An old fan of Neverwinter Nights, loving this MMO...

Greetings and well met, everyone! My name is Kara Lucielle Pythiana but you can just call me by my nickname Mara for simplicity's sake. I have been really enjoying this game thus far, I must say. I play as a Drow magic user named Mila'kitha and have really been kicking some butt... I think level-wise my character is in her mid-50's range already. So I am doing pretty good for not having been playing it a super long amount of time! I have always been a fan of dungeons and dragons PC (and console) games and back in the day I used to mod Neverwinter Nights and Neverwinter Nights 2, and in the Neverwinter Vault modding community I go by the name ChaosQueen_Kara_8. Previously, Chaos_Theocrat. I remember making a couple of really legendary mods, such as a totally 3D graphical remake of the first Zork game using the Neverwinter Nights engine, and a very massive RPG that I called Knights of the Holy Grail which was based on the Arthurian myths and legends, also using the original Neverwinter Nights engine. Back in those years, I was playing Ultima Online a lot, and I incorporated a lot of MMO style systems and concepts into Knights of the Holy Grail. It was an extremely ambitious idea at the time, since it was pushing the Neverwinter Nights engine far beyond what it was designed to do. As a result, there were some bugs and glitches but otherwise the game was fully playable from beginning to end and a lot of fans of Arthurian lore loved it. Casual players were not expecting the MMO elements though, and the high concept religious and spiritual themes (mostly Gnostic, since I myself am a Gnostic Pagan) made it difficult for a lot of those players to really get into if they were not expecting that sort of thing story-wise... so for those reasons it kind of faded into a bit of obscurity while maintaining something of a cult following on the Neverwinter Vault. Enough that it reached the old Vault's Hall of Fame, along with a lot of my lesser-scale mods (including a huge collection of prefabricated areas for modders and world builders to make use out of). My Zork mod was much more famous and much more fun and silly in tone, so that was probably my most famous work from that period. I did some other remakes, and at least one medieval murder mystery game titled "A Tooth for an Eye" which was sort of a spiritual sequel to Knights of the Holy Grail but much, much smaller in scale and scope. Just one adventure, one story it told rather than the countless stories I crammed into my Holy Grail game. So needless to say, I was very big in the old Neverwinter Nights community between the years 2006 and 2012. I never could quite get into Neverwinter Nights 2 with the same passion I had for Neverwinter Nights though... at least not modding-wise anyway. Both were fun, awesome games to play but I daresay the modding system they had for the second game was very inferior to the first. Not technical-wise... more, ease of access-wise I would say. It was just.... harder and more time-consuming to use. I toyed with making some games using the second game's engine, but there were a lot more limitations I found compared to the first game's toolkit's flexibility. I think the most amazing thing I ever saw to spin out of Neverwinter Nights was the first Witcher game, which used the same engine (the Aurora engine) and which was originally just a project thrown together by fans of the Witcher novels who probably never expected it to become such a massive and beloved video game franchise, as it has become today. But, my hat was off to them from the get-go since I know what it is like to build a game world from scratch and have to grow it from there and make it into something special! So the Witcher series will always have a special place in my heart. But back to Neverwinter Nights 2... it had a great story, as did the first game, even if that story was a lot smaller scope in a few ways. It just never quite reached the same popularity due to bugs in its' engine that were more pronounced than in the first game. But long story short (too late, I know!) I have been enjoying the universe of Neverwinter and Forgotten Realms in general for many, many years. Forgotten Realms was always my absolute favorite D&D setting other than Mystara, which was the setting that first got me into D&D as it did for a lot of people given it was where First Edtiion took place for the most part. And I must say... this fantastic MMO, Neverwinter, absolutely does it justice to perfection. Seeing Minc in the game was cool too, since I simply adored the Baldur's Gate series. Even my mother loved playing Baldur's Gate, and she was not really an RPG kind of person, so that is saying something! The depth of customization in Neverwinter Online, the vastness of its' game world, and how it is both enjoyable to high-level players and easy for new players to get into... all that, along with various references to the old Neverwinter Nights games... really make this game a jewel among MMOs, at least in my eyes. There was something special about going through places like Black Lake and the Beggar's Nest in this game, and remembering what those districts were like during the Wailing Death plague era of the first Neverwinter Nights game. The Nashers and the references to the Lord of Neverwinter from that old game... Nasher Alagondar... just really do serve well to hammer home the notion that this game takes place many years into the future of those original games. Much as I felt when I played Ultima IX: Ascension and compared it to, say, Ultima I: The First Age of Darkness. It is a humbling and wonderfully magical experience that makes the game world feel alive and which gives it the sense that things in the Forgotten Realms have evolved and changed a LOT in all those years. So, as a long-time fan of the genre and the setting... thank you for making such a great game, and for making it so enjoyable to play. See everyone in the lands of Faerun! *Smiles*