Neverwinter Nights 2 has always been something of an oddity in the RPG world. Much like many other RPGs at the time (like Knights of the Old Republic), it was a sequel to a game that was originally made by BioWare. It also had the unfortunate problem of having an interesting story that was hampered by just how buggy the original 2006 release of the game was. Post launch patches, at the time, weren’t as ubiquitous as they are today. However, the game ultimately still felt fun to play through because of how faithfully its gameplay mechanics captured the depth and structure of classic tabletop role-playing systems.
The release of the Enhanced Edition has proven that, with all of its bugs ironed out through decades of community-supported development, fan patches, Neverwinter Nights 2 is still a fantastic RPG that’s well worth playing.
Jumping into Neverwinter Nights 2 today, it doesn’t exactly make the strongest first impression. It kicks things off with some of the most generic plot beats and motivation you can imagine. The village of West Harbor, where your character grew up and has lived all their life, gets invaded. After having fought off the invasion, the protagonist is tasked with finding a mysterious silver shard in a nearby swamp and bringing it to the eponymous city of Neverwinter. Much of the plot after this revolves around having to deal with various factions trying to capture you in an attempt to get their hands on the shard you are carrying. To deal with this, you befriend several NPCs who join your party.
Neverwinter Nights 2’s story gets quite interesting once you actually reach the titular city, since there are all kinds of political machinations happening all over the place in an effort to either kill you for your shard, or to convince you to pick a specific side against the others. Your allies also add quite a bit to the experience, since they each tend to have their own thoughts, motivations, and alignments. Conversations with party members often tend to be some of the most memorable moments in the game, since these conversations can often get quite deep about the main story and the role your character plays in it.
When it comes to gameplay, Neverwinter Nights 2 makes use of a real-time with pause system; when a fight breaks out, all of your characters can be commanded to attack different enemies or cast spells, with all of these actions playing out in real time. When things get too hectic, however, you can freely pause the game to reassess your strategy, and even issue new commands. The combat system is based on a detailed, rules-heavy framework that was robust enough to give players plenty of options for character creation and development.
“Your allies also add quite a bit to the experience, since they each tend to have their own thoughts, motivations, and alignments.”
While modern RPGs like Baldur’s Gate 3 are praised for the level of freedom they offer players, Neverwinter Nights 2 shows that even earlier games provided a surprising amount of player agency. Throughout general gameplay, players have a wide range of options to shape their character’s development, from tweaking stats to figuring out new and more interesting equipment. The game even provides all the tools you might need to come up with unique solutions to problems.
With all of this freedom, however, comes a big price: the underlying mechanics that power Neverwinter Nights 2 can get too complicated at times. The sheer number of options you get when it’s time to level up often feels daunting, be it new class options like a new way of striking multiple foes for a Monk, leveling up your skills that allow you to do things like sneak or understand languages, or even just picking a feat that might let you wear heavier armour without its drawbacks. Things can often get overwhelming, especially for players who aren’t already familiar with the game’s complex mechanics and systems.
Since Neverwinter Nights 2: Enhanced Edition also packs in the game’s expansions together, we also get to experience a story that can easily contend for being one of the best we’ve ever seen in gaming through the Mask of the Betrayer expansion.
“The sheer number of options you get when it’s time to level up often feels daunting.”
Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer tells an incredible story, transporting us to the far-off continent of Rashemen. What makes Mask of the Betrayer especially wonderful, aside from the fact that it has a downright gripping story that revolves around ancient conspiracies, and your role in the overall world, is the fact that it also has some of the most imaginative places to explore. Rashemen is a strange continent, you see, and the land doesn’t so much obey the laws of physics as it bends or ignores them entirely. Throughout the expansion, we get to visit and explore dreamscapes along with more standard fantasy-styled locations.
Mask of the Betrayer is also still easy to pick up and play without having played the base game since, aside from having the same protagonist, the story is its own self-contained thing that doesn’t really bring up the base game’s events much. In fact, players can choose to finish the base game and carry over the same protagonist to Mask of the Betrayer, or they can instead choose to make a fresh character that gets instantly boosted to level 18, along with giving you all the gear that would be appropriate for the level.
“Neverwinter Nights 2 still holds up quite well today, and while the Enhanced Edition has fixed many bugs, the camera and UI still feel outdated.”
Mask of the Betrayer is joined by two other expansions: Storm of Zehir and Mysteries of Westgate. While both of these are still fun, they are quite a bit less ambitious than Mask of the Betrayer. Storm of Zehir is largely a dungeon crawler that allows players to flex more of their combat prowess, while Mysteries of Westgate is a layered and thought provoking story that revolves around a low-stakes three-way gang war in the city of Westgate.
Neverwinter Nights 2 still holds up quite well today, and while the Enhanced Edition has fixed many bugs, the camera and UI still feel outdated. The visuals might still feel dated by modern standards – the original is almost two decades old at this point – but the higher-resolution textures, smooth framerate and a general lack of bugs go a long way into making the game feel excellent. The base game and Mask of the Betrayer both have excellent stories that draw plenty of parallels with real-world historic events, fantastic character development for the protagonist, their allies, and even the antagonistic forces and factions, and just about every character is written in a believable way.
It certainly helps that all of this is held together by a gameplay system that is widely regarded as being one of the best tabletop RPG rulesets of all time thanks to the sheer number of gameplay options that, while overwhelming at times, gives players an insane level of freedom.
This game was reviewed on PC.
