Neverwinter

Publisher: Interplay
Developer: BioWare
Release Date: Late 2000, Early 2001

Holding a torch

Inventory

Good Omens

BioWare has been working on Neverwinter Nights for quite a long time and has only started showing it very recently. Neverwinter is a multiplayer RPG quite unlike any other before it. The game won't be based around the massively multiplayer concept embraced by Verant and Turbine. Don't expect to share a server with hundreds of people all competing and interacting within any given area. Neverwinter promises a much more personal experience than any RPG before it. People will join Quake-style servers and play online with their characters. There are two ways to play of course.

In town

Exploring the world

One is the more secure method to prevent cheating - store the character on a server and that way no one can get an unfair advantage over anyone else, unless it's the server operator. However, this has the drawback of limiting your play to that single server, which can limit your advancement and especially interaction with other players, since you're probably going to find yourself playing with the same people the whole time. This won't be bad if the other players are all friends of yours (one of BioWare's key goals was to promote interaction among friends), but the opportunities to meet new people like this will be limited.

Thus, you can also play with the characters stored on your machine and sent to any server accepting those characters. This does have, however, the disadvantage of making cheating much easier (think: Diablo), since characters will be stored locally and modifiable at will once the encryption is broken.

Looking around

Follow me!

Solstice

While Neverwinter will come with various pre-made campaigns and scenarios for the players to go through, the big draw seems to be the Solstice Toolset. This is an easy-to-use game design tool made for the DM to run and make the campaigns that the players will be going through. Encounters, NPC interaction and loot can all be set beforehand, while still allowing the game designer to adjust things as necessary to compensate for the unpredictability of player interaction.