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A fun game, if you can tolerate the performance issues...

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 55 / 61
Date: January 27, 2007
Author: Amazon User

NWN is a fun, exciting story that is unfortunately swallowed alive by its own technical limitations. I won't say much about the game quality other than to say that long time fans of Black Isle games will recognize the fun and depth built into NWN2, and the story is everything you would expect from the successor to Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, and Neverwinter Nights 1. Sadly, the fun of playing through the story is quickly swallowed up by the frustration of fighting the game's significant technical flaws.

The user interface, and particularly the camera control, is horrendous. Any time you enter one of the game's many tight, swirvy dungeons, count on stopping to adjust the camera angle every few minutes as it gets hung up on seemingly every wall, plant, or chunk of rock within throwing distance. You may miss much of the game's more impressive eye candy as the camera points uselessly off at nothing or grants you an extreme closeup of a patch of dirt on the wall.

Sadly, the technical issues with NWN2 don't stop with the UI. Independent reviews at Gamespot confirm what countless users on Atari and Black Isle support forums are reporting: achieving a playable framerate (> 30 FPS) in this game requires significantly better hardware than that which is "recommended" by the box.

Users logging onto the Atari & Black Isle support forums are consistently reporting single digit framerates in almost all areas of the game. My own impression, based on many hours scouring the forums, and on my own in-game experiences, is that if you have the absolute best hardware available on the market, and you turn *all* of the graphics options down to "mid grade" or lower, you can expect to see about 25 - 30 FPS. If you have the hardware "recommended" by the box, and you turn all of the graphics options all the way down (disabling any optional eye candy), you can expect 5 - 15 FPS, complemented by a constant 100% utilization of both CPU & GPU (is it a bad sign when CPU utilization remains at 100% just looking at the game's main menu?).

Unfortunately, Atari and Black Isle support have left their userbase without a solution to these issues, reporting that they have been unable to reproduce any of the performance problems reported on their support forums. Personally I find it hard to believe they are unable to reproduce what is a seemingly ubiquitous set of problems, but either way they have yet to release a patch or troubleshooting step that has provided a resolution to the many users experiencing significant performance issues with NWN2.

Given the many technical issues this game suffers, I cannot recommend it to any but the most die-hard fans, and even then I cannot recommend it to anyone who's hardware is less than the best the market has to offer.

More like a NWN expansion pack

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 77 / 107
Date: November 05, 2006
Author: Amazon User

The requirements have been seriously jacked up from NWN original and you really get very little for it. The 50 hour new capmaign is decently put together but none of the view options work very well to play the game in realtime. You will spend half the game repositioning the camera. Game plays slow on my machine, which only a year old 2ghz Dell with a gig of ram and I have a reasonably new 256 meg graphics card. Heck, I play Oblivion reasonably well with less than full grahpics, but I can't make this game work and let me tell you.. this is no Oblivion. Graphics are a slight improvement over NWN original but they are bellow par for any PC game I have seen come out in a year. I am very disapointed. Obsidian Entertainment never failed me before, but this game is a failure.

UPDATED: 4/4/2008 - So a couple years have passed and people are still on my case for saying the game doesn't run fast enough. No kidding right. Computers and graphics cards are sorta faster now you see. I doubt a 2005 rig could still play it.. BUT I just got the Mac version on my brand new MacBook Pro and it runs just peachy on max settings so I'd say technology more than caught up with the game. It runs very smoothly now. Of course now the interface and camera action are even more dated, but if you can handle the sorta retro feel of it the game is not half bad. Certainly a lot of love has gone into it from the community since release. I am sure I will enjoy finishing the main quest and checking out the expansion.. if that is actually possible on my Mac anyhow. Sorry I would have updated my review sooner but the PC DVD got scratched and the copy protection wasn't interested in letting me play without it.

If I could change my vote I'd give it 3 out of 5, and 4 if I could just figure out how to make the freaking camera follow me. There has got to be a way, it is just too big an oversight not be in there somewhere.

Oh yeah, the graphics on max settings are MUCH better than NWN 1. Had to scale them down before so I guess I never saw what it was really capable of.

A must have for fans of traditional RPG's

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 18 / 19
Date: November 26, 2007
Author: Amazon User

DISCLAIMER: I bought both NWN2 and the expansion pack, Mask of the Betrayer, at the same time and installed them both, so my review reflects changes that were implemented with the expansion pack but still available in the original campaign.

I'm probably in the minority of gamers in that I never really liked the original NeverWinter Nights. I loved the concept of a game that allowed you to create your own campaigns and play online, but I got really turned off by the single character with henchmen aspect. NWN2 has fixed this with a more traditional 4 character party system.

I am running it on the following system:

AMD Athlon 64 3000+, 1 GB Ram (Single Channel), GeoForce 7600 GS 256MB DDR3. So my system is nice, but by no means state of the art! I am able to run at almost all of the highest settings for graphics and action.

Pros:
The game play is great, very similar in style to the older Infinity based games.
The graphics are beautifully rendered, a significant upgrade from NWN
The storyline is engaging (haven't finished it yet, about 1/3 through)
There is enough flexibility in how you control your party to allow various styles of play.

Cons:
I've tweaked the mouse control as best I can and it still gets a little jumpy when I try to pan around.
The load times between areas can be a bit long at times.
The world (so far) is not fully built out. For instance in several of the villages I have encountered so far, there are only one or two buildings you can enter. While I understand how time consuming world building can be, one thing I always enjoyed about the Baldur's Gate and Ultima series was that you could go almost anywhere you wanted. If you are playing a thief, this seriously inhibits your ability to role play.

Neutral:
There are so many feats, skills and other abilities, that it's hard to keep track of them all and know which ones to use.
Each of the party members always have the same level of experience points. This makes it easier for balancing the party of course, but it seems a bit strange that when a new member joins, he is at the same level of the other characters. I always enjoyed managing the characters to make sure each got enough XP.
So far the story has been very linear. I prefer a more open gameplay (like Ultima and BG).
Cut scenes are well done, but can be a bit long at times.

Synopsis:

For those that love the party based CRPG genre, this is a must have, despite some of the flaws of the game. I have only found one CRPG since the release of Baldur's Gate II that I really enjoyed, and that was a user mod of Dungeon Siege (Ultima V: Lazarus). Icewind Dale II just didn't hold my interest (the story seemed to convoluted, especially given how linear it was), Temple of Elemental Evil just seemed unplayable, and NWN lost me with the single player/henchmen concept.

Additionally, given the large community that made campaign modules for NWN, there should be plenty of modules coming out that don't have the same story issues as the original campaign.

UPDATE: I did have some performance issues once I got to Neverwinter and had to turn down the settings some to avoid low frame rates during combat, but it still plays very good.

THE PATRIARCHS OF cRPGs ARE SLIPPING YET FURTHER DOWNHILL ...

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 17 / 18
Date: October 09, 2007
Author: Amazon User

I remember watching the trailer for the first NWN and actually holding my breath. I had IMMENSELY enjoyed BALDUR's GATE I & II and all their expansions, a well as the ICEWIND DALE series. I had been enchanted by the best cRPG ever, PLANESCAPE TORMENT. Now the same game developers were delivering a 3D, cinematic version that would make total immersion inescapable! Right? Wrong, oh boy, so WRONG!

Measly henchmen replacing our deliciously diversified company, nauseating camera movement, infantile designed objects, slow battle movements, low polygon characters and bland storyline. Now, NWN had its virtues, no doubt. It was such an original approach that games like WOW and OBLIVION borrowed heavily from its innovative concept of a Third-Person cinematic RPG. Nevertheless, it suffered from raising the expectations bar too high - and then not delivering but a fraction of its obvious potential. It eventually got accepted by the MODing community that created numerous ingenious MODs that saved the day.

It has been over a year now and NWN2 does not seem to take off. It is as if no one wants to concern himself with it. And for good reason.
The much higher system requirements do not translate onto the screen. There are improvements of course but not by much. It feels more like an expansion than a sequel.
The camera movement is even worse. Much WORSE! Supposedly it positions itself in the best angle, Well, I found myself spending more time repositioning the camera than the interacting with the characters!

Does it have bugs? Enough to make a horror B-Movie! Patch after patch gets released and the damn thing still stutters and freezes and crashes. Another fine example of an untested product rushed to the market unfinished. While traveling everything seems fine. When the battle heats up, though, and spells fly left and right all hell breaks loose. Tweaking the video and graphics settings helps but does not eliminate all problems.

All in all, a game to avoid if a cRPG fun. If new to RPG games do not start with this one: you will get disappointed and may be miss out on true gems.

Another fine example of accountants and stock-jockeys meddling with an art-form they cannot grasp...

Rushed and Buggy

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 17 / 19
Date: November 08, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I previously reviewed this and gave it a slightly higher rating - my score has come down because the more I play it the less satisfied I become. First, NWN 2 has none of the stuff that made NWN good (and I didn't care for NWN that much). And it has none of the things that made games like Baldur's Gate (which I liked) fun. So it basically is a failure on a number of fronts.

The user-interface is terrible, for example click a button which brings up a menu and you can pick inventor - very clumberson - in Baldur's Gate, for example, you could just click on the person icon and have an inventory.

Camera angles are a major pain and things are always blocking your view. Interior views are just annoying.

Tons of bugs because of the tons of cut scenes (which are mediocre and have poor voice acting in general) - the bugs are slowly being elimiated with patches but right now the game is more of a beta then in production shape - it is unacceptable when you cannot finish the first level because of a bug - which a recently released patch has fixed.

Graphically stale but requiring a major PC to run - system recommendations are not even close to what is required to run the game at an acceptable frame rate with the effects turned on.

Party AI is okay for fighters (fair amount of running past one bad guy to get another bad guy for no partciular reason except to give the first bad guy a attack of opportunity) but if you switch between players, the computer takes over and does what it wants with the other players. So if your scorcer is using a crossbow to conserve magic and you switch to control another player, the computer starts running through spells and ignores what you had the sorcer doing. Luckily the fights are pretty simple so there is not much need for tactics - which you couldn't use if you wanted to.

So it basically is one of the worst D&D games I have played to date from a user interface standpoint. The story may be fine but I am usually so annoyed that I don't care. Which is a shame - this game with some polish could have been something. Stay away unless you are sadistic or you plan to use the toolset to make your own games. The 8.5 that IGN gave this game was WAY to high - it should have been about a 5.0. The fact that you can make your own game does not make this game worth anything - it just gives certain people a reason to buy this terrible game anyway.

Improvement over original, but not groundbreaking

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 60 / 106
Date: November 02, 2006
Author: Amazon User

At first glance, the graphics are on par with Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil. That's not good since that game came out in 2003. But after a little while I've decided they are a little better than that, about 1-2 years advanced from the original NWN (which is 4 years old). But not up to snuff for late 2006/early 2007. Perhaps lesser graphics are necessary for the Toolset, since they need to be mass-producable (sp?). At least this time you can see your cloaks when you wear them without the unstable CEP.

The provided campaign (I'm still in Chapter 2) is rather boring to me. I do not see as being more immersive as someone else said, just less exciting or interesting. But less than half of the original NWN players I've spoken with over the years were not very excited about the original storyline either. Conversation in the Official Campaign are an improvement over the original, but that may be because of the movie animations involved that the toolset probably can't provide to the average module builder. I have only just opened the Toolset, so I cannot yet comment on how user-friendly it is. But it is different from the first one.

My recommendations are thus: if you want a single-player game, wait until the price drops and bugs are worked out (advice for almost all games). If you are the more creative type and are most interested in the Toolset, then I would suggest going ahead and getting it so that we have something to play when the rest of us finish trudging through the OC. For multi-player play, I can't really comment except to say visit the official forums and wait until the first patch is actually ready.

Disappointing But Shows Promise

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 16 / 18
Date: December 07, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I was so looking forward to NWN2 - I loved the Baldur's Gate & NWN series from Bioware; and to a lesser extent the Icewind Dale games. The pre-release hype implied this would be NWN with radically improved graphics, especially scenery, with a more BG feel to the game and interface and everyone expected such. Instead Obsidian seem to have scrapped the entire engine & toolset (the most developed parts of NWN) and rebuilt from scratch. However they recycled many voice scripts & background music from the original! So you get a new game engine that is basically similar to NWN on the surface (but nominally to D&D 3.5 Edition standards), but which has no new features of any huge merit and a limited quality rendering for your character customisation and only limited new original sounds (voice, ambient, or music).

NWN2 also exhibits similar bugs to what NWN had, in fact on first release it had more originally but by the 5th Patch (version 1.03.840 on 05 December) it has at least reduced to a more acceptable level. However some characters in game are seriously hampered by bugs (e.g. Defensive Casting mode is erratic for spell casters). NWN2 was probably released too soon and it is yet to be seen whether Obsidian (& Atari) have a genuine commitment to support the game long-term as considerable patching and improvement will still be required.

Graphically the game is visually impressive in some areas (notably Outdoors Terrain), but the poor customisation capability for characters, limited variety of interior terrain, poor spell effect graphics, and issues with frame rates undermine this. Obsidian have also indicated they may not offer any real support for PWs; and only minimal MP support! I don't dislike this game, but I am disappointed, apart from the overall first impression of the outdoors graphics it offers little over the original NWN and expansions. I expect the game may be worth 4 stars by about June 2007 if Obsidian are committed to improvement.

I purchased the Limited Edition (DVD) version, primarily to get the extra Feat & Store Items in game, although the artwork book is also nice (but features spoilers so shouldn't be read until after playing). The NZ/Au version of the LE seems to be much better than the UK/European one. Despite what the packaging says you will actually need about 6.5GB to install, and about 7GB free space to play & patch).

If you have not previously played the original NWN and expansions you may get much better value from buying them (Platinum or Diamond Editions are recommended) and downloading additional Premier or Free modules off the Internet until NWN2 has been further debugged & enhanced.

Not a suitable successor to NWN (Expanded after 20+ hours use)

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 15 / 18
Date: November 04, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Many bad things about this title and performance isn't one of them for me as it runs fine.

Bad:
Radial menus are gone.

No more quick chat options like greetings and goodbye.

Campaign is linear.

No exploration as there are no longer any area transitions. Go to world map, click area, fight in small area, go to world map, continue over and over.

Toolset is not intuitive and frustrating to use. If you think NWN's was difficult this one is much worse. NWN's is far superior in ease of use.

There are very few tilesets and they lack what NWN's have.

There are no longer any Item, Monster, Clothing, wizards in the toolset.

They used the same character soundsets as NWN but they're worse.

Camera edge scrolling is too slow to use effectively. There is no way to adjust edge scrolling.

Chase camera is useless underground because walls obstruct view.

Cannot put 2 weapons or shield and weapon on quick slot - Dual Wield

Cannot unequip a weapon using quick slot. It must be done manually from the inventory screen.

Cannot put skills/feats on quick slots.

AI party characters get stuck and cannot move.

AI party characters must be micro managed as the AI is horrible. You have to keep pausing the game to get everyone working together, unpause for a few seconds, pause and rearrange them, and so on, and so on.

AI sometimes will not do what you order them to.

Direction keys WASD over control movement making it very difficult.

New targeting system is difficult and you end up casting spells on the wrong target constantly.

No Linux support.

No Great Cleave of Coup-de-Grace animations. the monsters around you just drop dead without anyone touching them.

Cannot drag a box or ctrl click all of your party members to select them all; Like older titles from Obsidian??

Character heads pretty much all look them same. You can give them different hair styles though.

Hardly any monsters. They used different colors or just renamed some monsters with the same model. The first part of the campaign is just fighting dwarfs. No Minotaurs, Hobgoblins, only 2 dragons.

no rideable horses which NWN has

DM client is beta as they planned not to add one even though the 1st has it

Large persitant worlds are gone because of huge memory requirements (Developer's own words) This is probably why it shipped with D&D online a pay per month subscription

Don't ask me how but there is lag in offline play

Non-stop cutscenes

Poor animations

No more character portaits

Hardly any variation in armor, weapons, clothing, items, etc - Falls way short of NWN

Graphics are better than NWN but mediocre when compared to other current titles. Frame rates are worse than titles with better graphics!

Obsidian dropped the ball on this one. They have not listened to the large NWN following and have implemented what they want, not the customer.

If you're thinking about buying, it is more like Baldurs Gate than NWN. Even the "You have been waylaid by enemies," on the world map is back. If you like Icewind Dale or Baldurs Gate you'll probably like this.

Neverwinter Nights it is not.

If you own NWN stick with it, if you like the sound of this type game buy NWN Diamond edition. It is far superior to NWN2.

Experience:
28 years D&D player, DM
NWN player since original release
PW world developer

An improvement over the original in some ways, but in others a step backwards

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 12 / 13
Date: January 28, 2008
Author: Amazon User

I want to get this out of the way - it's taken me a very long time to get from start to finish of Neverwinter Nights 2, and for good reason. When the game shipped in 2006 it was all but unplayable for many people because performance was just atrocious. For this reason, I couldn't get passed the first hour or so of the game; it was just too distracting. But the state of the game now is not the state of the game as it was at release. Numerous patches and an expansion pack have made me pick up the game again to give it another try, and I was pleasantly surprised with the game's improvement.

Character Creation (not scored)
When you first start the game, you'll be taken to the Character Creation screen. There are many, many, options for you when you start character creation, and I'm not just referring to what color hair your character has. So much so that it's overwhelming. In fact, I almost didn't get into the game at all because I didn't know what to do. There isn't really a tutorial or anything to help you figure it all out; instead, the game just gives you paragraphs of information on the right side of the screen detailing complicated, esoteric Dungeons and Dragons jargon. I will revisit this problem later when I talk about game-play, for it is a problem that permeates the game - in order to get the most out of the game you really need to have a pre-requisite knowledge of the way D&D works. It wasn't anywhere near as overwhelming in the original game or Baldur's Gate or other D&D based games - the game worked with or without your own personal experience with the game's systems. So when the game describes dice rolls, and stat offsets without explaining what they mean, it alienates the less hardcore consumer who hasn't spent half their life in a dank basement rolling for initiative. In the end, I just chose one of the pre-set character customization options or else I never would have gotten started. I will say, though, for the aforementioned D&D fanatic, the options and classes are very deep and varied; just don't expect for the game to cut you any slack, at first at least.

Story 8/10
This is one of the game's biggest strengths. Within the main campaign, you will easily find 50+ hours worth of playtime. The game takes place in the Forgotten Realms, more specifically the Sword Coast. You play a guy/girl/creature from a small southern swamp town, with an unknown destiny. There is an attack on your town at the beginning of the game, leading you to discover said destiny and set off on an epic journey to the city of Neverwinter and beyond. The set-up is very familiar, but the execution is top-notch. There is political betrayal and intrigue, racial tension and other problems to contend with that help make the world feel alive and vibrant.

The game also employs use of a good/evil alignment system that attempts to make character interaction more interesting, but it doesn't have any effect on the story at large - you'll still end up battling the same final boss, and you'll either win or lose. Which brings me to the main problem with the campaign: its linearity. The world is large, but you'll discover it in a very linear manner. There are side quests, but for the most part, they are just optional objectives to fulfill along the main story arc, rather than allowing you to explore other parts of the Sword Coast.

Game-play 8/10
Game-play is exactly what you would expect of a D&D game. The difference between the original and the sequel, though, is that you control an entire party of four people rather than just one. You have complete control over your henchmen, rather than having the game automate all of their actions. The AI does control them when you want them to, but you have the option of micro-managing every action and level up.

Battle consists of giving orders to your characters, watch them act out those orders, hitting the space bar to pause the game, giving more orders and doing it all over again. It isn't really any different that it has been in games like Baldur's Gate, but why fix what isn't broken? It's fun, engaging, and the reason to play the game. If you didn't like it before, you won't like it here, but it's dungeon crawling at its finest.

The game gives you a rather slow-moving, basic tutorial at the beginning of the game to orient you with the way combat works. It sort of does its job, but once again, the game doesn't really teach you the way D&D works. So you either learn it elsewhere or ignore the underlying mechanisms, but it will make you feel like you don't understand what's really going on if you do just ignore it. The idea behind having a computer version of a D&D game is to automate it for you, but I felt alienated by being kept in the dark, and I often didn't know how to play different classes.

Also, it is FAR easier to play as a melee-oriented class than a caster. Because you need to rest constantly to recharge spells, you won't always have your basic spells to use on your foes. When your casters have leveled enough, this will cease to be a problem, but if you start out as a mage, expect to rest after every encounter for the first 8 or 9 hours of the game. Also, you won't be able to manage any kind of aggro, so be prepared to need a fighter or warrior to get through most battles. This is part of the challenge of the game and the nature of D&D, but playing a fighter really is a breeze, while playing a sorcerer can be an exercise in frustration. Also, the AI is okay, but you'll notice sorcerers using their most powerful spells on rats when just a magic missile will do. As such, you'll probably want to order around all of your characters rather than trusting the AI. Inventory management can be clunky, too, but you generally have plenty of space for everything you want to pick up and sell.

All of these issues are often minor, though, and playing the game is a blast most of the time. After a few hours you'll get a handle on how everything works, and it'll start to feel more natural. Later in the game you gain control of a fortress, which is yours to reinforce and work on, hire soldiers for, etc., which is also really engaging.

Performance 6/10
And here we reach the biggest issue with the game. The game just wasn't programmed to perform well on most systems. Especially considering the level of graphical detail inherent in the game design, performance is downright awful. Framerates rarely exceeded 15fps for me, and I have a gigabyte of video memory and two gigs of ram. The game has a particularly difficult time dealing with SLi or multi-core processors, which may have resulted from the game's lengthy development period. The patches and updates have made a big difference, but since then huge game-breaking bugs have reared their ugly heads.

By far the biggest bug is one where the game actually deletes party members from your roster. It wouldn't be such a huge issue if certain campaign events didn't require you to have specific characters in your party at the time. See, the game stores character information every time you change scenery. However, when you have a familiar summoned, it will overwrite your useful tiefling thief or dwarf fighter, or what have you, with that familiar, effectively losing said character. It requires clunky file manipulation or a game restart, to fix which almost made me give up the game after 35 hours of playing. It is inexcusable to have such an enormous bug in the game a year and a half after release still in its code. Also, in order sidestep said bug, you have to unsummon all creatures every time you leave a scene, which is just irritating. Patch documentation state that this has been addressed, but this is a flat-out lie; I started a new game after all the latest updates had been installed.

Graphics 7/10
Even with the game's poor performance, the game looks okay. It kind of gets away with it much of the time because it doesn't require twitch action from the player. The backgrounds are pretty, with certain districts of Neverwinter being almost beautiful. The spell effects are the highlight of the game, with firebolts, mage missiles, and ice balls being flung all over the place during combat. It's very pleasant to look at while fighting, and satisfying when a meteor storm obliterates a boss character.

However the characters look like they fell out of a time warp circa 2001. They often look awful, and the hair is particularly bad. I would expect character models of this caliber on the PSP, not on PCs. Also, the graphics engine is buggy, with random flickering happening quite frequently. Again, this all depends on your setup, but it is the norm, rather than the exception, if forum dwellers are to be believed. Loading times are very high, framerates are low, and bugs abound. The camera is particularly suspect - it's kind of isometric, kind of over the shoulder, but you there is no automation whatsoever, so plan on constantly manually moving it to get a better view of the action. Even more frustrating is the fact that it doesn't save where you were last looking with it when you transition to a new area, so you end up with an awful view every time you gain control of your characters. I don't know what was wrong with the way the original camera worked, but it detracts from the game experience.

Sound 9/10
I don't really have any criticism here. The voice acting is of high-quality across the board, the orchestral music is compelling and fitting, and the sound effects are satisfying. This is easily the most consistent part of the game.

Summary
All of the issues can really creep up on you while you play, and it's unfortunate that there are so many of them because there truly is a lot of fun to be had here for the persistent. All of this isn't really new to PC gamers, who are used to doing all kinds of tweaking to get games to work, but a history of this doesn't exclude Obsidian from the responsibility of releasing such an unpolished an inconsistent piece of software. That having been said, once I got the game working at a stable rate, I had a great time discovering and becoming part of its world and the tale it has to tell. The bottom line is that it's fun, engaging, and deep. Keep in mind the bugs and problems you may encounter before making a purchase, but it has my recommendation.

Pros:
-Engaging story
-Great sound
-Fun, deep gameplay
-Lengthy campaign

Cons:
-Extremely inconsistent performance
-Mediocre graphics
-Difficult to get started
-Complicated game systems
-Lack of in-game explanation of those systems

Overall Score - 8/10

Doesn't meet expectations

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 14 / 18
Date: November 09, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I am not a hardcore gamer. NWN is the only "intense" game that I invest the time to play. I have been waiting for the 2nd version with anticipation for quite a long time.

On release date, I bought two copies of the game. Sadly, I have only even bothered to open up one of them. The game, as is, only beta quality in my opinion.

It is very buggy, and some of the new design decisions that were made in terms of UI and such were not good ones. Online gameplay is almost impossible with the way things are right now due to bugs and poor UI.

I am still hopeful that they will patch the game and make it the game we all expected it to be, but I am extremely disappointed that it is 8 months late and still in the condition it is in and I still had to pay $50 for it.

Unless you absolutely have to have it, wait until after the new year before buying it. There will probably be a half a dozen or so patches out by then.

If they fix some fundamental things like NPC AI, the Camera, and Inventory I will reconsider my rating, but at this point in time I am very disappointed.

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