When I first knew of people building their own PCs it was back in the early to mid-2000s, and if my mates weren't building them specifically for Neverwinter Nights, then it was a game I heard them mention often enough.
They had their own Dungeons & Dragons group going, but Neverwinter Nights would allow them to adventure together on the computer, using the latest D&D rules, no less. Not only that, but it would allow whoever was the DM to create their own campaigns and alter them on the fly to accommodate the groups' actions. Neverwinter Nights was the future of Dungeons & Dragons.
Or was it?
Frustrations
I've got my hands on the 2005 Diamond release of Neverwinter Nights, which comes with a bunch of extra content, mostly in the form of more campaigns to tackle with your party of adventurers. The number of different versions of Neverwinter Nights results in this one being called Neverwinter Nights Deluxe: Special Edition, but I shall call it the Nevergonna Launch edition.
It has problems launching from GOG, which is where I bought it in the first place, but the workarounds are simple enough, and before long I'm up and running in ultrawide with the bell and whistles on and the violence slider all the way across to 'Special'. No, I've no idea what that'll lead to either.
The city of Neverwinter is suffering from the Wailing Death, a plague that is sweeping through the lands and causing everyone to panic. Champions are sought to deal with the problem, including tracking down its origins, which are clearly hinted at being caused by some nefarious group, rather than it just having sprung up and infecting everything.
There is, of course, the option to create your own character, but there is also a sizable list of pre-made characters to get you into the action right away. All manner of races and classes are available, and then I noticed that some of these folks appear to start at level 15...
Uh... yeah. I'm gonna choose a level 15 character if you don't mind. I start with a weapon, I begin with stats that'll actually hit something - why would I not?
Fun Times
So here we are, in a bedroom. Not your usual starting point for a fantasy RPG, but one we'll immediately leave to head into a conversation.
Further Frustrations
Playing at this resolution isn't going to help you with any immersion, what with all the dialogue happening in the corners of the screen rather than somewhere near the characters, but that's my fault.
What isn't my fault, and to be fair isn't really the developers' fault either, is how characters have to omit names and pronouns, seeing as they don't know what character you are. Seeing something written ever-so-slightly differently isn't too jarring. Having a conversation stop dead, but continue in the text is jarring. With the sheer amount of dialogue, having everything voiced would result in an awful lot of audio to find space on the disc for, so we can cut it some slack and just be prepared for it going forward.
This prelude is a tutorial where you are taught how to interact with the world. WASD movement is supported, as is point and click, which players would be familiar with from earlier games like Baldur's Gate. Clicking on interactable objects results in you doing a default action, like talking or attacking, and a right-click will reveal a kind of quick-select options wheel for actions like examining something or casting a spell.
Hotbars and keyboard shortcuts will have you viewing your inventory, journal, map, or casting spells and using special abilities with no hassle at all - provided you know enough D&D to know when a special ability is useful, or when it can be used.
At the end of our tutorial, we are ambushed by someone teleporting into our training halls, and after dealing with them (or watching the other NPCs deal with them, slow to the draw as I was), I was told of our situation.
We're looking for a cure to this plague, but the creatures that may yield results have been lost or something, and need hunting down so we can see if they're of any use. It's not what I was expecting to have to do, I must admit. Then again, this whole start has been a little strange. If the city is infested with plague, why do we start in the safety of this wherever-I-am? If champions were called for to deal with it, why is the task to look after some creatures?
I'm a little confused, but at this point, with tiny text that sometimes comes with voice-overs and sometimes doesn't, I don't find myself pressing any other dialogue options to find out more. I just want to get into the game, and that means escaping this academy, which is now under attack from teleporting ne'erdowells.
Combat in Neverwinter Nights uses a real-time incarnation of the D&D 3rd Edition rules, which I had a brief spell with before we all moved on to v3.5. There is the option to pause the fight and cue up your actions in your own time, but as a level 15 ranger with a +4 Longsword, I didn't feel the need. I was only up against skeletons and goblins. I could deal with the problem.
It wasn't long before I was outside and seeing the city for the first time.
It is here that I want to write 'underwhelming', but in actuality, compared to the fixed views we had in Baldur's Gate, for example, this is a fully 3D space where you can move your camera in and out and round and round in order to get a good view of your surroundings - and there's plenty of them.
It's just a shame that my framerate at this moment absolutely tanked and sucked out all the joy I had of seeing the sunlight cobblestones of Neverwinter. Zooming in to reduce what was in view helped a little, but not enough.
I was heading for the Peninsula District, where there were rumours of some of these creatures I needed to find. Unfortunately, this is the prison district, and prisoners have escaped and are running rampant in the streets.
There are loads of prisoners on this map, but they have only two character models between them, that of a brute and a spellcaster of some description. The next half hour of gameplay went like this: move into a street, trigger opponents to engage me, everything within earshot swarms to your location, sit in one spot and click on an enemy, wait for them to die (time varies depending on how many incoming attacks you dodge), click on another enemy, repeat until quiet, loot the remains, rest to recover your health, move into the next street.
Games have identical enemies, I get that, but these were so obviously generic enemies that they were an absolute nuisances, more than anything else. The city guard was on site, but only near the safety of the gate. You could draw enemies towards them for an easier time, but that's a hassle if you're on the other side of the map, so you just sit there, soaking up the damage like a sponge until everyone around you dies.
Why not have pockets of fighting that you could join or skirt around? Why not allow players to sneak past the trouble? Maybe I could have done, but more often than not, I'd round a corner to find someone already coming my way, and the most accessible out I had was to wait for the die rolls to kill them. Combat just wasn't satisfying, and yet that's all I seemed to be doing...
I'm in the prison itself at this point, fighting my way through the inmates to get to whatever guards are still alive. I've already forgotten why I'm in prison doing such a thing. I think there's gold in it. Well, I know there's gold in it, I just don't remember what the gold reward is for.
I make it down to some other part of the prison where a lone guard calls me into the safety of a room, says he's not going anywhere until his colleagues have been avenged, and I turn the game off.
Final Word
I have written down a lot of negatives for Neverwinter Nights, but amongst them all, I can see a game to be excited about. Maybe excited is the wrong word, but I do see the potential. A jump into the third dimension, as aged as it is these days, still makes for an immersive experience. The voice acting, where it is, isn't terrible by any means. The plot is unusual and hasn't grabbed me, but the addition of new campaigns, created by both the developers and the community, should, in theory, allow for there to be something for everyone. Scrap all of that and invest in the game for the multiplayer experience with your own D&D group, and Neverwinter Nights is incredibly appealing.
But it's 2019 when I write this, and it hasn't aged well. It's not awful, despite the framerate and text-size issues I was having, and I think they're fixable without too much difficulty. The question is whether I'd want to.
I haven't got an accurate grasp of the difficulty, for one thing. Was starting at level 15 what allowed me to take on large groups of prisoners? Would there be fewer prisoners had I been level 1? If there weren't fewer, and I wasn't capable of taking on many opponents at once, I think I'd be rage quitting with the way they swarmed at me as soon as they saw me.
I've also been out of the D&D universe for so long that I haven't got a clue how special abilities worked back in the day, and what half of them even are. That's definitely on my shoulders for starting at level 15, instead of getting those abilities one by one as I level up, but there is still a giant Hotbar of gaming that I've not touched, and its the same with spellcasting. I assume casting spells is as easy as attacking people, but what about all those caster level checks and spell failure stats?
If you are the type of person who reads hundreds of pages of D&D rules, Neverwinter Nights may be for you, but given its age, it may only be for you if you played it or D&D 3.0 before. It's a tough sell, and while I'm not aversed to playing it again to see if the problems I've faced were of my own making, I kinda want to leave it where it is and play something that was inspired by Neverwinter Nights instead.
The 1001 list appears to say that its campaign creation and multiplayer gaming is the reason you must play it, which is how I haven't played it, and perhaps never will. As I say, those features sure do sound appealing to the right players, and maybe in its heyday, Neverwinter Nights was the only way to play an RPG on the computer.
The boat has sailed on this one, but it was sailing to a plague-infested city, so I think we dodged one there...
Fun Facts
Some health items in the game depicted the Red Cross, but the Canadian Red Cross got in touch to remove them, in an attempt to discourage the use of the symbol outside its original intentions.
Neverwinter Nights, developed by BioWare, first released in 2002.
Version played: Neverwinter Nights: Diamond, PC, 2005.