Top mods - Neverwinter Nights

Buy to play

Apart from the huge swathes of single player content provided by the community itself, Bioware have not rested on their laurels and have also created five 'Premium Modules', four of which can be bought and downloaded directly (with the fifth being a free attachment to one of the others). These modules cost around $8 and add large new single player campaigns to the game as well as modifications to the way the game is played. For instance, the Kingmaker and Pirates Of The Sword Coast modules offer the party based gameplay of the original Baldur's Gate games, whereas the most recent, Infinite Dungeons, provides a random dungeon generator which allows you to cook up new dungeons for single or multiplayer adventuring.

The multiplayer element is where Neverwinter Nights really comes into its own, as one of the first modern PC RPGs in the purest sense of the word. Lots of games have nice graphics and loads of hack and slash action, and if you hunt for them there are still plenty of text based MUDs (multi-user dungeons) for the hard core roleplayer; but Neverwinter Nights is the first game to be able to accommodate both of these extremes in a single game.

If you hunt around the remarkably friendly server brower you can find games of all types, from the less-said-about-the-better social servers, to the hack and slash adventures, to PvP arena servers and finally, and most impressive of all, the persistent worlds. There are many of these persistent world servers, where your character is stored in a similar manner to an MMORPG, so you can log in and progress over time. Many such servers include modifications and scripts to the game code, allowing for changes to the game rules and the addition of things like crafting skills, the need for provisions, permanent character death and all the trappings of a pen and paper RPG.

One thing to note particularly when looking for a persistent world server is that the abbreviation FR does not necessarily mean that the server is in French, it usually stands for Forgotten Realms, meaning that that is the server setting, although sometimes you can end up in a French Forgotten Realms server. D'oh.

A Land Far Away

The most impressive modification to emerge from the Neverwinter Nights engine is the A Land Far Away project. This ever-expanding work in progress is designed to accommodate only role players, so l33t McAx3 the warrior need not apply. Entry is restricted to those who fill out an online application form or who make a good impression on the open public server, so that only players judged to be worthy gain access. A stringent policy but a sensible procedure to filter out unwanted players. For any ordinary server such elitism would seem downright unfriendly, but the A Land Far Away project is a step above the usual.

Sporting fifteen linked servers each covering a specific region of the AD&D Forgotten Realms ALFA comes as close to providing a complete map of the gaming universe as any computer game ever has. This level of detail is provided by a bank of custom hak packs, character portraits, music and sound files that weighs in at a shade under two gigabytes. Considering this is effectively double the size of the original game install it's pretty clear just how much has been taken on by the development team in creating a work of such scale.