2002’s Neverwinter Nights gets a patch in 2025 from “unpaid software engineers” – Ars Technica
Bioware’s beloved Dungeons & Dragons CRPG remains a rich space for storytelling.
Neverwinter Nights came out in 2002 and received an enhanced edition in 2018. In 2025, that should really be it, but there’s something special about Bioware’s second dip into the Dungeons & Dragons universe. The energy from the game’s community is strong enough that, based largely on the work of “unpaid software engineers,” the game received a new patch last week.Neverwinter Nights (NN) Enhanced Edition (on Steam and GOG) now has anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering built in, major improvements to its networking code and performance, and more than 100 other improvements. As noted by PC Gamer, NN was originally built for single-core CPUs, so while it may seem odd to seek “major” improvements to performance for a 23-year-old RPG, it is far from optimized for modern systems.NN received a similar fan-led patch, described as “a year-long love effort” by community developers, in 2023.Perhaps it’s not so surprising that NN achieved this kind of fan-driven immortality. Opinions vary on the virtues of its single-player campaigns, but its “persistent worlds,” essentially tiny MMOs run by people with DM-like powers, kept it from giving off the abandoned feel of other “massive” online games. Fantasy author Luke Scull credits the game with launching his writing career and continues to work on an unofficial sequel to the game, The Blades of Netheril, with a roadmap of seven chapters through at least 2027.NN was so flexible that you could use a modified version to teach journalism skills, like interviewing, fact-checking, and being beaten to death by goblins you accidentally triggered when you failed a concentration check on invisibility.What of Neverwinter Nights 2? That game, brought into the world during a very troubled time in publisher Atari’s Dungeons & Dragons journey, has far less chance of seeing a similar decadeslong commitment. While Beamdog, made up of some former Bioware workers, maintains NN, the sequel was developed by Obsidian. The rights to Neverwinter Nights 2 exist somewhere between a half-dozen companies, including Atari and Wizards of the Coast/Hasbro, and they look unlikely to be aligned in service of a new edition.Among other issues, the online services for the game were provided through GameSpy, which shut down in 2014 and left many games unmoored from the wider web. In the Complete Edition available on GOG, you can still connect to fan-made servers.Ars Technica has been separating the signal from
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