A little background.

I first purchased the original DVDs back in 2007, when I was still in college. The game was full of bugs, and sometimes there were gamebreaking. Needless to say, I never finished the DLCs and I lost those DVDs. In 2013, I purchased the game digitally on Gamersgate, and either there was no support or Gamersgate was selling games without CD-keys, so I spent $19.95 on a game that should not have been sold. Even now, when I try to download and install the game, the game automatically uninstalls. F Gamersgate for being douchebag thieves.

The experience has left a foul taste in my mouth. Now, I am seeing a lot of problems in gog.com about it, and it is a shame that a game that had so much potential is reduced to this.

You are reading what is essentially a support forum, and seeing people report support issues. That is normal for any game.

I bought NWN2 here, and had negligible issues, played every DLC, most of them multiple times and many third party modules.

Maybe not worth it for you. But I have had hundreds of hours of enjoyable playtime for a small price.

NWN2 is a great game, despite its bugs and annoying problems (like the camera... ugh). I just love it.

You don't need a CD key for any of the single player campaigns. Nonetheless, GOG version comes with a unique key that you can find in your account page for multiplayer (access it from a browser like Chrome, NOT Galaxy. For some reason CD key sections are not visible in the Galaxy client.).

If the full price is too steep for you, it goes on sale every now and then.

+1
Because of the bugginess he mentioned, I didn't buy it until maybe 2010 along with a new laptop with the juice to run it. IIRC, part of its issues had to do with requiring a lot of computer power for what should have been necessary. You had to then get used to the admittedly wonky camera which took all of a few minutes of messing with it. After that, the only actual bug I've had in ten years from the CD version or the GOG version is the one with the big battle in the courtyard in chapter 3 where the story won't advance. Is it slightly annoying? Sure, especially given the timing of it being a crucial point in the game. Is it enough to spoil literally hundreds, maybe thousands of hours of enjoyment? Lord no.

Bear in mind any game will present technical issues due to the vast array of hardware/software configurations available, and ones that are no longer updated by their developers/publishers may also encounter increasing compatibility issues as hardware/drivers/Windows advances (or regresses, depending on your point of view). NWN2 is no different from any other game here and the numerous threads here could be considered a sign of NWN2's continued popularity.

However I would certainly agree with your statements about bugs in the disc version - in no small part due to its complexity (especially with multiplayer), it seemed that every update by Obsidian was a case of "two steps forward, one step back" and manual patching was a nightmare. Nonetheless, after about 2 years and 11(!) updates, the final result is mostly pretty good with the final (1.23) patch removing the hated SecuROM disc check.

The GOG version avoids having to do all that patching, includes all the expansions (in particular, the only DRM-free version of Mysteries of Westgate) and you can apply mods like Kaldor Silverwand's Original Campaign Makeover and Mask of the Betrayer Makeover to add SoZ enhancements (you need to have Storm of Zehir installed, obviously) and fixes.

Also NWN2 now has a huge variety of user written modules available.

So it may have suffered from the over-ambition of Obsidian and the dead hand of Atari support, but now it seems to be in pretty good shape.

I think this issue is pretty common, due to how the game was programmed, so be prepared to run into it, even if you buy it here. I had it, too, occasionally, but in those case a reboot often fixed it (and that dll in the linked thread might help as well).

Well, if the OP is for real, I will add that I bought NWN2 Complete here. Complained about the camera, but ended up with something I could work with. The camera was not bugged, just boggling. I experienced 0 bugs, and have added a few QOL mods. You should try again. I have nothing to say about EEEEEEEEEEEEEE versions. Oh, yeah... It ran on a $300 laptop HDMI'd to a large monitor.

Yes the game is bad, compared to NWN1, what disappointed I was.
The only good is that it is DD3.5 and use the subraces.

Oh c'mon. You really like NWN1 better than NWN2? In my opinion the second one is a lot better, especially when it comes to single player campaigns. It has better dialogues, better story telling, gives full control over your party and doesn't leave you with a sense that it was built with generic blocks. NWN1 can only dream about such a good campaign as Mask of the Betrayer. The only thing worse is the controls. They're problematic even to experienced players.

I like NWN better than NWN2 as well, but it all comes down to your preferences and perspective.

I would agree that of all official campaigns, Mask of the Betrayer is the best and the OC of NWN is the worst, and that the landscapes look better in NWN2. The colors might be a little more attractive, too (I really dislike that drab tan red/brown default clothing in NWN). And the character heads are way better than NWN's default ones. The party and spell management is definitely better, and you don't have to deal with such bad AI as in NWN (because you can toggle it off), although the pathfinding is just as bad or worse, and the camera is abyssmal in NWN2, and NWN2 was terribly optimized back then and even now for modern PCs, very resource hungry without good reason, and more likely than NWN to cause performance issues.

Personally, I don't quite like the character's stances and body shapes in NWN2 with. e.g. halflings looking like downscaled humans, I don't like the tiny inventory where a sword would look exactly the same as a scroll with a sword emblem on it, and I don't like the cutscene-like zoom in on dialogues, which might kind of work with voiceovers, but looks ridiculous without them. But those are all personal peeves and matters of preference, and there will be enough others who'd criticize (and not without cause) how blocky and low res characters look in NWN, how clunky and inconvenient they find playing NWN's inventory Tetris, how small the text windows in dialogues are and how boring it is to just read the text etc. Fair enough.

But a lot of people like NWN for community modules and multiplayer, as a tool for creating player made content, not just for playing the official campaigns. I've never tried multiplayer in NWN2, but I've heard not so great things about the performance and other things. And I could never really get into the NWN2 single player community modules I tried; I'm not quite sure why, I think it may be that in NWN2 it is a lot harder to make your module look as professional as the official campaigns. No matter how good the writing is, the graphics always seem a bit behind, with areas looking a bit empty and amateurish to me. In any case, there are a lot more highly acclaimed community modules for NWN, and one of the reasons is precisely that the generic blocks make it so easy for everyone to build and build upon, while in NWN2 it takes a lot of time, knowledge and persistance just to create nice looking areas.

Anyway, just my 2 cents (or euros).

That's true. The main problem of optimization in NWN2 is that it doesn't use multi-core CPUs (NWN1 also doesn't, but it's not as resource hungry). The game came out near the release date of the Intel Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Quad and it should support them. Single-core processors can't handle the game engine good enough. What's interesting the toolset utilizes those processors only the game doesn't.

This resembles the system that was used in the classic Inifinity Engine games. I don't treat this as a disadvantage. The inventory is less chaotic than in NWN1.

Agreed, those cutscene dialogues clearly miss voiceovers. Maybe there were plans to do it, but Obsidian didn't have enough time or budget. Hard to tell.

I never played multiplayer in any of the NWN game. But I heard that NWN1 is a lot better in this aspect.

Personally I view the NWN2 toolset as more powerful. Especially it allows more in terms of landscape crafting. The areas in NWN1 are quite flat and it's hard to craft good looking mountains for example. In NWN2 it's quite easy. I like the editor from the second game.

That's exactly my feeling when it comes to NWN1. :)

I agree that there are more good modules for NWN1. The problem is they're all similar when it comes to graphics. I view the block construction as a disadvantage, but the truth is that graphics are not the most important thing in RPGs. Also you can find quite a lot of single player modules for NWN2. Maybe the editor needs more commitment to build something significant, but the result is better in overall IMHO.

That's true, but the icons weren't as tiny in the classic Infinity Engine (well, they were in terms of pixels, but the resolution was much lower originally ;) ). And I think they might have been more colorful and distinctive? But that could be nostalgia talking, I haven't looked at the IE games or NWN2 in a while. Personally, I don't really like the inventory in IE games either. I kind of like the one in NWN, although I concede that it is chaotic and requires a lot of micromanagement. Just as matter of preference.


Agreed, but that's what I meant, the editor is more powerful but also less accessible for beginners and requires more time investment. Although, to be fair, I'm just basing this on what I heard from others, I've never actually tried to work with the NWN2 editor myself. Anyway, crafting pretty mountains is all well and good, but when your party tries to ascend them and the camera is ofen all over the place ... ;P


I assume the result could be better if someone put a huge amount of time and effort in it (and it already takes a lot of dedication to create a good NWN module), but what I'm saying is, I feel the gap in quality might even be bigger between decent and really good modules in NWN2 than in NWN. It sticks out if you don't go the extra mile and make your module near perfect. Beginner modules just look too amateurish to me.

Anyway, do you happen to have played any high quality NWN2 community modules that you could recommend?

Yes, I'd recommend Wizard's Apprentice series: https://neverwintervault.org/project/nwn2/module/wizards-apprentice. Also there are a few remakes of original games made in the NWN2 engine. Especially check Pool of Radiance (https://neverwintervault.org/project/nwn2/module/pool-radiance-remastered), Baldur's Gate (https://www.nexusmods.com/neverwinter2/mods/794) and Icewind Dale (https://neverwintervault.org/project/nwn2/module/icewind-dale-nwn2). There's of course more of them. You might consider checking the Hall of Fame list from NWNVault: https://neverwintervault.org/article/reference/neverwinter-nights-2-hall-fame. Most of the modules from this list are worth your while. I usually wasn't disappointed when I picked something from it. Of course it would take ridiculous amount of time to play them all.

I had checked out 2-3 high rated ones in the past and could not get into them, but maybe those were the wrong ones or I just need to give them more time and be more open about it. I'll be looking forward to giving Wizard's Apprentice a try, thanks!