Review: Neverwinter Nights 2 game

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, you could roughly divide kids up into two categories; those who played computer games and those who played Dungeons and Dragons.

That’s a generalisation, of course. There were probably lot of kids who didn’t play either (although Lord only knows what they did with their spare time). And then there were those who spent rather too much of their lives cooped up indoors playing an unhealthy mixture of both.

Ever since then, the fortunes of the video gaming industry and role-playing games have been forever intertwined. But, while countless games have wantonly pilfered from the D&D Players’ Handbook, precious few have carried the official Wizards of the Coast seal of approval. Neverwinter Nights 2 (NWN2) is one such game.

NWN2 is the sequel to the hugely popular 2002 original, which itself was the successor to an early 1990s massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) of the same name.

For the 2006 follow-up, the developers at Bioware have handed over the reins to their best friends at Obsidian, just as they did with their Star Wars RPG, Knights of the Old Republic (KOTOR).

And, just as it did with KOTOR II, Obsidian has sensibly avoided making any major changes to the formula, keeping everything that made the original Neverwinter Nights popular and making minor tweaks, improvements and adjustments to bring the series up to date.

For a start, the game is based on the very latest D&D rules (version 3.5 for those who are counting), which includes a number of relatively minor revisions to the game’s core mechanics.

New spells, feats and classes have been added to the mix too, while an improved party system means that it’s easier to switch from your main character to one of your team members (you’re allowed up to three) and use their unique talents or inventory items to your advantage.

Dialogue is the key component of NWN2. The way that you talk to NPCs or mem bers of your party can have a big influence over what happens in the game. It’s an interesting mechanic, but those who favour fisticuffs may find it tiresome after playing the game for several billion hours.

Let us point out at this juncture that NWN2 is not a game to get into if you have any kind of demanding work commitments or social life. Initial character creation alone could easily devour a whole evening.

The enormous single-player story campaign, meanwhile, will take several days of solid adventuring to complete and there are countless side tasks to flesh things out even further.

If that’s not enough, then bear in mind that you can play through the whole thing again as an evil character, or team up with some chums online and conquer the game as a team.

On top of all that, the game is supplied with a special toolset that allows users to create their very own Neverwinter Nights 2 modules.

This in itself makes for quite an interesting challenge, but it also means that there’s a whole lot of user-generated additional content to download from an already burgeoning NWN2 online community.

Soundtrack-wise, much of the dialogue is voiced fairly well for a game of this type and a better-than-average musical score helps to punctuate moments of high drama.

It’s a shame we can’t say the same about the visuals.

Graphically, NWN2 looks very crude, even on a fairly high-powered system. Textures look pretty bland, and shading are rather poor. Some of the character models look positively primitive.

If you can get past this fairly superficial weakness and you’ve got bags of time to spare, then you’ll certainly get your money’s worth out of Neverwinter Nights 2.