A Thorough Look at Neverwinter Nights

My sister Emily took her own life last year and she loved this game; I’d always sit behind her computer chair and watch her play because I didn’t have the attention span to play it myself. The description you gave of Lady Aribeth in Hordes of the Underdark, about her “hidden anguish over the knowledge that she didn’t want to be herself”, that’s just how my sister felt. But before then I remember us doing impressions of Deekin in the most annoying pitch possible and cracking each other up and that will always be a fond memory for me. Watching and listening to this is so comforting and helps me feel a sense of closeness with her, thank you.

The best thing about Deekin is that at the very end of Hordes when Mephistopheles is turning your companions against you, while you can mitigate this with good Persuade/Intimidate rolls or simply command them to stay on your side with their true name, Deekin will stay loyal if you just tell him that betraying you would hurt your feelings.

i started to learn english because of this game years ago.i had dictionary with me all the time and i translated every sentence in that game.

This is probably my most rewatched video on youtube. Words cannot describe how much i love your channel aswell as NWN1. Thank you for the great content Noah.

Literally one of the best games ever made. Me and my father spent more than 10 years building an entire world in the Neverwinter Nights world editor. People have played for years on it. And we even upgraded the first time players into the new "pantheon", so when they came back almost 7 years later, they made new characters and worked on worshiping their previous characters godhood for blessings and curses. Top 5 games of all time. Bar none.

"I AM A HAWFLEEN THEEF, AH AM AH AM" is probably the greatest thing I've heard in your videos. Thank you so much.

People these days talk about long videos they watch again and again like a favourite film, but for me this is the one I keep coming back to. Three hours of detailed, earnest, personal and compelling writing on a lost corner of RPG history. It's like a documentary being narrated next to me on the couch. Thanks, Noah.

It's great to see it in action and getting attention even after all these years. I've been working on NWN DLCs back in the days, and was part of the modding group Dragonlance Adventures. Infinite Dungeons, Kingmaker, Wyvern Crown Of Cormyr, Pirates of the Sword Coast. Many of those expansive tilesets from these DLCs where largely my work. Went under the handle 'Velmar' back then. Awesome times, with awesome people. Some of us scored jobs at Bioware, and one even being responsible for animating for KOTOR cinematics. I still remember how much work it was to get that Drawbridge working, or the amount of heart's blood that went into getting the horses to work and look as brilliant as they now are. Love the work this community has done, like the City Of Doors Initiative (CODI) and Dragonlance Adventures (DLA) , who then got into creating these DLCs. The community has always been what has made NWN the best RPG to date in my opinion.

I'm Stefan Gagne and I made the HeX coda, Penultima, and Elegia Eternum community modules for NWN1. I very, very nearly created a premium module for Bioware -- the HeX coda was supposed to be released as official DLC. But after a very long delay (several months) before I could get started while the corporate side of things got their house in order, it was cancelled due to conflicting IP interests with WOTC and I ended up releasing it for free. A complete mess, honestly, and one of the reasons I stopped making mods. Also, I feel the main focus of these games wasn't really the official campaigns themselves, but the toolkit and the assets added to it with each expansion. That's where the excitement lie, and may help explain why the reviews of the base games themselves are so tepid -- people who invested in the NWN "ecosystem" did so to play community mods, with the campaigns as afterthoughts in the player's eyes.

When I speak with people about gaming, there are some people who tell me how many time they've beaten... say, Zelda or Final Fantasy, how they beaten the game for eighteen time and they can play those games for years. That's when I show them NWN and say, I've been returning to this game for nearly two decades now, and I STILL have new things to play, new campaigns to beat, new modules to explore, new stories... At some point, the community recreated so many official 3.5 modules, you could pretty much solo play (or explore with multiplayer!) the entire 1 - 20 lvl campagin, starting with Sunless Citadel! This has been the best purchase, the game that keeps on giving, and Role Playing communities on perpetual servers beat any MMO I've ever played.

To this day I consider Mask of the Betrayer perhaps THE most underrated gem in RPG history. So far above the base campaign.

Your script writing is so incredibly good. Half the joy of watching your videos is hearing your word choices. It feels very clever and musical.

i found this game for cheap in a store when i was like 11 and i spent hours playing through it. it was my first rpg experience, my first dnd experience, and honestly i was blown away. it's still one of my favourite titles, i love it so much and i always come back to it and replay it every couple of years (particularly hordes of the underdark). but as you mention at the beginning, i hardly ever see it mentioned anywhere. needless to say i am so glad to have 3 hours of content dedicated to it, even if it probably won't be 100% positive. i'm just glad seeing this title talked about at all!

Tomi cheerfully saying "Ayyyyee it's done" as he attempts to path to a trap to disarm it, and then accidentally triggering it and taking it in the face, is a family meme amongst me and my brother. That is my take away from this franchise. Love the video Noah.

I've watched or listened to thousands of hours of gaming youtube over the years. I always come back to this video. It is the finest game analysis on the platform

"Your old pal Tommy isn't real as a person or a character, he's a can-opener with a back story" 😆

As a DM, the description about campaigns that never come together feels very real :(

This was an amazing trip down memory lane. In highschool, I spent hundreds of hours in NWN, particularly in its user-made module community; I even made one myself! It was horrible, but that's fine - I'm someone with no interest in programming or game design, and haven't gone anywhere near the field since, so I consider it a victory that Aurora was such a simple and approachable game engine that it got me, a rando with no computer background, to build levels, set quest triggers and write dialogue trees. You've wisely chosen to restrict yourself to the official content, or we'd never hear the end of it. However, I still remember my awe at discovering the custom module community; my bandwidth was so bad at the time that I could never download the more famous and expansive campaigns, so I stuck to the shorter ones, the most highly rated of which were the Chris Huntoon horror modules. Some of my most vivid memories from NWN come not from the BioWare campaigns or even the expansion, but from those bite-sized ghost stories, made all the more effective by the limitations of the engine shifting the burden to the player's imagination.

the best thing about NWN - the custom modules. it boggles the mind that you can get tens of hours of content from one module alone, and there are entire series of them, catered to all different classes, alignments, and play styles. there are full fledged campaigns made by one or two people that are miles better than any of the premium stuff. right now I’m playing through Almraiven and it’s been nothing short of amazing.

I loved NWN as a kid but I was the only one out of my friends to play it or even really know what it is. So all the memories I took away from the game were kept to myself. So having this games memories be something I had never shared with anyone and hearing Noah belt out “IM A HALFLING THIEF I AM I AM” broke me harder than any other line he’s delivered. Glad to see someone else with a deep-seated resentment of Tomi after all these years 😂