Talk:Neverwinter Nights (1991 video game)

Quantum Computer Services
The name of Quantum Computer Services' network was Quantum Link. I have edited the reference in the first paragraph to represent the service name, and stated that it was a venture of Quantum Computer Services.

I'm not that happy with the sentience structure, and will verify that Quantum Computer Services was still around in 87. If it was, great, I'll rewrite it. If not, I'll rewrite it that way, referencing AOL as what was to come. Pyrogen 11:26, 29 May 2006 (UTC)


 * Quantum Link was their C64 service, later followed by AppleLink and then PC-Link. Quantum Computer Services was the corporation name, later changed to AOL.  Coll7 02:03, 5 August 2006 (UTC)


 * i have no real idea what you people are talking about, but i still have a computer with both NWN and AOL installed. the last time it was able to go online was in 1993 before the poor thing stopped working with modems. now i don't know why it is claimed that AOL was called this at that time, but my bank notice is also on that computer stating a charge of over $800 to America Online for the hours (@ $5.95/hour) i played NWN. what i woukldlike to know is why then AOL is being claimed to be called something different? and even form the AOL article this timeframe is off. "After the two companies parted ways in October 1989, Quantum changed the service's name to America Online." so during ANY time in which NWN was on AOL, it was AOL already for at least a year. shadzar|Talk|contribs 12:42, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

Request for clean up
This article could use some reformatting to bring it up to the quality I see in most other articles on Wikipedia. Neverwinter Nights would be a good example of a good article; perhaps add the sidebar, a screenshot, and clean up the text/reformat it to create some paragraphs. Add sections as well.

I hate to dump this task on someone else's shoulders, but I never played this game; elsewise, I'd do it myself. FarFromHomeFish 08:28, 23 June 2006 (UTC)


 * It also needs citations. Things like this cannot stay in the article without a credible citation Some users bragged about monthly game bills of $500 or more --Crossmr 21:13, 29 June 2006 (UTC)


 * I've performed a basic cleanup. Someone more familiar with it (I'm into D&D but never played this particular game) can perhaps work with the specifics a bit more. --Crossmr 21:35, 29 June 2006 (UTC)


 * Citations added. Coll7 02:01, 5 August 2006 (UTC)


 * Well some of those citations are fine, citing the slashdot discussion isn't valid. Comments made there are unverified self-published information and fail WP:V and WP:RS.--Crossmr 02:08, 5 August 2006 (UTC)

Forgotten World
Should I expand the derivative of Neverwinter Nights (Forgotten World) on the same page or would it be wise to opt for a completely new link? The problem I see is that there's already a game called Forgotten World. N0manarmy 21:39, 17 July 2006 (UTC)
 * This would probably be fine unless you think it would be excessively long?--Crossmr 21:40, 17 July 2006 (UTC)
 * It wouldn't be too long. There's plenty of information on the external page about the game and when it expands in the future I'll revisit the article. At this point though, talking with the developers of the game, they'd be interested in seeing more information listed. N0manarmy 21:46, 17 July 2006 (UTC)
 * Yeah that would be fine to include it under derivative works then.--Crossmr 21:47, 17 July 2006 (UTC)

Gameplay
The Gameplay section doesn't describe whether the game is real-time or turn-based. Do you control one unit or a party? Etc., etc.. Only the tournament style is described; basic gameplay information is omitted. SharkD 05:38, 1 April 2007 (UTC)

UA?
The graphics look identical to Unlimited Adventures. Is there any connection? The Jade Knight 01:39, 8 August 2007 (UTC)
 * This and several other games all used the Gold Box engine.--Crossmr (talk) 07:21, 1 August 2008 (UTC)

Fair use rationale for Image:NeverwinterNightsAOL.gif
Image:NeverwinterNightsAOL.gif is being used on this article. I notice the image page specifies that the image is being used under fair use but there is no explanation or rationale as to why its use in this Wikipedia article constitutes fair use. In addition to the boilerplate fair use template, you must also write out on the image description page a specific explanation or rationale for why using this image in each article is consistent with fair use.

Please go to the image description page and edit it to include a fair use rationale. Using one of the templates at Fair use rationale guideline is an easy way to insure that your image is in compliance with Wikipedia policy, but remember that you must complete the template. Do not simply insert a blank template on an image page.

If there is other fair use media, consider checking that you have specified the fair use rationale on the other images used on this page. Note that any fair use images lacking such an explanation can be deleted one week after being tagged, as described on criteria for speedy deletion. If you have any questions please ask them at the Media copyright questions page. Thank you.

BetacommandBot (talk) 21:11, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

Dispute a couple sources
I'm going to dispute a couple sources I feel that fail WP:V. The bladekeep source is obviously not from any kind of reliable news organization and looks like just a hobby site someone put together. As a self-published source it isn't remotely reliable. The Raph Koster timeline is of a similar nature with some listed sources, but they appear to be random people for all we know and who knows what came from who. I realize this isn't a highly covered topic, but article content needs to come from reliable sources, and articles don't get a pass because there isn't much out there.--Crossmr (talk) 07:28, 1 August 2008 (UTC)

Not first graphical MMORPG
This is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitat_(video_game) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 97.116.119.207 (talk) 18:32, 11 February 2011 (UTC)

For that matter, this game isn't an MMORPG at all. You could argue for MORPG, but that acronym doesn't really get used in practice. The defining element of an MMORPG is a massive shared world. This game only allowed a handful of players to share a given game world at a time. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 96.228.67.84 (talk) 12:18, 28 November 2012 (UTC)


 * Agreed. This isn't a MMORPG. MORPG, as you point out, but not a MMORPG. 59.167.245.193 (talk) 02:21, 23 March 2013 (UTC)

Just like you wouldnt write that Penicillin is a car or that democracy is edible. Thats just 100% plain wrong, its not even open for debate. Hell, I even doubt NWN was the first multiplayer RPG to feature graphics, but i dont know that for a fact. I do know, for a fact, that there was nothing "massively multiplayer" about NWN though. "Multiplayer" sure, "massively" hell no. Was it 4 players max or something? UO was the first MMO, because Garriot coined the term for that very game. Some would argue Meridian though. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 90.184.146.157 (talk) 12:30, 22 December 2012 (UTC)


 * It may not have been "massive" by today's standards, but it allowed quite a bit more than 4 players at a time. For the text of the article, the servers could handle "50 players in 1991 to 500 players by 1995" and by "1997 the game had 115,000 players and typically hosted 2,000 adventurers during prime evening hours". 24.12.74.21 (talk) 14:51, 22 December 2012 (UTC)

Some of these dates are not correct. The AOL version of NWN was playable as early as 1990 perhaps even 1989, not 1991. While official source websites no longer exists, you can find plenty of online sources that say so. The only ones I find that don't are obvious copies from this article. I know from personal experience having been a player during my senior year of high school. I graduated in 1990, only ever played this at my parents house when I was in high school and I had left my parents house by September of 1990 and never played it again (though boy I rang up some phone/aol bills when I was!). There were plenty of people online even back then playing so I think a bit of research is in order here and corrections to the dates of when this was actually online. I suspect this mistake comes from the fact that the stand alone (non-AOL online) version was released to the public in 1991.

Also Habitat wasn't even an RPG so how could it be an MORPG or MMORPG? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.229.169.183 (talk) 21:48, 10 December 2014 (UTC)


 * Just because it wasn't fantasy doesn't automatically render it "not RPG". In Habitat aka Club Caribe, you had actual avatars that you could even design yourself by means of so-called "Q-pons". And just like people above me have said, when it comes to historical games, we really need a proper definition as to what means "massive" at what time. For all I know, Q-Link and Habitat/Club Caribe already held several hundreds of users online at the same time during the 1980s. The big "quantum leap" of Habitat/Club Caribe was that it wasn't just a roguelike dungeon crawl anymore, by instead having you walk around and communicate with other users online inside a Zak McCracken-like environment. True, the main function of the game wasn't to kill anybody or complete any "missions", but actually to socialize and communicate with other users instead while trying out some early "virtual reality" stuff, but that doesn't make it any less of a game. So it was a bit more like an early version of Second Life, rather than like Space Invaders, so what? --2003:EF:1705:5E14:E886:C77D:2D3:2B04 (talk) 09:48, 7 March 2021 (UTC)

Indeed, what about Avatar_(1979_video_game)? -- Polluks ★  10:56, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

Screenshots?
99.21.39.161 (talk) 13:23, 20 July 2011 (UTC)
 * What, you got some? Then share, please!  :) 129.33.19.254 (talk) 13:58, 20 July 2011 (UTC)

"Feature" of the game: the ladder system - Also discussion of the mechanics of the game
The ladder system cannot be correctly called a "feature" of the game, as it was not actually a part of the game at all, but rather a completely separate ranking system created and managed by players. In fact, PVP combat was not even strictly possible within the game's rules. Instead, players would meet together in certain pre-ordained combat encounter spots, which could accept multiple characters coming into the battle against computer-controlled monsters. The monsters would be crowd-controlled or otherwise avoided while the players would engage in a PVP event by manually targetted their spells at one another. Melee PVP combat was not possible in the game, as other players were not recognized as enemy combatants, only computer-controlled mobiles were considered hostile and able to be melee attacked. Thus, all PVP was done by spellcasting, as spells could be manually targetted on anyone, including on oneself. These combats could be simple, spur of the moment attacks, or could be larger, pre-planned or long-running events.

Since it seems most of the people in the talk section are saying they've never played the game, and I spent thousands of hours in this game, I'll spend some time describing some of the game mechanics here and let someone better suited to editing and posting it put it on the page.

Basically, since this game was hosted on AOL, when you logged into the game, you used your AOL screen name as your character name. You could not have more than one character per screen name, and you could not change the name of your character to be different from your screen name (which is why you'll see some very unusual character names from the old archived names, sometimes peoples' real names and such, or including numbers, etc). But, you could have multiple screen names on AOL, so each of those screen names (which iirc were free to make) could have a separate character. Usually, new players would log in and later discover the "Roleplaying naming conventions" later, and end up making a new character with a new name to match those conventions. By conventions, I mean things like tags that identified what guild you were with. For example, if you were part of the largest and most organized roleplaying/PVP guild, the Temple of Lloth, you would precede your character name with TOL, so for example a character (and thus AOL screen) name might be TOL Everbright. I don't remember every single guild by any means, but there were dozens who had similar acronyms used to identify guild members. In fact, as guilds were NOT an actual feature of the game, but entirely based on player role-play, these self-identified tags were often the only means of telling who was part of what guild. The only two specific guilds I remember exactly by name are Temple of Lloth (whose player base created "L'Ilythiiri Zhaun'ol" or "The Drow Dictionary" based on a few tidbits of words and names from the language found in TSR's original product "The Drow of the Underdark". The other guild I remember is The Camarilla, based on the White Wolf Games' Vampire the Masquerade RPG. This was a hugely popular and majorly populous guild with a very simple identity tag at the beginning of player names: V for Vampire. So, for example, a specific player name I remember is an old friend "V Mirsalla". I think there might've been a guild called MECH that used something like Mech Warrior as a basis, they were a huge PVP guild as I recall, but I was never a member of that guild, whereas I was personally a member of both TOL and Camarilla.

Now, once you had created a unique screen name that may identify you as a member of a guild, you would log into the game, and you were presented with character creation. This was essentially identical to all the other games in the TSR Gold Box series, and used the First Edition AD&D rules set. You rolled randomly (all six at once) for your character attributes, Strength, Intelligence, Wisdom, Dexterity, Constitution, and Charisma. You could hit the "reroll" button as many times as you liked until you got a set of stats you liked, but if you hit reroll you couldn't go back to the stats that just disappeared so it was a bit of a gamble if you had "decent" stats that may go away. You'd then pick things like your race, class, alignment, and purchase starting armor and weapons. Once that was all done, you'd finalize the character and log in, where you could begin playing the game. Races available were Human, Elf, Dwarf, Half-Elf, Halfling, and Gnome. Classes available were Fighter, Magic-user, Cleric, Thief, Ranger, Paladin, as well as a few multi-class variants. Max level was somewhere in the range of 12 for fighters and thieves, 9 or so for magic-users and I think 10 for clerics, though if someone has a document or source to confirm that I don't remember for certain.

You would then go about questing and levelling up. You controlled only a single character, not a party. There were no "party" mechanics like later games, though it was a shared world and literally anyone could join a battle against monsters you were fighting at any time. Like the other games in the Gold Box series, the world exploration was 3D, and when you encountered monsters and combat began, it switched to a sprite-based overhead tactical map view based on icons. The icons were customizable with a variety of features such as the weapons you held in your hand, the shape of your head, your character's stance, and color of head, hair, body, and armor/gear to the extent of the 16-color palette available at the time. This allowed the black skin and white hair of the drow or dark elves, which in a 16-color environment was quite distinct and noticeable (since there wasn't an actual "drow" race in the game), which was part of the reason this character choice was so overwhelmingly popular. Now, once you were in combat, the combat was essentially turn-based using the AD&D 1st edition combat rules, but as I said, other players could jump into the battle at any time. So, for example, if you were walking around the exploration 3D game world, and you came upon another player(s) in combat, you would receive a message that an ongoing battle was taking place here and you could either join or avoid it. You would join these combats blind, not knowing the status of the players or the monsters, but you could get the names of the player(s) from a menu that appeared when it offered you the option to join or not, so you could at least get an idea of how many players there were (this was important for the PVP system later). Players in the battle would receive a message "V Johan is joining the battle" during one of the turns while that player was loading in. That player would then load in and take their place in the turn-based tactical battle map at the "spawn point" for players in the battle.

As I mentioned, you couldn't melee PVP other players, but you could cast spells (even damaging ones) on yourself or at the ground or at any other player or monster. This led to magic being the only way to PVP and almost ALL PVPers would eventually become split-class Cleric/Magic-users (or CLAMs as they were called) because that split class had the best/most access to a variety of useful spells. Someone joining a battle in the fashion described above could be a lone agent joining against another lone individual and could either help them kill the monsters (for a share of XP and loot, automatically divided by the game system), or they could use their spells to hinder or PVP the other player(s) in the battle. Oftentimes, lone players would take the role of individual assassins, seeking out other lone players to take them out in such PVP situations, but this was fairly uncommon, as there was nothing really to be gained from such activities unless it was a pre-planned roleplay encounter set up by the players, which was somewhat common.

Far more common were large set encounters were dozens of players would join and participate in group or solo PVP. There were no set teams, but oftentimes a PVP guild would join one of these large set encounters in groups of 3 or 4 individuals and all play together against whoever else was there. They were open to join, so even if it was a large-scale guild-sponsored event, anyone from outside of those guilds could freely join (though I think there was a limit of something like 16 or 32 players total that could stand on one space, and therefore be in one battle at once, this may have increased during the life of the game). Guilds often coordinated large-scale battles like this in roleplay events such as guild vs guild wars or would conquer turf, again strictly in roleplay, as these were not actual systems in the game itself, just the creative use of the game by players. Guilds would also often run large battles like this and have a few officers in the battle as observers as a sort of recruitment interview. If you did poorly or didn't know how to PVP, you would not be invited to some of the higher end guilds.

The "feeblemind" spell was often used in 1v1 (or larger) duels between players as well. As a 5th level magic-user spell in 1st edition AD&D, it was above the level that could be blocked with a "minor globe of invulnerability" spell, which any decent PVPer would have up 100% of the time to block level 1-3 spells from hitting them. This spell, minor globe, being so common, led to 4th and 5th level magic-user spells (5th level being the highest in the game) being the only spells that could be practically used in most PVP situations, though sometimes the lower level spells could be used for some utility purposes or against the ever-present monsters that were still in these combat situations. Usually, the monsters would be crowd-controlled off in some corner somewhere and ignored for a dozen rounds or so while the PVPers did their thing, then someone would pop a fresh crowd-control ability on them and the PVP would resume. By keeping the monsters alive and out of the way essentially forever, some battles could literally last for hours, which is why some PVPers racked up such huge bills at $5.00+ an hour at the time. The tactics of the PVP "system" resulted in certain unusual spells like Feeblemind (which reduced the intelligence of the target to 1, the lowest possible value, on a successful hit), Stinking Cloud (which, despite being a 2nd level magic-user spell, was cast on the ground instead of at a player, and so would get its effect through the Minor Globe) and similar spells being the most commonly used in PVP combat, in addition to "stun" effect spells such as "Hold Monster". Feeblemind, as I mentioned, was often used for 1v1 duels, as the spell often did not work on enemy targets (low success chance) but you were rewarded with the in-game message " is stupid." when it succeeded. This led to an entire subculture of screen-shots of these messages being posted to various locations on the AOL service as a "Wall of Fame" for the big PVP groups and guilds. There was nothing quite like getting the name of your "enemy" guild leader "is stupid" to put up as a virtual trophy after a long battle. Also, by reducing the intelligence of the target to 1, they are unable to cast any more spells, and lose all their currently-memorized spells, rendering them combat-ineffective until they leave the battlefield and go rest to regain spells, effectively putting them out of the fight for some time.

Roleplay, as you can imagine, was an incredibly important and central element to this game, as the game's built-in systems were not that robust, especially when compared to later games. That's a big part of the reason why the player based was so incredibly hard-core and diehard. They spent so much time actually making interesting roleplay characters, rather than just a paperdoll with equipment and game stats. There was, of course, an "ERP" element to the game as well, as anyone who's played a modern MMO probably would expect.

Lastly, then, the reason I initially started writing this entire thing was the entry on the wiki page that says the "ladder" system was a feature of the game. It was not. It was entirely run by players, as PVP wasn't even a feature of the game, technically. The PVP we engaged in was actually a circumvention of the game's systems, not a feature, and the ladder was something we just kept as a sort of record of who was the best of the best at PVP. So someone should at least re-write the bit that says it was a "feature" of the game. Also, please feel free to take and re-write literally anything or everything I've said above in a much more wiki-friendly style to use in the article proper. I'm not a regular wiki editor or contributor, I just felt I had information that would be beneficial, so I stuck it here in the talk page for you guys. Hopefully it helps. Thanks! — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2001:48F8:4078:2AB:79CC:9C97:F88E:A8EB (talk) 09:36, 29 January 2020 (UTC)
 * Wow, that brought back a lot of great memories of the hundreds of hours I spent in that game once upon a time...thanks, IP! Schazjmd   (talk)  23:28, 24 November 2020 (UTC)

Source

 * https://archive.org/details/game-players-pc-entertainment-vol.-7-no.-1-january-february-1994/page/n53/mode/2up