Neverwinter Nights 2

The Good
Neverwinter Nights 2 is less a sequel to the first game than a spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate series and Knights of the Old Republic. The first Neverwinter Nights concentrated more on a single-character experience, with party members being nothing more but "henchmen" for hire. The second one returns to the classic formula that was picked up by Obsidian in the Knights of The Old Republic sequel: party-based role-playing is the driving force of the game.

The core gameplay of Neverwinter Nights 2 follows the familiar template we have seen and loved in Baldur's Gate games. It utilizes the same fantastic combat system - and this time it is fully justified by the return to proper party management. Real-time combat quickly deteriorates into a test for reflexes, leaving little room to tactical thinking; turn-based combat can get too slow. What we have here is a fast-paced system that gives us the best of both, As in other games of the same kind, the combat system works flawlessly (if you disregard technical issues such as poor pathfinding). Positioning your characters, choosing melee or ranged weapons, protecting your spellcasters - everything has an effect. Some of the enemies are surprisingly clever, going for weak and wounded characters, chasing them all over the place, buffing themselves up with spells, etc. The game uses the newest edition of AD&D rules, and there are tons of ways to customize your characters, a nearly unlimited amount of spells, skills, and abilities to choose from. You can spend hours just sitting in front of the "level up" screen, gazing at all those possibilities. It is quite overwhelming.

The many cool spells make druids and mages more interesting to control than ever. Just as it should be in RPGs, preparation and strategy influence the outcome of the battle much more than brute force. Having a balanced party with characters of different classes is a key to success. There are plenty of powerful spells to exploit, many ways to outsmart your enemies and to make battles easier. Since there are so many companions of different races, classes, having different spells and abilities, you won't be able to see everything the game has to offer during your first play. There is a good replay value and so many things to do that the game can eat up a big chunk of your time. Even if you choose the quickest way to the goal, the game remains large and long.

Neverwinter Nights 2 was clearly custom-made for party-driven gameplay. Your companions aren't just picked up and invited to your party; each one of them is connected to the part of the story you are currently experiencing, presented in a dramatic fashion, and logically integrated into the events. Companions have different reasons for joining your party, and those reasons are properly explained, often with a detailed psychological background to the character's actions. After they have joined you, they continue to make comments on your actions and remain present. It is clearly visible how much effort and care was put into designing those characters' actions during the game. Many of the cutscenes will be different each time you play the game with different party members, because they will speak in cutscenes just as they do during gameplay or while performing side quests.

The focus on characters in Neverwinter Nights 2 pretty much drives another big nail into the coffin of Japanese RPGs. Each character is a colorful, clearly outlined representation of a type, sometimes carried to the extreme, but always done with conviction and great charm. You'll want to play this game just to spend some time with your companions. Even the most deliberately generic characters come with personal backgrounds that make them more than just an obligatory cliché. The moral decisions you make in the game might affect the story in a certain way (like a large split in the story arc that occurs when you decide whether to side with law enforcement or criminals in Neverwinter), but they become even more interesting and exciting once you realize that they also influence your party members. Nearly everything you do in the game is noted by your companions, and they sometimes react even to a small dialogue choice. I remember how my companions initiated a conversation with me after I have saved two children in a side quest, talking about education and parental responsibility. I chose answers that made me sound like a mature person with an understanding for a child's mind, and the female druid elf said I would make an excellent father, and (very cautiously) asked me whether I'd already thought of getting married and having children. That's what role-playing is about.

Naturally, most of the choices are just plain old good and evil decisions. Good characters will favor compassion and kindness, evil ones will prefer doing things for the sake of destruction and violence. But it's not always as simple as that. Sometimes you'll have to know a character on a more personal level to make a decision that will influence him or her. A conflict rising when you have to make a decision that involves being careful or just throwing yourself into battle is not necessarily a choice between good and evil, but rather between too equally understandable approaches.

The writing in Neverwinter Nights 2 is, overall, excellent. While I expected this from a game that continued a tradition of high-quality dialogues, I was still impressed by the amount of care put into them. Nearly every dialogue line, no matter how unimportant and casual the conversation is, is written so cleverly that it becomes a pleasure to simply read the game. No matter how generic the subject is, the choice of words makes the conversation interesting. Often such quality is achieved by excessive implementation of humor, but the game avoids this trap and doesn't turn itself into a comedy. On the contrary, it is a serious game with a serious story. It has plenty of humor, but it is not a parody; the humor is there to soften things and shed new, unexpected light on familiar topics. Without turning the game into a caricature of itself, the warm, intelligent humor of Neverwinter Nights 2 works like a magical spell. Suddenly, the medieval fantasy setting of the game becomes a part of our reality. Characters don't talk like generic noble heroes, villains, or commoners. Their language is rich and updated to modern sensibilities, touching upon issues that were probably not discussed in a real medieval society.

Even though the game begins in a (probably deliberately) generic way - you are an orphan, your village is attacked, the attackers are after a magical artifact split into several pieces, and so on - the story soon turns into a complex net of situations that grows the more you play the game, unveiling the main story arc layer by layer. The architecture of the story line is very impressive, and the word "epic" comes to mind when you see how all those quests are bound together, morphing into larger quests, which eventually take you to your ultimate goal. The main story line develops slowly, but that's a requirement for a true epic. The quality of this story is manifested in the quest design, where nearly every quest is a mini-story of its own, dealing with different people, locations, moral issues, etc. A bit like in Final Fantasy VI, what matters here most is not necessarily the main plot, but those little stories that make each location and encounter personal, creating an image of a living, believable world. Even so, the main plot has quite some twists up its sleeve, and becomes progressively interesting until it reaches its climax in the end of the game, where you'll also have to face the consequences of your decisions and the way you have treated your companions.

The Bad
I guess the only substantial complaint that can be made about Neverwinter Nights 2 is its unabashedly traditional personality. And I'm not talking just about the classic medieval setting, the AD&D gameplay, the familiar conversation style, the classic combat system, etc. This is a 3D game created with the same rules that applied to classic isometric RPGs. As a result, very few of the things made possible by 3D graphics are actually implemented here. Sure, you can rotate the camera and get any view you want, but that's about the only feature that reminds us of the fact this game is indeed three-dimensional. There is no physical involvement in the game world of Neverwinter Nights 2. You cannot perform any physical actions, cannot climb or jump. You can only walk on pre-determined paths, and even though the game is large and has plenty of locations, they are artificially separated from each other, and every location has mysterious borders that prevent you from exploring it properly. Sometimes your path will be blocked by a ridiculously small obstacle, but you still won't be able to walk over it. In some cases, you can barely get off a road to explore a nearby meadow, because the game simply doesn't let you approach this meadow. You might say that I demand too much, but I find it deplorable that until now there hasn't been a single RPG that was equally satisfying in both party-driven role-playing and physical immersion in the game world.

Other than that, there are some minor issues, like the long loading times and slow-downs or the party AI. You can forget about general strategies and just go with the old Baldur's Gate-style micro-management. If you let your allies loose, they will do things that can almost be compared to what Fallout NPCs did to you in terms of sheer stupidity and suicidal tendencies. Hurting a badly injured ally with an area spell or running off to unlock a faraway chest at the most critical moment of a battle are just examples of what this AI can accomplish if you have the misfortune of turning the puppet mode off. Also, the pathfinding is quite bad. My companions often got stuck in the middle of a totally empty space on their way to the enemy, and I had to manually re-direct them. I remember one time when I cleared an entire dungeon area before realizing that one of my characters was stuck in a door just near the exit during the whole time, making idiotic movements with his weapon, but still unable to walk through an open door.

The Bottom Line
Neverwinter Nights 2 won't win any awards for originality, but it doesn't matter. For anyone who cares for the wonderful style of RPGs that was manifested in Baldur's Gate (and actually has its roots in Ultima), this is a great choice. Ignore the voice whispering "been there, done that" to you, and bask in the nostalgic glory of complex role-playing rules and romances with cute half-elves.