Neverwinter Nights (1991 video game)
| Neverwinter Nights | |
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| Developer(s) | Stormfront Studios |
| Publisher(s) | Strategic Simulations |
| Platform(s) | MS-DOS |
| Release | 1991 |
| Genre(s) | role-playing video game |
| Mode(s) | multiplayer |
Neverwinter Nights was the first multiplayer online role-playing game to display graphics, and ran from 1991 to 1997 on AOL.
Neverwinter Nights was developed with gameplay similar to other games in the Gold Box series. Players begin by creating a character. After creating the character, gameplay takes place on a screen that displays text interactions, the names and current status of one's party of characters, and a window which displays images of geography marked with various pictures of characters or events. When combat occurs, gameplay switches to full-screen combat mode, in which a player's characters and enemies are represented by icons which move around in the course of battle.
The game features a hierarchical ranking of players based upon prowess in battle known as a Ladder. The most widely renowned of such Ladders, the World PVP Council (WPC) Ladder (PVP= Player Vs. Player), "rated as 'the' ladder to prove your mettle in Neverwinter".
Neverwinter Nights was a co-development of AOL, Stormfront Studios, SSI, and TSR. It was the first multiplayer online role-playing game to display graphics.
Don Daglow and the Stormfront game design team began working with AOL on original online games in 1987, in both text-based and graphical formats. At the time AOL was a Commodore 64 only online service, known as Quantum Computer Services, with just a few thousand subscribers, and was called Quantum Link. Online graphics in the late 1980s were severely restricted by the need to support modem data transfer rates as slow as 300 bits per second (bit/s).
In 1989 the Stormfront team started working with SSI on Dungeons & Dragons games using the Gold Box engine that had debuted with Pool of Radiance in 1988. Within months they realized that it was technically feasible to combine the Dungeons & Dragons Gold Box engine with the community-focused gameplay of online titles to create an online role-playing video game with graphics although the multiplayer graphical flight combat game Air Warrior (also from Kesmai) had been online since 1987; all prior online RPGs had been based on text.
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