Neverwinter Nights 2 makes its grand return on modern platforms with the Enhanced Edition, following hot on the heels of Aspyr’s Tomb Raider remasters. This time, Aspyr has taken on Obsidian’s acclaimed follow-up to BioWare’s beloved original, delivering a complete edition that’s been updated and optimised for current-gen consoles.
While Neverwinter Nights 2 was previously available as a complete collection on PC, the Enhanced Edition brings extra polish, improved visuals, and reworked controls, ensuring both longtime fans and newcomers can fully enjoy this classic CRPG experience.
Despite the “2” in the title, Neverwinter Nights isn’t a direct sequel to the first game. Instead, it throws us into the land of Faerun for a new adventure against forces hoping to resurrect the ominously titled King of Shadows.
You begin your journey as a lowly Harborman in the village of West Harbour. But when the village is raided by forces looking for a mysterious artefact, you’re sent packing to the city of Neverwinter to seek help and answers. As these things go, nothing is simple, and trouble will dog you every step of the way on to your final confrontation with the King of Shadows.
Of course, this being a complete collection, you’re multi-hour journey against the forces of darkness won’t end with the main campaign as the Enhanced Edition comes with the game’s three expansions.
Mask of The Betrayer takes up where the main campaign ends after the battle with the King of Shadows. Storm of Zehir throws you onto a shipwrecked isle where a conspiracy that threatens Faerun is brewing, and, finally, Mysteries of Westgate throws you into a campaign that isn’t related to anything that’s come in the sequel before. You’re character finds a cursed mask and needs to find answers about it. Answers that lead to the city of Westgate.
Obsidian has extensive experience with BioWare’s style of RPG design, having taken on development duties for Knights of the Old Republic II, along with BioWare having a hand in Neverwinter Nights 2’s development. As such, if you’ve played any of BioWare’s RPGs pre-Mass Effect, you know what you’re getting yourself into.
In-depth class building? Check. Choice heavy dialogue? Check. Morality systems? Check. Carefully curated encounters to always have you at just the right level for a challenge? Check. Plenty of loot drops? Check. An in-depth understanding of the D&D systems to get the most out of your builds? Hyper-check!
As with the first game, Neverwinter Nights hits all of these check boxes faithfully. Fans of the first game will be right at home jumping into Neverwinter Nights 2. As for newcomers? Well, you can jump right on in as well, since it’s a standalone story, but I highly recommend you play the first game beforehand, as its excellence still stands up today. The most arduous task, most likely, is figuring out the D&D dice systems governing it all. Well, that and probably over-encumbering your character by picking up everything that you can find.
Figuring out all of the games behind the scenes mechanics for character building really is important if you want to get the most out of these kinds of CRPGs. There’s no way to power level here, as each of the maps has just enough encounters and quests to give you the right amount of experience to be at the level the developer wants you to be at for that sequence. This means that it’s just as easy to get stomped in any encounter as it is to survive it.
There is an auto-level system in place that chooses the recommended upgrade path for each class, but I found that it was better to pick and choose skills and feats to survive maps without having to rest and heal every other minute or so. Word to the wise, if you don’t have a thief in your party, you’d better look at unlocking some trap and lockpicking skills because there are plenty of those in the dungeons to suck your health away.
Few things are as frustrating as making it through a lengthy corridor only to have your party AI engage an enemy at the other end of a trap-filled corridor, thus ensuring a quick demise as they rush to theirs – and your – doom.
While the artificial AI for your party is fine enough for general encounters, you’re going to have to micromanage the hell out of each of your party members if you want to survive boss fights or large-scale encounters. Sadly, the AI isn’t as nuanced as it could be, but if you take the time to be tactical, you’ll make it through.
As a game, Neverwinter Nights 2 straddles a divide of players that like it and those that don’t. The game certainly had many problems at launch, least of all the bugs its rushed production turned out. More problematic was that a lot of the campaign and its areas felt like fan-made modules, a problem not helped by the external area map design that showed a team still getting used to the new sculpting terrain tools. As such, internal areas looked great, but the external ones? Not so much.
Overall, Neverwinter Nights 2’s visuals on its original release were. . . passable. Character models were fine, but textures were quite bad, looking like they straddled a line between being washed out and low res. The subsequent expansions benefited from improvements to both the visuals and mechanics design, but for me, it still fell far too short of the original in many ways.
Which makes returning to the game on console a bit of a treat, really. To be fair, it’s still the exact same game. The design issues that plagued the game in 2006 are still here, along with many of the original bugs. But what is new, or remastered, has made playing it on console a lot more fun and, therefore, more forgivable, for all its shortcomings.
Visuals and textures have received some tweaking. Most noticeable, of course, is the higher resolution and tweaked textures that certainly look better than they did in 2006. It’s certainly bare minimum, but I can’t say they made me go “Sheesh” as I always do when loading up the original. More could have been done, but there are limits between making an affordable enhanced edition of a game versus a full-blown remaster or remake.
The UI and control scheme have been reworked for console, and it works admirably well, I must say. Pro-tip number two: go through the tutorial, as you’re going to need to get used to the controller method of navigating the, admittedly, numerous menus. There are lots of little shortcuts that become second nature the more you play. That said, the menus could have been better streamlined in how you access and manipulate both your and your party’s inventory.
And finally, there are the new camera options. The Switch version gets two camera and control layouts compared to the PC version’s three. The first is the original isometric strategy camera that controls like a traditional mouse version of the game, where you click and point to control your character. It’s great for combat but less ideal for exploration.
The second camera control is a more traditional third-person view for adventuring. You control the character with the left analogue stick, while the right controls the camera. I found this to be the best way to explore the game’s environments, switching to strategy mode whenever combat was involved.
It’s not a seamless Enhanced Edition, though. As I stated earlier, there are new bugs added to the experience and the frame rate can drop in more detailed areas. Twice, I had to close the game and restart it when leaving it paused or in sleep mode for an extended period of time resulted in the game becoming unpausable. And from a playing perspective, you can get stuck on environment objects quite a bit, regardless of camera mode, an issue shared with the first game’s enhanced edition as well.
But my biggest issue is with the sensitivity of the camera in third-person view. Which is to say, that it’s oversensitive and swings wildly all over the place. This can lead to serious aggravation in internal areas. It’s nothing that a sensitivity slider won’t fix, but for now, be prepared to handle the right stick with kid gloves.
Despite these issues and Neverwinter Nights 2’s built-in problems, I found myself enjoying my time with it a lot more on console than I did way back in the day. A lot of that certainly has to do with the portable nature of the game on Switch, along with the third-person camera, sensitivity issues aside. We won’t be seeing game balancing fixes and tweaks for this, but I can’t complain with a version that’s so much more accessible in terms of control and UI changes.
That it looks slightly better is definitely a plus as well. Aspyr’s remaster here may be somewhat bare bones, but it’s certainly the definitive way to play Neverwinter Nights 2 now.
Neverwinter Nights 2 Enhanced Edition Switch Trailer
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Game code was provided by the Publisher.
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