On the positive side, Storm of Zehir, even with its faults, still has some of that old time charm of Pool of Radiance / early Bioware style exploratory gameplay. And the original campaign and Mask of the Betrayer are definitely worth playing through once. Also, the UI scaling works now. However, on the negative side, there are lots of things that have not been fixed. Weird non-reproducible functionality bugs, even a couple of crashes. Default settings for mouse (hyper)speed when moving the camera angle are as bad as ever, wish something was done about them. PSA: If the frame rate starts stuttering all of a sudden, try rebooting. There is a known performance issue in NWN2 after your PC had been up for several days, and it still exists in the EE. There was a workaround mod (NWN2 client extender), but I think for EE the only option is to reboot whenever starting to play the game? Note: no promises. This only fixes one potential performance problem, there may be others. On the gameplay side, be aware that computerizing D&D 3.5, the ruleset that NWN2 relatively faithfully implements, makes even more for an optimization puzzle than D&D 3 did... anyway, you may end up spending way more time planning your "builds" than playing the game.
Positives: quite a few interesting areas and encounters, and also a couple of interesting enough new companions (well, M'Khiin at least). And the writing around some of the lesser-used BG companions like Safana and Khalid seemed quite good to me. Negatives: the chapter by chapter structure with sidequests that you can't go back to is annoying - can't really plot your own path, leading to less replayability. The main plot has way too much foreshadowing. Not to mention the several sidequests that you can do to discover what is actually going on ahead of the big plot reveal... but for some reason everybody gets amnesia about the discoveries. The result of a game scaled back and chopped to fit a release schedule? I'm not that bothered by sidequests and optional parts being weird and/or cringy (for every vampire sidequest in SoD, there's a Drizzt encounter in the originals), but the good parts don't quite transcend the mediocre ones in this one for me. And I don't think it's just nostalgia for my youthful days. I do think the original Bioware team must have been fans of AD&D, and 2nd edition Forgotten Realms in particular. Sometimes it shows in the fairly cringy but apparently mandatory Elminster insertions, but I guess it also created a fairly consistent, shared voice across the group of people designing and implementing the quests, the dialog, and the events - not to mention that some of the odder NPCs, side quests and locations must have been mined from old AD&D campaigns, they had a very "played-in" feel to them. SoD, on the other hand, seems to follow the conventions of computer game logic instead of the archaic AD&D - and even if the team included tabletop RPG fans, in my experience the later editions of D&D have quite a different tone in actual play, even pre-Critical Role. So it's no wonder it doesn't quite feel like a continuation of the same game.
The game has many weirdnesses (fewer now than on release), many of the characters are caricatures (though many of them still grow on you), the campaign pacing is not so terrific, the AI is dire especially towards the end... But it just keeps me playing. And replaying. And replaying. Higher difficulty level, solo challenge, iron man run... and then back to the easier challenge but with the "crappy" mercs with no teaching, or no explosives skill... or focus on grit and heavy weapons instead of stealth, do things out of order, play with the campaign triggers... There's something about it that keeps me up until the wee hours of the morning, for the first time since Civ 4? 5? I can't quite remember when that series lost its hold on me.
Archaic, simple, morally even simplistic, still eminently replayable. Maybe the most balanced Ultima, game-wise? The XP and gold rewards are reasonably generous, though reaching level 8 with all companions could be a chore Item hunting is hard to rate, since I know the game too well. Not too bad? Things like buying reagents in small doses and always paying honestly to get an eighth is a bit silly, but it is simple and understandable, and never TOO grindy. The monsters are a lot easier than in most other Ultimas. Anything up to Balrons in small numbers is not so bad - even if the party just has basic armor and nothing but slings and crossbows. The combat system is simple and breezy - Ultima V combat system was "nicer" but takes a lot more time. There are some subtleties to it, too - the humble level 1 Shepherd is, on the face of it, the worst pick as the Avatar - but it turns out to be perhaps the optimal choice from the point of view of finishing the game with a minimum of fuss and boring grinding. Starting from level 1 means you end up close to all 50s in stats with nary an Orb needed, and since the items and quests give XP to the Avatar, reaching level 8 requires requires only maybe 1000 combat XP - far better that your companions be the main combat XP collectors with their magic wands and axes and high-falutin' spells. So relying on your companions instead of becoming a demigod yourself (like in Baldur's Gate) has its advantages - something quite in keeping with the idea of the game. I wonder if this designed, or just an emergent property of the game. The MS-DOS version here looks and definitely sounds a bit worse than the old home computers did. I don't miss the disk loading times, and DOSBox has a few benefits of course: can speed up the simulation to get the moons into the right alignment quickly. Can run it non full screen to make notes. No more "where did I leave the balloon and the ships"...
