Neverwinter Nights

Neverwinter Nights is a video game that consists of 0 releases

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Bioware's epic RPG lets you play as a noble paladin, a sly thief or a powerful mage as you battle to save the world from a powerful foe that rises again.

Overview

Flush from the very successful Baldur's Gate and Baldur's Gate II games, developer Bioware abandoned their former 2-D, isometric perspective design roots, and began work on a brand new, 3-D RPG set in the Forgotten Realms universe. After years in development and several delays, Bioware released Neverwinter Nights on the PC in 2002. Using the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons’ rule-set, Neverwinter Nights shipped not only with an excellent, 50 hour long campaign, but also a robust campaign editor to let players design their own Dungeons and Dragons campaigns and share them online. The game also allowed players to completely the campaign mode cooperatively online, as well as play any of the player created modules. The expansive campaign and incredible create-a-module features helped the game build a devoted fan community that created and released content years after the game's release.

Intense!

Beyond the game's incredible size and the steady stream of new content during its life cycle, Neverwinter Nights made huge strides in accurately delivering a Dungeons and Dragons experience to the PC. A simple, elegant new interface made selecting abilities, casting spells, and using feats much easier to access. The game moved much faster than in Baldur's Gate, and the increased game speed endeared the RPG to many players who were never interested in character sheets and rolling dice. Neverwinter Nights also, despite being a large game, reduced its scope in several key ways. The player only controlled a single player (and, usually, one henchman) instead of 6 to 8 different party members. This reduced the amount of item and class micromanagement greatly, streamlining the RPG elements and making them easier to manage. Combined with the intelligent writing and interesting quest design that Bioware was always known for, Neverwinter Nights was hailed as an RPG triumph, and the finest CRPG released since Baldur’s Gate.

Plot

Bioware were coming off the great success of the Baldur's Gate series and even though, Neverwinter Nights' campaign failed to reach the truly epic proportions of the former, it still is probably as good a single-player role-playing campaign as any there has ever been. The story essentially begins when the city of Neverwinter lays a call-to-arms to all adventurers in nearby locations to come and help defend the reagents that have been found to cure a plague that has been destroying the city. At the end of the game's prelude, all the reagents are lost in battle and it is upto the player to retrieve all of them to provide hope for the city of Neverwinter.

The campaign itself is split up into 4 chapters each of which provides a unique overall objective to the player. The first chapter has the player hunting down the reagents that were lost in the prelude as well as helping figure out as to which cult is behind the whole plot to overthrow Neverwinter. The second chapter really serves up some unique plot points and takes a surprising turn at the end of it all. The third and fourth chapters push the story forward ultimately ending up in an epic climax fitting of the build-up in the preceding chapters.

Prologue and Act 1

The city of Neverwinter is in chaos. A plague of unknown origin, named the Wailing Death has been slowly killing off the populace. The citizens are in uproar, demanding their King provide them with a cure to the plague. In the hopes of finding a hero who might be able to put a stop to the disease, the King of Neverwinter, Lord Nasher, creates an academy for budding warriors, mages, and healers of all races and classes. Led by Lady Aribeth, a formidable female Paladin, the academy would take in promising recruits and turn them into heroes. The hope of all of Neverwinter must be somewhere in that academy, a champion who will find the cure for the disease.
That mysterious hero is, of course, the player's created character, who, at the start of the game, is just about to graduate from the academy. As it just so happens, that very same day, the academy received a shipment of four extremely rare creatures. The creatures may be able to provide ingredients to cure the Wailing Death.
Before you can graduate and investigate the creatures, the academy is rocked by a tremendous explosion, and the player soon discovers that most of the academy students and teachers have been murdered by several mages and an army of goblins. To make matters worse, the four creatures were lost in the chaos of battle, and now lie somewhere in Neverwinter. Having survived the battle at the academy, Lady Aribeth instantly graduates the player's budding hero, and tasks them to recover the four missing animals and try to discover the source of the Wailing Death.

Gameplay

Bioware bundled along with the game, the full 3rd Edition Dungeons and Dragons Manual to help players who really wanted to get into the nitty-gritty aspect of DnD. However, creating a character was as easy as choosing a race, class and then letting the game itself pick what abilites are best suited for the player by clicking a "Recommended" button which made the character creation aspect of the game much easier than most other RPGs where it tends to be somewhat intimidating to newcomers.

Standard RPG leveling and grinding gameplay apart, some unique side-quests and player created experiences provided great relief from the more subdued nature of the main campaign in addition to providing some unique items and spells unavailable in the main game. Bioware also provided players with the ability to multiclass their characters which gave experienced DnD players the chance to create some truly innovative mix of races and classes as well as adding to the overall replay value of the game.

Multiplayer

Neverwinter Nights is probably more fondly remembered for its multiplayer than its single-player campaign. Bioware provided the entire DnD power to the player with the ability to play as the dungeon-master where one player essentially controls everything as in a DnD board game. Although, playing as dungeon-master did require intimate knowledge of the 3rd Edition rules as well as a group of friends to be enjoyed to the maximum, it did provide a unique online multiplayer experience when compared to other online RPGs at the time like Diablo II.

Bioware also bundled the entire toolkit which was utilized to create the game which led to some great fan-made experiences many of which were truly unique in their own right.

General Information Edit

Game Name	Neverwinter Nights
Platform(s)	PC Mac
Publisher(s)	Atari, Inc. Atari MacSoft
Developer(s)	BioWare
Genres	Add a new genre Adventure Role-Playing (RPG)
Themes	Add a new theme Fantasy
Original US Release	June 18, 2002 need a fuzzy date?
Original US Release	know the real date?
Aliases	NWN