By Ryan in Community • Published on December 18th, 2024
In a heartfelt homage to Brighter Shores, a dedicated fan has recreated Hopeport in Neverwinter Nights 2 at an impressive 80% scale. This recreation provides players and enthusiasts with a unique opportunity to experience the full layout of the iconic town and surrounding areas in a way not possible within the original game.
The project is the brainchild of Molior RS, who has been rebuilding various RuneScape locations in Neverwinter Nights 2 since 2011. With Brighter Shores' recent release, they turned their creative efforts toward reimagining Hopeport, offering a fresh perspective of the bustling port-town featured in Episode 1 of the game.
While they initially aimed for a 1:1 scale, the final project came out at roughly 80%. This slight variation, caused by minor tile misalignments, required creative workarounds. For instance, they connected certain paths differently to maintain overall cohesion. Despite this, the core town area-what many would consider "Hopeport proper"-was fully represented.
"Due to the environments of the game, you cannot see the full surrounding areas [in Brighter Shores], so it left me thinking, is Hopeport surrounded by woodlands? Hills? Castle walls?" they explain. This project allowed them to visualize a fully scaled Hopeport while speculating on what lies beyond the town's visible boundaries.
Although this recreation omits the swampy regions and beach areas to the west, they focus on the central "civilised" parts of Hopeport, offering a faithful and immersive representation of the town's key elements.
For them, this project stems from a deep passion for world-building and a desire to pay tribute to the developers of Brighter Shores. "I've always been interested in seeing Hopeport on a full scale," they shared. The recreation also serves as an easter egg in their larger Neverwinter Nights 2 server, where they have been crafting an MMO-scale experience for years.
Interestingly, they note that the size of Hopeport, when scaled to their 1:1 standards, is comparable to RuneScape's Lumbridge region-stretching from the Dark Wizards area south to Al-Kharid's gates.
The Neverwinter Nights 2 project, which has been ongoing since 2011, now reportedly nears 70GB in size. While originally designed as a single-player game, NWN2's multiplayer features enable fans like Molior RS to create persistent worlds that can be explored with others.
For those curious about the project, Molior RS shares updates via their YouTube channel, where viewers can see videos of the various areas they've painstakingly recreated.
The Hopeport recreation is an inspiring example of what dedicated fans can achieve when creativity and nostalgia come together. Molior RS' reimagining invites us to explore and appreciate the iconic location in a whole new light.
Check out this video tour to see the impressive scale and detail for yourself:
[youtube=SAlXGrgISCA]
Whether you're a Neverwinter Nights 2 player, a RuneScape enthusiast, or a Brighter Shores fan, projects like these remind us of the enduring impact games can have on their communities.
What inspired you to start recreating entire game worlds like RuneScape and Brighter Shores in Neverwinter Nights 2?
This will be two answers;
For Runescape: I used to make my own 'server' as a kid on Neverwinter Nights 1. Creating quests, monsters etc for my friends to play. It's fun designing worlds. But as an avid RS player, I wondered what it would be like to see Lumbridge in NWN1. So I did it, and then got hooked and started to build more. I then realised I had NWN2 in my steam library and gave it a shot in there (note, developing in NWN1 is significantly easier than NWN2, so this put me off at first from NWN2). I re built Lumbridge in NWN2 and (to blow my own trumpet) it looked incredible and felt incredible. You have to remember, this was when Runescape 2 had the very limiting fog and not the RS3 graphics we see today, or the HD graphics in OSRS.
For Brighter Shores: I'm going to be honest and say I've never been a fan of the environment/world appearance of Brighter Shores. I understand it's unique appeal but what interested me was how hopeport itself is built. You start off in the corner with a low wall, and then only one side of hopeport has a wall defending it. I wanted to see a full scope Hopeport (the civilised parts i.e. buildings/docks, I haven't built the beaches or the swamp/woods, as I don't think they benefit what I'm trying to capture).
Which, as you can see in the pictures and video, I had to improvise the exterior of Hopeport with woodlands, hills etc.
What was the most challenging part of bringing Hopeport to life, and how did you overcome it?
Honestly, there wasn't anything challenging about it and I think that's primarily due to me having done it for over 13 years. Brighter Shores is a tile based game and you develop in NWN2 based on tiles, so it's as simple as counting 2 steps in Brighter Shores, then designing those 2 steps in NWN2.
However, I would probably say that, Brighter Shores has a lot of unique buildings and you can't 'look up' in-game to see what they look like. So trying to find the right building was difficult.
But, it's worth noting that Brighter Shores i.e. the re-creation in our project is an easter egg, so there has been minimal detail gone into it and it doesn't have interiors or NPC's that we usually do. We've started to model our own buildings to match Runescapes (such as Lumbridge castle), but sadly this isn't priority for easter eggs. Hopefully that explains why you may see the same building here and there.
With the limitations of Neverwinter Nights 2, how do you balance creativity and technical restrictions?
I could write a 100,000 word essay on this ha There are without a doubt limitations and constant work arounds, especially technical restrictions. Certain things are hard coded. There are thousands of examples, but the best one I can give is...
In Runescape, if you want to increase your damage, you have prayers, potions, helmets, capes, gloves, shields, boots, amulets etc etc.
In NWN2, you have a strength attribute, which increases your melee accuracy and damage. However, one technical restriction is that you cannot stack strength attributes on items. So if rune gloves gave +5 str, rune boots gave +3 strength and you used super human strength prayer for +3 strength, you would only get a +5 boost, not +11.
We've created many scripts/coding to work around this, so that equipping or using all the above do contribute to your strength. This is something we've only done in 2024.
Something we do need to work on is armour sets, such as for our barrows equipment.
What advice would you give to other fans looking to start similar large-scale passion projects?
It has to be a hobby.
Myself and the other developers build because it's fun. It has it's moments, we have breaks for weeks/months from burnouts. We've had developers come and go, we have an open door policy i.e. you aren't forced to work or do the crappy jobs, you can join the developer team to build land/make quests etc.
We've had a fair few people contact us about trying to make money from it and we've always rejected. We have things like patreon, but this is purely for server costs.
But yeah, the main thing is, you have to find enjoyment out of it. We've made expansions and updates with 0 players online. We don't do it for a playerbase, we do it because it's fun.
We've had 15+ players online at once and of course it's an incredible feeling, even for that small amount & it encourages us to develop more, but we don't advertise our server or try and gain a playerbase from advertising.
What's next for your Neverwinter Nights 2 project? Do you plan to expand Hopeport further or tackle new areas?
Given Hopeport in our project is just an easter egg, I might eventually get round to building onto it with the rest of the 'episode 1' land, such as the woods/swamps/beaches. I don't think I'd expand further to say episode 2/3/4, mostly because 2 is just woods and 3 is mines, but I don't have membership for Brighter Shores :D
As for the project itself, we're currently re-designing our combat system. We're on our 97th quest, so we will soon be developing quests such as Desert Treasure and eventually Recipe for Disaster, as well as Nex.
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