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1. #Neverwinter nights online paid by the hour series#
2. #Neverwinter nights online paid by the hour free#

All game development at AOL other than NWN was suspended, and the game's player capacity was enhanced through server-side improvements but not through the addition of new playable areas. AOL diverted all its efforts into keeping up with the exploding demand for modem connections and online capacity. At about this time AOL’s subscriber growth started to expand exponentially, as the adoption of e-mail by everyday Americans drove new sign-ups. The original Neverwinter Nights was expanded once, in 1992. Near the end of its run in 1997 the game had 115,000 players and typically hosted 2,000 adventurers during prime evening hours, a 4000% increase over 1991.

#Neverwinter nights online paid by the hour free#

Ultimately the game became a free part of the AOL subscriber service. As a result of these upgrades, the capacity of each server grew from 50 players in 1991 to 500 players by 1995. As the years progressed, Internet connection costs dropped, AOL and NWN membership grew, the servers became faster and the hourly player charge declined. Some users bragged about monthly game bills of $500 or more.

The game originally cost USD$6.00 per hour to play. The area also was close enough to the settings of the other Gold Box games to allow subplots to intertwine between the online and the disk-based titles. Case approved funding for NWN and work began, with the game going live 18 months later in March of 1991.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.

#Neverwinter nights online paid by the hour series#

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. 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. 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 RPG with graphics. In 1989 the Stormfront 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.

Neverwinter Nights was a co-development of AOL, Stormfront Studios, SSI, and TSR (which was acquired by Wizards of the Coast in 1997).ĭon Daglow and the Stormfront game design team began working with AOL on original online games in 1987, in both text-based and graphical formats.