Dungeons & Dragons Neverwinter Nights 2: Enhanced Edition Review

It seems we are in a bit of a CRPG renaissance, as quite a few examples of the genre have either made a reappearance after a long hiatus, as in the case of Baldur’s Gate 3, or have made their way into the popular zeitgeist. As such, I’ve been looking forward to the day when I would be able to replay some of my childhood favourites with modern technology. With the release of Dungeons & Dragons Neverwinter Nights 2: Enhanced Edition, my bucket list is almost complete. Fingers crossed for a Jade Empire remake!

While the original version of the game is still playable and available on multiple platforms, the harsh truth is that they are not exactly a feast for the eyes or compatible with those of limited patience (such as myself), requiring a fair bit of modding to meet today's standards. Neverwinter Nights 2: Enhanced Edition aims to bring the classic adventurer (along with all of its expansions) to a modern audience, giving it both a new coat of paint and making it playable on a controller, which I’m still struggling to comprehend… as they kind of succeeded.

Before we go on, a short primer on the game itself. If you are familiar with the original title, you can safely skip the next three paragraphs, as the plot and mechanics of the title itself remain unchanged.

The game is set in the world of Forgotten Realms, and revolves around the titular city, much like the first title and the Baldur’s Gate series — the cities are actually along the same coastline, funnily enough! It is divided into four different campaigns, which represent the base game and add-ons. Unlike what one may assume, the adventures can be played in any order and with completely different characters. However, some may be harder than others to start off with, as they may start at higher levels. In addition to the base campaign, the remake contains the Storm of Zehir, Mask of the Betrayer, and Mysteries of Westgate expansions.

The games are viewed from an isometric viewpoint by default, and use the standard control scheme of CRPGs: you move your character and interact with the world via the mouse, with the right click opening up additional options. The keyboard can be used for shortcuts, to pause, and to prepare specific actions, like hitting a hotkey to prepare a potion to drink. Combat is an interesting mix of real-time battle with a turn-based engine under the hood. Like the TTRPG it is based on, Neverwinter Nights 2 has a turn order and an action limit, but it is all performed at once, making combat seem much more involved. If you’re interested, you can actually follow the turn order in the combat log.

If you’re fresh to the series, you may hear Dungeons & Dragons and think your recent dalliances with Astarion are enough to survive. While this is not exactly wrong — a lot of the terminology is familiar and it's the same setting — the game uses the Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 edition ruleset, which is a massively different beast from the modern 5th edition many may be familiar with. To summarise the differences, the 3.5 ruleset is a much more complex system with headache-inducing math involved. For example, remember Perception? It’s now three different skills: Spot, Search, and Listen.

So, what does Neverwinter Nights 2: Enhanced Edition bring to the table? First off, it looks good on my 2560x1440 monitor, and I can actually read the text without a magnifying glass, which is quite nice. Additionally, the camera is much smoother to control now, making the overall experience much more pleasant. In fact, I had to turn down the sensitivity a tad, which is a grand departure from the slow speed of the original.

In terms of graphical look… well, here is where I get into a bit of an issue. To my mind, the game looks almost exactly like it did back when I played the original, with maybe some slightly better textures on the characters themselves. Now, I was wary that this may be due to my rose-tinted goggles, so I fired up my copy of Neverwinter Nights 2: Complete and, honestly, I see very little difference. The audio design, especially the voice acting, however, is much better in the remake.

Regardless of the state of the graphics, the most impressive feature in the game is the controller compatibility. The Neverwinter Nights series is pretty complex, with a cornucopia of commands and options to parse through, and it goes as far as being pretty taxing to play even with a keyboard and mouse. As such, I was pretty sure it would be a nightmare to play on my Steam Deck… but no! Honestly, playing on a controller was surprisingly intuitive.

Make no mistake, it is still very complex, with varying modes, stances, spells, and options to keep in mind during each and every encounter. However, the custom-made UI is easy to understand, and it is surprisingly smooth, all things considered. It's a bit unwieldy and clumsy simply due to the sheer amount of features, but it is playable and even pleasant once you get used to it, which is much more than I was expecting; full marks!

Regretfully, this edition comes with its own share of issues to go along with the improvements, with minor bugs here and weird QoL decisions making the ride a tad more bumpy. In terms of bugs, I had some issues with the menus in character creation, with certain windows not being scrollable and the voice packs for my character playing the wrong sounds. In the game proper, I ran into a few instances of a character getting stuck in the terrain or going through it, but these were pretty minor, all in all, and pretty common in the original experience.

Confusingly, the game is also poorly optimised. Load times are surprisingly long for such an old title, and I noticed my GPU making frustrated noises when multiple spells were exploding on screen. Additionally, a proper quick-save and quick-load system has not been implemented, which is a pretty standard feature you'd expect. This is further exacerbated by the experience being fairly challenging at times. There is a button for the feature, yes, but its placement on the main menu makes it only slightly more convenient than just using the normal Save option. Pressing F12 seems to save, but it also takes a screenshot on Steam, and I could not find the mapping option in the settings. Considering there is a 32 GB difference between the Neverwinter Nights 2: Enhanced Edition and Neverwinter Nights 2: Complete, I’m a bit unsure where all that data went
 

As a final note, the remake also brings us Steam Workshop integration. This is especially exciting, as it may be a whole new source of custom campaigns and interesting ideas! I bet we’ll see a Baldur’s Gate 3 mod within the month, right after the DOOM conversion.

Despite my grumblings, I am very happy to be playing Dungeons & Dragons Neverwinter Nights 2: Enhanced Edition again. It is a wonderful title with interesting campaigns, fun characters, and hours upon hours of dungeon-delving fun to be had. While one could easily stick to the earlier versions of the game, the Enhanced Edition makes picking up this classic so much easier for newer players or those who have the itch but can't be bothered with modding. If you haven’t played it before, I heartily recommend it! Just be prepared for a bit of jank.