Why BioWare’s Neverwinter Nights still has thousands of active players - Ars Technica

Neverwinter Nights was made by the studio that produced seminal RPGs Baldur’s Gate, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Mass Effect, and Dragon Age. It sold well and was critically acclaimed at launch. Yet, somehow, it has not been canonized in most gamers’ minds over the decades the same way the games that came before and after it were.

Nonetheless, more than two decades later, it still has a tight-knit and surprisingly active community that none of those other games can rival. I think that’s partly because it was a completely different beast.

BioWare is known for making multi-character, story-driven role-playing games that focused primarily on single-player story campaigns, though some supported co-op play in those campaigns. With Neverwinter Nights, BioWare instead made a game that was as focused on a modding toolset for content creation as it was on giving players a pre-packaged story, and that emphasized multiplayer at least as much as solo play.

Today you would expect this to be a calculated attempt to bring more long-term, always-on, multiplayer-as-a-service to an RPG franchise that has mostly appealed to solo players. You might imagine it would be about selling cosmetics, a subscription, or a battle pass, or maybe you would think it was about nabbing appealing engagement numbers.

But it’s clear from playing it today that Neverwinter Nights wasn’t primarily made for those reasons. Instead, it came from a passion for tabletop role-playing and a desire to get closer to that in video game form than ever before.

Yes, the BioWare team noted in some interviews that they saw this as a trial run for exploring the idea of making a massively multiplayer game (MMO)—something that, in the year 2000, was seen by many as the hot new business opportunity in gaming, and which was in many ways the precursor to the games-as-a-service we see today. They then indicated they realized that an MMO was harder to make than they had assumed and abandoned that ambition well before Neverwinter Nights shipped.

Neverwinter Nights is not exactly an MMO. Instead, it’s designed for small communities of people to inhabit and create with, and it features a powerful toolset for virtual dungeon masters to use to subject regular players to challenges in an improvisational way on a live server.

“We always envisioned it as a table with four legs—the single player, the multiplayer, the DMing tools and the toolset (the module making tools),” BioWare’s Ray Muzyka told IGN around the time the game was released. “They all appeal to different groups, and we’ve tried to make them all equivalently high quality.”

Over the past month, I’ve been replaying Neverwinter Nights ‘ main story campaign, The Wailing Death, as a solo player, for the first time in 20 years. The nostalgia has been strong in this replay, but I have also found that BioWare didn’t quite nail “equivalently high quality” for all the pillars. Still, it doesn’t matter, because as we’ll see when we check in with the game’s community, the campaign is not the point.

The single-player experience is… fine

“The single player experience has to be as good as anything we’ve ever done in [ Baldur’s Gate ], [ Baldur’s Gate 2 ], or Throne of Bhaal and hopefully better,” Muzyka told IGN. “Our goal here at BioWare is that each game we do has to be better than the previous one.”

If single-player is one of the legs, it might be fair to call Neverwinter Nights ‘ table a little wobbly. It still stands, but you know how irritating it can be.

For example, Neverwinter Nights leaves behind Baldur’s Gate or Icewind Dale ‘s party-based systems, and instead has the player controlling just one character directly. It makes sense for a multiplayer game, but doesn’t work as well for a single-player experience in this case—at least with the Dungeons & Dragons rules of the time.

I chose to play a monk, a martial arts specialist, simply because I’ve always been drawn to that particular fantasy identity, and because I’d never played one in a D&D game. I regretted that decision after a while.