Neverwinter Nights is the best PC game I’ve played, all thanks to the custom content the players made.
Bioware made the toolset and modding support a big part of the prerelease interviews and live demos. The message to the tabletop RPG crowd was “hey, you can finally build and run your D&D modules as a real DM-led multiplayer group experience online”. Probably the only problem with that marketing was that making modules from scratch was still an involved process and making usually needed scripting skill, so maybe the TTRPG crowd didn’t end up as enthusiastic as they could. But people still ended up making boatloads of great singleplayer and multiplayer-capable adventure modules! And the multiplayer persistent worlds were essentially like MMOs but in small scale.
I think the built-in campaign was more of a hindrance in retrospect, because if you hadn’t heard this, you probably expected another game like Baldur’s Gate 1/2. A lot of people went in thinking that the official NWN campaign was the main offering. The campaign was incredibly mediocre by Bioware standards because Wizards of the Coast was incredibly needy. They wanted high level of control, and essentially only approved a committee-built pile-of-meh plot, leaving Bioware to build something around that.
This, by the way, led to Bioware swearing they’d not work with needy licensors anymore and ended up designing Dragon Age instead.
(And if anyone is saying “wait, didn’t this just happen again with Baldur’s Gate 3?” Yes. Yes it did. WotC is basically impossible to work with.)
Neverwinter Nights is the best PC game I’ve played, all thanks to the custom content the players made.
Bioware made the toolset and modding support a big part of the prerelease interviews and live demos. The message to the tabletop RPG crowd was “hey, you can finally build and run your D&D modules as a real DM-led multiplayer group experience online”. Probably the only problem with that marketing was that making modules from scratch was still an involved process and making usually needed scripting skill, so maybe the TTRPG crowd didn’t end up as enthusiastic as they could. But people still ended up making boatloads of great singleplayer and multiplayer-capable adventure modules! And the multiplayer persistent worlds were essentially like MMOs but in small scale.
I think the built-in campaign was more of a hindrance in retrospect, because if you hadn’t heard this, you probably expected another game like Baldur’s Gate 1/2. A lot of people went in thinking that the official NWN campaign was the main offering. The campaign was incredibly mediocre by Bioware standards because Wizards of the Coast was incredibly needy. They wanted high level of control, and essentially only approved a committee-built pile-of-meh plot, leaving Bioware to build something around that.
This, by the way, led to Bioware swearing they’d not work with needy licensors anymore and ended up designing Dragon Age instead.
(And if anyone is saying “wait, didn’t this just happen again with Baldur’s Gate 3?” Yes. Yes it did. WotC is basically impossible to work with.)