Should you complete the campaign and find yourself hungry for more, you are in luck.  Neverwinter Nights could have easily stopped at the campaign game and provided players with an enjoyable experience.  Luckily for you, though, they didn't.  There will be a BioWare Live Community Team that will be constantly developing new content for the game.  You'll have a plethora of new adventures to experience long after you have played your way through the campaign. 

It's not just the BioWare team that will be providing new worlds and adventures for Neverwinter Nights - you'll be able to do so yourself, or be free to just enjoy the adventures created by other fans of the game, thanks to the integrated Neverwinter Nights Toolset.  The Toolset was demonstrated at E3, and it looks like it will be a very powerful yet easy to use tool.  It will give you a very large degree of control over your adventures, while making it easy to quickly create content.  You'll be able to program the personality of NPCs, create new magical weapons and items, set the disposition of monsters, set event triggers, and more, all through simple mouse-clicks and a user-friendly Windows-based interface.  Those of you who want ultimate control can actually edit the individual attributes for anything appearing in the level, be it a monster's attacks or a weapon's damage.

Once completed, new levels can be run on a server and support up to 64 players simultaneously.  Even more exciting, level servers can be connected via a portal system to form an even larger game world.  This opens up the possibility of exploring large player-created worlds - a player designed and ever evolving massively multiplayer world.

Neverwinter Nights will also be the first game to forge a link between computer RPGs and their pen and paper ancestors.  The game will support an in-game Dungeon Master (DM) who will have the power to manage the adventure for a group of players as they play.  The DM will be able to directly affect in-game events, constantly tweaking the game to respond to the style of play of the players.  Monsters can be added on the fly, NPC actions and conversations directed as needed, and new levels added as players move beyond the level and look for new areas to explore.  It might not replace the feel of a face-to-face gaming session between friends, but it will certainly make for a more dynamic and unpredictable experience than can be gained from most computer games.

All of this gameplay comes wrapped in a very nice package, thanks to the new Aurora graphics engine.  Colorful, fully-3D graphics, fluid character animations, and dynamic shadowing and weather effects are just a few of the visual treats in store for Neverwinter Nights players. 

Neverwinter Nights looks like it will set a new high water mark for computer RPGs, providing great open-ended gaming possibilities for fans of the genre.  It will undoubtedly lead to some long summer nights for RPG fans this June when it is released.

« The campaign