BioWare, when it made Neverwinter Nights, had hoped that it would be far more than just a game; it had wanted Neverwinter Nights to become a platform for games, specifically games based on the third edition of Dungeons & Dragons.
There were earlier computer games that utilized Dungeons & Dragons rules, namely BioWare's own, such as the Baldur's Gate franchise. However, they were self-contained adventures with their own materials and content, and most importantly, could not be played in any other way than what is officially intended. Neverwinter Nights is intended to surpass that limit, by having the very tools that BioWare used to create the official adventure in this game packaged together with the license of the game.
The publisher was originally meant to be published by Interplay, but the publication - and ownership rights - of Neverwinter Nights was handed over to the reborn version of Infogrammes, now known as Atari, who had also hoped that it would be a market-changing game. Neverwinter Nights did cause a ripple, but not as big as BioWare or Atari would have hoped. Regardless, this game would be known for its surprisingly good adventure-creating tools.
Both the tools and the adventures that can be played are run using the Aurora engine, which is purported to be the successor to the (then-already ancient) Infinity Engine. Whereas the Infinity Engine was highly dependent on hand-made 2D animations and art materials to furnish adventures that are run using it, the Aurora Engine is fully 3D, complete with features of real-time lighting (that is, automatically generated, non-hard-coded lighting) and surround sound (which was not common for many 3D engines at the time).
However, the graphical achievements of the Aurora engine are not exactly very impressive, if compared to those by other contemporary 3D engines. Much of the graphical materials that shipped together with the Aurora engine consist of polygons with sharp edges and lots of vertices. There appears to be some effort in creating different-looking textures, but the default polygons that make up the surfaces that these are stretched over tend to be very flat and thus hardly do any patterns or motifs any justice.
The consequences of these lowly-rendered 3D polygons can be seen in the designs of environments and characters in the officially packaged adventure, and also those of any user-made adventures that merely use the default materials.
There are a lot of environments with repeated textures, terrain features and wall shapes. The environments also appear to adhere strictly to grids of horizontal squares, resulting in awkwardly shaped hills and cliffs, among other terrain features that should not be shaped in manners that cause disbelief. Furthermore, if the player forces the camera to detach and move freely, he/she will notice that the environments have little in the way of skyboxes for the outdoors or ceiling for the indoor segments. Some levels, especially certain dungeons, simply float in the void.
The characters perhaps fare the worst, as they have to suffer the indignity of looking obviously cobbled together with polygons for limbs, torsos and heads, all of which resort to unsightly clipping to look as if they are connected to each other. Some of their facial features like eyes and mouths are little more than textures stretched over their head polygons, while the rest are modelled using sharp protrusions from these polygons. Their hands also appear to be little more than lumps as well, with the handles for their weapons simply clipping through their hands.
In fact, weapons can be considered to be better modelled than the character models themselves. A bow believably looks like a bow, while great-swords and great-axes look impressively and satisfactorily imposing, to cite some examples. Unfortunately, putting these onto the models for characters only make the contrast in polygonal designs even more acute.
There are many entries in the default library of graphical effects: bursts of light, magical sparkles, fiery conflagrations, and the bleeding of blood. These are mainly used for visual changes in NPCs and player characters, as well as any action that they perform that involves magic, such as spell-casting (or other things that would normally be accompanied by graphical effects) and their enchanted/magical items, if any. Bugs with graphical effects rarely occur, and most of them appear to have been applied appropriately and satisfactorily on said NPCs and player characters and their gear.
Unfortunately, these are still not enough to cover any possible occurrence that can be expected of happenings in an adventure with high-fantasy settings. The same graphical effects mentioned earlier are also used to give graphical effects for the environment, especially in the official adventure. For example, an observant player will notice that the graphical effects for many fire-related environmental objects or occurrences will use the graphical effects for the Flame Arrow and Fireball spells, thus diluting the pizzazz of these graphical effects with repetition. There are some graphical effects unique to the environment, such as rain and the spattering of raindrops, but these are so few.
Animations appear to be the only graphical aspect that is somewhat well-done. The character models have plenty of animations, for both actual actions performed and secondary ones for idle motions, such as jiggle-bone animations for ponytails. Characters also have many emotes for expressing themselves with, which compensates for their lack of facial animations. However, the same animations also highlight the simplicity of their models.
(It has to be noted here that only creatures with prominent jaws, such as Dragons and Ogres, are the only characters with facial animations - if the simple opening and closing of said jaws like they are hinged doors can be considered so.)
The environments are less animated than the character models. Few environmental objects will have animations, not even trees, a rare few of which only have swaying animations. That said, the game resorts to a lot of graphical effects to give these objects life, as mentioned earlier.
Fortunately, while the developers may not be proficient in graphical designs, they have gone out of the way to make sure that the graphics do not get in the way of the action. Any obstacles, including other characters, which are blocking the player's view of his/her player character, are rendered translucent so that the player has an inkling of his/her character's relative distance to other things. The game also has a camera that is quite competent in following the player character, and also has a default tilt that shows a virtually optimal view of the action. The player can rotate the camera to see further, though he/she will need to have set the appropriate draw distance or otherwise have fog obscuring faraway objects.
The less-than-articulate modelling for the characters and environments also results in a stable frame rate, and also allows most desktop machines to run the game at maximum texture fidelity and graphical effects.
The Aurora engine offers a better aural experience than it does a visual one. Making use of their partnership with Dolby Laboratories, BioWare has included a system for producing crisp sounds and music not just for plain two-speaker sets, but also surround sound systems. Players with the latter would appreciate this, as threats can come from all around the player character and a surround-sound system helps in locating these.
As for the aural content itself, most of them would be what the player would expect from a game with high-fantasy settings. For battles, there are the usual clashes of metal on metal where medieval weaponry is involved and the twangs of bows and crossbows releasing their munitions, among other sounds accompanying physical occurrences. For magical ones, there are the usual warbles, twinklings, roaring, whooshes and other otherworldly sound effects that a veteran of high-fantasy games would expect from magic.
Then, there are the musical soundtracks. The main soundtrack and its variations, which are used for the main menu and pivotal moments in the official adventure, are suitably epic-sounding. The rest of the soundtracks are not as awe-inspiring as these, but they are still more than satisfactory in setting the mood for the location in play, such as an ominous tune for a crypt filled with dangerous Undead.
A game based on the Dungeons and Dragons franchise wouldn't be much of one during Neverwinter Nights' time if it resorted to text and more text for driving the story forward. The official adventure packaged with the game shows that voice-over clips can be worked seamlessly into the game and be affected by the sound-generating system too, e.g. faraway voiced-over characters would sound fittingly distant.
Their technical aspect aside, the voice-overs are mostly thematically appropriate and fits the situation satisfactorily. There are some cheesy and melodramatic voice-overs, especially for the segments where the villains of the official adventure reveal themselves and where some secondary characters are faced with devastating setbacks, but there are little grating or groan-inducing lines to be suffered.
Neverwinter Nights may have been intended to be a game to craft more story-oriented games with, but it will need a good example to show that this can be done. The official adventure is fortunately quite competent at being this example.
The story of the official adventure starts by having the player character being introduced as a new recruit for titular city of Neverwinter's paramilitary unit, which is made up of loosely affiliated adventurers of different professions. It was not exactly the best of times to be part of this unit, what with Neverwinter having severe problems from within. Matters typically get worse from there, though these conveniently give a reason for the player to be invested in the story, and also for the player to be acquainted with the controls and game mechanics.
For better or worse, the story of the official adventure is crafted such that it fits a player character of any name; in other words, the player will always be referred to in the second-person, and if in the third-person, always with neutral terms that do not refer to specific details about the player character (namely his/her name and character class) or derogatory ones (typically where villains are involved) in voiced-over segments. (For segments without voice-over, the game handily generates the first or last name of the player character within the text.) These references are mostly expertly written into the lines for NPCs and are usually far from awkward, but considering the more personal manner that the other named NPCs are referred to and their plights described, the story may make some players feel that their player characters are little more than playing second fiddle to the other protagonists/antagonists, even if they are the ones that will have to instigate propagation of the story.
Furthermore, there is little difference that variations in the player character would make; for example, a Cleric will be mostly going through the same quests as a Fighter would. There are rare few occasions in the official adventure where the player character's abilities would be important, such as a segment where a Cleric can choose to use healing spells on an injured NPC instead of handing over healing items, but these options still generally lead to the same outcome, e.g. the aforementioned NPC gets healed and expresses gratitude.
That is not saying that the official adventure is not worth replaying though. There are segments in that adventure where a player can make a pivotal decision where there may be ramifications to gameplay as well as the story, and many quests can be ended in more than one way.
The gameplay, as to be expected from a game that is based on Dungeons and Dragons, makes use of the rules from the tabletop editions, but with tweaks to adhere to the semi real-time execution of the game.
The first facet of these rules can be seen when creating the player character. Following the third edition table-top rules, there are nine primary classes, ranging from franchise main-stays like the Fighter and re-vamped classes like the Rogue (formerly the Thief) and Wizard (formerly the Mage) to relatively new classes like the Sorcerer and Barbarian.
The latter would be familiar to veterans of Dungeons and Dragons games, who would know that they were experimental classes that eventually filled certain strategic gaps in the variation of abilities that player characters may have. For example, the Sorcerer is an Arcane-type spell-caster that does not need to memorize specific spells to cast them, while the Barbarian is a front-liner that has a reduced dependence on gear for protection compared to the other front-liners and instead relies more on intrinsic toughness for survivability.
Neverwinter Nights also implements character skills, which are a feature of the third edition of Dungeons and Dragons. Skills give characters an opportunity to make use of certain gear or interact with the story through event scripts that make checks against these skills; they also happen to allow players to customize their player characters to suit their playstyles, up to limited extents that do not take them beyond the official descriptions of their character classes.
The Rogue is perhaps the best example of a character class to further elaborate the mechanic of skills with, what with his/her tremendous number of skills (as befitting the canonical description of a Dungeons and Dragons Rogue). The Rogue can be developed as an outright front-liner, making use of Dexterity and Dodge save bonuses to keep out of harm's way while making use of skills like Disarm and Taunt to hamper enemies with. He/She can also be developed to make use of Traps, either obtained from disarming Traps that line dungeons or from crafting them out of materials that the player character will obtain during his/her travels. The Rogue can also be developed as a smooth-talker, allowing him/her the option of choosing a diplomatic solution to problems, if NPCs that would otherwise attack him/her give him/her the chance to open his/her mouth.
Indeed, a Dungeons and Dragons veteran would have the initial impression that Neverwinter Nights had adapted the third edition rules quite well.
However, , the player will eventually notice that he/she can ever only control a single player character at one time in the official adventure and other adventures that are made using the official and default tools. This is a marked departure from BioWare's previous Dungeons and Dragons computer games, in which the player usually takes control of a party of player characters (even if not all of them were created from scratch).
This has immediate consequences on gameplay. Whereas a party with a balanced composition of player characters may have a range of abilities for a solution to any scenario, a single player character of any class in Neverwinter Nights may not have enough versatility for that. This can lead to a lot of complications, such as a character class not having the means to bypass deadly traps that have been rigged along a corridor that he/she has to go through.
The official adventure and the default materials that are packaged in Neverwinter Nights do offer some form of compensatory measures, one of which is in the form of items with properties that can perform certain actions that are usually associated with certain character classes, such as Healing Kits that can be used by characters who lack healing capabilities to compensate for their shortcoming. These items are also associated with character skills, such as the Healing skill for Healing Kits, so player characters can spend points on these skills to enhance the efficacy of these items.
However, these items also happen to dilute the talents of player characters that have abilities which perform the same function, even rendering them redundant. For example, Clerics who stock doles of Healing Kits wouldn't have much of a need for his/her low-level healing spells (which have to be used in the same range as Healing Kits, that is, point-blank). Using Healing Kits count as a special action, which cannot be prevented or cancelled by hostile attacks that do not outright incapacitate the Cleric; this is contrasted with the casting of said spells, which can be interrupted.
That the official adventure also has merchants that sell potions with many, many different effects also render not just the healing spells of the Cleric redundant, but also some of those that the other spell-casters have. For example, Potion of Barkskin is a very common potion that can be bought at stores and found as common loot, thus making the Druid's (and Ranger's) low- to mid-level variants of his/her Barkskin spell unnecessary.
The other compensatory measure that the official adventure offers is the mechanic of Henchmen. The player character can bring along one named NPC, whose gear and abilities are completely out of the control of the player. However, they do have some convenient, if rather cheesy, designs worked into them. If they are set to use ranged weapons, they have the benefit of being designed with unlimited ammunition. They even have their own unlimited supply of potions, though these are subjected to timed cool-downs. Another convenience is that they can be asked to "level up" immediately when the player character himself/herself has achieved a level, thus making sure that they are always at least a level below that of the player character.
Their actions are not in the control of the player, but are instead under that of AI scripts that attempt to do what is best for the Henchman and the player at the time. The official adventure does allow the player to give instructions to Henchmen, effectively setting parameters for said AI scripts. However, the only instructions that can be given are very rudimentary, such as their equipped weapon at the time (either ranged or melee) and the distance between them and the player character.
The player can also give on-the-spot orders to a Henchman, but these can feel like hand-holding at times. For example, certain glitches like collision flaws may occasionally cause bugs in their path-finding, and the only way to get them detached is to issue a "Follow" order from a direction where they can turn around and reach the player character without any obstacle in the way.
Another example is how they approach battles: regardless of their AI settings, once battle commences, they will pick their own targets and perform their own special abilities, unprompted by the player. The player can somewhat direct their wrath by issuing attack orders on specific targets, but their AI scripts will always have them performing the same sequence of actions on any enemy, even if these actions may not be effective on the target. Spell-casting Henchmen are particularly affected, namely the Gnomish Sorcerer, Boddyknock Glinckle, who may cast completely ineffective spells on certain targets, such as Flame Arrows on Fire Elementals.
Fortunately, despite their categorization as "Henchmen", Henchmen are more than just extra muscle (or magic, or both). Each of them has a background story to tell, as well as a minor stake in the plot of the official adventure. Each of them has a longing for certain items of sentimental value for them; the locations in every chapter of the official adventure may contain these items for retrieval and return to these Henchmen.
Retrieving these items can feel somewhat contrived, as their presence in the chapter can seem so convenient at times, such as an NPC villain having said item that can be looted off his corpse when he is eventually dealt with in a seemingly unrelated quest. However, they do unlock more back-story exposition from these characters, and this can be interesting and entertaining to listen to. In addition, they will also grant special quest-category items that also have special bonuses when equipped, and which can be upgraded from chapter to chapter.
Returning to the matter of the player possibly not having the best solution for a situation, the usage of the third edition rules mean that the player won't necessarily be caught in a situation where there is simply no way to win. For example, if an enemy creature seems to be quite resistant to mortal weaponry, the third edition makes certain that this creature only appears to have a finite resistance, i.e. it is not completely immune to such weapons. A determined - or very lucky - player can still attempt to chip away this creature's hitpoints with weapons that are largely ineffective against it, though the game still ultimately rewards preparedness.
Another crutch that BioWare has provided in the official adventure to lessen the drawbacks of having only one character directly under the control of the player is the ability for the player character, and any companions, to rest at just about anywhere as long as they are not engaged in battle at the time. For better or worse, this make battles a lot easier as the player can "reload" any intrinsic abilities or spells that can only be used a limited number of times.
Although player characters are restricted by their chosen classes, the third edition rules allow them to perform many abilities that are made available through their innate talents, skills and feats, which are special and generally beneficial bonuses that they can obtain after every few levels; feats in particular can open up many new actions. Making use of so many abilities can seem daunting, so thankfully, BioWare has designed a controls scheme that is oriented around the use of many hotkeys, all of which can be customized to be used for any action, from the use of skills and abilities like Knockdown to the casting of spells and delivering of orders to Henchmen.
These hotkeys are mapped to the function keys by default, and with a holding-down of the Shift or Ctrl key, can bring up another row of hotkeys that are also mapped to the same function keys. The glut of hotkeys would be especially handy for the Wizard, who can have so many spells for so many situations. (In fact, Wizards can be considered among the most prepared classes for the official adventure.)
In addition to hotkeys, Neverwinter Nights also features radial menus that are convenient, intuitive and context sensitive. For example, bringing up the menu on open ground mainly shows options that affects said ground and/or what the player character (or Henchman, or summoned creatures) can do with said ground, while bringing it up on an enemy target mainly shows offensive options.
Most players would find that the controls are up to the task.
The gameplay of Dungeons and Dragons has always been oriented around probability-dependent mechanics; Neverwinter Nights is no different. While this may be a deterrent against any person who has yet to play any Dungeons and Dragons games and is averse to luck-based gameplay, BioWare has incorporated some features that it has learned from previous games to ease the level of entry.
Chief of these is a cluster of difficulty modifiers that can be either be set to conform to pre-packaged groups of settings or have individual settings tweaked. These modifiers affect factors in the running of the game, such as the all-important (digital) dice throw, which can be rigged to give higher chances of success, for example. A comprehensive digital manual that comes with the game also helps the player utilize the features in the game, if he/she bothers to read it. Even if he/she does not, every loading screen in the game is accompanied by tips and hints on how to play the game better.
Up to then, Neverwinter Nights did seem to be the most accessible of BioWare's role-playing games.
Neverwinter Nights also sports multiplayer games (which is a huge departure from BioWare's previous games), and also supports the use of servers which can be set to have numbers of player as high as up to 96 active ones. However, the multiplayer experience depends a lot on the adventures being played.
Adventures are packaged in the form of "modules". Modules can be set for closed multiplayer sessions (effectively preventing new players from joining) or open ones. There can even be modules set on dedicated servers to support a persistent game world. However, the game only has limited player-chat features that are not able to notify players about any updates on new/existing game sessions, even if they are already running Neverwinter Nights. This prevents players from coming together spontaneously, unless they already have advanced knowledge of these sessions.
Perhaps the most important component of Neverwinter Nights' multiplayer is the Dungeon Master feature. The Dungeon Master is a disembodied player in control of switches and other scripts that govern the execution of the game session in play - if there are any and any that are given over to the Dungeon Master to control in the module. A Dungeon Master also exists outside of the roster of active players. He/She/It is expected to alter the challenges that players would soon face, so as to give them an entertaining experience in the current game session. There can even be more than one Dungeon Master for a session, if it is particularly large and has a long duration (especially for sessions set up as persistent game worlds).
In single-player adventures, the computer will take on the role of Dungeon Master, though how good it is will depend a lot on the AI-scripting that is included in the adventure modules. The official adventure by default always generates the same kinds of challenges, regardless of the player character's statuses. This is to the detriment of the replay value, and is an odd design decision on the part of BioWare, who could have used the official adventure to showcase the Dungeon Master feature.
If it is not apparent already, the longevity of Neverwinter Nights is highly dependent on user-made content. In this aspect, the game comes with powerful tools to craft adventures with, as mentioned earlier. In addition to being able to craft adventure modules for single-player, short-term multiplayer and persistent game-worlds, the toolset for the Aurora engine is also very accommodating of material that had been made using third-party tools, especially scripts.
The toolset also allows for the creation of new races and classes for player characters, if players are wont to incorporate things that they knew from the tabletop games.
The game also makes it easy for players to incorporate mods for the game. A directory that is created during the installation of the game can be filled with material such as new models and scripts, and the game will load these and override any default game material/scripts with them if there are any file overlaps. (Incidentally, BioWare will also make use of the same directory for later updates to the game.)
There is no hassle such as digging into the game files where simple mods are concerned, but the Aurora toolset does come with official features that allow this very option, if the player wishes to make in-depth and very permanent tweaks to official game materials. Each feature also comes with documentation that can be accessed while they are running, though deep modifications or scratch-building of game materials is still very much the domain of enthusiasts with some IT experience.
However, it has to be mentioned here that doing so requires the player to have enough computing resources for the Aurora toolset to tap into, and these resources can amount to more than those which are needed to run game sessions. There is unfortunately, no in-depth documentation on any scaling of the resources needed for crafting modules and custom content; these are highly dependent on the game material being handled.
Furthermore, as convenient and powerful as the toolset is, it cannot allow the easy incorporation of new graphics, such as more sophisticated polygons and skeletal animations for models, without a complete overhaul of the engine, which can ever only support DirectX 8 graphics. The game does allow the use of sophisticated custom-made audio materials though, thanks to Dolby Laboratories' support of this game (at this game's time, of course).
Nonetheless, players who can get over the visuals of the game will find that there is plenty of fun to be had from the Aurora toolset and the myriad of adventures that it can make and run.
In conclusion, Neverwinter Nights may not have been the revolution that BioWare and Atari had wanted it to be, but it certainly offered a lot of versatility and potential fun for players who had wanted to create digital adventures using the third edition rules of Dungeons and Dragons.