Who is working on the updated version of Neverwinter Nights?

Former Neverwinter Nights team members such as Mark Brockington (who wrote the scripting and multiplayer systems among many others) and Jason Knipe (who wrote the Aurora graphics engine) are our key developers on the project. Trent Oster, the original project director for Neverwinter Nights, is leading the team. We've brought Bernhard Stöckner, a community leader who maintains Neverwinter Vault, onto the development team. We also have an advisory board consisting of talented Neverwinter Nights modders and longtime community members who are essential to the future of Neverwinter Nights Enhanced Edition.

What is the Advisory Board?

The Advisory Board is a group of talented modders and programmers that have been deeply involved with Neverwinter Nights for many years. We gathered the Advisory Board together to curate and develop Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition. Going forward we will be directly interacting with the Neverwinter Nights community on the Beamdog forums and elsewhere to ensure fan voices are heard. Your feedback and the input of the Advisory Board will direct where our work is focused in future updates.

Are you changing existing content in any way?

Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition includes UI and quality of life features. All the included story content remains as it was in Neverwinter Nights Diamond Edition.

Is NWN:EE DRM free?

The single player Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition experience is DRM free. NWN:EE multiplayer requires a unique CD-Key.

What are the major technical changes since Neverwinter Nights 1.69?

Mark Brockington: We’ve decided to make the game into a good Windows citizen. We now have a write-able directory where your files reside and a read-only directory where the read-only files reside. This allows us to patch the game without us having to worry about a patch blowing away your content.

We’ve re-enabled the master server and have the service up and running within the UI. There is no need to patch your executable to get server lists anymore!

We’ve also added a cross-platform library (SDL) for implementing our input systems.

Jason Knipe: The graphics engine has been updated so that everything runs through GLSL shaders, including the toolset. The shaders reproduce the old hardware T&L functionality from the original NWN, and were not meant to add detail or fidelity that did not exist in the original. However, this means that you can create and apply your own custom shaders in the game which opens up a wide variety of graphical possibilities.

Bernhard Stöckner: We've done a thorough security audit of the codebase, removing all known exploits and crash issues in the process. We have also addressed a great many engine, game and rules problems, as well as improved server performance significantly.

On the big feature front, we have done work as well. In addition to things mentioned elsewhere, you can expect to see a collection of new scripting commands and ini configuration flags, hak loading before character creation, area instancing, and much more as the beta will progress and bring in feedback.

Last, but not least, we've approached the NWNX developers and are actively helping them with a clean and complete rewrite of the codebase to the new release, so that the majority of server transitions will go as smooth as possible. Future patches will receive the same loving attention!