After Icewind Dale 2, Interplay decided to drop the Infinity Engine and go 3D. Neverwinter Nights, developed by Bioware in Canada and released (under the Black Isle label) in 2002 for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, was the first RPG in the new style. While you can choose between three camera modes, they are all third person and similar to an isometric view. Combat is real-time.

I can't say very much about this game; it charmed me at the beginning, seeming to combine many of the things I liked in Daggerfall and the Fallout series. But then I lost interest pretty fast.

Mods

The game comes with an editor, which I found not very easy to use, and there are only few and mostly marginal mods available. The best place to find them is Neverwinter Vault.

Surround Gaming

Back in 2005 when I first wrote this, Neverwinter Nights was the only single-player RPG that supported Surround Gaming. Later it was been joined by Oblivion (and Morrowind, with a 3rd party patch).

Surround Gaming support in Neverwinter Nights is good. There is no fiddling around with the settings. The game will recognize the Matrox Parhelia and give you additional screen resolutions, up to 3840×1024. I suppose that with a 3GHz processor this will not be a big problem either. When Bob Colayco tried it in 2002, 3072×768 still was the largest reasonable choice.

Actually Surround Gaming makes even more, or at least a different sense in RPGs than it does in shooters. In an RPG you usually have lots of little windows you'd like to but can't keep open all the time because they get in the way. With surround gaming, Neverwinter Nights puts them on the side monitors, leaving the view on the center monitor free.

TruForm

Neverwinter Nights is one of the few games that support ATI's TruForm (Radeon 8500 and above). To enable it, you must set Enable Truform=1 in the game's INI file.