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General discussion (archive)GOG loves D&D: Neverwinter Nights(35 posts)(35 posts)
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Posted September 19, 2012
GOG loves D&D! Here's why:

While our [url=http://www.gog.com/en/promo/hasbro_stacking_promo]Diamonds of D&D promo is in the works we--the GOG.com staff-- would like to share some very personal memories with you. Today we we're talking about Neverwinter Nights, the game that had an excellent single-player campaign but it was the outstanding multiplayer capabilities and modding support that prolonged its lifespan indefinitely.

Today we welcome a special guest, who committed a lot of time and effort to creating and maintaining one of the most active cRPG communities out there: NeverwinterNights.info. But before we move to his statement, let's hear what some of the GOG.com staff members have to say about NWN.
[/i]

I was an admin for one of the Poland's biggest persistent NWN servers for two years. In my opinion the today's MMO's don't even come close to the amazing feeling we maintained in our very own fantasy world. The Neverwinter Nights multiplayer was as close to the real pen&paper RPG experience as a computer game can possibly get!
--Mr.A, the GOG.com video violator


Ah, to create worlds and populate them with virtual people (and other creatures), each with its own back-story and personality. Nothing beats the feeling! I love designing devious dungeons and manufacturing monumental landscapes. Had I more programming skill I would have become an actual game dev. Neverwinter Nights--like no other game--gave me a set of almost hassle-free tools that made playing god easier than ever! And one more thing: Whoah! Mr.A actually played a computer game?!
--G-Doc, the GOG.com clickity-click guy


DANGER: Neverwinter Nights just might be the last RPG you buy! Why, you ask? Quite simply, because in addition to more than 100 hours of exciting adventure that ships in the original Neverwinter Nights Diamond campaigns, there is a lifetime of adventure that awaits you online. Enough to satisfy even the most discriminating RPG player. You see, one of the most exciting and enduring aspects of Neverwinter Nights is its multiplayer capability. Shipped with the game are a toolset and a special application that enable players to craft their own adventures and host those games for others to play via LAN or internet connection. Due to these powerful adventure-crafting tools, hundreds and hundreds of online worlds have sprouted up and are frequented every day by thousands of players– even as the game celebrates over 10 years of play.

Playing online is easy. Just click the “Multiplayer” option when the title screen appears after you launch Neverwinter Nights. This will launch the Gamespy client (that ships with the game) and after creating a username and password, you’ll be connected online and can view or join any one of the worlds. Create a character on that world and jump into the action. It’s that simple. These worlds run the gamut of play styles such as roleplay (where you can let your inner elf come to the fore), hack’n'slash action, arena combat, social, or story-based. Most blend a bit of everything. They may be based on the worlds of popular fiction or be of the designer’s creation. They may be set in the world of fantasy, the modern world, or even science fiction. Try a few, try them all. You’re sure to find more than a few that fit your interests and excite your imagination.
The best part is that access to this unlimited online adventure is free. With your purchase of NWN, you gain access to play all these without ever having to pay again. Unlike those “free to play” MMO games where up it is free up to a certain level or where success can only be achieved through plunking down additional cash for gems to buy the best equipment, Neverwinter Nights online play is wholly and entirely free. Forever.

If that wasn’t enough, you could download any of the hundreds of free community-created adventures from [url=http://nwvault.ign.com/]nwvault.com[/url] (many of these are regarded as being as good as or better than the original campaigns). You can also expand your game with new spells, feats, skills, races, classes, or treasure. At the risk of beating a dead orc, this content is also free. The prolific community-driven effort to create adventures and expand the look and feel of the game has led to a large and passionate following for the game that has succeeded in making Neverwinter Nights stand tall, even when compared to the RPG games of today. So, where should your Neverwinter Nights adventure begin? NeverwinterNights.info is a good place to understand the depth of the game. Get online and find out why Neverwinter Nights just might be the last RPG you buy. Ever.
--Thudnblunder, Neverwinter Nights Community Site admin


So, there you have it. Personal stories of (mostly multiplayer) group love for the Neverwinter Nights. Care to share one of yours?

IMPORTANT NOTICE: In order to access the game's multiplayer features you need to input a unique CD-key. Here's an explanation on how to redeem one for your GOG.com copy of Neverwinter Nights: Diamond Edition.

[i]The previous entries in our GOG loves D&D series, along with some great user-submitted stories (thank you!), can be found here:
GOG loves D&D: The Baldur's Gate series
GOG loves D&D: Planescape: Torment
GOG loves D&D: Icewind Dale series
GOG loves D&D: Forgotten Realms: Demon Stone
[/i]
Post edited September 19, 2012 by G-Doc
Posted September 19, 2012
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wwwwolf: NWN was made for both user-created content (singleplayer and multiplayer) and group-oriented multiplayer
When people buy a game they expect the game to have enough quality content on its own. I don't want to dig through tons of random people's horrible campaign (because most of everything usermade is horrible) only to find a few good ones, especially not righ after I bought the game. Being able to extend a game with user made content is a great opportunity, but the game needs to be able to stand on its own. Imagine if no one had made quality campaigns, then you would be stuck with what's in the box.
Posted September 19, 2012
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wwwwolf: NWN was made for both user-created content (singleplayer and multiplayer) and group-oriented multiplayer
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HiPhish: When people buy a game they expect the game to have enough quality content on its own. I don't want to dig through tons of random people's horrible campaign (because most of everything usermade is horrible) only to find a few good ones, especially not righ after I bought the game. Being able to extend a game with user made content is a great opportunity, but the game needs to be able to stand on its own. Imagine if no one had made quality campaigns, then you would be stuck with what's in the box.
That sounds like you didn't understand what wwwwolf was getting at. But of course it's just as valid to see NWN as a standalone game and completely ignore one of its core concept, if you prefer that. It won't make you happy about your purchase, but then clearly NWN wasn't the right game for you.
Posted September 19, 2012
He sayed he was astounded about the pattern of people buying the game, playing the campaign and then concluding that the game sucks. I was just giving an explanation why that keeps happening. It's really not the least bit surprising why people have that attitude. Most people don't care about making campaigns, they want to play campaigns; it's not just NWN, all UGC games are always doomed to disappoint.
Posted September 19, 2012
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HiPhish: He sayed he was astounded about the pattern of people buying the game, playing the campaign and then concluding that the game sucks. I was just giving an explanation why that keeps happening. It's really not the least bit surprising why people have that attitude. Most people don't care about making campaigns, they want to play campaigns; it's not just NWN, all UGC games are always doomed to disappoint.
Only if they're advertised in the wrong way, and that's where I'd disagree with him and agree with you: Despite NWN mostly shining in the community department and despite NWN explicitly being created with that in mind, IMO they didn't advertise that enough and so yeah, you're right, it's very easy for consumers to miss it and be mislead about what NWN really is at its core. Not even GOG advertises that on the game card, they treat it like any other single-player RPG, when it's so much more than that and designed as a game creating tool and do-it-yourself MMO.

Judged only as a single player RPG, NWN sucks - with that I'd agree 100%. But you're missing out on a lot of greatness if you do that, because NWN is the best proof that you shouldn't dismiss an author's work just because they're not paid and published. Of course there's lots of junk among the user-created stuff, but the good thing about NWN is that there's more than enough quality stuff there as well; so much in fact that you won't even notice the junk if you just stick to the top voted modules which will keep you busy for years.
Post edited September 19, 2012 by Leroux
Posted September 19, 2012
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GOG.com: many of these (adventures) are regarded as being as good as or better than the original campaigns
Well, that shouldn´t be too hard ;)
Posted September 19, 2012
I spent 3 years playing this game and very little else. Kept me completely out of getting sucked in to any MMOs. I just moving from module to module. Some good, some bad, some absolutely fantastic.
Posted September 19, 2012
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GOG.com: creating and maintaining one of the most active cRPG communities out there: NeverwinterNights.info
neverwinternights.info isn't so much a community itself as it is a resource for the community...both for experienced players (and DMs, builders, and content creators) and for those that have yet to try the game. The Amethyst Dragon (that'd be me) built it with links and information collected from the NWN community at large. It's designed to both replace and improve upon the old offical BioWare NWN page that EA/BioWare shut down over a year ago (when the legacy forums were hacked).

-----------------------------------------------------------

Neverwinter Nights is by far the greatest value in computer gaming you can get. Pay once to purchase it (it's only $5.99 at the moment for the entire thing, and never jumps up higher than $9.99), then everything else is free...forever.

I started playing the game back in 2003 (after I got a computer good enough to run the game). I played the single player campaigns (I found all three were quite enjoyable). Eventually I started playing on multiplayer servers. This was back in the day when I was still on a dial-up connection...NWN can be played multiplayer on a slow connection!

Being curious, I popped open the included toolset. I played around a bit, and started making several small plot-less fighting modules (adventures) for friends.

In 2005, I decided to try to bring my pencil and paper D&D world to NWN as a persistent world. With some time and effort, I managed to teach myself the coding to make new things happen in the game (it's based on C++), and dove into using new art content (models, textures, etc.) produced by community members. With their assistance, it wasn't too long before I was able to start making new content myself (some folks may remember playing with my altered GUI sets, or adding tenser's floating disc to their own modules).

Even to this day there are those of us in the NWN community that are making new adventures, creating new things for this game (such as hundreds of new monsters or terrains), updating parts of it (try a google.com search for "nwn reforged"), and pushing it far beyond what it was 10 years ago (there's a software genius that goes by the name virusman that has created programs that open the game options considerably).

-The Amethyst Dragon
NWN Community Site Creator & Administrator
World of Aenea PW Creator
NWN Custom Content Wyrm
Post edited August 17, 2013 by NathanBruha
Posted September 19, 2012
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HiPhish: When people buy a game they expect the game to have enough quality content on its own. I don't want to dig through tons of random people's horrible campaign (because most of everything usermade is horrible) only to find a few good ones, especially not righ after I bought the game. Being able to extend a game with user made content is a great opportunity, but the game needs to be able to stand on its own. Imagine if no one had made quality campaigns, then you would be stuck with what's in the box.
My point was that people were still doing that when people had already released great modules and were already busy organising games online. And it's incredible how people are still doing that exact same thing, after all these years and after all these modules.

Yeah, if people discovered that the campaign is rubbish and there's no modules to play either, that'd be a bad thing. The problem was that as it actually turned out, people just tend to look at the campaign and decide not to even look at the custom modules or the expansions. They probably just assume that these tiny little hobbyist projecs or afterthought cash-ins would never be as good as the big professional campaign in the box - and that was a big fat false assumption.

Still, both the pre-release hype for the game, the marketing, and the box made a pretty big deal about the toolset, capability to make modules of your own, and the multiplayer. It's pretty sure the campaign wasn't a big selling point. Is it fair to completely ignore the custom content on principle? Is having a great campaign in the box such a non-negotiable detail that a game must always be judged by it, even when it was neither a design goal nor much of a selling point?
Posted September 19, 2012
Some youtube videos to showcase what the NWN community has made possible:

The Hive
Wild Woods tileset
CTP Dwarven Halls tileset
Zwerkules Medieval City tileset
More tilesets by Zwerkules
Arbor Falls and Cormanthor PW
Ravenloft: Prisoners of the Mist PW
D20 Modern
Modern Combat animations
etc. etc.

(NWN community videos are quite rare, I wouldn't claim this is representative, it's just a random glimpse!)
Post edited September 19, 2012 by Leroux
Posted September 19, 2012
What the uninitiated don't understand about NWVault is that you DO NOT wade through an endless pile of user-made rubbish to find the gems. NWV has already done the work for you. Every mod is voted upon by the community, and they rate the mods on a list of criteria. Every so often, a mod is is selected for Mod of the Year due to its exceptional quality. Those mods which have stood the test of time for a long while are inducted into the site's Hall of Fame.

So, skip to the good part! Go directly to the Hall of Fame on NWV and download the best of the best.

Side note: Up until Guild Wars 2, there did not exist an MMO which could compete with the complexity, breadth, community, and sheer entertainment value the NWN persistent worlds offered. Now, we have GW2, and it's prettier, but "Epic Path of Ascension" still manages to almost hold its own against the new kid on the block.


-Khalaq
Posted September 19, 2012
It took me about 10 years to get around to finishing everything in the Diamond edition, but I'm glad I finally buckled down and finished the expansions / premium modules this year.

Years ago I really enjoyed the first half of the original campaign, and while I thought the latter half dropped the ball with poor pacing and awful balancing (how is my pure rogue supposed to take down the 2 dragons near Morag in the final dungeon?) I still think it was worth a playthrough.

Shadowguard and Witch's Wake are awesome first chapters to a larger tale I really wish was finished. Still, they were enjoyable afternoons to stroll through.

Shadows of Undrentide is stronger than the OC, but still not spectacular.

The real "diamond in the rough" (so sorry) is Hordes of the Underdark. Great writing, characters, setting, quests, etc. I had a ton of fun with this one - I thought it did high level D&D better than Throne of Bhaal (which I felt was a non stop Time Stop spam fest). Every few hours I was swapping my equipment out with awesome sounding loot from dragons or demi liches or something. Excellent.

Taken as a whole, I probably spent 100 hours with this one collection. And taken as that whole, I heartily recommend this to any RPG fan.
Post edited September 19, 2012 by wenchwogg
Posted September 20, 2012
Dear GOG, since you are now buddies with Obsidian Entertainment and Atari has a lot of games here already. Why not bring the Neverwinter Nights 2 Platinum here? Pleeease? :)
Post edited September 20, 2012 by MichiGen
Posted September 20, 2012
I remember installing this one hust to play the Trading card game mod .... yeah sad old git that I am lol
Posted September 20, 2012
I had a great time with the original campaign playing multiplayer with friends and family. It was one of the best gaming experiences I've ever had. Since then I have found plenty of incredible content on the Vault and in some cases been able to have the content updated to include MP when not originally available. The community is very supportive and the game is great.
Buy it, play it, enjoy the immersiveness.
Posted September 20, 2012
GOG, please oh please release Neverwinter Nights 2 Platinum (fully updated and with all expansions). I beg of you! It would complete the D&D collection perfectly and add an awesome game. Make it happen please!
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General discussion (archive)GOG loves D&D: Neverwinter Nights(35 posts)(35 posts)
(35 posts)