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Neverwinter Nights

The Specs

Neverwinter Nights is a Third Edition Dungeons and Dragons computer roleplaying game. The emphasis is on multiplayer play with one player serving as a Dungeonmaster (DM), although it supports solo play and multiplayer without a DM as well. It uses the Omen engine first developed for MDK2, with an isometric view supported. The game will ship with about 50 modules that are linked adventures that can be played alone or online. It will also feature a robust editor that Bioware promises will be easy to use for players who want to make their own adventures and share them online or DM them. There will be no fee to play online with up to 64 players in a game at once.

The Speculation

Mark's Comments: The click-clack of polyhedral dice rolling amid lead miniatures, some painted and some not. Graph paper with partially drawn mazes. Character sheets smudged and worn through from too many erasings. Empty pizza boxes and small pyramids of soda cans. Excited chatter as the minutiae of rules are argued. Afternoons giving way to evenings spent in basements or garages or attics converted to gaming rooms. This is the essence, the aqua vitae that BioWare is attempting to pour into Neverwinter Nights, and it's something that RPG fans have been thirsting for. We're getting a computer game that's returning us to our roots of pen and paper Dungeons and Dragon gaming. Let's just hope they can deliver a game with an easy-to-use editor and good network code.

Tom's Comments: Mark just explained to me that Neverwinter Nights and Icewind Dale aren't the same thing. I get confused by all the BioWare titles that have something to do with cold things. Anyway, I'm hoping there will be massive delays before Neverwinter Nights is released, because I want to play Baldur's Gate 2 and Icewind Dale, but I'm still in the middle of Planescape Torment and I can't play two RPGs at once. It's like reading more than one book at a time -- some people can do it, but I can't. Here's hoping for a long and involved QA process and a release date sometime in 2002.