What's Ahead: We've heard a great deal about Neverwinter Nights' dungeon master mode, and BioWare recently released an early version of the dungeon tool kit. We still haven't seen all that much of the single-player game, or of the pick-up-and-play multiplayer game, which will let players play Neverwinter Nights online and store their characters in an online character "vault." Hopefully, these two aspects of the game will turn out as well as the dungeon master mode seems to be.

Of course, you've probably heard all of this before. After all, Neverwinter Nights has been one of the most-talked-about PC games around these past few years. So after all this time, and all those reports and updates and screenshots, it was a little difficult to really get excited about a game we'd heard so much about--even a game as ambitious as this.

And yet, despite how ambitious Neverwinter Nights seems, it's coming along beautifully. At the show, we got a chance to jump into a session of the game's fully functional dungeon master mode, and it looked great, played well, and, most importantly, it worked. Though we've been as skeptical as you were about all the remarkable and powerful features that BioWare claimed it would include in Neverwinter Nights, we've really seen it come together. And now that we've finally been able to get some hands-on time with the game, we can safely say that these weren't all just empty promises. It's truly shaping up to be the all-encompassing role-playing game it was intended to be, and despite how many years it's been in development, and despite the incredible amount of press coverage that the game has received, we still can't help but be excited about Neverwinter Nights all over again.