Text settings Story text Size Small Standard Large Width * Standard Wide Links Standard Orange * Subscribers only Learn more Minimize to nav 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. Table of Contents Jump to section 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. For many of the character levels covered in The Wailing Death, the monk basically just picks between two fighting modes: one that misses more but attacks more frequently, and one that’s just normal.
That, along with some intense restrictions on which weapons or armor can be used while keeping all their benefits, and a couple of knockdown and stun attacks that often don’t work, make up the whole kit for many hours of playtime, particularly in the first act. (It does get better later on, though.) The original campaign is fun and nostalgic, but it’s arguably not BioWare’s best. Credit: GOG The original campaign is fun and nostalgic, but it’s arguably not BioWare’s best. Credit: GOG A kit like this makes sense in a pen-and-paper RPG with a live dungeon master (DM), because the player and DM can work together to invent creative expressions of their abilities, and it works in a party in a video game because it’s just one of multiple complementary characters with a wide range of skills and spells. But for a game that is about 80 percent battling enemies without controlling any other characters, it gets monotonous quickly.
There aren’t as many meaningful character builds, gearing, or tactical choices as you’re used to in some other RPGs until quite a ways into the campaign. Often, you just run in and watch the dice roll until either you die or the enemy dies, while sometimes drinking potions. This problem is less severe with some other classes, but the tension is usually there to some degree. Whereas Baldur’s Gate 2, for example, had a partial authored background for your character that then played into the narrative, Neverwinter Nights leaves you as an Elder Scrolls-like blank slate.
I normally love that! It’s good for role-playing with friends, because you can make up your own character completely. But it means the story can’t be character-driven, and the gameplay doesn’t provide enough flexibility or freedom in return. Still, I enjoyed my experience with the campaign when I replayed it recently, even if it couldn’t match Baldur’s Gate 2, Knights of the Old Republic, Mass Effect, or other BioWare classics for me personally.
While the story wasn’t anything special by BioWare’s standards, there was something genuinely cozy to me about the genericness of the narrative. It took me back to an earlier time in CRPGs, before things got quite so precious. “This is just like D&D!” was still enough to sell it on its own. Maybe it’s just nostalgia, though. Since most people played the game solo, and it was a relatively small portion of the player base that dove deep into the construction kit or DM tools, I think this is the main reason Neverwinter Nights has not achieved the same pantheon status as other BioWare titles that came before and after it.
But for those lucky few who were invested in those other table legs, it actually was quite special—and amazingly, it remains so today. The persistent worlds of Neverwinter Nights “The main thing I would shout from the rooftops if I could, is that firing up Neverwinter Nights and launching its original campaign… does not do justice to what Neverwinter Nights has become since,” a longtime player named Daniel Morris told me. He goes by Irongron in the community, and he runs Arelith, which is both one of the OG persistent multiplayer servers and one of the most popular servers today. Morris is also working on a visual overhaul of the original campaign; he hopes to release it next year.
Arelith hit its peak player count “a little less than two years ago,” as Morris tells it—not way back when the game was new. “Our community is t
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