Neverwinter Nights
Quick Facts:
Platform: PC
Genre: Role-Playing Game (RPG)
Developer: Bioware
Publisher: Infogrames/Atari
Release Date (North America): June 18, 2002 (PC)
Rating: T
All aspects of the game included, Neverwinter Nights is probably the game I've played the most time in my life, especially once you factor in the all the expansion packs that came out for it. The single player game throughout the series is good and definitely worth playing. The characters in the game may not be the most memorable (besides, of course, Deekin), but the story and gameplay are very good. But that's not the only reason I love this game. The multiplayer for this game was amazing.
The game came with a full toolset that let people create their own mods and even whole worlds and then host them online using their own computers as dedicated servers. The toolset that came with the game included most of the things Bioware used to create the actual single player game. For people that actually get into coding and all that stuff, you can really do a lot with the world you want to create, and even for people that dont know how to do all that stuff (like me), it had an easy enough interface that you could learn some tricks and make some areas. And once someone created a mod and put it online as a server, they could log in not only as a player but as an all-controlling Dungeon Master (a D&D term) and play along with or even against the players by spawning monsters, items, and many other things all while staying invisible to the players (if they wanted to). It's really hard to explain the awesomeness and all-encompassingness of this game to someone who's never played it. To people who have played some other Bioware games but not this one, it plays and looks a lot like an earlier version of Knights of the Old Republic or the recently released Dragon Age: Origins. You can still go online in Neverwinter Nights today, more than seven years later, and find online communities that are still playing user-made mods. I started playing online in the same worlds with the same people and became part of a large community back when I used to play this. This is where I put the most of my hours playing this game, logging on to the NWN servers every night and seeing where my online friends were playing. There were some awesome servers and mods online and a lot of cool people to play with, and best of all, it was all free. Looking back, the online component was a lot like World of Warcraft before there was World of Warcraft, but it was free, and players could create their own worlds and stories and control them on the fly as people played them.
Honorable Mentions:
Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind (PC, Xbox)- Not a perfect game by any means, but a very ambitious and good game. The game is in a completely open world, even more so than its successor Oblivion. There are even fewer area transitions, and for its time the world was very well made and detailed. It's not perfect though, as the combat is not very good and there were a lot of glitches/problems with the gameplay. Still, this was a big game for this year, and laid the foundation for Oblivion.
Warcraft III (PC)- An RTS that I still occasionally play, it has great gameplay, great online play, and a great story and characters (something unusual for many RTSs).
Kingdom Hearts (PS2)
Metroid Prime (GC)
Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell (Multi)- I only played this one a little (I'm not a big fan of stealth games), but I've only really ever heard good things about it, and it laid a foundation for several Splinter Cell games to come afterwards.
Thanks for reading, and as always feel free to comment/post. Stay tuned next week for the best games of the year 2003!
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