Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition

Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition brings back to life a game that meant more to a lot of people than just its campaign: BioWare shipped it in 2002 with a complete module editor, and a community grew up around it that still produces its own adventures and runs persistent worlds with dozens of players running continuously for years.

Beamdog fixed what stood in the way of running the game today: higher resolutions, modern operating systems, network play that works without having to work around firewalls and ports, and support for community extensions accumulated over two decades in the form of custom scripts, portraits, and items. The package includes both major expansions, Shadows of Undrentide and Hordes of the Underdark, with the latter ranking among the best things ever made for third-edition Dungeons & Dragons rules—it gives the player an epic-level character and a story that genuinely plays out accordingly in the underworld of Faerûn. The so-called Aurora toolset itself, in which the modules are built, was in its day one of the most complete RPG creation tools any studio has ever released to the public for free alongside a game.

The original campaign is the weaker part of the package, and it's fair to say so—it's long-winded, repetitive in its quest design, and its companions are nowhere near as good as those in Baldur's Gate. This game's value lies elsewhere: in the expansions, and above all in what players around the world have created for it over twenty years. The editor still works, you can build practically anything in it from a single quest to a full campaign, and modules are still being released today. Persistent worlds, where dozens of players live together in an ongoing set environment governed by their own set of rules, are perhaps the most valuable thing this community has created over two decades, and Enhanced Edition gave them a new, technically stable home.

Why play it: It's not so much about the campaign as about two excellent expansions and a living community of creators that has kept building for this game continuously for over twenty years.