It was also part of the whole fascination and experimentation with open-source licensing that came out of the Free & Open Source Software movement (FOSS) which was a large part of my RL career path (technically, Brownian motion is a type of path). Most significant to me at that time was that its multiplayer networking allowed me to continue playing w/ old friends at home and would help keep me connected to & playing with new friends abroad as I continued shuffling between countries. I picked up the game, easily one of my top ten favorite computer games ever, during my last stint in grad school before heading overseas from my ancestral homeland. What are your memories? Share your story! I ended up writing professionally for several computer games (including on the expansion Wyvern Crown of Cormyr, then NWN2 and the Witcher).

Many of us used it to tell stories, and several of us went on to become authors. I think for many this was what set the game apart and gave it such longevity: so many people could now create games they wanted, worlds they wanted. Then the game came out, and though I found the original campaign to have some bland bits, I could see the story-telling potential, and I was nevertheless excited to get my hands on the toolset, and wonder of wonders, it was easy to use. This may seem like an odd moment to get excited about, but until then I had been treating NWN with typical scepticism, especially the toolset, which I thought would be heavily prescriptive and complex to use. Wind back a little further to the pre-release forums for Neverwinter nights – clunky, buggy and fuelled by dial up modems… the moment for me when I knew NWN was going to be something amazing was when Bioware were doing a demo of the game, and unexpectedly a deer they had spawned outside walked into the dungeon they had just entered. It went on to spawn a dizzying array of different content - modules, community packs, new authors, persistent worlds and even new game studios like Ossian, DLA and RoXidy games. 20 years ago Neverwinter Nights entered our lives.

Free download neverwinter nights 3