Neverwinter Nights 2 is a game I didn’t play when I was younger. I don’t know why, because I loved the first game when I was a teenager despite not really knowing what I was doing, but I just never grabbed the sequel back in the day. I did eventually venture in about two months ago, loading up the original game with a bunch of mods, and that very recent experience has me questioning why Neverwinter Nights 2 Enhanced Edition is really necessary.
Neverwinter Nights 2 is a CRPG built around the Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 ruleset. It’s big, complex, and incredibly satisfying provided you know what you’re doing. The star here is the story and writing, which is incredibly deep and has more detail that’s just mentioned in passing than you’ll know what to do with. Starting in a village that is inevitably attacked, you recover a macguffin and are sent to the city of Neverwinter by your almost comically disinterested adoptive father. From there begins the kind of fantasy adventure you’d expect, although sometimes with enemies you might not, such as the lizardfolk which are a scourge upon your progress early on.
It’s an excellent game, truly a classic, but this remaster has done the absolute minimum. For one, I played this game on PC three months ago and I’m not certain there’s much of a visual difference between what I saw on my PC then and this enhanced edition. It still looks pretty dated, despite improvements to texture quality, which have counterintuitively made environments look strangely sparse. Characters fare a little better, honestly looking quite good when you’re zoomed out considering, but when you’re in conversation and the camera is zoomed all the way in, they’re still a bit rough. They’re still better than the ones in the first game and its remaster, though that’s more down to the leap in graphics tech between 2002 and 2006 than this remaster.
Little seems to have been done to improve the actual gameplay experience as well. There are also bugs, such as one from just the first fifteen minutes of play that forced me to repeatedly murder a villager who kept getting back up. I was supposed to beat him up a little and then he gives up and agrees to go help defend the town, but instead he continued attacking me afterwards, constantly distracting my party members so they weren’t with me when I triggered combat.
There’s also annoying little things wrong as well, such as having to open a door, then interact with the door again to actually use it, which is dumb on its own (just go through the door the first time!) and fiddly because positioning yourself to interact with it is awkward and the camera has a habit of suddenly zooming all the way in when I’m standing in front of a door so I can’t see. This happened on literally the first door I used.
As a console port of an old PC game, the controls are about what you’d expect for a keyboard and mouse game on a controller. It works just well enough that you’ll be able to put up with the awkwardness if you love the game. It’s definitely not ideal, but it does the job.
Outside of all this, it’s Neverwinter Nights 2 with all of its expansions playable on consoles with a controller. That’s nice. It would’ve been nicer to see some real attention given to these games to perhaps iron out some now almost twenty year old bugs and really improve things, but at least it’s playable and exactly how you remember it. For better or worse. Of course you could just play the original on PC and benefit from all the mods that have released over the years, no doubt some of which will also improve the game’s textures.