NWN2 (when compared to NWN1) is pretty much doomed

At the time Neverwinter Nights was released, it was a big hit earning several well-deserved awards, literally thousands of active multiplayer servers, and a large online community full of fans dedicated to further improve gameplay experience. BioWare's later addition of its expansion packs, premium modules, and official patches kept the fans' interest at its peak and their love for the game grew.

No game is without it's bugs, and NWN was no exception, having several bugs affecting its gameplay in many ways. BioWare fixed them at an efficient rate via its patching system. About 22 patches were distributed, each patch fixing a good number of bugs, and as of their final patch version 1.69, NWN was approximately 95% bug-free. Through patches 1.67 and 1.69 they even gave players well over 600 free in-game content such as new armor, music, areas, characters and even furniture, as well as a whole new character class to play as, and best of all, the ability to ride and fight on horseback for the first time in NWN history (Up till now, you still can't ride horses in NWN2).

Hello ladies. Look at your man, now back to me, now back at your man, now back to me. Sadly, he isn't me. But if he stopped using lady-scented body wash and switched to Old Spice, he could smell like he's me. Look down, back up. Where are you? You're on a boat, with the man your man could smell like. What's in your hand? Back at me, I have it, it's an oyster with two tickets to that thing you love. Look again, the tickets are now diamonds. Anything is possible when your man smells like Old Spice and not a lady. I'm on a horse.

4 years after NWN saw the much anticipated release of its sequel Neverwinter Nights 2. But as a result, the NWN community was torn into 3 (unequally sized) communities/groups. The first group consisted of gamers who weren't enthusiastic about NWN2 and thus remaining 'loyal' to the original NWN community, myself included. The second group consisted of gamers who had at least a good opinion of both NWN and NWN2. The third group consisted of ex-NWN fans who moved on to NWN2, leaving NWN behind them because they feel NWN2 was a major improvement. To be honest, although I hate NWN2, I can admit that there are some 'general' improvements.

Truthfully, I played both games for only a fortnight. If you think 2 weeks of experiencing 2 games is too short a time to give a fair review, don't blame me, but instead blame my father who hates video games with so much passion as to not even make any sense out of his already retarded little mind. I'll have you know that I played these games against his wishes whenever he was away at work. One day he found out about my deception and broke the discs. But that's another story.

In any case, I was new to RPGs at the time, and common sense led me to play NWN before its sequel. I was immediately enchanted by its wonderful music, graphics, and gameplay, and the in-game tutorials were easy enough to learn from, thus turning a 'newbie' like me into an intermediate roleplayer/NWN addict. I knew that I hadn't much time left before father found out about my charade, so I decided to put all my NWN quests on hold and try out NWN2.

At this point, I thought that since it was a sequel, I could use my knowledge of NWN to help familiarize myself with NWN2. I was greatly mistaken. It turned out that NWN2's user interface was completely different from NWN's. The simple yet efficient radial menu of NWN had been replaced with a very ugly pop-up box which was difficult to use.

The various icon sizes of items from NWN had been replaced with equally sized item icons of 1cm square each, which killed the fun of having to organise the stuff your carrying. On the left is NWN's inventory window, on the right is NWN2's inventory window. Personally I prefer the design of NWN's window.

NWN2's in-game tutorial was too complicated to follow. You see, NWN's in-game tutorial was easy to follow because it was set in a pretty much linear fashion, hence teaching you new things one at a time at a pace you're comfortable with, whereas the tutorial in NWN2 tries to cram all the lessons up your ass (and it's literally a painful experience). As a result, I managed to complete NWN2's tutorial after several attempts, and I still wasn't sure of how to play. I was still a newbie then, mind you.

NWN's story was pretty simple to follow and yet throughly enjoyable. Basically (no spoilers here, don't worry) it's about an evil ancient race of imperialists which used to rule over humankind. Apocalypse happened, and the imperialists went into a self-induced hibernation in order to preserve their kind. Their absense led to ancient humankind gaining freedom and eventually became the civilisation they are today, forgetting that their tyrants ever existed. And now after all these millenias the imperialists have awakened for no reason whatsoever and want to establish control over humankind once again. Your job is to stop them and save humankind. Doesn't that sound lovely?

NWN2's story, however, is not as simple, and not as enjoyable to boot. Frankly I haven't had the time nor the interest to finish the story, so if you're interested to hear it, click this spoiler alert. The reason I hate it is because you lose a dear friend so early in the game. The tutorial gets you together with your NPC 'best friends' and you have a great time with them during this tutorial (they're the only things that made the tutorial enjoyable) and then in chapter 1 one of them dies. I lost the will to continue playing after that.

Now, I did say that NWN2 had some general improvements over NWN. It's the graphics I'm refering to. Although NWN utilizes low poly 3D models, the overall graphics is still amazing thanks to ingenious texture designs. Why, you wouldn't even notice/mind that it's all low poly. NWN2, however, uses 3D models which consists of damn large amounts of polygons to make it all look realistic, removing the need of good textures. Sounds good? Actually yes, but this results in unreasonably high requirements in terms of graphics. It's almost certain that you can't avoid lag in NWN2 single-player modes without reducing graphical display to a bare minimum.

Neverwinter Nights in all its low poly glory

NWN2 in its overpowered graphical glory

Now about those bugs in NWN2, I'm not sure if I personally noticed any, since the game was so confusing that I couldn't tell the difference between a bug and so-called 'normal' game behavior. But I've heard people say things like "NWN2 is flooded with bugs", "patches are too difficult to install", "auto-patcher not working" and things like that. I've seen a list of all the official patches for NWN2, and it's a damn long list. Worst of all, NWN2 is still buggy even now. Why couldn't it be as quick and efficient as NWN?

Maybe it's because Obsidian handled NWN2 instead of BioWare? Probably.