Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition Digital Deluxe Edition

The best game from my childhood, now with new expansions! I can just recommend this timeless classic!

Beamdog should be banned from even approaching the classic games. Not only because their “improved” versions are complete garbage. The real problem is that the classic and WELL-DONE versions disappear from the stores.

My review is for the game itself: some of the original questline and modules. And not for the mere potentials of 3rd party modules. The main campaign is just boring and uninspired. But that's the typical opinion. The modules that new players are commonly directed to are just as bad. Boring story with poor design. To get this straight: these kinds of CRPGs are adaptations of DnD rulesets. Yet, they are designed around ways which would never be done in a game of DnD. I'll give an actual example. You have an encounter where you have to kill a high level character, called J'nah. One of the worst designed fights I've ever seen in a game. You can do many things to prepare for this fight, and make a lot of different choices. Yet, not one of them matters. You turn a group of her underlings against her. You prepare with items you find in the preceding area, and you get from another character. Not one of these things will matter after about 10 seconds into the fight. Your build could very well make the fight unwinnable. The best way to win is to come in with prior knowledge and to repeat the encounter and redo for better rolls, which is so counter to what you would do in a tabletop game. Fine enough, but this is adapted from tabletop rules. For reference, there's no 'parties' in this game, like in a traditional tabeltop. You go by yourself, and maybe one companion at once. But a lot of the game doesn't feel designed around it, but still has parts designed around complimentary builds. It makes for a very boring experience, like playing the most boring, grinding free to play MMO. That's what it feels like. An absolute downgrade from previous CRPGs (which, personally, I think are over rated to begin with). The design is sloppy and thoughtless, like nobody had a simple plan for how it should be as a cohesive experience. The best thing about the game is the potential of the module system.

If you want to feel nostalgic without incompetent and insensitive developers ruining your great old memories then you certainly want to avoid this. The only good thing about this package is that all the DLC is included for completionists. Yes, we can celebrate that beating the dead horse and milking the nostalgia cow has hopefully been ended. The bad thing is that there are incomplete and buggy (at least at the time of writing) modules included that you normally would want to avoid. So in that sense it's not really complete after all. If you want a modern DnD gaming experience that's true to the lore, the fantasy universe and it's setting then you better look at Baldur's Gate 3. If you aren't looking for a modern DnD then you are still better off buying the vanilla NwN EE that comes with the old version of the real game. Because that's really the game you might want, not the EE version.

Despite my owning everything in this package, gog is still trying to sell it to me again. It's because Beamdog keeps rereleasing new editions with nothing or nothing of note to offer over the previous ones.