Between: Dungeons & Dragons Neverwinter Nights 2: Enhanced Edition and the complete edition? Does anyone know?

Dungeons & Dragons Neverwinter Nights 2: Enhanced Edition is the 2025 "remastered" or "enhanced" version of the original game and its expansions, developed and released by Aspyr. The product description is somewhat vague on detail as to what exactly is enhanced or remastered, other than graphics and camera controls. The complete edition is just the original release of the game and its expansions packaged together and released digitally by the original developer and current rights holder of the originals.

Here is the text from the product description describing the 2025 version: "A Relic, Restored: Everything you loved about Neverwinter Nights 2 has been preserved. Enjoy smoother gameplay with refined camera controls, polished mechanics, enhanced textures, and full controller support with a newly designed controller-specific UI. "

The Tomb Raider and Legacy of Kain remasters done by Aspyr are pretty solid, though not quite Nightdive-level quality in terms of remaster/remakes. Here's hoping they've done something similar with Neverwinter Nights 2. Though, the screenshots don't seem that enhanced . . .

From the trailers, and info, probably not much.

If you already own it on GoG (which I do), I'd take a wait and see approach until there is something significant it adds.

IMO, the biggest reason they did this was to get it back on Steam and on Consoles. It won't really add much over the GoG version.

It should at least perform better on modern systems than the Complete Edition has. CE can be very stuttery on modern systems, and no setting seemed to help, and I never found anything that was supposed to help. At least not years ago.

Thank you!

Well, at least one improvement is that the download is 32 GB instead of the previous 8 GB. Much of the difference seems to be that the new version contains a lengthy EULA that is slightly too "modern" for my tastes.

The game menus appear to be updated, and UI and text scales better than the out of the box NWN2 Complete (at least up to 1440p).

I notice that I have the exceedingly fast mouse middle click camera rotation that I remember needed to be fixed for the base game as well. The UI options seem to do nothing to fix it and I can't quite remember what needed to be changed.

The save games from NWN2 Complete can be loaded, though I haven't tried actually playing them.

The only change I can see is controller support.

They could've, and should've, restored cut content. Everyone mods it back in. And they should've made the server run on 64 bit systems.

Thank you for the info and the link.

If there's actual support for multicore CPUs then it's miles above the original.

The Enhanced Edition does spread itself across across multiple cores very well, compared to the OG spiking one core to 90%.

??

Multicore problems are a myth.

Tons of old games run on one core, because that's all they need. The Original version is no exception. I already had multicore CPU back in 2006 when it released. It was fine then and it's fine now. I upgraded to quad core in 2008, and it was still fine.

Today, the original runs perfectly smooth at 120 FPS on my 6 core i5-12400.

Given that prevailing opinion over Beamdog's run seems to have been "NEW THINGS BAD" as a collossal overreaction to BG1-2 having new content that was a bit intrusive, I rather expect Aspyr went the bare-bones route intentionally this time. I would call that an overcorrection, but oh well.

Anyway, to give a straightforward answer to the OP, the difference is basically that some graphics and effects have been touched up (in the very literal definition of the word, it is very minor) to look a bit better, controllers are now supported as an option for PC and as the main thing for the console ports, and the user interface is scaled up to look better at resolutions the original game wasn't necessarily designed to accomodate.

So, basically: the interface doesn't look like it was designed for ants anymore. So that's nice. Also, there's a console version.

That is basically it.

Beyond that, the game's compatibility with modern systems will likely outlast and outshine NWN2 Complete in the long run. But I would expect player-made modules to be a little mucky for a while since it's still close to launch and nobody (not Aspyr, not module creators) have had a chance to test things out and polish them.

Err ... the problem with Beamdog was not "new things bad" but that they had some writers who have picked the wrong jobs, i.e. definitely couldnt write.

The result was that new content sticks out like a sore thumb as low quality among the old stuff.

Most specifically the new PCs that talk a LOT and have very little to say. Also for that matter they are all hilariously useless in their build, except for Baeloth (never actually played with him though because the dialogue is still obnoxious). Neela is also a bit useful in BG1 because theres a shortage of good mages there; her low hitpoints are a pain though, as is her dialogue. The new sidequests have been very flat and boring, too.

Another annoyance is that they actually managed to fix too much, including things that havent been broken in the first place. For example suddenly Keldon would no longer lend Minsc his armor in a hurry. Why wouldnt Keldorn do that if the situation demands it ? I cant think of a single reason. In fact nobody but Keldorn can now use his armor, not even tricksters with Use Any Item. Why not just have Keldon take his armor with him if you throw him out of party ? Makes much more sense to me.

Or they removed the hidden +1 on your primary stat during the hell trials. Which was a nice easter egg in the originals.

This overinterpretation is just annoying and stupid.

What also pisses me off about the second game is that they didnt made the UI scale properly on higher resolutions, so its still too small and a PITA to use on a notebook with a small screen.

Other than that there are many nice improvements, especially in BG1. And of course the UI scales now. And the game overall feels more stable.

It got dumbed down for controllers, in order to sell the game on consoles. That's about the only new thing in the remaster.

Almost none of the issues from the original got fixed.