Video Game Review - Neverwinter Nights

Guest Contributor: Rich L. (aka gamerdude)

Rating: 4 out of 5 Stars

Neverwinter Nights is a computer roleplaying game set in the Forgotten Realms using the Dungeon and Dragons 3rd edition rules. Concerning 3rd edition rules, love it or hate it, in my opinion Neverwinter Nights was ahead of its time when it was released on June 18, 2002 (North America) and July 3,2002 (European Union and Australia). The main game consists of 4 chapters and a prologue that propels the story forward. The plot concerns a plague called The Wailing Death that has hit Neverwinter, and the race to find the cure and who may have started it. Besides the main game, BioWare, the publisher of NWN, released two expansions and five premium modules and the game doesn’t end there! Neverwinter Nights 2 Vault (http://nwvault.ign.com/) has tons, that’s right, tons of fan created material using NWN’s toolset. Not only can you play the game, but you can create a module and then host it on the net via one of Gamespy’s network or upload it to Neverwinter Nights 2 Vault for the whole community to play.

The recommended requirements is 256MB ram, 8x cd drive, DirectX 8.1 or later, 2.0 GB of hard disk space (that’s only the main game folks, not counting any expansions, updates, or fan created material), and a DirectX sound card. It will run on almost any system from WIN 98 through XP. With Vista I’m not sure about the compatibility, so I can’t comment there. By the way, all the system requirements were found at BioWare’s website (http://nwn.bioware.com/about/requirements.html).

Graphics are pretty good, not the state of the art you might expect in new game, but for a 6 year old game, not bad. There’s some voice acting, but you’re going to read the majority of the dialogue, and it can get pretty repetitive. You will find yourself talking to some of the same characters and fast forwarding through their dialogue. I know I do. Background music and sounds are excellent. Sometimes I hear a cat, and I’m wondering, “Is it the game, a cat outside, or one of my cats?” (I have two). Gameplay, like I mentioned before, is really unlimited. You could play the same scenerio several times with two or three different characters and chances are you might not get the same gameplay due to the characters’ skills, special abilities, or spells, not to mention all the fan created material. BioWare really does a top notch job with NWN also, with regular updates that gives the player/creator more content to play around with (their last update was 1.69).

So the question is “Is it worth it?” and I will tell you if love computer rpg’s like I do, “YES!!!”. I snagged NWN up about two years ago for $6 and never regretted it. I have a folder on my pc that’s devoted to nothing but fan created NWN material, that I’ve downloaded from Neverwinter Nights 2 Vault, and it weighs in at a whopping 3.10 GB! I didn’t hardly play any of my other pc games for about a year and a half, until I just got burned out (hey it happens!). All this and not to mention all the modules that you can play online. Out of a 10, I’d give NWN a 8.5 (the dialogue kills the score a little).

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