Neverwinter Nights 2

Game Facts

Neverwinter Nights 2 (NWN2) is a 3rd Edition Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) rules Role Playing Game (RPG) made by Obsidian Entertainment in 2006. Like its predecessor made by Bioware, it is set in the Forgotten Realms campaign world, one of the most iconinc and detailed D&D settings, but this sequel uses a different engine and has a much updated appearance.

There are two official expansions, Mask of the Betrayer and Storm of Zehir, and dozens of patches which I shall discuss in more detail. As with NWN1, a main feature of the game is the toolset that allows you to create your own D&D adventures or play those that the community has created for you. This can extend the longevity of the game a hundred-fold.

Opinion

It was not exactly surprising that I was going to review this game considering the time I have spent on it. Along with NWN1, it is the game that most clearly justifies why I would want to write game reviews in the first place, namely that reviewing a game after playing it for years allows a different perspective from a journalistic review on a pre-release version perhaps submitted on the day of release. Games might be patched to varying degrees, might have hidden depths not apparent on a quick playthrough and might have a historical significance not apparent without the benefit of hindsight. And the perspective that we have with NWN2 6 years down the line is probably even more different from first release than with NWN1.

On that first release, there was obviously a huge amount of anticipation within the community that had been playing NWN1 and its hundreds of custom modules with their hundreds of MB of custom content. Outside the community, I suspect it was more a case of “Huh?! Yet another D&D RPG, and set in the same city?”.

But, as is usually the case with overegged anticipation, there was a sense of let down. The most major one was that the lovely graphics did not run at all smoothly on most computers. There was a nagging need to tweak down various graphics parameters. Then there were the bugs and crashes and a long process of patching. This process took years, the final one – version 1.23 – came out only recently long after even the expansions had been released and was actually the work of a community member. Some of the patches were, shall we say, flawed. One I recall actually broke all forms of natural armour class so that it was virtually impossible to miss a dragon – hardly a recipe for heroic combat. That was the only time I posted a negative comment about Obsidian…

Then there was the story. The problem was that players did not have the one NWN1 story to compare with; they had been fed a regular diet of hundreds of community modules as well. There would never have been that same sense of waiting ages to play a new story – any new story – that there would have been between Icewind Dale and Baldur’s Gate 2, for example. Although the custom modules were of variable quality, some were good, and their designers got headhunted into the industry. And with a roleplaying game, there is still fun to be had with a paper thin plot. So when the story of NWN2 was not mindblowingly brilliant compared to what they had been playing every week, there was disappointment.

Finally, there was the toolset. Obviously it was better than NWN1, because the visuals were so enhanced, but it was also an order of magnitude harder. And the expectations of the community were so much higher. For example, it would take me a hour to lay out a wilderness area in NWN1, with its tiles and automatic tile matching. Yes, there were the lame ramps between different height areas, but there was no expectation for anything much better. You could then get on with the story, NPCs, conversations and a few custom scripts for someting a bit different from fetch and carry quests. In NWN2, the same wilderness would take weeks to complete for a mere mortal like myself, and also not look as good as what a proper CAD artist would do, because of basic lack of talent. In terms of gameplay, you would have achieved nothing more than the one hour in NWN1, and an end result where people would think, “Well that is clearly detracting from the overall module because it is not half as good as the best I have seen in the official campaign or on the Vault (Neverwinter Nights Vault – a website for community content)”. This last point is obviously not a flaw with the toolset as such, as it is providing scope for a greater level of artistic talent, but it does entail a trade-off with the volume of and lead time for content that is going to be uploaded.

It was not just the area design where the toolset was difficult. It would crash more (lose several hours work) or become corrupted (lose several weeks work). I have no direct experience of this, but I understand there were particular problems trying to create persistent worlds with area transitions that are asynchronous between players, which was really frustrating for those wanting to upgrade their NWN1 worlds or create new ones (or play in them!). The documentation was very poor. There were more vagaries with the commands and functions. And finally, I had the constant feeling that the script sets and engine were just tacked onto the NWN1 engine, so that there were loads of dud commands, constants and parameters that were obsolete but you didn’t know they were obsolete.

As a result of this, by the time players had finished the official campaign, there was nothing like the same number of community modules to continue the experience as there had been with NWN1.

Fast forward five to six years, though, and the picture is completely different. PCs and graphics cards are more powerful, and the game engine considerably optimised. As a result, gameplay is smooth and crashes are much more rare. The patches eventually fixed many of the bugs, culminating in the heroic effort by a community member, Grinning Fool, who did the final patch that included a host of bug fixes and AI enhancements. Persistent Worlds came on-line, there came new NWN2 custom content, and module designers eventually finished their custom modules and uploaded them. Because module creation was so much more a labour of love, those that did eventually see the light of day were generally of pretty good quality.

 So, six years later, my stand-out features are:

• Graphics that, while not up to the standard of Skyrim, nevertheless still enhance rather than detract from the roleplaying experience.
• Replaying the game with many different modules and appreciating the huge breadth of character creation and gameplay options that come with this PC port of the 3rd Edition D&D game.
• Having complete control of up to six characters in the same way as Baldur’s Gate, while at the same time having the option of the single character focus that was the feature of NWN1.
• Playing the Mask of the Betrayer expansion with its Planescape-like undertones, and realising that this was the storyline for which the game seemed to have really been made.

What Next?

That is the point. Nothing.

First, from a rules perspective, Storm of Zehir was like a swansong for the end of 3rd Edition. There were even points in the story that hinted at a coming calamity, namely the Spellplague. This was the Forgotten Realms event that was a kind of game-world justification for the dramatic changes that were to come with 4th Edition. This review is not a critique of 4th Edition D&D, but suffice to say that many tabletop players are sticking with 3rd Edition, and there is even a non-Wizards of the Coast 3rd Edition update called Pathfinder. In the same way, many PC players will want to stick with the huge breadth of options that 3rd Edition offers. The advantages of 4th Edition, namely less laborious number crunching in combat and the greater relative gameplay options at lower vs higher levels, is not so relevant to computer gaming, where the computer handles the stats and one can rack up a level every hour.

Second, although there exist some new releases (including one named Neverwinter), from a game setting perspective there has been no major hardcore single player Forgotten Realms D&D game, no successor in name or in spirit to the series that traces its lineage from Baldur’s Gate to Neverwinter Nights 2.

So, for a few, computer D&D roleplaying still means looking for more NWN2 custom scenarios. I say a few because if one looks at download numbers of community content, they are pretty tiny now, as one would expect with a six year old game. What is more disappointing is that the numbers were never as great as with NWN1, and they have not moved in large numbers to any successor of NWN2. That feeling with NWN1 where the community was taking off, with people sharing and playing modules like a worldwide tabletop gaming group where there was a new adventure to play every week, is gone for the forseeable future. I don’t know where all those players, and the new generation, are now. Some are downloading Dragon Age modules. Perhaps the rest are just downloading houses or different coloured axes in Skyrim, or maybe sitting on their hands waiting to be spoonfed the latest official big-budget sub-D&D roleplaying offering.

Summing Up

Neverwinter Nights 2 is in my opinion the definitive computer D&D experience, offering total flexibility from single player single PC campaigns (found in many custom modules and a masochistic option in the official campaigns) to single player multi-PC campaigns (the official campaign, expansions and certain community modules), to single player multi-PC campaigns with individual conversation options and interjections from different party members (Storm of Zehir), to RTS map style exploration modes like very early computer RPGs (Storm of Zehir again), to multiplayer multi-PC campaigns (as for any single player multi-PC module), and finally to massively multiplayer online (MMO) worlds (community Persistent Worlds). All this, and unlimited replayability as a result of said community content!

And yet I feel that the initial flaws still haunt the game. Too many players were put off in the early stages with the quality of the intial release and the user unfriendly and poorly documented toolset resulted in it taking too long for the community content to come online to maintain interest. As a result, the game lost large numbers of NWN1 fans that never came back. And, when one looks back on the game as I have done with the benefit of hindsight, that is a real shame.

The Court’s Verdict: 9/10