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Bioware isn't known for taking baby steps when it comes to creating games. Although still a newcomer in the industry with only two published games under its belt, Bioware has shown a propensity for crafting ambitious games. Baldur's Gate was an expansive and epic role-playing game that helped revitalize the genre. And Baldur's Gate II likewise sounds like a title with high aspirations, a game that Bioware is modestly hoping will become the best second-edition AD&D game ever. However, with its next big title, Neverwinter Nights, Bioware is pulling out all the stops. The company that is now nearly synonymous with D&D is trying to bring Dungeons & Dragons fully onto your computer. Not just an adventure, but the entire game, with all of its social interaction, interactive worlds, and the DM/player dynamic. If Bioware does this right, it will basically give anyone the ability to play pen-and-paper D&D (not the watered-down electronic version) on the computer, without any of the shortcomings that have plagued other games that have tried to emulate the D&D experience and failed.

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There have been some great D&D games in the past, to be sure, but they all were like modules: preset, finite adventures with canned, albeit well-told, stories. As good as they were, these games couldn't come close to capturing the true D&D spirit, which was a group of people gathered around a table, acting together as a team, facing new challenges thrown at them by a dungeon master, who told his stories from the head of the table. While D&D computer games were limited because the programmers couldn't program for every action a player might take, the D&D pen-and-paper games were truly open-ended, as the DM could literally make decisions on the fly and shape the adventure completely to the players' needs and actions. Now, with Neverwinter Nights, Bioware hopes to finally give computer players the ability to craft campaign worlds filled with multiple modules and give them the ability to play games with a DM and multiple players. This will all be possible thanks to Solstice, the toolset that gives players all they need to create worlds and gives DMs all the tools they need to run an entire D&D campaign on the computer.

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It is still very early in the game's development, but GameSpot visited Interplay for a short demo of Neverwinter Nights. What we've seen so far are technology demos, which were built with the game's tilesets and which show off the engine and the possibilities of the game rather than the game itself. Right now, Bioware is still completing the Solstice toolset and the engine, which by now is so heavily modified from the MDK2 Omen engine as to be an almost new engine entirely. However, we were still able to see some of the game and get an idea of where Bioware is heading with Neverwinter Nights. In the coming months, we'll preview more of the game, but for now, we'll look at what Bioware and Interplay have.

Next: The look