Neverwinter Nights | Code Like It's 198x

Most computer role-playing games ask you to play someone else’s adventure. Neverwinter Nights came with the tools to write your own and to run it for your friends. Computer Gaming World listed the three things in the box in 2002: “the game itself, the Aurora toolset for building custom adventures, and the DM client for running Neverwinter Nights and custom-made modules”. The toolset was the one BioWare had used to make the game. The DM client let one player take the part of the Dungeons & Dragons dungeon master, moving monsters and speaking for characters while the others played. “The DM client and tools elevate Neverwinter Nights from being just another good RPG,” the magazine’s reviewer wrote, “into a creative medium of expression.”

Fast facts

Developer: BioWare, Edmonton. Publisher: Infogrames, which renamed itself Atari in 2003.
Released: June 2002 for Windows in North America; in Britain that summer at £40. A Linux client and a Mac OS X version followed in 2003.
Rules: Dungeons & Dragons, third edition, in the Forgotten Realms.
Engine and tools: the Aurora engine, with the Aurora toolset and a C-like scripting language.
Multiplayer: over a network or the internet, on servers for up to 64 players, with an optional human dungeon master.
Music: Jeremy Soule.
Expansions: Shadows of Undrentide and Hordes of the Underdark (both 2003).

A name from AOL

The name was older than the game. In June 1991 America Online introduced an online Neverwinter Nights, built with SSI on its Advanced Dungeons & Dragons “Gold Box” games, and by 1994 Computer Gaming World called it the service’s most popular game (see the history of the MMORPG). When BioWare and Interplay announced the new game at the GenCon convention in 1999, the magazine noted that, “although commandeering the name used by an online-only D&D game that ran on America Online for years, this NEVERWINTER NIGHTS is a completely original product”.

From Interplay to Infogrames

BioWare had made Baldur’s Gate for Interplay, and Neverwinter Nights was first announced as an Interplay game, due at the end of 2000. The licence moved under it. In 2001 Computer Gaming World reported that Hasbro, which controlled Dungeons & Dragons, had sold Infogrames the exclusive right to make computer games from its properties, D&D among them, for the next 15 to 20 years. In late November 2001 BioWare ended its contract with Interplay, and PC Gamer reported that BioWare had sued Interplay, alleging breach of two contracts and the distribution of BioWare’s games to third parties without its knowledge. BioWare’s joint chief executives, Greg Zeschuk and Ray Muzyka, told Computer Gaming World that the game was on track and would be unaffected by the move to a publisher they had not yet named. It turned out to be Infogrames.

BioWare’s Trent Oster told Edge that during the upheaval the team had talked seriously about converting the game to a rule system of its own. “I felt that third edition D&D was core to the whole concept, so I fought like hell to keep it D&D,” he said.

The toolset and the dungeon master

“Neverwinter is a full programming language at its heart,” Oster told Edge. “The toolsets have access to pretty much everything in the entire game; you can customise so many things.” A builder chose a tileset, painted the terrain, placed monsters and characters, and wrote branching conversations in an editor, with wizards for most common jobs. Edge managed a lava-filled dungeon with vampires and a conversation in half an hour. Computer Gaming World’s reviewer, Thierry Nguyen, “was easily able to draft up a murky dungeon underneath some posh mansion”, but found that anything more ambitious meant scripting, where “it’d help to be familiar with the C++ programming language”.

The DM client turned a module into a live game. A dungeon master could drop in monsters for a party that was having an easy time, remove them for one that was struggling, choose the treasure, change the experience awarded, and take over any creature or character, typing its lines as the players met it. Computer Gaming World’s editors played a DM-led adventure at the E3 show in 2002, fighting through undead to free a captured silver dragon while the DM adjusted each encounter and spoke for the dragon.

The campaign

The official campaign begins in the city of Neverwinter, struck by a plague called the Wailing Death, and follows the cult behind it across the north. Computer Gaming World took nearly 20 hours over the first chapter and put the whole campaign at more than 60 hours. The player controls one character, with one hired henchman at a time instead of the full party of Baldur’s Gate; Nguyen thought the henchman idea “pretty darn good” but missed being able to control them directly. Most actions went through a radial menu and a bar of hotkeys. He found the first chapter “immensely boring” and the later ones much better, and the magazine’s preview had singled out a quest in which the player sits in judgement on two brothers for a crime that robbed their village of its children.

Edge gave it nine out of ten, and in its awards for the year it came second only to Metroid Prime as game of the year. PC Gamer gave it 94% and called it “role-playing’s current daddy”.

Servers, modules and expansions

BioWare built the game for players to host. Two years before release, Computer Gaming World described 64-player servers that could be linked by portals, so that a character could walk from one world to another, and found more than 30 websites where fans were already planning worlds, one of them to revive the AOL game. Such persistent worlds, running on players’ own machines, offered some of what subscription games such as EverQuest did without the monthly fee, a point the magazine had made in 1999.

Two expansions followed in 2003. Shadows of Undrentide added a new campaign, prestige classes, monsters and tilesets, and improvements to the toolset. Hordes of the Underdark raised the character cap to 40, with “epic” spells and feats from level 21. BioWare then sold new adventures as premium modules, beginning with Kingmaker in 2004. In 2006 Atari published a sequel, Neverwinter Nights 2, made by Obsidian Entertainment. The first game came back in 2018 as Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition, from Beamdog, with console versions in 2019, and players have used the Aurora toolset to make thousands of modules.

Sources

Computer Gaming World issue 184, November 1999: GenCon news report and preview (Interplay as publisher, release planned for late 2000, third-edition rules in the Forgotten Realms, the DM role, player-hosted persistent servers without monthly charges, the name taken from the AOL game).
Computer Gaming World issue 192, July 2000: preview (64-player servers, portals between servers, Windows, Mac and Linux versions, fan websites planning worlds and a revival of the AOL game).
Computer Gaming World issue 201, April 2001: Hasbro’s sale to Infogrames of the exclusive right to make D&D computer games.
PC Gamer (UK) issue 103, December 2001, p. 31: BioWare’s lawsuit against Interplay and Infogrames’ comment.
Computer Gaming World issue 211, February 2002, pp. 36 and 41: BioWare’s split with Interplay; Zeschuk and Muzyka on the game; a stress test with two 32-player servers.
Edge issue 111, June 2002: preview and interviews with Trent Oster, Greg Zeschuk and Ray Muzyka (the publisher change and the D&D rules, the toolset, five chapters and about 60 hours, Jeremy Soule’s music).
Computer Gaming World issue 217, August 2002, pp. 60–62: preview (the Wailing Death, the first chapter’s length, the judgement quest, the DM client, the E3 adventure, the henchmen, the three things in the box).
Computer Gaming World issue 218, September 2002, pp. 80–82: Thierry Nguyen’s review.
Edge issue 113, August 2002: review (Infogrames, £40); nine out of ten, as listed in issue 114.
PC Gamer (UK) issue 113, September 2002, pp. 89–90: Neverwinter Nights, “PCG 112, 94%”, “role-playing’s current daddy”.
Edge issue 123, May 2003, “Edge Awards”, pp. 56–57: game of the year, Metroid Prime first and Neverwinter Nights second.
Compute! issue 135, November 1991: America Online’s Neverwinter Nights introduced in June. Computer Gaming World issue 123, October 1994, p. 28: AOL’s most popular game.
Australian PC User, September 2003 and January 2004: Shadows of Undrentide (new campaign, five prestige classes, toolset improvements). Australian PC User, April 2004, p. 120, and Computer Gaming World issue 236, March 2004: Hordes of the Underdark (the character cap raised to 40, epic spells and feats).
Australian Macworld, October 2003: Neverwinter Nights among new Mac game releases.
Wikipedia, “Neverwinter Nights (2002 video game)” (accessed October 2026) (web, secondary): release dates, the Linux client and Mac version, Kingmaker and the premium modules, the Enhanced Edition, and “4,000+” community modules. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neverwinter_Nights_(2002_video_game)
See the Obsidian Entertainment entry for Neverwinter Nights 2.