The story begins with the player character being sent by Lady Aribeth to recover four monsters needed to make a cure for the Wailing Death, a plague that is sweeping the city of Neverwinter. Neverwinter is a city on the Sword Coast of Faerûn, in the Forgotten Realms campaign setting of Dungeons and Dragons. The first and final chapters of the story in the official campaign deal with the city of Neverwinter itself, but the lengthy mid-story requires the player to venture into the countryside and then northward to the city of Luskan. In the original NWN scenario supplied with the game engine, the player is single-handedly responsible for defeating a powerful cult collecting the four reagents required for stopping an insatiable plague thwarting an attack on the city of Neverwinter, and many other side quests. Play centers on the development of a character who becomes the ultimate hero of the story.

The core release includes the game engine, a campaign that can be played as single player or multiplayer, and the Aurora toolset (for Windows only) used for creating custom content based on the same engine. The game was named after the original Neverwinter Nights online game, the first graphical MMORPG, which ran from 1991 to 1997 on AOL. The belief was this model would create a potentially infinite massively multiplayer game framework. The game was based on the concept of building an internet-like model for a massively multiplayer game, allowing the end users to host the server.

On October 31, 2006, the sequel Neverwinter Nights 2 was released followed by its first expansion in late 2007 and its second one at the end of 2008. Two expansion packs were released in mid and late 2003, and a third in 2005. MacSoft released a Mac OS X port in August 2003. BioWare released the freely downloadable Linux Client in June 2003 (purchase of game still required). Infogrames released Neverwinter Nights for Windows on June 18, 2002. It was originally to be published by Interplay Entertainment, but the publisher's financial difficulties forced the change. Neverwinter Nights (NWN), produced by BioWare and published by Infogrames (now Atari), is a third-person perspective computer role-playing game that is based on third edition Dungeons & Dragons and Forgotten Realms rules.

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