A few weeks back a couple of individuals from the Neverwinter Nights modding community contacted me about the possibility of starting a Nexus sites for the veteran series of games. While I was sceptical about the prospect at first because the games have always been dutifully serviced by the Neverwinter Vault site, unfortunately it's also common knowledge that IGN are starting to wind down their fan site services and some are already falling in to disrepair, and the worry is that losing the Vault would decimate the Neverwinter community.

After talking it through with the modders over on the BioWare Social Site it became apparent that interest in a Neverwinter Nexus was high, and that it might help to provide stability and even revitalise the community in some areas. While the series has not had a new game in over 5 years, and is unlikely to see another since BioWare created their own IP in Dragon Age to remove their reliance on licensing the D&D universe from Wizards of the Coast, supporting this great community seemed like something I had to do out of duty. And that's why I am happy to announce the launch of Neverwinter Nexus.

If you've never played either of the Neverwinter games then stop what you're doing and go buy them. Where have you been these past 10 years? The series is arguably one of the last bastions of quintessential cRPGs, where your character build and the story telling play a more important role in the game. Remember when levelling up your character meant putting points in to your attributes like strength, dexterity, agility and so on and so forth? Remember when you could pick from lots of different classes, feats and abilities and you could literally spend hours planning your character build before you'd even started playing the game (and enjoy doing it, as well)? Remember when storylines were at least half interesting and slightly less clichéd and generic? Remember when developers didn't think you had the attention span of a five year old? That's Neverwinter Nights (and Icewind Dale, and Baldur's Gate...).

Neverwinter Nights (NWN) has a very mature modding community, as mature and large as the Morrowind and Oblivion modding communities respectively. The types of modifications for NWN are slightly different to Elder Scrolls mods, however, and mods tend to be released less often, but are much larger and content filled than their Elder Scrolls counterparts. So while Elder Scrolls modding has lots of small tweaks, texture patches, weapons and armour and so on, Neverwinter modding is more about the large expansions, conversions and additions. It's a nice balance. Case-in-point, a mod has just been released for NWN2 that is a complete remake of Icewind Dale, 3 years in the making. The entire Icewind Dale game from start to finish, remade for NWN2. Brilliant.

If you're from the NWN modding community and new to the Nexus community of sites then welcome. We're a 3.5 million member strong community of mod authors and mod users for various games, focused on providing as top-notch, stable, easy and efficient modding experience as possible. I understand that learning a new site interface and working out where everything is can sometimes be quite daunting, especially when you're so used to using one site for so long, but hopefully you can work it all out eventually. If you are struggling then you might find some of our Wiki articles are worth a read to get your bearings, or alternatively you can always ask on our forums for help or guidance.

Many mod authors have already uploaded their mods to the site, and I'm sure there are plenty more to follow, and it's really great to see a modding community so enthusiastic about modding the games even 5 years on from the last game release. My hope is that over the coming weeks and months I can work more closely with the community to get some spotlight features out, including some interviews and reviews of some of the content that is on offer here and elsewhere, because we all know that the Neverwinter Nights community already has lots to offer.

But for now, let me just welcome everyone to this new site, and I look forward to seeing the great mods this community has already created, and will create, being show-cased on another Nexus site.