An old BioWare RPG just got a big new community patch

Six years after its debut, Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition, the Beamdog-buffed update of BioWare's famed 2002 D&D RPG, has got a big new patch featuring improvements to the UI, better HDR-bloom post-processing effects, more than 100 bugfixes, and “significant performance improvements across the board.”

The patch was first announced in early December 2023 but only went live yesterday, after a couple months of testing. Interestingly, it wasn't developed by Beamdog: The patch notes (via GamingOnLinux) say the update “was developed for personal enjoyment and out of goodwill for our fellow players and creators by unpaid software engineers from the NWN community: clippy, Daz, Jasperre, Liareth, niv, shadguy, Soren, Squatting Monk, tinygiant, virusman.”

Highlights of the new patch include:

New HDR-bloom postprocessing effect accumulates overlapping effects more naturally and makes intense colors bleed into the surrounding pixels.
Improvements to the gameplay UI, such as toggling object highlight by double-pressing TAB.
Significant performance improvements across the board, both on servers and clients.
Many new and improved scripting functions, including support for synchronised audio playback and improvements to the scriptable UI.
Over a hundred bugfixes, including several notorious 20-year-old bugs, such as area objects sometimes showing up too late.
Script compiler is now open source and available as a standalone tool at https://github.com/niv/neverwinter.nim.

Despite its age, this isn't the first big fan-made patch to come to Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition. Many of the developers of this update rolled out a similar “beefy update” in 2023 with quality-of-life tweaks, new modding options, and an optional graphical overhaul.

To some extent, I feel like this level of ongoing fan support reflects BioWare's aspirations for Neverwinter Nights when it first came out. The included singleplayer campaign is unremarkable, but it also shipped with a toolset enabling users to create and share their own custom modules for it. That focus on player-supported content helped foster a community that persists to this day: The decidedly old-timey Neverwinter Vault has active forums and a wealth of content, some of it quite current. Want to add Baldur's Gate 3 character portraits to NWN? The gang's all there.

The player base on Steam is impressively resilient too, with an average concurrent player count consistently hovering around 700 for almost the past four years. Those aren't huge numbers, but it's rare to see a player graph stay quite this straight for quite this long: