Neverwinter Nights: Platinum Edition

"You shook me all night long."

Wow. I was taken by surprise when I first played this. I spent many many many hours on this little gem. Neverwinter Nights was released a few years ago, I never really noticed it since I wasn't into PC games back then. It's an RPG made by Bioware, those responsible for the Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale sagas. This is actually pretty close to those, the main difference being the decent 3d graphics. So if you've played Baldur's Gate or Icewind Dale, you know what to expect.

Neverwinter Nights, as I said before, is an RPG. The official campaigns are fun, they have a few twists here and there. I don't know if you'll want to replay them afterwards unless you're just testing a new character out, but they're fun the first time around. Since the platinum edition comes with the 2 expansions released for Neverwinter Nights, there's more than 1 story. Each of them are set in the Forgotten Realms, and deal with the events that take place in it. Such as the official campaign deals with a plague going around the famous city of Neverwinter, and how there's a cure being developed and yada yada yada. I won't spoil it for you. However, once you get bored of the official campaigns, there's literally millions of player made modules. I'll get to that later.

The visuals are pretty nice, even for a game that's a few years old. You can tell the players and NPCs apart, You're appearance changes with the armor you put on, which means you can have a pretty sweet looking character if you get the colors and armor right. However, there's not very many character model's to chose from. By that I mean during character creation. It's pretty much chose if you're fat, hair color, very few hairstyles, and the very few tatoos. However, it doesn't affect it much because you're probably going to be decked out in armor. The sound is pretty good too.. I'm not a big sound person, so it doesn't matter too much to me. The music or sound effect aren't repetitive, which is always a plus.

The best part of the game, in my opinion, is definately the online segment. It's put together amazingly well, and it's so fun to play with other people. There's hundreds of online servers on at any one time, most of them filled with players. Plus each of these servers is filed into different categories. Like to roleplay your characters? The Roleplay servers are for you. Like to senselessly beat the pooh out of other players? Try the PvP or Action categories. Each of these worlds is different in everything. Different items, people, stories, you name it. It's different. Aside from the different modules, there's also plenty of add-ons. You can add anything from portraits to character models to voices to classes. It really adds a whole new experience to Neverwinter Nights.

I saved the gameplay for last so if you read the previous parts, you'll have a slightly better understanding. Neverwinter Nights is pretty much a clicker game. You click on the map and you run there. Or you can use the keyboard, which is a little more fluent in my opinion. Using the mouse as a controller isn't the most accurate. But anyways, Neverwinter is set in the Dungeons and Dragons realm, meaning that it uses the ruleset from Dungeons and Dragons. I'm not firmiliar with it too much, so I'm not going to try to explain it. There are plenty of side quests pretty much whatever you play on, plenty of unique monsters, tons of treasure that you can either sell or use to pummel your enemies. Everythings awesome.

Also, you can spend literally hundreds of hours playing this. I personally, have spent well over 1000 hours in this game. If you total the solo campaigns up, it comes over 100 hours right there. Plus you can spend limitless hours online roleplaying that evil wizard or just killing players in PvP arenas.

The reason I didn't give this game a perfect is because it's not perfect. I've been praising it like crazy, and it is an excellent game, probably one of the best games I've ever played. It's probably just my computer, but this game crashes quite a bit. I'll just be playing, and it shuts out saying it caused an error. Also the online community can be pretty mean. You know, accusing people of being n00bs because they're new to a server. This is also probably my personal problem, but I seriously had a social problem after playing this game. I was playing this about 15 hours a day. Sometimes for 24+ hours straight. Just so you know. I've since calmed down, not playing nearly as much.

Overall, this game is beastly awesome. It kicks the pants off many other RPGs, and it's just plain fun to play. If you haven't already, buy this game if you like RPGs. It's a blast, and it'll shake you all night long.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 09/19/05