Neverwinter Nights 2 and MotB – Awesome

Rarely do great RPG’s come around. Baldur’s Gate, Diablo 1 and 2, Neverwinter Nights, and a few others have always held a magical place on my shelf of games. Back in October 2006 a little gem from Obsidian hit the hard drives of gamers everywhere. It was called Neverwinter Nights 2. What an awesome RPG DnD experience NwN2 was and still is today! Being on a LAN here Graev and I take every opportunity to play games together. For anyone out there wondering, NwN2 is a fantastic multiplayer campaign experience. We played through the original campaign and got at least 40 hours out of it together. The first play-through together we went through as “good” and saw the good ending. After that I went back and played through the game a second time as “evil” and saw the evil side.

On the 9th of this month Mask of the Betrayer, the NwN2 expansion, came out offering another 25 hours tacked on to the campaign. How can we refuse?! Adding multiple races, classes, and prestige classes along with more content is too good to pass up. In the expansion they give you the option to skip the original campaign and level a character instantly to level 18 – but where’s the fun in that? We have decided to play through the original campaign together once again and this time go evil and experience the conversations and sides to the game we have yet to see. I’m really impressed with the sheer amount of gameplay in NwN2 and with the expansion it’s going to take us at least 70 hours to finish up both campaigns. Can it get any better?

Of course there are a few downsides. I can’t overlook the horrible camera (although I’ve made ini tweaks) and the performance and bugs on the Aurora engine is occasionally frustrating. The online play can be buggy and lackluster when joining servers that are not run well but finding that perfect server, perhaps a persistent world, you’ll find yourself enjoying NwN more than ever before. For anyone interesting in how to fix the camera: Go into My Documents > Neverwinter Nights 2 > Open nwn2player.ini > CameraFollowAlways > Set it to 1. Make sure you fiddle around with the camera options under multiple tabs. Good luck!

When we learned that Obsidian was doing Neverwinter Nights 2 instead of Bioware both Graev and I were skeptical. All reason for doubt is immediately blown away when you get into the game and give it a try. Overall the game is fantastic and so far the expansion, although we haven’t seen the new content, has given us our money’s worth in additional options. If you’re a fan of RPGs, DnD, or simply an awesome game then I highly recommend NwN2.

  • hmm.. To be honest, I can’t remember why I didn’t buy NWN2, but I think it had something to do with breaks from the design of the first NWN (which I loved). I might give it another look sometime, though I wonder if The Witcher amounts to a decent substitute.

    Either way, it will have to wait. I’m already spread thin with the games I’m planning to buy in the next couple months. Squeezing in one more game would be a step from “irresponsible” to “welcome to credit card debt”.