Neverwinter Nights

1001 Video Games

Neverwinter Nights appears in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die by General Editor Tony Mott.

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To coincide with the US release of Neverwinter Nights, Infogrames bought a full page ad for the game in the men's magazine Maxim. The interesting detail is that unlike other publicity for the game this one was a unique layout that mimicked the monthly "Have you seen this girl?" one-page pictorials of the magazine, which contain a full-page picture of a hot babe along some minimal info à la Playboy (likes, dislikes, etc.). In this case the pictorial shows a nymph named Anna, (wearing nothing but some seashells and vines). Her comments in case you are interested include: "I'm all about beauty but height has never been an issue" (on her dream guy) and "I'm not just a fantasy girl" amongst some other stuff.

Engine

Neverwinter Nights uses the Aurora engine, but originally it was going to use the Omen engine, developed by Bioware for their third-person action title MDK 2.

German version

In the German version, the in-game gore setting was removed, i.e. permanently stuck on the lowest setting.

Intro

Although the opening intro has literally nothing to do with the main game besides the symbol on the sword, a keen observer may notice that the hero wears the same armor as Lord Nasher of Neverwinter, and their basic facial features seem to match, although the hero at the beginning is clean-shaven and far younger. According to The Art of Neverwinter Nights, a compendium of all the artwork that went into making the game and bundled exclusively with the Collector's Edition, it is in fact Lord Nasher.

This video sequence premiered at the 2002 Game Developer's Conference in San Jose, California.

Music

The game's music files are listed with a *.bmu file extension, but in actuality they're encoded in plain-old MP3 format. So basically, you can listen to them in Winamp without any special form of decryption required.

Neverwinter

The city of Neverwinter is located south of the Spine of the World where the Icewind Dale games take place, and north of the Sword Mountains, the northern extremity of Baldur's Gate.

Ports

Original plans were to include the Linux and Mac versions (and eventually a BeOS version) in the same box as the Windows version. Though the game code was said to be fully portable, various design decisions - most important: the use of the Miles Sound System, which was not available for Linux at that time - delayed these versions for over one year. Official movie support and the Aurora toolset were never finished, the BeOS version was never released at all.

References

In the courtyard of the Arcane Brotherhood you can hear the chant used by the temple healers in The Bards Tale 2: Destiny Knight (Amiga version).

Support

Publisher Atari halted support for the game in May 2006, with no more patches or premium modules for the original game.

Violence

Tweaking some of the game's configuration files makes the violence in the game much more graphic. Several mods for the game use configuration files tweaked in this way to create a more visceral effect.

Awards

• 4Players
  • 2002– Best PC Role-Playing Game of the Year
• Computer Games Magazine
  • March 2003 (No. 148) - #2 in the "10 Best Games of 2002" list
• Computer Gaming World
  • April 2003 (Issue #225) – RPG of the Year (Readers' Choice)
  • April 2003 (Issue #225) – Best Development Tool of the Year
• GameSpy
  • 2002 – PC RPG of the Year (Readers' Choice)
• PC Gamer
  • April 2005 - #35 in the "50 Best Games of All Time" list

Information also contributed by Alan Chan, Iggi, Jason Musgrave, kbmb, Michael Palomino, PCGamer77, Sciere, Zack Green and Zovni