LinuxGameNetwork
With the original maintainers of Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition, Beamdog, busy on their upcoming title Mythforce, the community has stepped up with a new patch. The entirely community-driven patch 8193.35 bring several quality-of-life improvements, bug fixes, and a cool new 'toon' shader effect.
The highlights include:
- Spells and spell-like abilities now display a targeting indicator displaying their range and, if appropriate, their AOE shape and size.
- Added support for up to 8 multiclasses, configurable per-module.
- Improved area load times by up to 100x!
- Added an in-game News UI that shows upcoming patches and community news.
- NUI windows will no longer break input to the game (WASD, drag&drop).
- Added a new "Toon" postprocessing shader.
- Hundreds of new functions and goodies for module builders.
- Hundreds of bugfixes and optimizations.
For a complete list of changes, check out the official changes notes.
As mentioned, this patch really is a labour of love by the community. It's awesome to see how much enthusiasm there is for Neverwinter Nights after all these years. The release notes explicitly gives thanks to the following community members for their contributions to this patch: clippy, Daz, Jasperre, Liareth, niv, Soren, tinygiant, virusman. So thank you again for these updates!
For those interested in playing Neverwinter Nights for the first time, and in keeping with the community theme, I recommend playing through some of the amazing third-party modules for the game. Two of my personal favourites are Darkness Over Daggerford and Tyrants of the Moonsea. Both published by Ossian Studios, they are great examples of the creativity of the community.
