Neverwinter Nights

Neverwinter Nights brought the rules of Dungeons and Dragons third edition into a fully three-dimensional world while also giving players the tools to build their own adventures. The base campaign takes the hero into the city of Neverwinter, stricken by a plague, where they must gather the cure's ingredients, uncover a conspiracy, and finally confront the force behind the outbreak. The story is accompanied by a single hired companion, a more intimate approach compared to the studio's later games. Two official expansions, Shadows of Undrentide and Hordes of the Underdark, then offered noticeably stronger storytelling and higher character levels.

The heart of the game is its faithful translation of the rules: the player chooses race, class, attributes, skills, and special abilities, tracks armor class, saving throws, and multiclass combinations, and in combat, rounds play out in real time but can be broken down into individual actions with a pause. True longevity, though, came from the included Aurora Toolset editor, in which anyone could build maps, script characters, and release their own module. A huge community grew around it, with thousands of modules and persistent multiplayer servers where a dungeon master leads a group of players much like at a tabletop. Many of today's creators took their first stab at level design right here.

The engine was technically ambitious for its release year, with dynamic lighting and a fully rotatable camera, though at the cost of higher requirements and interiors built from repeating tiles. Today the game runs without issues and has also received an enhanced edition with higher resolution and better support for modern screens. The music works with a classic fantasy orchestral sound and supports the slower pace of exploration well. Reception was very good, though some reviewers considered the base campaign the weaker part of the package. The game's influence is undeniable especially in the field of player-made content, since it showed that an editor bundled with a game can keep a title alive for years after release.