Dungeons and Dragons Neverwinter Nights 2 Enhanced Edition Review – A Natural 1

We have brought a ton of reviews to Infinite Start, and now its the time for the Dungeons and Dragons Neverwinter Nights 2 Enhanced Edition review. Dungeons and Dragons is an extremely popular franchise that has been with us for decades now, and even went through many historical revisions. It is surprising to see that this game has been accompanying us for so long, and in some many mediums too. Neverwinter Nights is an addition to the series that has been praised by both RPG game fanatics and Dungeons and Dragons enthusiasts alike, the first game being truly a hidden gem for many PC players.

Neverwinter Nights 2 in 2006, was also another success in the franchise, some even believe that 2 is way better than the first one thanks to its solid story line, tons of new content compared to the previous game, and also a more refined system. Despite this, the first Neverwinter Nights happens to be the better one out of the two, happening to have more mod support than its predecessor. That does not meat that Neverwinter Nights 2 is a bad game, as a matter of fact it is a very solid game, but mod support for it is quite lacking.

Neverwinter Nights is a series of RPGs that was meant to play similar to the Baldur’s Gate series, them but those plans were changed up when the overall engine started taking shape. The first game dropped in 2002, while the sequel dropped in 2006, these are very old games, and all of them have expansions to them. While I personally recommend you to take on the better supported Neverwinter Nights instead of playing Neverwinter Nights 2, that does not mean that this game isn’t good, you really should try this one, but this enhanced edition feels more like a set of baffling decisions.

The original 2006 release weighed almost nothing, you could run it on any commercial hardware without much effort, it truly was a piece of its time and it even received nominations during that year. The story is arguably the best part of these games, although if you are coming from the Baldur’s Gate series, you may wanna look into other games since this one cannot compare in plot. The story of Neverwinter Nights 2 follows a player character in their quest to prevent the return of the King of Shadows. If you are looking for some very good plot after having played Baldur’s Gate, I personally recommend you to go for Planescape Torment, the pinnacle of Dungeons and Dragons Storytelling.

This game is fully rendered in 3D without any tricks however, the graphical fidelity far surpasses the antique Baldur’s Gate and the aforementioned Planescape Torment, at least for some people. Pre-rendered graphics in the aforementioned games are actually so much better than the full 3D environments of Neverwinter Nights which aged like milk. Going back to the “Enhanced” Edition of the game, imagine taking this 2006 classic, and to make it work, you just add tons of Gigabytes of unnecessary data and uncompressed textures, this is what you get for buying something “Enhanced”. Aspyr Media really outdid themselves in the department of “how can we bloat a 2006 game to make it feel like a modern game?”.

Aside from the outrageous 40GB of space one needs to run the game, this one also comes with a plethora of new issues too. Camera controls are somehow even wonkier than the original, which makes thing ludicrous, I wasn’t able to find the way to adapt the sensibility of the camera turning because I was busy finding more issues, most of them related to performance. How can this game run worse than the original 2006 version to the point one needs a newer rig to play the same exact game? Perhaps the only redeemable quality of it is the fact that all the expansions are included with the “Enhanced” Edition.

These being three expansions that released on 2007, 2008, and 2009 respectively, which added more to the story after it ended on a cliffhanger when you finish the game and pick an ending based on your alignment. Despite the plot ending this way, it was built in such a good way that it felt like you wanted to know more, so dropping these expansions to tell us the aftermath of the world after fighting or joining the King of Shadows was a smart move back in the day, it would be a good move even today.

The battle system is a bit clunky for 2006 standards, but it still sticks to the usual Neverwinter formula, forming a party of NPCs which you can then control separately, taking turns in turn based Dungeons and Dragons style battles. Your usual elements from Dungeons and Dragon 3.5 rule set are here, and compared to Neverwinter 1, you actually get to throw a d20 in this one to do checks, similar to what you would do in a paper campaign. There was plans that the game would have online components, as a matter of fact, Neverwinter Nights 1 does have these components, but Neverwinter Nights 2 lost them during the development cycle.

There’s a ton of things one can do in Neverwinter Nights 2, you can interact with a ton of NPCs, with the ability to recruit them, travel the vast region of Sword Coast completing tons of varied quests, one can even become a monarch themselves provided you advance enough through the story. Despite the fact that the online component of the game are absent, the amount of content that this game has is amazing for 2006, even amazing for today, but again, we are speaking about the “Enhanced” Edition here, a broken mess.

It would have been so cool if these components were a thing for the “Enhanced” Edition of the game, but the only exclusive thing one will receive after buying this is the privilege of experiencing bugs rather than something new. My current play through of the game is chock full of bugs that I’ve never experienced before in the original, some minor, and some can be game breaking. I’m surprised a modernized port for a 2006 game can manage to crash my PC despite having almost no changes to it, aside from adding instability it seems. General Steam reviews also validated my concerns showing that I wasn’t the only one suffering from them.

At the current price point, it is safe to say that one must avoid this bullet and keep playing the older version of the game. There’s stores that have removed that version, as if they were forcing us to buy a new yet broken release for the price of a full game. It is unjustifiable that Aspyr Media didn’t put enough effort into trying to make the experience more stable, to iron out some of the quirks present in the original, they actively made the experience worse somehow. Perhaps the people at Aspyr are demotivated or crunched to hell, because this has no business being an “Enhanced” Edition when booting up the older game yields a better experience.

Sure, newer OS systems struggle with trying to run old games from 2006, but there’s plenty of fixes for that one can find for free and install into their own copy of the game. Modding games is completely legal as far as I know, and maybe this release will be saved by the modding community, much to the like of how many modern games with optimization issues are saved by them. It is inexcusable that we have to fix what we paid for because it barely works out of the box, companies are supposed to bring convenience for a price, not this.

Dungeons and Dragons Neverwinter Nights 2 Enhanced Edition Review – Verdict

[Editor’s Note: Dungeons and Dragons Neverwinter Nights 2 Enhanced Edition was reviewed on PC and a copy was provided to us for review purposes.]