Westwood's Nox is getting the GOG Preservation Program treatment next

GOG confirmed that Westwood Studios' 2000 action RPG Nox won its July patron vote and will be the next title added to the GOG Preservation Program. The digital storefront announced the results on Bluesky, noting that the internal preservation team is now working on the game.

Nox was first revealed as a candidate for the program on July 15. It ended up taking 3,068 of the nearly 10,000 total votes cast by GOG Patrons. That was enough to beat out a strong list of legacy competitors, including Might and Magic VII: For Blood and Honor, Silver, and Albion.

It also beat out Lands of Lore, which makes for an interesting piece of trivia since both Nox and Lands of Lore were developed by Westwood Studios. The Las Vegas developer dominated PC gaming in the 1990s with Command & Conquer and Dune II before Electronic Arts bought them in 1998. The studio was eventually liquidated in 2003, making Nox one of their final original releases.

Three campaigns and a TrueSight engine

Electronic Arts published Nox on January 31, 2000. Westwood built it as a fast-paced isometric action RPG with a heavy emphasis on multiplayer and distinct class paths. You could play as a Warrior, Wizard, or Conjurer, and each class had a completely different narrative progression and playstyle.

The Warrior relied on melee weapons and chakrams. The Wizard set magical traps and teleported around the map. The Conjurer charmed enemy monsters to fight alongside them. Because the single-player campaigns were tailored to each class, you had to beat the game three times to see the whole story.

The game's defining technical feature was TrueSight, a dynamic line-of-sight engine that created realistic fog of war based on walls and obstacles. If a pillar blocked your character's vision, the space behind it went dark on your screen. It reviewed well and built a dedicated multiplayer community, but it had a massive problem: Diablo II came out five months later. Blizzard's massive hit swallowed the oxygen in the action RPG space, leaving Nox as a cult classic rather than a blockbuster franchise.

No more community wrappers

GOG launched its Preservation Program in November 2024 to guarantee that older PC games remain natively playable on modern operating systems. Right now, running the standard $5.99 version of Nox on Windows 10 or Windows 11 usually requires tracking down community patches or custom wrappers to fix resolution issues and graphical glitches.

By bringing the game into the program, GOG's internal team takes over that technical maintenance. They will update the game to run out of the box on modern hardware and commit to keeping it functional through future Windows updates. The formal program includes a dedicated quality assurance process and a stamp of approval on the store page.

GOG hasn't provided a timeline for when the updated build will go live, but the preservation work is officially underway.