Wyvern Crown of Cormyr Released as New Neverwinter Nights Premium Module

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In a rather stunning turn of events, Atari has decided to release the long-hyped (mostly) fan-made Neverwinter Nights module Wyvern Crown of Cormyr, as a Premium NWN Module. Yes, as one of the supposedly cancelled series. Supposedly this being the last, and the best one.

The module is available for purchase at BioWare's online store, costing $11.99 USD.

Here's a list of the module's impressive features:

* Explore the Kingdom of Cormyr on fully ride-able horses
* Compete in tournaments and joust against thundering opponents
* The first premium module to showcase flowing cloaks, tabards and long coats
* Extensive new art, new creatures, two new tile-sets and an enhanced version of the Tir Nan’Og tile-set (a massive 1200+ tile rural/castle/village set)
* Features a new prestige class, the Purple Dragon Knight
* Starting level 6 or 7, with new characters leveled automatically
* A rich, 18-20 hour single-player experience built around an engrossing storyline from esteemed community developer DLA

The module's page offers the background story and additional information, a trailer, a wallpaper, and a number of very nice looking screenshots to convince you.

While I'm sure that this module will not be simply another overhyped product whose greatness will seem lesser and lesser every subsequent month, the fact that this particular module alone got released, while all the other ones that were in development got canned, is bound to cause quite a lot of resentment among the other premium module teams who were not so lucky.

For example, Darkness over Daggerford, Ossian Studios' "premium module to-be", got released a while ago, and is by all accounts an excellent product certainly worthy of being a premium module. Only, the team working on it has had to release it for free, because they didn't get the special treatment from Atari that WCoC got.

On BioWare's message boards, the newly-appointed Community Coordinator Chris Priestly has had this to say in response to the question that many people are asking themselves: "Is it just because DLA complained the loudest that theirs (premium NWN module -Ed.) got reinstated?"

CP: "Not at all. Atari took a look at all of the (then) in developement modules before "closing down" the Premium Modules program. However, the Wyvern Crown module was so close to completion that they allowed the DLA team to finish.

This doesn't mean that Tyrants of the Moonsea or Darkness over Daggerford or the rest were any less well made, it was just that WCoC was further along."

Furthermore, BioWare's Designer Georg Zoeller has had this to say:

"You can believe us when we say, we would have liked to give an official store release to all the premium modules that were in production when the decision to discontinue the program came down. Everyone involved with those modules has put incredible effort into them and we would have loved to give all of them their official release.

As for WCoC, it was the most complete of the premium modules at the time the decision to cancel the program was handed down to us, in fact it was very close to release.

Atari and other parties were very impressed with the amount content and quality of work that had been done and how close to completion it was, so they changed their mind and decided to make an exception for this module."

That's all nice and dandy, but the question is, will any of the teams working on the cancelled premium modules try their luck again in Neverwinter Nights 2, should a similar premium module program be introduced there? If I were in their shoes, I'd certainly want to have a signed agreement that my hard work will not simply end up being one of the thousands of fan-made NWN modules that can't be sold and have to be released for free.

I think that in terms of fairness to the premium module developers, BioWare has made a big mistake. If Atari had decided to can the premium module program, BioWare should have made it clear that it's either an all or none situation, and not go along with an arbitrary decision on secretly keeping the "best" module, in whichever respect that happened to be.

Finally, Robert from DLA had this to say in the defense of his team's module being the only one released now, despite most of the other teams' modules being released for free several weeks ago:

"It takes a long time to get a premium module completed, QA'd and approved.

For the record, our review candidate for WotC was submitted in June, our *first* Release Candidate submitted in early July and our Final Release Candidate approved as complete by Bio QA on August 15, 2006. This is the version you can now download. Ossian released their module to the Vault the very next day after WCoC was approved by BioWare as complete.

Wyvern Crown then spent nearly a month in a gated approvals process through Atari, WotC, Hasbro and a parallel rating / approvals process through ESRB. It simply takes a long time for this process.

Daggerford is a great mod. But I think it would be fair to say that, given the bugs that plainly existed when it was released to the Vault (and a few that persist), that the time it would take to test them, fix em and get approvals, it would have been a minimum of an additional 4-6 weeks more to test and then a month more for approvals. Which would have put DoD on the horizon for early November as a premum mod - after NWN2.

Tyrants was cut fully in half before its release in early July. The Remington Studios' content was wholly pulled from it and we donated some models we had for Alazander to use in their stead.

The answers you are getting are accurate. Nobody is kidding you."

Whether you are convinced that it's all fair and square is, of course, up to you, gentle reader. As always, the drama continues on BioWare's forums.