"Neverwinter Nights": New patch after 23 years – from "unpaid developers"

There is a patch for the 2002 Bioware role-playing game “Neverwinter Nights”: According to a Steam post, the new update for the Enhanced Edition was created by a group of unpaid software developers – out of “personal pleasure and goodwill for our fellow players”, write the developers from the community.

The patch developed by fans will be rolled out via the official channels. This means that anyone who owns the game on Steam will receive the new update automatically. There are fan patches for many older titles with an active community, but they are usually distributed on modding platforms.

The update developed by the “Neverwinter Nights” community, on the other hand, has achieved official status and is therefore on a par with updates released by the original developers. For the release of the new patch, the community developers cooperated with the Canadian studio Beamdog, which released the Enhanced Edition of the role-playing game in 2018. Bioware, developer of the original, does not appear to have been involved.

The Android version of the Enhanced Edition of “Neverwinter Nights” will also receive the update developed by the community, Beamdog promises in a response to an X-Post.

Technical improvements

The new patch will primarily improve the technical foundation of “Neverwinter Nights”. Among other things, the developers claim to have increased performance through better CPU optimization, and the network code has also been revised – “Neverwinter Nights” can be played solo, but also on servers with up to 64 players.

Multisample antialiasing and anisotropic filtering have also been implemented, which should lead to reduced edge flicker and more detailed textures in the distance. The developers have published the complete changelog on the Beamdog website.

(dahe)