Neverwinter Nights 2 reviews

If your only consideration when purchasing a game is fancy graphics, then NWN 2 will have you in paroxysms of delight. On the other hand, if you'd prefer your game to run well, be relatively free of bugs and feature an intuitive user interface to complement the riveting gameplay, then NWN 2 is a game that will see you hurling abuse at your monitor.

Camera control is awkward, intrusive and generally horrible. Even on relatively modest settings, the game runs like a blind, lobotomised paraplegic. The storyline is dull, the NPCs predictable caricatures (a Scottish dwarf, a sanctimonious paladin, a mischievous rogue, etc), and prior to playing the game you're required to download approximately* 396 terabytes of patches, hotfixes and updates. If you're still on dial-up, you'll be sucking mashed banana and milk through a straw in a retirement village before this herculean download finishes.

And then we have Obsidian's Electron Toolset, successor to Bioware's Aurora Toolset. Aurora was intuitive, relatively simple to use and allowed you to knock up a vaguely playable module in a few hours. By contrast, Electron is about as user friendly as a rabid wolverine. While interior areas remain tile-based, exterior areas are sculpted from a flat plain with a selection of brushes. As a result, creating any sort of presentable exterior area is an incredibly time-consuming process, involving a lot of “painting”. If you're crap at painting, you'll be crap at creating exterior areas in the Electron Toolset – unless you're prepared to dedicate enormous chunks of free time to practicing.

Most people have jobs and lives, and spending their weekends wrestling with Electron is going to seem little more than a masochistic exercise in futility. Shame really.

*Hyperbole may have been employed for effect.

Personally I really enjoy this game.

For any dungeons and dragons fans out there, this game follows the rules to the book, using the 3.5 edition rule set.

I liked the story line and the shiny graphics. It is even more fun multiplayer and you can download new modules or create your own if you want a new story.

While it had many bugs when it was released most of them have been patched out now, and while the camera may still be annoying at times it does not ruin the experience.

Recommended for all RPG fans

but needs an ultra modern system to run. It doesn't look bad exactly, but certainly not amazing. It's quite nice with all the shadows on but I had to turn them off to get a consistently good frame rate. I didn't much like the art design either. Some weapons, armour and monsters look unrealistic and silly, and many items lack detail. Some interior locations are beautifully detailed though. I also find the overuse of particle effects annoying. Particularly the big explosion of blue sparks whenever an arrow, not even a magic arrow, hits anything. A clear attempt to impress the eight to twelve year old ADD sufferers.

All that aside, from what I've seen from a few days playing, it's an engrossing, and enjoyable, classic RPG experience. A deliberate attempt has been made to make it feel like NWN 1. I was pleased to see the old voice set from my NWN character was still available, so I basically just brought my old character back to life. The familiar music gave me warm fuzzies.

It's much more party oriented that the first one. I didn't like that so much at first. It would be better to have been required to play alone for some time before being offered companions. And unless you play on whimp mode you will definitely need a couple of helpers. The big plus though is I actually like the characters and enjoy having them along. Unlike the henchmen from the first game that were an annoying necessity.

The real test will be in how long and engrossing the campaign is, and weather towns and other locations are interesting to explore. Neverwinter itself is disappointing, but I'll have to wait and see. So far I'm enjoying it and it's keeping my occupied, which is the main thing.

Having completed the game on a system under the min requirements GPU wise (64MB requires a hack), I'd say the game was pretty decent.

The story's good, the Companions are brilliant, the graphics are fine. The biggest issue is still the interface which while better than NWN isn't quite up with BG2/IWD2 with regards to party controls.

Overall well worth playing.

This is a good game, with a nice storyline and good combat system. The masses of spells and abilities you can learn are just awesome. Also, there are over 20 classes, which you can multiclass in several exiting ways. I also have to defend obsidian here. There are way less bugs in the game than the other reviews would make you think, I already finished the game more than once, and I never downloaded any patches for it. Most of the problems can simply be fixed by adjusting something in the menu. For example, the “rotating camera bug” can be fixed by unchecking the some the option that allows you to turn the camera angle with the mouse. If your used to turning the screen with the keyboard, this shouldnt be a problem. Once you adjusted a few things in the menu, this is a great game.

NWN2 is a decent game when played alone but it really shines when played with a group of friends. I played through the main campaign over LAN with a friend and up to the beginning of the last act, we both enjoyed it greatly. Past that, however, it is just better to close your eyes, plug your ears and make up your own ending because the conclusion is so lack lustre it will ruin the rest of the game experience for you. Other than that, an excellent game for any DnD fan.

NWN2 is very OK – that's once you've got it patched up and running, which is itself a gigantic hassle.

It's unquestionably an improvement over NWN1. On the player's end, that is; reportedly, creating new content (mods) is much more time-consuming. A fully-patched NWN2 has some nice features including a “strategic” camera/control mode that allows you to select multiple members of your party and move them around in groups. Graphics are an improvement as well, though hardly to the extent you'd expect based on the game's outrageous hardware requirements.

To patch a shop-bought copy fully takes over 400MB of downloads. In addition, the first patch it will try to download (v1.05.912) is broken. To get to v1.05, you have to download several patches manually; disconnect your machine from the internet; then patch from the local files. For instructions, go to http://nwvault.ign.com/View.php?… and look for the message posted by “Heed” on 1 June 2007. Then reconnect; the remaining 250MB of patches should install properly.

Once patched, the game is entertaining. Its novelties all seem half-baked though; “tactical” control mode? Baldur's Gate had a far more effective and intuitive party control system ten years ago. Why are new games getting clumsier? Also, don't expect any challenges: all combat is drearily easy even on the hardest settings. (BG fans may know what I mean if I say that NWN2 is “cheese-tastic”.)

I got three quarters of the way through the game until, a fortnight ago, I started up Baldur's Gate to remind myself of the similarities and differences. I haven't started up NWN2 even once since then – BG has had my undivided attention. And you know what? With its detailed, hand-crafted environments, BG still looks pretty damn good.

I've played through the whole game now, and I should amend my comment about not liking the art design. Some items lack detail, but overall the detail and art design is good. It sort of grew on me and I really came to like the look of the game. To appreciate the detail you just have to stop and smell the roses, and zoom in occasionally.

The campaign is long but not particularly imaginative. It's very standard RPG fare actually and lacked the emotional impact of the first game. I found the way the story was presented was a bit confusing and disjointed. My character seemed to know things even though no one had actually told me. I also think it could have done with more side quests.

There aren't very many towns and the ones there are aren't fleshed out well. They are more or less backdrops, with just a few characters to talk to and a couple of shops.

A lot of people complain about the user interface and the camera angles and stuff but I didn't have any problems with this, although a hotkey for party commands would have been good.

I did run into a few rather dramatic bugs even with the latest patch (1.03) which is disappointing. Arrows and projectile spells would often pass right through walls. Not good.

I recommend the game, but don't expect it to be quite as good as the first one. It is a good game though, and good single player RPGs are rare these days.

I eagerly await the expansions.

I expected great things for nwn2 having spent a lot of time with the first, but struck straight away the annoying camera. it constantly zooms in, will move when you dont want it to, seems to ghost trees and cliffs when in narrow walkways and every time you accidently hit the top of the screen it tilts. Other annoting things are: -closes quickspell windows everytime you go through a load screen
-still has the attack “teleporting” bug despite having a new engine
-only will start 2/3 of the time without crashing
-stops at level 20 characters I say wait for a couple of updates and an expansion pack

The game engine is clunky and not much of an improvement on the original NWN. Even after completing the campaign I still didn't find the UI to be comfortable (camera modes/following never seemed right).

The campaign that comes with the game is enjoyable, but very linear and lacks much in the way of replay value. There are effectivly two paths of progression (good and “evil”), so you might want to replay it on the other, both are very similar however…

IMO I'd wait until there have been a couple more patches to sort out the bugs / performance issues, and for the community to generate some better content.

I was so looking forward to NWN2 – I loved BG & TotSC, IWD & IWD2, BG2 & ToB, and NWN and Sou/HotU. The pre-release hype implied NWN with radically improved graphics, especially scenery, with a more BG feel to the game and interface and everyone expected such. Instead Obsidian scrapped the entire engine & toolset (the most robust proven part of NWN) and rebuilt from scratch, but recycled the voice scripts & background music (for example). So you get a new game engine that is vaguely similar to NWN on the surface, but which has no new features of any huge merit, a limited and very poor quality rendering for your character customisation, all the same bugs NWN had on first release (and more) and yet virtually no new original sounds (voice, ambient, or music). NWN2 has been released too soon and is very buggy – no one expects it to be perfect but Obsidian have clealry failed to meet their repeatedly extended deadlines. They've also made it clear that they may not offer any real support for PWs, and only limited MP support! I don't hate this game, but I am disappointed – with several more patches (if Obsidian listen to the community) it may be worth 3 or 4 stars by about June 2007. Oh and the PC requirements are grossly understated on the packaging (e.g. you need 6.5GB to install and several GB free to play) .

The first thing I would say is regarding video cards. Although it lists the 6600 as the min spec I found it totally unplayable on my system with a 6600GT (which is aging but still does not have problems like this on any other game). The game would crash every 3–4 minutes or just reboot the system (playing in 800×600 with all settings on low). After reading the tech support forums the common theme for this seemed to be video card related.

I actually bought a new card (7600GT) and all the problems disappeared so I think a more realistic min spec is in order. Compounding this is the fact the graphics are nowhere near cutting edge for todays games and whilst adequate they should certainly not be so taxing on a system; leading me to believe there is a lot of optimisation to be done still (it does have a feel of being rushed to release, which is all too common in this day and age).

The second main problem is with a shift to 3D, it gives the game a much more limited feel to it. Whereas in the original NWN you could go pretty much anywhere in the 2D world, the 3D world forces you to chose specific paths when moving around locations. For anyone familiar with the original Dungeon Siege this feels exactly the same in terms of limited choice and somewhat claustrophobic gameplay.

The campaign seems a little lackluster and does not have tha x factor to keep you gaming into the wee hours of the morning. However the value in this title is sure to be in the mods that the community develops, leading to countless hours of potential gameplay.

Overall 3/5 – recommended for fans of the genre only.

Great game, shame about the technical problems.

Gameplay is just like NWN, UI is better, more of all the stuff that made NWN so good. There is so much stuff in here the rather limited default campaign only touches the surface of what is possible with this engine, but you are forced to think about your encounters to make the most of them.

As I said, the technical problems (and there are many) are what takes a lot of the fun out of the game. Obsidian are working on patching the game to fix the problems, but only time will tell if they can fix them or not. 3 out of 5

Played this for several hours and just couldn't get into it. The graphics requirements are exceedingly high, and you can't zoom out far enough. Gameplay is very slow compared to Oblivion or Guild Wars. GW: Nightfall is a far more fun game.