Neverwinter Nights (2002)

I have a vast and expansive number of things I picked up far after it was in vogue to experience them. I'm just the sort of person to want to dig into the old, the retro, see for myself what experienced game designers and roleplayers spent their time in. Before I had direction of what I should look to for inspiration, before I had developed my tastes, I was interested in approaching the 'classics' like one would books. Surely people tell you to play old games because they have some significant importance in the artform, right? Unlike books, it's less actually driven by master works, but more nostalgia and personal attachment. It's not mature enough of a medium to really have the same kind of appraisal of classic works yet. Even so, Neverwinter Nights did happen to end up being crucial in the lineage of CRPGs anyways, but now I'm also one of those people who can only speak of it and only replay it because of a sentimental attachment and not because I feel so strongly about it.

It's really not all that different from Baldur's Gate when it comes down to it. I'm sure a lot of fans of both Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights may take offense to that. But purely speaking of the base game, it is the same sort of fantasy pastiche one could expect. Everything feels so swelling and epic and people speak in this sort of pulp talk. Things never go so deep, relationships don't necessarily matter and neither does your disposition all that much. All of the actual role-playing you do is flavor simply for your own personal satisfaction, in a world that's far more catered to a particular idea of what fantasy should be. Fantasy with a capital F. High fantasy with a capital H. There are many proper nouns. All kinds of wild and fantastical characters far off from our own reality. Their problems seem so novel. A magical disease caused by a big eyeball fart monster, who spread it in the "beggar's quarter". It's all so silly and on the nose. And while I have such a low tolerance for it when Owlcat and Larian do it, I couldn't help but just smile and roll my eyes here, because something has been keeping me.

Writing and flavor silliness aside, the game delivers with the gameplay. Rudimentary by today's standards. Low poly in a way nobody finds chic. No more beautiful pre-rendered backgrounds. It's time for ambitious, and ugly fully 3D environments. The systems are all here. A great translation of D&D complete with multiple hotbars, with infinite granular customization of skills and multiple classes. Three different camera options. Real-time and pause gameplay. Traps, sneaking, engagement, flanking, sneak, attack of opportunity rules. It is more of what I'd wanted out of Baldur's Gate. To make it even better, it had all of the tools for people to host online servers, effectively making it a proper and extensive D&D MMO. I didn't play it online, I'd gotten into it far too late for that. But I heard stories, albeit mostly gross ones. I guess you could say Everquest did this kind of thing before Neverwinter Nights, maybe even other games before that. But this one had the right feel for a D&D style game and with the online as a cherry on top. It never felt like an MMO, really. It is a D&D game with online functionalities.

Around the time I was getting into this game, I was in college and had been close friends with someone in a college in the same building as mine. We'd spend a lot of time together on smoke breaks talking about media, comics, art, movies, games, and most of all, we would talk about roleplaying. He was older than me and had first got me into Vampire: The Masquerade, which I'd played a fairly long and ambitious campaign with him. We were both just sort of weird maladjusted and edgy vampires looking to express ourselves in a creative outlet that didn't feel like work. For a college where I was learning games, it sure really made me fucking resent games and resent art at several points, really making me want to throw it all away at several points. But the connections I made with him, it carried me through it. He was like a brother to me.

After some time, we got together with even more friends and put together a D&D group. I'd played it in passing when I was little, but while I was at the time so into all of these TTRPGs and CRPGs, it sort of felt like magic, the way I could take what limited ways I'd hope to express myself in a game like Neverwinter Nights and bring it out into an actual group with other people. Pour my creativity into something, with a bunch of new friends. First few characters I made weren't so inspirational or original obviously, but we all had a blast working through these strange campaigns. Pledged one to a fae spider goddess. (a funny foreshadowing to my weird spider thing and fae thing) Made another nature loving firbolg serve Ma'at, another really funny omen for me. I felt amazing with these people, the safest I'd ever felt with friends in my life, getting to expand upon all of our creative ideas together and just have a fun game with a lot of goofiness, and i meant more to me than these RPGs ever did at that point.

In turn, the sentimentality and connection, the purpose and inspiration of those video games and how they impact our lives became this undeniable truth to me. It gave me a healthier foundation and love for games, for design, for art, and for the sense of community and collaboration inherent to it. Retroactively, all of what I read in Rules of Play began to click. In my earlier classes, works and theories of design and psychology, systems and play. What it serves and what it ought to be designed around for, vaguely alluded to in such a dry book. It's like the book was a fixture to frame a whole different set of ideas that were invisible to me, completely clear at that point. Play and creativity and limitations and rules and creating a suspension of disbelief and narrative and story, suddenly did not feel like dry or contrived elements necessary to engage in art as labor necessarily, but as this nebulous sort of magic. And so then, I knew I was a game artist at my core. A designer, a creative, a writer. Not simply because it's what I can do better than any other type of labor. But because it all finally slipped into place.

A lot of people went to my college and didn't know how long they were going to make it, eventually dropping out. Some particularly pessimistic folk would try and guess how long they would last. I met my fair share of people who weren't cut out for graduation and tried to be nice and encouraging. And I knew a lot of people had other financial and life problems to prevent them from graduating too. I had my own road bump down the line later on myself. But there were some people who never necessarily 'got it' in the way I felt I got it. And it wasn't just D&D to help me reach this point either. It was a great deal of really absorbing the lessons and reconsidering my relationship with art on top of all of this experience with friends starting with CRPGs and leading into TTRPGs. It is a difficult, arduous process to really reflect and learn and change in many of these crucial ways to adapt yourself to become the kind of artists we were learning to be. Grueling and miserable and at times dispassionate, it's what we knew, what we felt. You needed a little bit of the fire with you through the most mind numbing and horrid moments and had to really have something driving you to the finish line and prevent you from becoming a burnt out drone.

There were a lot of other things I was battling with at the time. Some things not appropriate enough to be talking about on a site like here, really. But to put things short, I was not yet transitioned but deeply feeling as if life was not worth living because of it. I hated the way I felt about myself, I hated my body, I feared my relationship would end. By then, I was with my (current same gf) for so long, years, and wondered if she wouldn't really understand it. But she sort of knew, and was supportive of it the whole way through. And making friends with so many creatives, I learned many of the irrational edgy and hateful beliefs I'd held, the spaces I'd spent time in, were not good for me. I had to let it go, and it was the only way I could get on with this new group of people who were embracing a new friendship with me. It was the only way I could cut out a path of loving myself and living my own truth.

So back to that friend group, and my best friend of the time. We'd got along for some time, done a few campaigns, and I'd even been introduced to one of my favorite settings, Demon: The Descent. My friend wanted to run a one shot inspired by Planet of the Apes 2, and it was here I experimented with my first RPG character who was a woman. And as fucked up and bleak as that one shot is, it really felt amazing. All of those friends were really welcoming of it, and of seeing more of the me I wanted to be. Made accommodations for me, really made me feel at home. It really felt amazing. I was really starting to come out of my shell. Just one last demon I couldn't overcome. I was living in an abusive home. I was ashamed. I didn't want anyone to know, and I didn't really think telling my family I was trans would make my situation any better. But one day, it burst out in anger and self defense. Because I knew what I wanted, and I didn't want more of this fear hanging over me. And so, surprisingly, I was embraced by my family too. It wasn't the first time one of us came out, thankfully for me. So it wasn't so bad.

Even though that was fine, I was still in an abusive home. I took a break from college to sort my life out. I wanted to start transitioning, my life was in flux. I was scared of what my colleagues would think and say about me. Many of them just saw trans people as a topic to sexualize and debate for fun. I was close to graduating at the time and got cold feet too. I had become so passionate as a game artist that something shocking happened. I realized that a real game artist who truly loves what they do shouldn't have to put up with the kind of education experience I was, and should not look forward to the sort of future I was. There were times where my best friend wanted to watch a movie with me, came to my house, put it on. And while we watched, I was chugging through work. 60 hours of combined school and homework a week. I was in a crisis and at a serious crossroads not knowing where to take myself. So I went a bit insular.

I had always been one to miss a few games now and again. The depression would hurt too bad, or the schoolwork, or insomnia, I had a serious problem with that. I had a lot of problems. I also didn't want to sleep over because of a deep sense of terror at people witness me having nightmares and saying something about what I was experiencing at home. And with the difficulty of transition, I think my friends understood, but just didn't get all of the details. The abuse was my secret. Everyone else in the group had troubles too. People in their lives trying to hurt and get revenge on them, money struggles, and my best friend even felt lost with his career in the same way as me.

He wanted to do something noble with a criminology degree. He was aware of the problems of the world, with how bad capitalism and state violence is. Left leaning and pretty much a reasonable guy but unconvinced by my anarchist beliefs. Unsure of why I had such problems with authority, but sure enough he got why I hated crapitalism. I at times would try to dissuade him from certain beliefs. One of the most contentious was his conclusions of the Milgram Experiments and Stanford Prison Experiments, which I found to be erroneous in what they said of other people and faulty in how they were conducted. Still, he tried to understand me. But he drifted, had to focus more on a girlfriend, who would at times be part of our games. She had a kid, and he was a lovely little guy. Loved her, she was a professional carnie clown and taught me a lot of stuff, invigorated my love of miming. After a certain point, it all started to just feel so unstable and break apart.

I was close to finishing up my degree after getting back in. We were still doing our games, but they were further and further apart. He was close to graduating too. He was more pensive a lot of the time, but we'd still have a lot of fantastic banter. The talking went down online, I deleted my facebook because of the Cambridge Analytica data scandal and because I was unconfident about being out to every single person on the internet at the time. I was more radical, tired. He was more.. missing something. Really wanted to justify to himself that he wanted to become a detective and work with the police. I wasn't going to change his mind. He was living his own life, I was living mine. I loved him. I still do. But I'm not in contact with him and would likely have trouble to do so.

But there was one night. I was dressed super goth and slutty, as I tend to for the most part. I make no apologies. It was a fun bantery ride back home, and that week, we had an argument about the police and police brutality. I'm never going to forget it. But for you, I wouldn't go into the morbid details so explicitly. But we were pulled over, and I was assaulted by a police officer while they were doing a bullshit registration check on him. Trying to make small talk with them about wanting to join up. I was dead frozen as it had all played out. And when they were gone, the most unbearably maddening silence of my life. There was nothing I could say. There was nothing he could say. He dropped the idea of joining the police. He quit facebook too. The games eventually would stop, things were naturally drifting in that direction as a few other friends had moved away. And after my graduation, I eventually would take some time to plan to move away myself.

On my graduation, I felt a deep nothingness about what I had earned for myself and what future I had cultivated. The passion and fire I felt during college and with my friend group was starting to feel like a distant memory. Just a stupid paper at a school swept up in controversy. I'm trans, what game company will hire me, the world despises and wants to hurt people like me, the sorts of things I would be thinking on a regular basis. In the year I took to finally move away from family, I had completely burned out on art. I stopped making 3D art entirely, for that time pretty much. I was spent up on passion, but I knew I had some work to do to find that spark again. I wasn't giving up, but dormant. The dissolution of my D&D game group was a big part of all this. And.. the violence, the abuse. Everything.

Before I did leave, my friend asked to borrow my copy of Neverwinter Nights Diamond I got from Bookmans, of course I let him. He misplaced it, and he said he'd get me back a copy of the Enhanced Edition when it comes out. He never did, since we fell out of touch, but I like to think he would still want to today. I like to think he thinks about me in the same way I think about him. Just a deep sadness. But I'm proud I ever met him and played all of those games, spend all that time together, because he's a great guy. Even if I think he was wrong about sociological experiments, about the police, military, socialism. It doesn't matter to me, really. He was a light in my life when I really needed it, and I feel so ashamed that I sometimes wouldn't show it well enough. But I am now, where he probably will never see it. I'm sorry. I hope you're doing well.

Neverwinter Nights is a piece of art from the past that is still holding up strong today. It is an RPG with every D&D element, enemies of the lore and storytelling that you can think of. It is bundled with beautiful graphics for the time, a dark atmosphere and excellent voice acting.

In Neverwinter night you got a classic D&D story about saving the world from evil. It begins with an intentionally spread plague that ravages the city of Never Winter. It is your task to find the culprits responsible and find the unique components and creatures to create a cure. You fulfill your task and move on to catching the one responsible.

You learn that a mysterious cult is behind the plague and that a greater evil is at play here. Eventually, you find out that this cult is planning on resurrecting the “Old Ones”, the first creator race and the beginning of all beings. To stop this from happening, you must find four words of power and prevent the ritual that will unleash the Old Ones.

You fail in this mission, and the Queen of the Old ones arises. You fight her in her Prison Stone where she is about to break free from and defeat her. In the end, you are the ultimate hero that saved Neverwinter and the entire world. Just epic.

Neverwinter Nights plays with classic D&D rules, but with some small adjustments. Instead of turn based combat, you fight enemies in real time, while every hit is calculated with a dice roll. Your chance to hit the target and the damage output is depending on this roll. You can also get attacks of opportunity when trying to run away and enemies can score critical hits on you.

All the weapons and gear that you would expect from a DND 5e Game are present. You got bludgeoning weapons like the flail, mace and Warhammer, slashing weapons like long swords, short swords and axes, and many exotic weapons like enormous clubs or scythes. Neverwinter Nights includes a lot of enemies from the original lore. You got Intellect Devourers, Yuan-Ti, Dire spiders, bears and wolves, Orcs, Ogres, Goblins and many more.

The graphics in Neverwinter Nights are still beautiful, especially given the time period in which it was launched. The best part is that this game runs flawlessly on modern hardware and resolutions, which earned my deepest respect. The sound effects and music are also greatly done. The town music and battle tracks are really enhancing the DND experience, and your characters’ commentary really make you feel that you are in an RPG adventure. Although I have to say that this commentary will get old quickly, because it consists of three or four lines.

This game is gigantic. It has four chapters with many maps, areas, caves, houses and arenas. If you are a completionist like me, you can easily spend more than fifty hours in this game, excluding the various DLC that are available for it. My only issue with the progression throughout the game is the fact that the first three chapters are long, drawn out and mysterious, while chapter four gets all loose ends slammed together in three or four maps. Although not the intension of the developers, it felt a little rushed towards the end game.

I think there is only one problem with this game, namely the AI of your followers. Throughout the game, you find many different characters that can join your cause (only one at any given time) and they help you fight, unlock chests or disabling traps. The problem is that you cannot control their actions. When a follower is opening a treasure chest, but spots a trap, it immediately abandons the current task and moves on. This is especially bad when the trap is in another room and you cannot access it yet. Also, when you click on a trap or chest, your character will move towards it, but, if the movement is blocked by so little as a ledge or your own character, it will stop dead in its tracks.

Another small issue is the layout of the dungeons. Many play inside “a mansion like” maze that gets a little boring and repetitive after three chapters. A good thing however, is that you can export your character, so you never lose all of your hard work.

Nevertheless, I thought Neverwinter Nights was a great game. It is packed with content, lore, story, unique items, quests, and enemies, great story telling, and will keep you entertained for many, many hours.

Definitely recommend this game.

So far a great game. Just way too long. I'm not done yet (8/3/03).

Definitely an entertaining game. The best D+D game ever. With that being said it was waaay to much of the same thing. Hack, Slash, level up. Do over. Why do RPGs have to be 60 hours? I still have IWD2 yet. I liked it but it would have been better at 20 hours. (02.05.2004)

I actually was not able to finish this game, because it's quite a dreadful experience, stopped in chapter 3. Absolutely do not play this game as a single player game, it's quite awful in this regard and pretty much incomparable to something like Baldur's Gate.

I'll remember this game for multiple things:

• awful AI; the henchmen "companions" musthave been a complete afterthought after someone told the devs that people might want to play the game solo; or they were told to add henchmen as a punishment. One of the two.
• every chapter of the story has exact same structure.
• all the traps I couldn't disarm because I wasn't a thief character and didn't have a thief henchman (since you can only have one). You just end up facetanking all of them and if you die you reload, very fun.
• ALL THE LOCKED CONTAINERS. There's thousands of them, and 99% of them contain completely useless loot, mostly few gold pieces. Locked chests, crates, SARCOPHAGUSES?! (how on earth is this even locked? magically?), what a terrible waste of time opening those is. Who even has keys for all of that, random crates with 3 gold pieces in them locked on the street. Why? Is there some clown mephit flying around locking this stuff up as a joke?

When I die and if there's afterlife, and I will be allowed one question; I will ask: What on earth were the devs thinking putting all those locked containers in Neverwinter Nights?!

That's NWN in a nutshell.

Locked, locked, locked, locked, locked, locked, locked, locked, locked, locked, locked, locked, locked, locked, locked, locked, locked, locked, locked, locked, locked, locked, locked, locked, locked, locked, locked, locked, locked, locked, locked, locked, locked, locked.

I'm going to have nightmares about locked containers. And yes, those locked containers literally broke me and made me quit the game.

I decided to skip out on Neverwinter Nights 20 years ago because it sounded like it was just a worse take on Baldur's Gate. I was correct.

I played a bit of the main campaign and then decided to skip to Shadows of Undrentide (separate campaign that starts from the beginning -- most people like it better than the original campagin), which I made it halfway through before deciding it wasn't worth going further. SoU was a step up from the main campaign, but that's not really saying much.

D&D rules always make a game worse than having a properly designed system (not that I don't like quite a few games that use D&D rules!), and Neverwinter Nights suffers the worst from it. Allowing only a single player character and an AI henchman but still throwing situations at you that make you want all four standard roles leads to a lot of tedium on an already boring game. Further, the 6 second rounds acted out in real time while only controlling a single character makes combat plodding and uninteresting. This is on top of all the usual issues I have with D&D -- low level randomness, Vancian spellcasting and resting mechanics not being to my liking, boring martial characters, annoying high level gameplay (wizards dispelling wizards), etc.

The graphics and gameplay suffer heavily from the early transition to 3D. Everything looks a bit lifeless, and it's surprisingly clunky to move your single character around.

The audio design just feels off. I couldn't find a way to mix sound effects, voices, and music to have everything at an appropriate level. The sound effects themselves were also just a bit underwhelming. The music is actually pretty good though, with many tracks composed by Jeremy Soule.

Deekin, the kobold bard with dreams of being an adventurer, was by far the highlight of my experience. Deekin truly deserved a better game.

It's playable at first, it kind of feels and controls like every early 2000 MMORPG you played but you know: an actual RPG... It seems promissing and acceptable, but then, the bad pacing hits, this is in no way a game like Diablo 2 that's for sure, and that's obvious, these are both different genres but what I'm getting at is that it is not a smooth progression, there are moments in this game where you cannot progress due to how stiff the pacing is.

You'll go through an entire dungeon and suddently there is a point you can no longer go because the enemies do too much damage and kill you in two hits, like the very first prison mission in prison is an example of this, this is where you try and cheese the game to progress a little futher which works for a while but then you realize you are literally supposed to be doing anything else than finishing a dungeon you started... But despite the recurring pacing issues that limit what one can do, there are still a lot of options present in this RPG which are decent enough if you have the patience towards a slow-paced RPG...

The combat can repetitive as well considering most of the time you are just going to one enemy to another, clicking and clicking, resting and using potions, and using a little magic every once in a while, it's not the most stimulating game. Also it doesn't help that the background noises are kind of bad and become annoying once you heard about them once.

The fantasy setting can be a bit dull, especially with the very monotone look of this entire game, I cannot emphasize enough how much this game looks like an early mmorpg you found while you were young, in a way though World of Warcraft is more colorful at least. Even with the whole dark setting it is trying to set with the whole plague which makes me feel as if im in the 18th century it can be a bit boring.

This game hasn't aged that gracefully because since then there has been a lot more open games in the genre which are a lot more faster paced and have a lot more creative ideas, I can see why this was one of the best game ever due to how huge it is in comparisson to what many were used to, and for it's worth: it still runs fairly well today and is very polished. And maybe you do get through the monotony and get some nice things like a drinking contest with an orc.