Neverwinter Nights Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description
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
Play centers around the development of a character that 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.
The first and final chapters of the story in the official campaign deals with the city of Neverwinter itself, but the lengthy mid-story requires the player to venture into the countryside and then northward to the city of Luskan. Neverwinter is a city on the Sword Coast of Faerūn. It is part of the Forgotten Realms campaign setting.
In Shadows of Undrentide (SoU), the story begins in the Silver Marches, eventually moving toward the desert of 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.
True to its Dungeons & Dragons roots, the first thing a player must do is create a 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 damage inflicted).
The robust multiplayer component separates Neverwinter Nights from previous Dungeons and Dragons games, as there are many servers for players to choose from. Each server, depending on hardware and bandwidth, can support up to 64 players or more in the same module. NWN game servers run as a variety of separate genres and themes, including Persistent Worlds (which are similar to MUDs), combat arenas, and simple social gatherings similar to a chat room. The campaign included with the game can be played with friends, for example, or an intrepid team of builders can build a virtual world similar in scope and size to commercial MMORPGs.
Servers can be linked together as well, allowing the creation of large multi-server worlds. Two early examples include "A Land Far Away" and "Confederation of Planes and Planets".
Because Neverwinter Nights lacks a global chat function aside from the supported Gamespy, players typically join "pickup" games through the game's multiplayer interface, or schedule games in advance with friends. Matchmaking sites, such as Neverwinter Connections, facilitate scheduling of games, and the experience is much like traditional Pen-and-Paper roleplaying games.
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. It is a combination of a visual tile-based terrain editor, a script editor, a conversation editor, and an object editor. The Aurora toolset has spawned many modules that are available to download, each of varying quality depending on the skills and creativity of their creator(s).
Aside from using the supplied content built into the default game, aspiring game developers can add their own custom content in supported files called "Haks" using third party tools. Creature and object models can be created using modeling software such as 3-D Studio Max, and media composers can create their own music files and intro movies with appropriate software, all of which can be imported into a Hak file. A massive online library of custom scripts, haks, and modules are available for download at NWVault (link listed below).
The customizable nature of the game has inspired entire communities of independent scripters and content creators to develop additional tools, haks, and expansions that build off of the Aurora toolset. There are also many third-party software programs written by independent developers for Neverwinter Nights. One program of note is the NWNX2/APS package, which allows persistent storage of game server information. By interfacing with MySQL technology, builders can script persistence of object inventories, states, and variables. This package is of particular usefulness to Persistent Worlds, which require massive amounts of data manipulation above the capabilities of the scripting language.
NWScript is the scripting language of the Aurora toolset. The language itself is similar to C and Java programming languages, which can make NWScript daunting for the novice scripter. However, it allows for the creation of complex behaviors and sweeping changes to the rules inherent to each module. One set of scripts developed shortly after the release of Neverwinter Nights 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;.
One group has even used the Aurora toolset combined with custom content to convert the game into a teaching tool, simulating the environment and setting of Colonial America during the American Revolution. A city in Virginia circa 1773 was recreated, providing a stage for teaching grade school students about the life, culture, and history of Colonial America.
Overall, the success and longevity of the Aurora toolset (and by extension, Neverwinter Nights) lies in the hands of a dedicated and talented community of hobbyists, custom content creators, and independent developers. While BioWare continues to support the toolset and the community as of this writing (October 2004), the complexity of creating and writing a good module still creates significant barriers to the average gamer, so much so that Gamespy rated Neverwinter Nights as one of the top 25 over-rated games of all time, making the following claim:
"That's not to say that the game didn't spawn an active community of people who eventually figured it out. After all, this is our list of overrated games -- not complete failures. But the promise of a universal online role-playing game with a human DM remains unfulfilled."
Despite the technical learning curve, the Aurora toolset still is a powerful and versatile tool, which makes Neverwinter Nights a unique and long-lived roleplaying game. As Greg Kasavin from Gamespot writes in his June 24, 2002 review: "Some games are memorable, but years from now, people won't just remember Neverwinter Nights--they'll also still be playing."
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.
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.
This is an Article on Neverwinter Nights. Page Contains Information, Facts Details or Explanation Guide About Neverwinter Nights Gameplay
Multiplayer
Editor
Expansions
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Sequel
A sequel to Neverwinter Nights, Neverwinter Nights 2, is being developed by Obsidian Entertainment, a company with close ties to BioWare. According to BioWare, the change of developer is due to BioWare's business with other titles, such as Jade Empire and Dragon Age. External links