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Neverwinter Nights 2 is one of those games that has been widely anticipated for years. The first Neverwinter Nights game was a huge hit, creating a fanatical following and spawning three game extensions, not to mention hundreds of fan-generated modules. So how does NWN2 stack up?

Neverwinter Nights 2 Graphics

Neverwinter Nights 2’s graphics look very good, but come up short of “great” or “amazing”, although this is likely my computer. With an AMD Sempron 2800, 1GB of RAM, and an nVidia 6600GT 256MB video card, it’s a little dated, about a year and half. NWN2 still looks very good, at least as good as NWN, but failed to wow me. A large disappointment was a buggy texture for the night sky, filling black backgrounds with red blocks – very ugly. I do have brand new, shiny, uber-geek components on the way, so perhaps my new “beefcake” system will allow NWN2 to really show off.

Neverwinter Nights 2 Sound

The sound in NWN2 has not changed a lot from the original Neverwinter Nights. On the one hand, this is nice, it reduces the learning curve on what certain sounds are, and definitely produced a little nostalgia when a mage cast Magic Missile during the first big battle. The new music is great, and definitely pushes the Sound score up a point or two. Also, more characters and more conversations have voice talent, another big plus.

Neverwinter Nights 2 Gameplay

Perhaps my recent encounters with Titan Quest have spoiled me. When I played through the first Neverwinter Nights, I had no problems with the interface. Sure, sometimes it wouldn’t do exactly what I wanted, but for the most part, it works great. Fast forward a few years to Titan Quest, which has a fantastic UI in my opinion. Neverwinter Nights 2 has 4 different camera modes, none of which really satisfies me. The Driving mode works well when running from point A to point B, when you don’t need to look to the sides or want to be doing anything other than just running. My big problem with the Driving view is: I cannot zoom out – otherwise, this would be my favorite – the view is just too close, I cannot get a good view of my surroundings. The Chase view is supposed to rotate with you character, but wasn’t very good at keeping buildings or trees out of the view. It’s hard to kill monsters you cannot see. The default Top Down view works well enough, although without any automatic rotating, it’s difficult to move and control the camera at the same time. And the fourth and last view, the Free camera is not bound to your character at all, making it less than useless 99% of the time.

Neverwinter Nights 2 Longevity

Not having played through the whole game yet (see technical problems below), I’m not sure of the longevity, but if NWN is any indication, replayability should be high.

Neverwinter Nights 2 Technical

Ahh, the section I’ve been waiting for. The section where the vast majority of my gripes come out to play.

NWN2 Installation: Looking at the box, it says 5.5GB of free disk space are required. Well, a data-pack-rat like me doesn’t have that just sitting around, so I start archiving various installers, music, videos and more to my media server, and manage to free up about 5.6GB free on my D: drive. I startup the NWN2 installer, and find out I’m still about 100MB short – okay, I guess I really don’t need that video of SMG and Gollum at the VMAs. The game is finally installed, and I have a whopping 400MB left on my D: drive – not a lot, but should be plenty for a few saved games.

NWN2 Patching: Like any smart gamer, I immediately check for NWN2 patches. Okay, the installer prompted me to do that, but I would have done it anyway. Not surprisingly, it finds an update, but said I didn’t have enough disk space to proceed. Strange – sounds like a big patch! I move some things to other drives, free up some more space, and can download the update, but it won’t install – not enough disk space. After shoveling around a few more bits, I free up about 800MB, and now the update will start installing. I know what you’re thinking – why did it make me free up all that space? Well, after downloading the update, it has to apply the update. And after 3 steps, it runs out of disk space and cancels. So I go back and free up even MORE disk space, this time crying over needing to uninstall Civ4. After 5 or 6 tries, I am finally able to apply the update. The important things to come away from this with are: 1) every time I attempted to update, it had to redownload the file, all 83.5MB of it, even though it will still sitting in the “temp” folder from the previous attempt. And 2) freeing up all that space was necessary, because the update some how decompressed to take up over 5GB. Yes, that means I needed more than 10GB of disk space to install and update the game!

NWN2 Crashes: After about an hour of playing Neverwinter Nights 2, I got to venture out into the world, sent on a mission to go to the city of Neverwinter. At least, that’s what I was supposed to do. Whenever I tried to travel to the new area, the game would either lock up or crash. After 4 or 5 tries, I decided to hop on the support forums and do a little searching. Apparently some other folks had the same problem I did, and found the solution – Neverwinter Nights 2 was using the Windows “TEMP” folder for storage, and running out of disk space. I guess the 500MB I had free on that drive weren’t enough. So I updated my TEMP folder to point to a different drive, and sure enough, I was able to continue in my adventuring career.

NWN2 Saving: Well, before long I had butchered a few enemies, made a friend, and saved the day for a few nice commoners, so I wanted to save my progress. But I couldn’t. And the error message? Well, I hate to be formulaic, but there’s no avoiding it this time: insufficient disk space. “But how can that be?!” you ask anxiously. He still has 5GB free on his D: drive, and 500MB on his C: drive. Surely a saved game can’t take up more than, save 10-20MB! Well, there are two important facts you’re forgetting: games are saved in the My Documents folder, which is on the C: drive for most people, and NWN2 requires at least 1.5GB free to save games. Sometimes. Or something. That’s the answer I found in the forum, so after moving my My Documents folder to a drive with 3GB free, I was able to save. How I could save the first time, I don’t know. Perhaps the code to check free disk space before saving has a small bug in it. You know, the type that makes it off by a factor of 1000.

All-in-all, this game did not live up to my expectations. Without the technical problems, it would definitely be a fun game, though probably not worthy of the 240+ hours I put in the KotOR2. With the technical problems, it becomes a headache, unworthy of my $50 of the hour I spent driving around town trying to find a copy. In summary: “You Lose! Good day sir!”

–Guest reviewed by HomicidalGoat–

SyndicateX response:

Wow! We hate to see such a highly anticipated game get such a low score. It sounds like you have to be e1337 to even make NWN2 work. Hopefully with some more user feedback and patching, BioWare can make it right. We thought the first Neverwinter Nights was a very well done game with enormous community-generated content. It sounds like Neverwinter Nights 2 is more of the same but is held back by major glitches. We will cross our fingers for some future improvement. SyndicateX thanks HomicidalGoat for his detailed account of his experience with Neverwinter Nights 2.