5 prestige classes, 16 new creatures (two of them available as additional familiars), 3 new tilesets, and over 30 new feats and 50 new spells, as well as additional scripting abilities for those who use the Aurora toolkit.
In December 2003, another expansion, Hordes of the Underdark, was released. It expands the maximum amount of levels a character can reach to level 40 (epic levels), and adds a number of spells and items appropriate to such characters, as well as further tilesets, prestige classes, feats, and abilities.
In March, 2004, an expansion known as the Community Expansion Pack based on community material was released. This expansion was not made by BioWare, and it can be downloaded free of charge. It adds much new content to the game and works with or without the two earlier expansion packs released by BioWare.
History
The game is named after a former online game that was played on the AOL service, using software and an interface that was based largely on the "Gold Box" engine that premiered in Pool of Radiance in 1988. The original NWN, often referred to as "oNWN", was released in 1992 and was taken offline by AOL in 1998 after a switch to a new pricing model for games. The original game followed Dungeons & Dragons 2nd edition rules and was capable of being played by as many as 500 players at once. A persistent-world module, Neverwinter: Resurrection, has attempted to recreate many of the locales in the original game and attract the original player base.