Never before seen, 22-year-old E3 presentations help explain the rough first impression⁠—and enduring appeal⁠—of BioWare's other Dungeons & Dragons RPG

pcgamer.com:

Gaming YouTube channel Noclip continues to release rare, archival videogame footage on its secondary preservation channel. Last week, NoClip made good on a prior promise and dropped nearly an hour of never before seen Neverwinter Nights footage from E3s 2000 and 2001. Their presenter isn't identified, but it sounds like Trent Oster, NwN's project director who would later found prolific RPG remasterer Beamdog.

The in-progress Neverwinter Nights is immediately way more familiar than KotOR's bizarro world early version also preserved by NoClip. The tilesets, portraits, and character models here mostly resemble the final game, though the UI and character animations are noticeably different. Amusingly, it sounds like these builds used the spellcasting audio from Baldur's Gate 2 as a placeholder.

What really stood out to me is the focus of the presentations: Oster spends most of the E3 2000 video talking about NwN from a multiplayer perspective, while in 2001, the video was all about how the game's Aurora toolset could be used to quickly and easily craft custom levels. There isn't really any mention of the original campaign BioWare was cooking up.

Neverwinter Nights' original campaign was a little rough, starting out strong but running out of gas around the halfway point. It's a strange, awkward thing that doesn't compare favorably to the CRPG triumph of Baldur's Gate before it or the approachable, cinematic RPG experience of Knights of the Old Republic immediately after. That's not what Neverwinter Nights is remembered for though.

In the E3 2001 video, Oster describes a primary inspiration for NwN being Ultima Online of all games. «We looked at it and thought, 'well how do we get involved with this space?'» Oster explains in