I put NWN 1 on the back burner and thought I would try out NWN 2. So far, it's a drastic improvement, with party members actually having fleshed out personalities and good character moments, and the developing party dynamic is fun to watch. However, the problem is that the AI makes the actual "game" part rather intolerable. I've pretty much resigned myself to never being able to stop any of the characters from making ill advised 5 foot steps, but some of the stuff they do is just bizarre. I found the command list that lets me issue general orders, but whenever I switch over to a party member to, say, put them in a flanking position or attack a flanked target, and then switch back to my character, then the non-controlled characters will go and do something else entirely.

To give an example, we were in a graveyard. Only one of us had a blunt weapon, so I figured the best bet was to have the fighter bludgeon skeletons while the rogue flanked his targets and I cut my way through the zombies. So long as I remained in control of a character after instructing them on what to do, they did what they should (i.e. go somewhere and stay there, attack a certain target, etc.); once I stopped controlling them, they would complete the assigned action and then do something else (like stop flanking to attack a skeleton they can't hope to damage).

Is there some way to mod the AI to make it more, well, BG-esque? Lord knows I never thought I'd see the day when I would use that game as some sort of standard, but the ability to give commands to the group and trust them to carry them out really helped out in battle, whereas here, the free-spirited AI often winds up getting itself killed.

I've spent the weekend playing and getting accustomed to the game play, and the more I think about this, it makes the most sense to me. The times where I was most successful with fewer people going unconscious and being efficient with spells was when I was taking a very discrete control over my party.

I'm on the fence on whether the party members AI should be less idiotic or if its just to entice you to play a more critical version of the game where you control and develop all characters in your party, not just your main.

Puppet mode is definitely a marked improvement, but there were still times where I would give commands, switch to another party member, and then the rest of the party would drop everything and flock to the party member I had selected.