The kind of gamer I tend to be is a distracted one. I have trouble focusing on one game at a time, partially because I find many of them I give a chance to to be uninteresting and partially because of I always like to try new games but “new games” only stay new for so long. I rarely replay games anymore, preferring instead to move on to the next one to try and experience as many of them as I can, for better or for worse.
A lot of the time this leads to longer games being left in the dust. The Witcher was left unfinished on my PC until I upgraded enough to play the sequel, at which point I finished the game out of a misplaced sense of duty. Metroid Prime II: Echoes was left lingering on the last boss until a month before Corruption came out. Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne was beaten over a 2-year period where I only played it in between new releases. But no game ranks on my procrastination meter higher than Neverwinter Nights 2.
Neverwinter Nights 2 I got for free with the purchase of a graphics card way back in 2008. Subsequent expansions were purchased at a local used book store and eventually I repurchased the entire collection at gog.com. My first attempt at playing it occured sometime late in 2008 and I finished it only a week or two ago. I had restarted numerous times, got stuck just as often, and left it alone for such large periods of time I had forgotten what exactly I had been doing. In a sense, Neverwinter Nights 2 may likely be one of my own personal epics, a journey through a game that took me years to complete. Which is good that I got experience like that out of it, because the game didn’t really offer me one.
In fairness to the people over at Obsidian, that really isn’t their fault. But for those unfamiliar, Neverwinter Nights 2 is a computer role-playing game based off of Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 ruleset. Infamous for being quite exploitable, 3.5 is far from a balanced system and goes off the deep end from the mid game onward. As opposed to other games which use D&D rules like Baldur’s Gate or Planescape: Torment, which were designed as campaigns first that just happened to borrow the rule set, NWN2 is mainly designed for multiplayer in mind and is in that way meant to be a lot more focused on the mechanics than the actual campaign that was included with it. Hopefully that is enough context for me to say that 3.5 does not translate well into video game form.
In trying to cram all that they could from the source material into the game, Obsidian forced a clunky interface concerned with every little bit of minutia that could be wrung. Stealth, tracking, defensive casting, preparing spells, crafting, multi-classing, etc. Character menus, spellbooks, skill, feats, inventory are all multi-layered and dense menus, stacking on top of each other in a cluster of words, rules, numbers, and invisible dice rolls.
Of course, a lot of this is positive if what you are looking for is a 3.5 game. As far as NWN2 is concerned, in terms of adaptation it is the best D&D game made. While I may think the aforementioned Baldur’s Gate II and Planescape: Torment are better games, their use of D&D rule sets feels more like a foundation to build a game around rather than the focus, particularly in Torment. But this does not translate well for those looking for a good game. The detail, which will be quite familiar for vets of the pen and paper game, will leave others at a loss for what to do. The game makes no effort to teach you how the game works and what any of it means, assuming beforehand that you know. And those are just the applications of the rules within the game.
Just playing tends to be a hassle. You are given 2 options for camera control, one being the strategy camera, which locks how far you can scroll the screen to the immediate area around the selected character. I tended to use this more than the other options, even outside of battle where it shines. The other is an over-the-shoulder exploration camera, which is just useless. The several times I tried to use it resulted in me switching back every time, as the game is not good looking when up close and the exploration is all but unnecessary. The dungeon design is standard as all hell and very rarely does the environment come into play. By holding “Z” you can highlight everything you are able to interact with anyways, so the exploration doesn’t grant you anything except an up close and personal look at the game’s low res textures and flat game world.
Story wise, the game is as generic as possible. The game includes all the major classes and playable races available as companions but they all serve to fill slots in the least creative Mad Libs ever. There is a dwarf who likes to fight and drink. There is a rogue tiefling that’s out for herself. There is a brash, overconfident sorceress. There is a goofy bard. There is an elf wizard who thinks he’s smarter than everyone. There is an elf druid. The bland story and characters do little to highlight Obsidian’s strengths as writers. Their need to fill quotas comes at the cost of style and substance. Also, for anyone expecting to be fulfilled by the base game alone are in for a lazy surprise.
I have not yet had a chance to make my way through the game’s first expansion, Mask of the Betrayer (See you in 6 years for that one) but from what little I’ve started a lot of my complaints have not only already been addressed but the story is doing more for me than the base game ever did. Given that you can really only purchase this game as a complete edition, it will likely come with both expansions anyway. Those looking for a D&D experience streamlined in video game form, look no further. Those who are just looking for an RPG to get lost in can do better, but you could still do a lot worse.
For me, I can just be glad that I finally finished it.
The ABC's of Gaming 