Destineer subsidiary MacSoft made two announcements of note for Mac gamers yesterday: One is that the company’s long-awaited conversion of Neverwinter Nights is shipping, as promised, and the other is an update to a popular MacSoft game released earlier this year: Dungeon Siege.
MacSoft had earlier promised to begin shipping Neverwinter Nights on July 30, and general manager Al Schilling said that did indeed come to pass; in fact, the company anticipated seeing the game hit store shelves as early as yesterday.
Neverwinter Nights is a fantasy role-playing game featuring an advanced 3D graphics engine. Created by Baldur’s Gate maker BioWare Corp., Neverwinter Nights is set in the land of the Forgotten Realms, where you must solve the mystery behind the mystery plague that is ravaging the city of Neverwinter itself. It’s based on Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition rules and is billed as the most “accurate D&D experience ever seen on the Mac.”
Featuring 60+ hours of gameplay for the single player, the game also features extensive online play support between PC and Mac gamers, as well as a “Dungeon Master” feature that lets Mac gamers act as the coordinator of online adventures for other gamers, where they can populate maps with their own monsters and traps, just like they can with pen-and-paper D&D games. (There has been some controversy about the absence of tools to actually make new modules from scratch, although Mac players can use the myriad modules created by PC users).
Neverwinter Nights requires a G4/450MHz or faster, 256MB RAM, 32MB video card and 2.1GB hard disk space.
In related news, MacSoft also noted the release of Dungeon Siege v1.1.2 for the Macintosh. Dungeon Siege is a recently-released action/adventure game set in a medieval fantasy realm populated by monsters, magical creatures and other foes. A classic “dungeon crawl”-style game, Dungeon Siege contains elements of both role-playing and strategy games, and has been compared to classics like Blizzard’s Diablo series, though it features a more sophisticated 3D graphics engine.
The updater for Dungeon Siege synchronized the codebase of the US version with the French and German versions, thus allowing international network play. Other changes include a check for minimum CPU speed of 350MHz, fixes to problems with the game cursor, a stabilization fix in the Loader subsystem, and additional error reporting code generation on software quit.
The update is available for download from MacSoft’s Web site.