The Neverwinter Nights series is legendary and for good reason. Following the closure of the original online game – which was active on AOL in the early years of online gaming – both games were developed by Obsidian Entertainment and are arguably the best examples of Western RPGs ever created. Their cult following is as enormous as its fame, and have since gotten tons of fan-created content in the 20-ish years since coming out.
Originally released in 2006 and making use of (then) newly-unveiled D&D 3.5 edition rules, Neverwinter Nights 2 was an improvement upon its predecessor in every way and it’s hailed as some of the best 500+ hours (no joke estimation!) you can spend playing a game. It helped cement Obsidian’s reputation for excellently written titles, one that has prevailed to this day, also no thanks to other incredible role-playing games that were put out since then, like Fallout: New Vegas, South Park: The Stick of Truth, the Pillars of Eternity games, to name a few. Say what you will about some of their most recent works like The Outer Worlds, it’s hard to deny that they are good with them words.
Following the launch of Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition in 2019 and the absolute mess that has been the acquisition of the Dungeons and Dragons license by Aspyr, it’s time to see just how well the venerable RPG will do in this day and age with the arrival of Neverwinter Nights 2: Enhanced Edition. It includes all of the base game’s expansions and its adventure pack (namely Mask of the Betrayer, Storm of Zehir, and Mysteries of Westgate) as well as some technical and gameplay improvements.
Chiefly among those improvements are console controls – which we’ll get to in a sec – stable performance, something the first run was infamously bad at (chalk that to Obsidian’s iffy tech chops at the time), and a number of tweaks along the way. Unless you want to fiddle with numerous fan patches and grow a wish to bash your head on a wall with all the wonderful Windows 7 through 11 compatibility quirks it’s bound to have with its original version, this ‘enhanced’ edition is, by design, the most convenient way to play Neverwinter Nights 2 in 2025.
Now, saying that doesn’t mean it’s the best. There’s a lot to get used to if you aren’t already familiar with how the game plays and well, how old it is at this point. Without mincing words: it’s 19 years old and it surely looks and feels like it, even with the bumped up resolution and cleaner textures. Do those things make it unplayable by today’s audience? It’ll depend on how willing you are to look past them. Regardless of all the wrinkles, this is still Neverwinter Nights 2 we’re talking about here. Like or hate its arrival of consoles throwing an icky controller atop your Cheeto dust-covered tabletop, likely knocking your 20-sided dice to the floor, it can still be played the way it did back in 2006, with a keyboard and mouse just fine.
The most important question here is about to be answered: how bad is it to go into this game that was obviously designed for computers and computers in the KB+M sense only, but now with an Xbox pad, or whatever other kind of stick you might have at your disposal? Phew, these sentences are long and wordy, let me gather myself before answering: it’s playable. Is it better in any way? Absolutely not, but it works. It takes some getting used to, probably somewhere between a few minutes and a The Lord of the Rings movie-length of time, and after growing a bit of muscle memory in regards to its shortcuts, you won’t mind it at all.
Like other PC-centric games that ended up being brought to consoles, there’s a slight learning curve to Neverwinter Nights 2: Enhanced Edition. Given that it’s an RPG with a pause feature and plenty going on under the hood when it comes to dice rolls and characters taking their goddamn time performing actions due to it, it works well enough on a controller. Having to open a single menu in order to access, say, either your character screen or the journal, and then thumbing through tabs with the shoulder buttons to find the inventory, and pressing a trigger button to switch over to other party members might sound cumbersome when you read this out loud, it is, but after doing it a few times… it just settles in.
As for the actual content in this, it’s just plain ridiculous how much there is to play. On top of having Steam Workshop support if you’re playing on PC, you have an already immense RPG experience with the base game, and with its three official story expansions, all brimming with quests and whatnot to do, the 500 or more hours I put on a serious face for at the beginning there are surely no joke and I’m legit intimidated by it. The Enhanced Edition also includes crossplay for those with friends of disparate consoles who wish to play together through all – with the exception of Mysteries of Westgate, as it’s a single player-only experience – of Neverwinter Nights 2 and explore Faerûn as a group.
Back in the day, I only dipped my toe into the Neverwinter pool and spent months lost in the alleys of the plague-riddled city of the first game, so be sure to know how big of a commitment its ‘improved’ sequel is if you decide to dive in. It’s the type of thing that can keep you busy for a long stretch of time, a quality one at that, though.
Say what you will about Aspyr, they’ve been doing some good work bringing back popular franchises of old and making them more accessible to today’s gaming machines, such as their work with Legacy of Kain and Tomb Raider. For as awkward as it can be to play at first, it’s amazing to think that I could play something as grand and ginormous as Neverwinter Nights 2 portably now. It’s a game that alone could potentially make up all of someone’s videogame playing time without any fluff whatsoever, offering the quality writing and gameplay from Obsidian’s golden age, in what could easily turn into months or even years, depending on how they tackle it.
