Neverwinter Nights

In 2001, Bioware released a game called Neverwinter Nights. The game itself offered decent gameplay and a fairly shoddy RPG storyline, which was enough to separate it from the majority of RPGs that year since most of them had poor gameplay and fairly shoddy RPG storylines. (For those unaware, RPG stands for role-playing game, which I think is a misnomer since most of them consist of you playing the role of somebody who kills lots of random monsters without much incentive for doing so.)





What really has separated Neverwinter Nights from the other games of its kind is that the developers made the smart decision of releasing the module design toolset with the game, complete with a versatile scripting language that lets customers create just about any effect you can imagine in what amounts to a 2D field of motion rendered in three dimensions. It's basically a budding game designer's dream, being able to manipulate the workings of a full commercial game.

With relative ease, just about anybody can use the Bioware Aurora toolset and jump into the role of a commercial game designer and scripter.