Heroes of Neverwinter

Dungeons & Dragons: Heroes of Neverwinter was a Facebook game released in 2011 by Liquid Entertainment and Atari — a turn-based tactical RPG set in the city of Neverwinter and the surrounding Sword Coast, with a story that hung off the hooks in the contemporary Neverwinter Campaign Setting.

Gameplay

Players built a hero by choosing a class — cleric, fighter, thief or wizard — and a race from dragonborn, eladrin, halfling or human, then fought through some fifty dungeons in grid-based, turn-based combat loosely modeled on the 4th Edition rules. The game ran on two currencies: gold scattered through the dungeons, and Astral Diamonds bought with Facebook Credits.

Its standout feature was the Dungeon Workshop. On reaching level 10, players could build and publish their own dungeons for others to play, earning gold each time someone ran one — a social echo of the Aurora and Electron toolsets that defined the Neverwinter Nights PC games.

Reception and shutdown

Reviewers were struck by how much of a “real” game it was for a platform then dominated by shallow click-farming social titles. It nonetheless followed the usual arc of licensed Facebook games: it opened in beta in September 2011 and was shut down in December 2012, after which it became unplayable.