(Originally posted in club newsletter July 2002) It’s finally out! Released on June 20th, Neverwinter Nights is now on store shelves, from Electronics Boutique to Wal-Mart. This promises to be the ground-breaking computer RPG of the last ten years, since SSI came out with their legendary Gold Box series. BioWare (in conjunction with Atari!) has continued it’s string of award-winning Dungeons and Dragons games.
As you can see from the game specs, below, Neverwinter Nights
PC CDROM - 1 Player (3 disks)
Minimum
Windows® 98/ME/2000SP2/XP
Pentium® II 450 or AMD K6-450
96 MB RAM (128 recommended)
1.2 GB Hard drive space
8x CD-ROM drive
SVGA capable of 800×600 resolution
16 MB TNT2-class OpenGL 1.2 compliant video
Sound DirectX® 8.1 compatible sound card
DirectX® 8.1 (included)
Keyboard
Mouse Recommended
Windows® 98/ME/2000SP2/XP
Pentium® III 800 or Athlon 800
128 MB RAM (256 MB recommended)
1.2 GB Hard drive space
8x CD-ROM drive or higher
SVGA capable of 800×600 resolution
NVIDEA GeForce 2/ATI Radeon video
Sound DirectX® 8.1 compatible sound card
DirectX® 8.1 (included) or higher
Keyboard
Mouse
Neverwinter Nights is, like Gaul, divided into three parts. First of all, there is a brand-new single-player game, a successor to (though not a sequel to) the fantastic Baldur’s Gate series. It alone is worth the price of admission: 60+ hours of game play (100+ for those who enjoy finishing every quest and sub-mission). It is playable in both single player and multiplayer mode.
The second part is a powerful multiplayer tool, the DM Client The DM Client allows the host of a multiplayer game to directly interact with the adventure as it progresses. The host can add, alter or delete items and monsters from the game on the fly; increase or decrease monetary and experience awards (including altering experience levels), and even take over (“possess”) NPCs and monsters in the game, allowing the DM – er, host – to fight or otherwise influence the players face-to-face.
But really, all that is an almost minor aside, given the core of Neverwinter Nights: the Aurora Toolset. With this, users can create their own adventures, design dungeons and cities and wildernesses to set their own D&D campaigns in. It comes with a complete palette of textures, sounds and designs, plus allows for easy import of custom elements. Best of all, when your game is complete, you can allow internet players in to experience your world! Just so you know how powerful the Aurora Toolset is, understand that the single-player game was built using it.
Neverwinter Nights is the second licensed Dungeons & Dragons computer game to utilize the new, third edition rules (the first being last years’ much-reviled Pool of Radiance). I played through the opening three sections of the game with a half-orc Monk; my friend with a human Paladin. Our gameplay experiences were substantially different: his conversation trees generally involved polite commentary – high Intelligence and Charisma; mine were fairly crude and derogatory – low Intelligence and Charisma. It was a riot, watching my 8 Intelligence Monk say things like, “Me go now – this boring talk” to Very Important NPCs, as they in turn used words of one syllable or less to explain things to my character. Also, the game tailors treasure to the character’s class – I received Monk-specific magic items, my friend fighter-specific items.
I can think of very few negative points about Neverwinter Nights. My single biggest problem, aside from the inability of my four-year-old machine to run it, is that the game doesn’t fully incorporate the D&D rules, specifically a big chunk of the Skills and Feats. While I understand that many of them simply don’t translate well into a computer game, there were quite a few that were left out that did translate well. For example, the Improved Initiative Feat simply provides a +4 bonus to the character’s Initiative roll in combat. Initiative is used in NWN – you can see the “roll” in the text during combat. Yet NWN does not have the Improved Initiative Feat. Why, I do not know. There are other, similar examples.
Web note: Neverwinter 2
