Today you would expect this to be a calculated attempt to bring more long-term, always-on, multiplayer-as-a-service to an RPG franchise that has mostly appealed to solo players. You might imagine it would be about selling cosmetics, a subscription, or a battle pass, or maybe you would think it was about nabbing appealing engagement numbers.
But it’s clear from playing it today that Neverwinter Nights wasn’t primarily made for those reasons. Instead, it came from a passion for tabletop role-playing and a desire to get closer to that in video game form than ever before.
Yes, the BioWare team noted in some interviews that they saw this as a trial run for exploring the idea of making a massively multiplayer game (MMO)—something that, in the year 2000, was seen by many as the hot new business opportunity in gaming, and which was in many ways the precursor to the games-as-a-service we see today. They then indicated they realized that an MMO was harder to make than they had assumed and abandoned that ambition well before Neverwinter Nights shipped.
The single player is bad and hasn’t aged well, but the persistent worlds are 100% a different and massively (no pun intended) improved experience.
That’s especially true if you’re doing a scheduled campaign run by a human. When I was running my campaign, the players’ actions could actually have a permanent effect on the game world, and if they discovered a hidden area, the builders would work with me to construct it and put it in the game permanently.
Multiplayer is a whole different, improved experience.
I feel like if I was playing a scheduled game, I’d rather just play a tabletop RPG than be tied down to this game engine. But I guess the scale is different here and that might be interesting.
I did recently start a tabletop game, though with a system I like a thousand times more than DND.
That’s okay.
Not everyone feels the way you do, and being able to find a game online is nice.