ĭaglow chose Neverwinter as the game's location because of its magical features (a river of warm water that flowed from a snowy forest into a northern sea), and its location near a wide variety of terrain types. Case approved funding for NWN and work began with the game going live 18 months later in March 1991.

In a series of meetings in San Francisco and Las Vegas with AOL's Steve Case and Kathi McHugh, TSR's Jim Ward and SSI's Chuck Kroegel, Daglow and programmer Cathryn Mataga convinced the other three partners that the project was indeed possible. Within months they realized that it was technically feasible to combine the Dungeons & Dragons Gold Box engine with the community-focused gameplay of online titles to create an online role-playing video game with graphics although the multiplayer graphical flight combat game Air Warrior (also from Kesmai) had been online since 1987 all prior online RPGs had been based on text. In 1989 the Beyond Software team started working with SSI on Dungeons & Dragons games using the Gold Box engine that had debuted with Pool of Radiance in 1988. Online graphics in the late 1980s were severely restricted by the need to support modem data transfer rates as slow as 300 bits per second (bit/s). At the time AOL was a Commodore 64 only online service, known as Quantum Computer Services, with just a few thousand subscribers, and was called Quantum Link. ĭon Daglow and the Beyond Software game design team began working with AOL on original online games in 1987, in both text-based and graphical formats. It was the first multiplayer online role-playing game to display graphics. Neverwinter Nights was a co-development of AOL, Beyond Software, SSI, and TSR. When combat occurs, gameplay switches to full-screen combat mode, in which a player's characters and enemies are represented by icons which move around in the course of battle.

After creating the character, gameplay takes place on a screen that displays text interactions, the names and current status of one's party of characters, and a window which displays images of geography marked with various pictures of characters or events.

Neverwinter Nights was developed with gameplay similar to other games in the Gold Box series.

Neverwinter nights online free download