Neverwinter Nights holds an interesting place in gaming history. Not quite as fondly remembered as other licensed Dungeons & Dragons video games, Neverwinter Nights is a massive experience and, especially for players unfamiliar with either BioWare or D&D 3rd Edition, contains almost an overwhelming amount of content. The graphics haven’t aged well and the main story campaign is about as basic as role-playing games come, but a combination of bug fixes, server updates, and the inclusion of multiple premium modules make Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition a title worth checking out for anyone looking for an old-school Dungeons & Dragons adventure.
Neverwinter Nights was originally released eighteen years ago as both a game and a functional tool set, not only letting players complete the fifty-plus hour campaign either alone or in online multiplayer servers of up to 64 people but also giving them the ability to access the game’s engine and creation functions, allowing anyone to create and host their own campaigns created in the game’s Aurora Engine. This led to not only thousands of user-created adventures (many of which still exist in online Neverwinter Nights communities today) but also to the game being utilized by multiple educational systems in order to teach everything from Shakespeare to video game design.
The console port of Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition has some problems, the majority of them seemingly stemming from the lack of a keyboard. Menu navigation is cumbersome at the best of times and only grows more irritating as the game goes on, with the simple act of looting enemies making every battle take three times longer than it should. Multiple radial menus attempt to simplify the process of things like detecting traps and casting spells, but, much like Beamdog’s previous D&D remaster Baldur’s Gate, the lack of a proper targeting system often sees players accidentally attacking bookshelves or attempting to unlock NPCs.
Thanks to the many multiple campaigns packaged inside the Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition, which includes two full expansions (Shadows of Undrentide and Hordes of the Underdark) as well as eleven premium modules, console players have an abundance of adventures to choose from. Some of these modules are more entertaining and well-written than others, and some are less focused on story and more on action, but standout inclusions such as the Wyvern Crown of Cormyr campaign, which sees players participating in multiple jousting tournaments, and the Hordes of the Underdark expansion, which lets players finally reach level 40, gives a necessary amount of variety to the gameplay.
Variety like this is important, because Neverwinter Nights moves slow, especially in the early portions of the main campaign. Dialog segments occur frequently and are often cumbersome, and although the player usually has the ability to end a conversation prematurely it’s often at the cost of either their alignment, reputation, or loss of understanding of the plot. Combat, too, is often tedious and repetitive, an unfortunate combination because combat and conversation are two of the main pillars on which the game’s entertainment value rests.
Like many other early BioWare titles, the attacks in Neverwinter Nights are firmly ingrained in Dungeons & Dragons dice roll mechanics, a process which works well on paper but ends up with two animated characters swinging their weapons wildly at one another with no damage being dealt on either end as the text window below continuously scrolls through a random number generator until someone finally gets lucky. While this becomes less of a problem in the later portions of most campaigns, as the characters become higher leveled and better equipped, early on this dice-based attack system can make Neverwinter Nights feel like quite a slog. However, fans of games like Knights of the Old Republic will likely find some enjoyment in playing Neverwinter Nights, as the former was based off of the lessons BioWare learned while making the latter.
Neverwinter Nights is not a bad game, but it is a product of it’s time. The early 3D animations prevalent in games from 2002 stand out sharply today as rather under-developed, and although changes have been made to resolution and the game’s UI the core graphics remain the same, meaning distance fog, object pop-ups, and loading screens are common in almost every area of the game. These do not necessarily detract from the gamplay, especially since these Enhanced Editions thankfully load far, far faster than their original PC counterparts, but newer gamers who lack the nostalgia for angular, polygonal 3D characters may find the game to be rather ugly, despite the newly-designed character portrait icons.
The sheer amount of gameplay on offer in the Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition, easily over 200 hours when counting all the modules and expansions, makes it a title worth buying for anyone interested in Dungeons & Dragons video games. Hundreds of thousands of lines of dialog, a plethora of different locations, and the wide variety of gameplay styles offered by different characters and classes in the D&D pantheon give the title both replay value and lasting power. The ability to play online with other players is also likely a welcome addition to many, especially after the game’s original GameSpy servers shut down years ago.
Although the main campaign’s story is terribly thrilling, subsequent expansions and premium modules do a better job of utilizing the Aurora Engine to present a wider variety of gameplay choices, and the end result is something which has been undeniably influential to the gaming medium. Games like Mass Effect and Dragon Age would have likely never happened had it not been for the success of Baldur’s Gate and Neverwinter Nights, not to mention the hundreds of other game designers who were likely inspired by what BioWare had created, and as a piece of gaming history it’s nice to see so much of the original Neverwinter preserved here.
Not everyone will enjoy Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition, but that’s okay. It’s a game made for a very specific audience in mind, one which thoroughly knows the rules of Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition and doesn’t mind the limited graphical capabilities of turn-of-the-century computers. For those fans, or for anyone interested in role-playing PC history, Neverwinter Nights is a no-brainer.
Next: Dungeons & Dragons: Ranking All Of The Base Classes, From Least To Most Powerful
Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition is available for the Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, PS4, and PC. A PS4 code was provided to Screen Rant for the purposes of this review.
