Rumor Mill: Neverwinter Nights MMO Ready for an Announcement

Statements from Atari representatives and registrations for a variety of sites suggests that a new video game set in the Neverwinter Nights Dungeons & Dragons universe is in development and could be officially announced soon.

Publisher Atari has managed to revive interest in Dungeons & Dragon Online by making the game free to play earlier in the year and it seems that the company is ready to invest more resources in the setting with the announcement of a new title that uses the Neverwinter Nights universe.

A representative from the company has said at GenCon that an “announcement coming about some kind of D&D video game” was on its way but that he was unable to offer more detail at that event.

For some time rumors have been swirling around about how a MMO type video game might attract all those players who were interested in the two Neverwinter Nights single player role playing games and even in the earlier Baldur's Gate series.

The list of domain names that have been registered lately that are linked with a potential new game includes:

http://whois.domaintools.com/visitneverwinter.com
http://whois.domaintools.com/neverwinter-game.com
http://whois.domaintools.com/neverwintergame.com
http://whois.domaintools.com/play-neverwinter.com
http://whois.domaintools.com/playneverwinter.com
http://whois.domaintools.com/save-neverwinter.com
http://whois.domaintools.com/saveneverwinter.com

Atari has been relying on Cryptic Games, a studio that it now wholly owns, to develop its biggest projects and an official announcement linked with the Neverwinter Nights MMO might actually happen when the company talks about its new project before the end of summer.

Recently Cryptic Games has launched Champions Online, a MMO that is based around superheroes with a lot of humor added, and Star Trek Online, a game that uses the classic television franchise as a setting and allows the player to explore planets, undertake missions and engage in ship top ship space combat.

The rumored Neverwinter Nights MMO needs to come up with a unique pricing system in order to compete with the genre dominating World of Warcraft from Blizzard, which is getting another expansion this fall, called Cataclysm.