I have had a look around on the site and at Bioware but can't find a release date. Has it been announced. I'm also a bit worried that it might come out in the US long before Europe as per the BG games. That could affect the initial start up of Aorta, all you lucky ones across the pond will have levelled up characters and will have to guard all us newbie wimps.

OK Slappy old chum, here's the scoop: latest UNOFFICAL estimate for NWN release is 16th sept 01 but take that with a liberal pinch of salt. When Tal tells us it's gone gold we know we are in the home straight.
Yes, our friends across the pond will probably get it before us, Amazon may help (what were the experiences with HoW?)
But don't worry, It will take ALFA a while to get up to full speed and the first set of characters will probably suffer high attrition.
We had all better get used to adventuring in parties with mixed levels, cos that's going to be the norm. Think about it:
Different people will adventure for different amounts of time, some will be cautious, others reckless, death is fatal and sends you back to level 1.
And there'll`be a few of us Europeans around too.

September! (so early 2002 probably), although Bioware have been pretty good with the BG games release dates. Anyway, its going to be tricky to wait until then.

Still, it will give us all plenty of time to prepare and start playing around with some of the DM development kits. I downloaded the Never Winters NIght mapping tool today and have had a quick look at it. It seems fairly (ish) easy to play around with and very similar to the sort of preperation I used to do in my old DMing days (no D&D experience for me though). It'll be interesting to see how these maps get intergrated into the final release.