Neverwinter Nights
Neverwinter Nights is a series of video games developed by BioWare and Obsidian Entertainment, based on the Forgotten Realms campaign setting of the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game. Aside from also being set around the city Neverwinter, it is unrelated to both the 1991 Neverwinter Nights online game and the 2013 online game called Neverwinter. Overview The Neverwinter Nights series take place primarily in the city of Neverwinter, located in the Sword Coast region of the fictional land of Faerûn. Also commonly referred to as the City of Skilled Hands, Neverwinter grew from a multi-racial settlement named Eigersstor founded several hundred years prior to the start of Neverwinter Nights. At the time the first game takes place, the city of Neverwinter was beset by a magical plague named the Wailing Death, whereas in the second game the city is threatened by an invasion from its ancient enemy named the King of Shadows. Gameplay The Neverwinter Nights series is a franchise of role-playing games with a third-person isometric perspective. The systems of the games are based on the rules of Dungeons & Dragons, a table-top role-playing game originally developed by TSR, Inc. Both Neverwinter Nights and Neverwinter Nights 2 contain three game modes: a default campaign, a multiplayer mode, and custom contents. Campaign Both Neverwinter Nights and Neverwinter Nights 2 include a default campaign, which focus on the development of the player character through a series of distinct acts. In addition to the main story, the player also has the opportunity to undertake a variety of side quests, some of which form storylines that span the entire game. The player has the ability to make key choices in specific quests can affect combat encounters, key plot points, and the outcome of the overarching story. Before the player can begin the campaign, they must first create a new character through the game's character creation interface. The player may customize a new character from scratch, or select one of the pre-set characters provided by the games. If the player chooses to create a new character, they are then guided through a series of choices about their character, including race, class, appearance etc.. Some of the choices such as gender and appearance are purely cosmetic, whereas others such as race and class affect how the player character fights and what abilities they have access to. Custom content In addition to the base campaign and the multiplayer mode, both Neverwinter Nights and Neverwinter Nights 2 also included sets of software development tools which allow the players to create custom campaigns which they can then share with other players. Neverwinter Nights shipped with the Aurora Toolset, while Neverwinter Nights 2 shipped with the Electron Toolset, which was completely rewritten by Bioware using the programming language C#. Reception The first instalment in the series, Neverwinter Nights, was generally well received according to review aggregator Metacritic, which gave it a score of 91/100 based on 34 critic reviews and a score of 8.1/10 based on 608 user reviews.