Development History
The development of the game started in 1995 as a personal project of Michael Booth, the future technical director and lead gameplay designer of the game. An avid gamer, Booth began programming his own games on Apple II and Commodore VIC-20 computers while still at school, and started working on Nox "in a spare bedroom of house" in college. To help produce the game, he co-founded Hyperion Technologies, a company that also worked on driving simulators. After Booth showed a demo of Nox to John Hight, an executive producer of Westwood Studios, at the 1997 Game Developers Conference, Westwood decided to acquire it and moved the development team to California.
Booth originally envisioned the game as an "updated version of Atari's Gauntlet", focusing on real-time magical combat in the vein of Magic: The Gathering and Mortal Kombat. Inspired by the "epic wizard battles" described in fantasy literature, Booth wanted to create a "multiplayer wizard battle game" and decided to set it in a medieval fantasy setting. It wasn't until Westwood started working on the game that it began to lean towards the RPG genre and two more classes (warrior and conjurer) and a single-player campaign were added.
The game was originally intended to be played with a gamepad, with spells cast by quickly pressing several buttons, inspired by Mortal Kombat's combos, but it was eventually deemed to be "a large barrier for new and less dexterous players" and replaced with numeric hotkeys and mouse-controlled movement. The leftovers of this system are, however, still seen in the released game in the form of syllables and hand gesture icons accompanying the casting of each spell. The "TrueSight" vision system has been programmed by Booth early in the development and served as one of the cornerstones of the gameplay.
The multiplayer modes were inspired by the online first-person shooters, such as Quake and Unreal, both of which the development team played extensively.
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