NWN2 - Worth playing in 2021?

HiddenX

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Ye Old Entertainment has reviewed Neverwinter Nights 2:

Neverwinter Nights 2 review: Is this RPG worth playing in 2021 while you wait for Baldur's Gate 3?



Welcome to our Review video on Neverwinter Nights 2. The Neverwinter Nights 2 soundtrack is revered as one of the best soundtracks ever made. But is the quality of the gameplay in Neverwinter Nights 2 up to par with its musical counterpart? Is this D&D classic RPG on par with Baldur's Gate 2?
Thanks Redglyph!

More information.
 
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Like NWN 1, I could never get into this. It felt clunky to me even when it was new, and I couldn't get comfortable with the camera controls no matter what I did. I should really give it another shot sometime.
 
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I didn't mind it, if you like ISO party games and D&D I think it's worth playing definitely. For me it needed a few mods, I really didn't like the vanilla weapon models and there's a few engine quirks with it that can be annoying. The wider character options, rule set and better visuals are welcome upgrades. Being able to puppet mode your party members is a vast improvement over NWN1. That said, I've tried twice but never completed the NWN2 MQ and have put many hundreds more hours into NWN1 and EE compared to NWN2. I haven't even touched the NWN2 expansions, one day hopefully I'll get around to them. Have never played NWN2 online either - is there much of a PW scene with NWN2?
 
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Still one of my most played games just because of mods. Now is it perfect no, but it was the last true D&D PC RPG we got for a while. Cause after this everything went MMO.

It took over ten years but now we have Pathfinder, Pillars of Eternity, and BG III.
 
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Play it for the mods and the expansions. Main campaign was irritating as it felt artificially gated and your choices ended up with you at the same place regardless. Some of the characters were interesting to converse with but the AI was broken and your characters aren't always under your control even with AI off. Combat was annoying because of this and you are dealing with lots of trash mobs so be prepared to cheese it.
 
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I bought my first ever graphics card because of NWN2. It played like zombified molasses. When I finally got it to soar past that 5 fps mark, I found it to be a so so game, much clunkier than its predecessor. Its mod scene was also never as good, but Mask of the Betrayer was one of the best things to ever bear the NWN name.
 
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Like NWN 1, I could never get into this. It felt clunky to me even when it was new, and I couldn't get comfortable with the camera controls no matter what I did. I should really give it another shot sometime.

I don't remember what patch it was that finally got the basic 'Chase Cam' from NWN1 done correctly, but that totally changed the experience for me. I still liked it - but it was an absolute resource pig out of proportion with graphical quality and effects. I haven't finished in a while but have played chunks and still enjoy it.
 
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I didn't play it until around 2008 or 2009 and I think they'd fixed a lot of the control problems (or at least improved them). I loved it, that said the story was kind of formulaic and some of the locations didn't feel fully fleshed out. I could never get into MotB though. I should give that and SoZ a try. I played through the Baldur's Gate Reloaded Mod which was awesome.
 
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Unfortunately, the game is getting a bit glitchy of late because of updates to Windoze.
 
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Unfortunately, the game is getting a bit glitchy of late because of updates to Windoze.

It could probably use the EE treatment by now. I assume the only reason it hasn't gotten it is because it's an Obsidian title and not Bioware.
 
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I never had an issue with NWN 1's camera and controls back then, probably because I was coming from action 1st/3rd person view, so using the keyboard to move the character and mouse to change the camera felt natural. When I try now, it feels a little weird.

In NWN2 it was originally fine too, but it's become very glitchy with new versions of Windows and I can't find a comfortable way to play anymore either, because some keyboard controls remain stuck and the point-and-click are awkward (mainly because the configuration system is terrible). Obsidian won't fix it, and there were community patches to work around the bugs but it's not helping much.

One feature I liked in NWN2 was the quick spell window, much better than the radial menu of NWN1, which was original but too annoying to use. I miss that in games like Pathfinder.
 
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This is a game that I finished in spite of the UI and technical issues such as loading times.

To me NWN2 is among the technically more flawed games I've played. For that reason I don't think I'll get back to this game ever again even though I enjoyed it in parts and usually complete my games. And I have replayed Arcanum, KOTOR 2 and Gothic 3 tens of times, so it takes a lot of technical issues to keep me from playing a game...

NWN2 has the worst camera controls that I can remember in a game, and the UI is also among the worse with similarish functionality spread out in many incoherent locations on your screen.

The AI is horrible both in terms of pathfinding and not actually doing what you tell it to. There is for instance no way of turning off NPC use of the paladin smite evil ability, which has a limited number of uses per rest... NPCs will continue spamming some abilities even if you set their AI to not use abilities.

It also suffers from some stupid design decisions (lets fill the game with creatures immunne to critical hits, making certain builds pointless).

By comparison NWN1 felt like playing in a world built from lego bricks but simply had much smoother gameplay. Ditto for the infinity engine games or even the old goldbox titles.

The sheer number of options from the ruleset, some NPCs and the branching storyline still made it worth it to play through the game though.

Sadly I simply couldn't stand the interface by the time I got to Mask of the Betrayer, which is supposed to be the best content for the game.
 
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Ok NWN2 had some bugs at launch and the camera controls are a bit complicated. Maybe it's just me, but I don't care that much for those technical issues when analyzing if a game is good or not. NWN2 is probably my favorite game, I still have the original box of the game.

NWN2 has so many good qualities, it has a good implementation of the D&D classes and rules, the soundtrack is amazing (my favorite), the OC and the first Expansion are really good (IMO at least), and the graphics were so good for the time that the game still looks good today. Moreover, now you can optimize and fix many of the problems mentioned. For those interested, there is a guide for this here: https://lilura1.blogspot.com/p/neverwinter-nights-2-mods.html

For me, with such technical problems, there is always a workaround. What doesn't have a workaround is whether or not the game is boring, uninspired, and implements a good system that makes the character progression interesting. And while I see this problem in many recent cRPG titles, I don't see this in NWN2. I think NWN2 had the same problem as Pathfinder:KM. Those are both inspired, fun games that brought lots of innovations. But both had technical issues and for some people, this is more important and they just can't get over it.
 
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I'm replaying NWN1 at the moment and I have to say I never finished NWN2. Never really played it, actually. I borrowed it from a cousin at launch, but my PC was not good enough to run it. Even on the lowest settings it ran at 5FPS, and I kind of skipped it. When I got a PC good enough, there were other games to play. I'm interested in this video but I have to ask people who watched it, does it contain any spoilers? I actually managed to hear or read nothing about the game and wouldn't like to have it spoiled.
 
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Oh the horror he spoiled a 15 year old game.:biggrin:
 
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Oh the horror he spoiled a 15 year old game.:biggrin:

15 years or 50, it's new to me. And I don't mind if he spoiled it, I'm just not going to watch the video, simple. That is why I asked in the first place.
 
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I tried NWN 1 for awhile, but just didn't click with me. Good ideas and classic fantasy themes - which I loved - but just a bit too goofy in its overall look and tech was really too primitive to do it justice at the time. (speaking of which, I'd love to see NWN remade in full modern day graphics isometric glory!)

As far as NWN 2, I always thought it looked terrible and never was interested to even try it out at the time, when it was new. It was very unappealing aesthetically, much worse than even NWN 1, I thought. Just seemed like a bad sequel all round.
 
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I tried NWN 1 for awhile, but just didn't click with me. Good ideas and classic fantasy themes - which I loved - but just a bit too goofy in its overall look and tech was really too primitive to do it justice at the time. (speaking of which, I'd love to see NWN remade in full modern day graphics isometric glory!)

As far as NWN 2, I always thought it looked terrible and never was interested to even try it out at the time, when it was new. It was very unappealing aesthetically, much worse than even NWN 1, I thought. Just seemed like a bad sequel all round.

NWN1 was - at time of release - standing on wow effect provided by fully 3D environment and characters. Gameplay and story were dumbed-down, compared to previous BG games. I dont think NWN calls to be remade in modern graphics as nothing but graphics would really stand out.
 
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