| The Legacy of NWN, Elvis and Human Nature - Zalaster (7-31-00) |
Note: This Article originally appeared on our Shadowbane Affiliate Site, Aerynth Atheneaum
This morning I was chatting online with Greyden Winter, member and former GM of PRoW. (Which used to be called the Pirates of Neverwinter back in the day.) At one point in our conversation he asked me, "Why is everyone so determined to hold onto NWN?"
My reply, with little real thought, was: "Not to hold onto NWN the game, but a community of like-minded folks, friends." It continued on for a length after that, but you understand the general direction I took.
While what I said is essentially true, throughout the day I kept coming back to that question. Then it struck me. Many of the attitudes of oNWN’ers (to borrow a term from another development company’s message boards) mimic those of the fans of rock stars who died in their prime. It seems human nature to want more from a good experience. Let me take Jim Morrison as my first example.
Denial
While I was in the Navy, I had a friend that was a devoted Doors/Jim Morrison fan. He would quite convincingly argue that there was no evidence beyond the death certificate that Jim Morrison was dead. He would continue on to say that the only people to see Jim’s body were his wife and the coroner, and that since his wife disappeared a few years later, it was probably a cover up and that they were living together somewhere in South America. While I have no clue whether any of what he said was true, he went into so many elaborate details that it sounded plausible.
When NWN initially was shut down, a common outcry was that AOL would rue their mistake and welcome us back soon. Then when it was clear that this wouldn’t happen; some thought of bringing legal action, thereby either forcing AOL to reopen the gates or imposing punitive damage upon AOL. Both were the products of the denial that the fate of our beloved game was not under our control. In some corners of the now far-flung community, denial still runs rampant. Denial and its close cousin Anger are often the first emotions to surface.
Anger
The conspiracy gurus have it in for Courtney Love. Quite obviously, I presume to their way of thinking, since Kurt Cobain was bopping along quite nicely and screaming out the songs they loved while single, that once he got married and died from a shotgun blast to the head it was his wife’s fault. Depending on the source, she did everything from driving him to it to actually pulling the trigger. She is the target of a great deal of misplaced anger.
The NWN fan-base expressed many corporate conspiracies (though not nearly as outrageous as the Courtney Love theories above)that ‘proved’ how AOL, TSR, the game staff, the CIA, or whatever group the particular mouthpiece was angry with, were using this as a ploy to further their own nefarious ends. I’ll let you all in on a secret, 99% of the companies/developers out there are looking to make some kind of profit. (I love those ForgottenWorld folks though for bucking the trend.) This kind of anger is understandable, up to a point. When people are faced with the loss of something beloved, they naturally seek out someone to blame and vilify. In time signs of the wound may remain, but it is usually covered by something else.
Unadulterated Nostalgia
Look at the fans of Elvis. They don’t care that their idol had gotten fat and old or that he hardly ever performed anymore. They don’t care about anything but the memories they have of days gone by and the experiences they had. All the oddities and bizarreness that were part of Elvis are either forgotten or enshrined. He is on their walls, in all his oil on velvet glory, looking how they want him to look. He is and always will be the King to them.This is the category that most of us oNWN’ers are in nowadays. Nearly forgotten are the memories of not being able to get in because AOL went unlimited and the game held a mere 500 at a time. The drac lines, being passed hacked items and landing in jail, long queues at events and any other number of frustrations that just drove us crazy are fast becoming fuzzy in the collective mind. The ability to look objectively at what was going on with the game and where it was headed has become more difficult with each passing year. I say this nearly three years to the day from the closing. What is vivid in the mind is the death matches won, pearl items earned, whom you slaved, the first LS+3 (long sword +3 for the uninitiated) you stole, or whatever is fond to you. Lets take a look at what the interim has taught us though.
A Legacy of Nerf
When AOL went unlimited it strained the seams of the entire network. The influx affected NWN greatly. It was increasingly difficult to get into the game. The game was besieged by newbies, and I'm not talking about people just new to the game. I mean the people who would never learn. The game could not have survived as an 'everything for everyone' enterprise without changes. There was already the institution of no jumpers allowed on certain quests, even though the quest was in a PvP zone, and a growing trend towards nerfing.
I believe that had the game continued it would have become spoken of as many speak about UO and EQ today. The mushrooming of the number of players and the collective cacophony of whine that is generated by those numbers has had that effect in most every game that has tried to be everything for everyone. I know of only a few graphical ORPG’s that have had the balls to not try to live up to the mediocrity of this model: Shadowbane and ForgottenWorld, two entirely different games, both of which are still in development.
Acceptance?
Because NWN was cut down in its prime, so to speak, we are left with our nostalgia intact. NWN will always be more akin to the legendary Jimi Hendrix than the graying (and frequent victim of comedians everywhere) Keith Richards.
Now, please don’t misinterpret what I am about to say. If I had the option, I would play NWN just as it was when I started, minus the $200-$300 monthly AOL bills of course… In the end, I will steal a phrase from Def Leppard and add my own twist to it. I say about Neverwinter Nights: "it’s better to burn out, then to be nerfed away."
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