Neverwinter Nights 2

Game Info

Publisher: Atari

Developer: Obsidian

Genre(s): Role-Playing Game

Players: 4

ESRB Rating: T (Teen)

Release Date: October 31, 2006

Summary

Neverwinter Nights 2 is the sequel to BioWare Corp.'s best-selling and genre-defining role-playing game set in the popular Dungeons & Dragons Forgotten Realms universe created by Wizards of the Coast. Neverwinter Nights 2 will be developed by Obsidian Entertainment, founded by Feargus Urquhart who, as the President of Black Isle Studios, was responsible for the publishing of the Baldur's Gate and Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance series and the development of the Icewind Dale and Planescape: Torment franchises, both powered by BioWare Engine Technology, as well as overseeing the creation and development of the Fallout series. BioWare will provide tools, technology, and game assets from the original Neverwinter Nights as well as lend creative input and oversight to the development process. [Atari]

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What The Critics Said

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What Our Users Said

Vote Now! The average user rating for this game is 5.3 (out of 10) based on 235 User Votes

Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

James K. gave it a6:
Anyone who's played NWN will be disappointed, but that doesn't mean it's a bad game objectively. The camera ruined the entire game for me, you can't do anything without the camera screwing you over.

Gewthen gave it a2:
Looking at how the game is made and not the content, nor the story, nor the mechanics, the programming effort was very poor. One glaring problem the camera-- or rather how objects in the world don't fade out of the way. For example, you'll be navigating the streets of a city with multi-story buildings. The buildings block your view such that the only usable camera angle is directly above or 45 degree angle behind your characters. One would think that if the game system isn't going to fade out buildings, then they would swing the camera around to a usable angle. Another issue is that I found that most of the game I was zoomed out most of the way. A good game system would swap out textures with lower resolution and reduce the polygon complexity of the models. However this system does not do that. In most 3D worlds parts of objects facing away from the camera are not rendered, but I get a strong sense that this system does that and so a unnecessary performance hit occurs. Occasionally I find my keyboard shortcuts to cease functioning. Pressing the console hot key fixes the problem, but I would not expect such a problem in any piece of commercial software these days. Also problem is that the pause option does not realy work. If you pause in the beginning of a round, select a spell to be casted, but then change your mind to cast a different spell, the system will replace the current round with a "do nothing event" instead of casting the spell in the current round as expected. The next round the spell will be cast, a whole round behind from where it should be casted. This could lead to a party member dying or a complete party wipe. The lack of side quests is smaller than what I would thought. I played Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 and Neverwinter Nights 1 and so I expected a bit more atmosphere in the game. I remember how in Baldur's gate there were buildings a thief character could break into and steal items. There were consequences for getting caught, not so much in NWN2. Another severe problem is that if you attempt to talk to NPC with characters only than your main character, your main character will meracrously teleport from wherever he is in the current area/level to the NPC. The same sort of thing happens if your main character is a Wizard and so you are trying to keep him behind the melee fighters in a dungeon. If there happens to be a cut-scene or a NPC interaction followed by a fight your character will also teleport in front of your melee wall and will have little time to cast a protective spell before being swarmed. Unless your know about these interactions ahead of time and cast protective spells before the NPC interaction, then your forced to have your main character be of a class that can take little beating (e.g. not a mage or a thief). The Party AI is worthless. Baldur's Gate 1 had better AI. The AI will cause your mages to burn through spells very fast or cast a high lvl spell to kill of a enemy when magic missile will do just fine. The AI will often just run off to the enemy when one of them sees it and even when you tell it to move away from it to avoid engaging the target, they'll run to where you told them to go, and then go back to the enemy. The only way to prevent this behavior is to issue "guard me" or "follow me" in the dropdown menu (high-leve/coarse grain AI) or turn of the AI. A couple of times I ran into a game stopping bug where I was left in an area without a "world transition". A dialogue event was to occur which would lead to a new area, but it never happened. I had to reload from a previous save. For those who like to explore, there is not exploring. In fact, much of the wilderness areas are not walkable for some reason. Every area seems to have a purpose either to the main story line or a side quest starting in some city or town. There are very few areas if any that are not linked to a quest. Most buildings in towns and cities are what the engine calls "environmental objects", which are static object without any interaction. The manual says that all objects in the editor begin as intractable objects (have inventory or a door..etc), but should be made a "environmental object" to increase or maintain a good performance. It seems that the "environmental object" concept was used to avoid having to sold a difficult problem. This mean years after release and with three expansions, there are no excuses for not fixing these problems because nearly all of the issues I'm mentioned are game engine problems that would carry over to any expansion or user-made content. They just don't care, Obsidian does not have the passion in this as Bioware did in all the previous D&D games.

Fred F gave it an8:
I got the game about a half year after release and couldn't see what all the bad player reviews were about. Bugs have been fixed for a long, long time and the game is a lot of fun. NWN'ers will have about a ten minute learning curve and then will loose themselves in the customization and immersion the gorgeous graphics and character generation process give you. Good game, still needs higher end hardware to run well on high settings. Good story, good options, great graphics, familiar feel. It's a worthy successor to the crown. It's biggest problem was the system requirements were way misleading and that pissed a lot of people off in 2006. It's still an issue today in 2009 but a medium end gaming rig will run this game on High.

Chris Q gave it a0:
This game is an insult to our community...I will never pre-order again, nor will I believe the hype from the online reviewers reviews for games from this company until "real" people that are unbiased post theirs after playing. I can't describe how disappointed I am with this game.

Hanna L gave it a6:
I almost completed this game, two years ago. I never did. Owen T, below has already said much of what I feel signifies the problems with Neverwinter Nights 2. My first problem the first time around was that after four hours of playing and eventually reaching the city from where the game draws its' name, I still didn't feel like the story had started. The story eventually picked up and even got somewhat interesting (albeit remaining terribly cliché) at times, but it was still too slow to start and at times it felt like half a dozen writers wrote a part each and then joined them together hastily. I could probably live with a bad story if the gameplay was smooth. But it isn't. The controls are sluggish or over-sensitive, depending on what actions you are trying to perform. The interface is clunky, counter-intuitive and the targetting functions in such a way that half the time I found myself throwing fireballs at my own party members only to start applying healing to the enemy. The graphics are at times great, but mostly stick to bland with a few dips into sheer ugly or out of place and often times I found myself thinking "Wow, Dungeon Siege looked better than this". All this combined with a difficulity that flails wildly from cake walk to hair tearing frustration in the span of two encounters leaves you with a game that you occasionally find yourself wanting to play more of. But most of the time, the uninspired story, the horrid interface and controls and the strange design decisions will just be too much to stomach. I give it a 6, because for all its' shortcomings, NWN 2 still delivers a solid dungeon raiding experience from time to time. Every now and then, you actually feel as if you are playing a virtual simulation of the Pen & Paper game that NWN2 draws its' rules and setting from. It never lasts long and it certainly doesn't make up for Obsidians glaring lack of polish (which holds true for all their games so far) but it saves NWN2 from being a complete disaster of a game.

Rene C gave it a6:
No too original. Not too absorbing. Horrendous camera. Clunky interface. So gameplay, which is so important in, well, a game, is badly hampered. The whole thing begins with an overused ploy, an attack that so urgently requires you to do simple and uninteresting things to resist. Done this we move to the typical ladder of monster-vanquishing. Start with Lizardmen, move on to Bandits and most likely would have gone up to Goblins and Orcs very soon. I do not know since I uninstalled the game quite early. The RPG immersion is broken constantly by "world transitions" glowing on the ground and assorted cut-scenes that many times do not quite match what has taken palce. An RPG is not ONLY a humongous dialogue tree, it is also fluidity of the action so we don't have to emerge from the, hopefully, depths of the character. Giving orders and mounting creative attacks or solutions to situations proved an exercise in futility. Too many clicks are needed constantly to herd your companions to make it fun and practical to use them fully during the encounters, and, as was my experience, resorting to other means of solution that are not combat were close to non existent. When there is a chance to speak to an enemy, talking may be a way to solve a situation, but trying to use, for example, pure stealth and a careful disposal of the enemy force from the shadows no to confront them directly, was not, as this course of action met its doom against scripted spawning of antagonists. My fellow dungeon crawlers were not too bright. Even after tinkering with their "Behaviours" the results were not too much more satisfying. Frequently I found them running to help me the longest possible way, activating all traps and getting themselves dispatched before reaching me. Or collecting other creatures on the way to arrive with a tail of pursuers. The central story may be good, I have no idea, but the side quests were unremarkable, common and unattractive. The camera is, along with the interface, one of my greatest sources of irritation. Ceilings, walls, wooden beams, pillars and other structures that in most games are usually transparent, were constantly obstructing my line of vision. With the unkindness of the interface, the whole process of a simple battle was made very difficult. Graphics are nice, sounds are merely OK, the 3-D models are not nice but varied enough. Overall it may please D&D hardcores, and maybe other RPG enthusiasts too, but I think that the game has just too many low points to make it a must of the genre as, let's say, Torment, Baldur's Gate or Fallout all are. What makes this game very promising is the inclusion of the necessary tools to create your own scenarios, for the myriad of Dungeon Masters that want to see their creations turned into a video game.

Anthony B gave it a5:
GRAPHINCS: I was expecting a lot more from this game. After playing it about a year after release it still suffers greatly from bugs and poor performance. What I mean by poor performance is that the hardware requirements are too high for the graphics you get. Sure it better than NWN1 in terms of graphics but other games out there look a heck of a lot better with less horsepower. This must be on the of worst 3D engines for a game today..buggy as hell and not optimized. AI: The AI in NWN2 is inferrior to NWN1. Too many times does the henchman get stuck or refuse to join the battle. Story: Here is where it shines. I liked it better than NWN1 and found the backgrounds of the henchman more interesting. Interface & Camera: Feels very clunky. The camera view is not as good as in NWN1. To many things can get in your way blocking important views during battles ie. trees. Dialogue: OK..this one is mixed. I like that fact that more voice acting was involved but I did find that the cut scenes-dialogue scenes intefered with tactics. You can be in stealth mode but as soon as you hit a an area that calls for dialogue scene your stealth tactics are thrown out the window, and if battle pursues after the cut scene you are at a disadvantage tactically. The only way to play is with straight on battles...using no stealth or magic tactics allowed. I found the same problems in a NWN1 mod of Darkness over Dagerford. Rules: I find that 3.5 is better than 3.0 so I have to give it a nod over NWN1. Overall: a major disappointment. It feels like KOTOR2 all over again. Taking a great game and messing it up.

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