Neverwinter Nights (game, 1991)

Based on the board role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons , Neverwinter Nights was similar in gameplay to other games in the Gold Box series. In the beginning, the player had to create his character. The main gameplay took place on a screen divided into several parts - in one of them a graphic depiction of the terrain, other characters and events was demonstrated. In other parts of the screen, textual interactions, character names, and information about their status were displayed. If the player entered the battle, the gameplay switched to a full-screen battle mode, in which the game characters and their enemies were represented by static images. Players could compete with each other in a hierarchical ranking reflecting their success in the game; the most famous of these ratings was the World PVP Council (WPC) Ladder ^[2]

Neverwinter Nights was jointly developed by AOL, Stormfront Studios , SSI , and TSR ^[1] , and is called the first graphic online role-playing game in history ^[3] .

Stormfront Studios and game designer Don Daglow have been working with AOL (formerly Quantum Computer Services) Internet service provider on original online games, both graphic and text, since 1987. Quantum Computer Services at that time provided the Quantum Link online service, designed to connect Commodore 64 computers to a single network and had several thousand subscribers in the United States and Canada. Online graphics in the late 1980s was strictly limited by the data transfer speed through modem lines (300 bits per second). Since 1989, Stormfront Studios began working with Strategic Simulations to work on games based on the Dungeons & Dragons board role-playing game using its own Strategic Simulations Gold Box engine - it has already released several games starting with Pool of Radiance (1988). Within a few months, the developers of Stormfront Studios realized that it was technically possible to combine the Gold Box engine with the gameplay of online games - in other words, create a graphic game in which tens and hundreds of players could interact. By this time, there was only one multiplayer graphic online game Air Warrior - a multiplayer flight simulator developed by Kesmai; all computer role-playing online games of the time were based on text.

At several meetings in San Francisco and Las Vegas with representatives from AOL, TSR and SSI, Deglow and programmer Catherine Mataga were able to convince partners that such a project was indeed possible. Funding for Neverwinter Nights has been allocated and work has begun. The game was launched 18 months later, in March 1991. Daglow chose from the possible locations of the game the fictional city of Neverwinter , which had previously appeared in Dungeons & Dragons , due to its magical features - the city stands on a warm river flowing out of a snowy forest and flowing into the North Sea, which allowed the game to show a variety of terrain types. This scene was also quite close in the setting of Forgotten Realms to the locations of other games in the Gold Box series, which allowed the transfer of individual elements from single-player games to an online game and vice versa.

At the end of June 1997, AOL announced that it would stop supporting the game on July 19, 1997 ^[4] . Other AOL online games were ported to the World Play paid online service, but Neverwinter Nights was simply shut down ^[4] .

In 1991, game servers supported up to 50 players at a time; this number has increased to 500 players by 1995. In later years, the game was free for AOL subscribers. At the end of the existence of the game in 1997, the game had 115,000 players, and in the evening "peak hours" the number of players online reached 2000 - a record for that time ^[5] .

The popularity of the game was largely based on the activities of the players themselves - they united in guilds , organized many meetings and events in the game itself. Bioware Studio, licensing the rights to Neverwinter Nights, hoped to attract this loyal fan base when it acquired the rights to the name from AOL and TSR - the result was the computer role-playing game Neverwinter Nights , released in 2002 ^[6] . The game unplannedly caught the eye of the press when it appeared in the Don't Copy That Floppy social advertising campaign from the Software Publishers Association .

In 1998, work began on the development of a clone of Neverwinter Nights, called Forgotten World (from the English - “Forgotten World”) ^[7] .

After the release of BioWare's Neverwinter Nights game in 2002 - which included a multiplayer mode, but generally designed for single-player play - a group of former players in the original Neverwinter Nights used the Aurora toolkit included in the new game to recreate a similarity to the original Neverwinter on its engine Nights , albeit with a limited number of players. This project, called Neverwinter Nights: Resurrection, had limited success, but it was supported for a very long time - its servers were closed only on July 31, 2012 ^[8] .

In 2012, a single version of Neverwinter Nights was released for Unlimited Adventures after two years of development ^[9] .

The review was published in 1992 in Dragon magazine # 179. The reviewers Hartley and Patricia Lesser and Kirk Mahler in the column “Computer Role” gave the game 4 out of 5 stars.

Fans of the Gold Box series know what to expect ... and the human component makes the game even better.

- Computer Gaming World

... hundreds of loyal players survived many adventures in one common city between 1991 and 1997, when AOL blocked the game with oxygen; politics, guilds, alliances - all of them quickly formed a social community, which was much more important than the game itself.

- GameSpy

In 2008, Neverwinter Nights, along with EverQuest and World of Warcraft, won the 59th annual Emmy Technical Award for promoting MMORPG as an art form. Don Daglow accepted the award on behalf of Stormfront Studios, AOL and Wizards of the Coast .

• Neverwinter Nights on MobyGames
• The Original Neverwinter Nights
• UGO & GameBanshee interview on history of original NWN