// PC GAMER — GAMING
The best D&D videogame you've never played is one guy's outsider art, personal Baldur's Gate saga
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Welcome to Dungeon Master, PC Gamer's regular RPG column. This week, junior cadet RPG correspondent Ted Litchfield is taking over for Fraser while he shanks a goblin for a studded leather jerkin, iron shortsword, and four gold pieces.
The ongoing Neverwinter Nights mod campaign, Swordflight, feels like the CRPG equivalent of fans circulating the tapes, a forbidden, perfect bootleg of the greatest hardcore set ever performed. It's one of the most cleverly-designed, bracingly difficult RPG campaigns I've ever played, and it's a hobby project one guy has been cranking away at since 2008.
Swordflight is a series of discrete playable chunks or "modules" for Neverwinter Nights, BioWare's awkward middle child between Baldur's Gate 2 and Knights of the Old Republic (that we still can't help but love). NwN's Aurora Toolset is one of those legendary mod platforms that balanced ease of use with power and flexibility, resulting in a flowering of fanmade projects.
Think the Doom or Thief mod communities: Not everything is a gem, but so many people took to Aurora and so many projects were made that the best of the best still encompasses several full games' worth of RPG goodness. The Alazander modules, Aielund Saga, and Swordflight are among that best of the best.
Swordflight's first module came out in 2008, and its most recent released in 2022, with at least one more chapter on the way to finish the story. It's a zero-to-hero D&D epic like very few I've ever played: There are low-level adventures like The Temple of Elemental Evil and plenty of level 1-20 campaigns, but very few games or series of games that capture the feeling of coming back to the same character and dungeon master over a span of years.
Swordflight, the original Baldur's Gate duology, and arguably Owlcat's 100-hour campaigns like Kingmaker fit the bill. Many RPG designers rightly fear D&D's early levels, wanting to juice you up to level 3+ as quickly as possible to get you to that midgame sweet spot and past early game one-hit kill, missing your attacks doldrums, but Swordflight creator Rogueknight333 embraced that design challenge.
He felt no need to rush players through Neverwinter Nights' 40-level adaptation of D&D 3E rules, but instead has luxuriated at every possible stage of character development. Swordflight's first chapter, for example, is easily a 10+ hour experience, but you need a fairly optimized character and completionist play to reach level five by the end of it.
To date, I've only played the first two of five finished chapters, but multiple times each. That 60 hours or so of roleplaying has hit me with one of the worst cases of reroll-itis I've ever caught, tied with Owlcat's Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous. Neverwinter Nights has a particularly excellent version of D&D's class system—its 11 base and 12 prestige classes presaged Baldur's Gate 3's smorgasbord of 48 subclasses and Wrath of the Righteous' triple-digit madness.
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