The Neverwinter Nights series was the last hurrah for single-player (and non-MMO multiplayer) licensed D&D games. “All those other games had the mechanics and setting of an RPG, but weren’t able to offer the full experience.” NWN was, at the time, full of promise, and he credits this replication of the pen-and-paper player-DM relationship. Morris got involved with Neverwinter Nights around its 2002 launch, after playing isometric RPGs all through the nineties. All the way through, I pick his brain about level design in this game (building areas to make player traffic work out is crucial), about his player base (he tries to cater to a mix of all four Bartle types), about the history and geography of the world he tends. They belong to the world of independent sites of yesteryear-and, I hope, of tomorrow.Ī whirlwind tour of Arelith, led by Morris and his fellow dungeon masters, takes up the better part of two hours, and I’m sure I haven’t seen even a tenth of what’s in there. Independent from any one company’s services, persistent worlds exist outside of the “platforms” of today’s internet-a bit like "multi-user dungeons" that are the common ancestor to both multiplayer RPGs and MMOs. Or, as was the case with Arelith for a while, your PW can just be a dedicated computer that lives in your basement. All one has to do to create a persistent world is run the server software on any computer continuously maybe you rent a server on a rack somewhere, or nowadays use a virtual private server rented from Amazon or Google or a smaller provider. They’re story-focused, but with a story that emerges from interactions between players rather than pre-scripted quests. Persistent worlds like Arelith are neither of these. After Neverwinter Nights, the genre forked: Bioware, CD Projekt Red, and others focused on building carefully authored single-player experiences, while Blizzard and others (well, mainly Blizzard) built the great Western MMO: Vast worlds with complex mechanics, interlocking systems, and huge numbers of concurrent players. But it was the digital tabletop built for the dawn of the online gaming era, carrying the weight (and the familiar ruleset) of the most popular tabletop RPG of all time.Īrelith is both a treasure and a road not taken. Neverwinter Nights was not the only game doing this but it combined that feature with powerful level-creation tools that allowed for fully custom scenarios, and more accessible online play than was possible even a few years before. It did this with a “DM client” that let players join as dungeon masters in multiplayer sessions, able to take control of NPCs and change the game world on the fly to adapt to an emerging story with the players. Neverwinter Nights built the tabletop experience into a digital game in a way that really worked. That feeling would stay on tabletops, and eventually studios would move on to focus on other strengths of the digital RPG with titles like Mass Effect and The Witcher. However surprising the plot twist, however complex the world-building, they never really replicated the actual experience of sitting down at a table with a DM and three other players to build a story together. While games like Baldur’s Gate and Fallout were successful and critically acclaimed, they only delivered pre-scripted (if branching) narratives.
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