Neverwinter Nights and the Community Its Siblings Can’t Match

Neverwinter Nights came from the studio behind Baldur’s Gate, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and Mass Effect. More than two decades on, Ars Technica reports, it still has a tight-knit and surprisingly active community that none of those other games can rival. The site’s writer credits that partly to the game being a completely different beast rather than a variation on what the studio had already mastered.

Which is a useful way to think about durability: it may be a design question as much as a quality one. Some games get remembered. A few get occupied.