Neverwinter Nights 2 (PC Games)

By the time I picked up NWN2, I already knew some general points about the game -- it was akin to NWN1, featured a stronger storyline, and had an updated interface. Delving into the package (installation was a breeze), I booted the game up and was ready to go. After a solid week of playing this title, I feel I'm able to give a tentative summary of what worked and what didn't work so well with me.

The campaign: Unlike NWN1, the main campaign in NWN2 felt more personalized and less cookie cutter, although some of the same "fetchquest" elements and uninspired dialogue remains. From a personal perspective, I felt that Obsidian could have improved upon the weaknesses inherent to NWN1 (regarding the main campaign) more than it did; however, at least an attempt was evident and the main campaign is by no means completely boring. The largest complaint I log herein is the fact that the main campaign left me with the same feeling KOTOR2 did -- incomplete. The game builds up pretty nicely but somewhere along the way decides to rush and mash as many plotlines together as it can; leaving gamers like myself with a incredulous look on our faces and a sick feeling in our stomachs.

Graphics:
Basically, the graphics suck. I'd try to phrase this nicely but the problem is ... I can't. There is minimal improvement from the CEP packs in NWN1 and based on how much this game decides to suck up processing power on my middling CoreDuo2 mid-tier machine, I'm logging heavy complaints. Oblivion has framerate stutters if I max out viewdistance or go overboard on community texture packs; NWN2 stutters around like a cripple with 3 legs when I get attacked by 10 enemies. Turning off some components (notably shadows) smooths things out a lot, but that's just horrifically bad code optimization.

Sound:
I didn't really notice it much, and that's a good thing. Then again, this isn't going to be winning any awards, so we'll leave it at that.

Online:
I'm not certain what sort of mod support is out there yet, as I've only fiddled with a few mods, but if it's anything like the NWN1 community, this is going to be another one of those ridiculously well supported community-oriented games. The online component works well, though I did run into some latency issues while hosting games, something that really SHOULDN'T happen unless the coding scheme sucked. Since the graphical coding optimization is obviously crap, I guess I can't cry too much about online optimization being only sometimes-crap.

Overall:
When it comes down to it, I had fun dropping this on my computer and whittling a few hours here and there playing it. It's not by any means the next great RPG, but it does come packaged with the necessary materials for you to DESIGN the next great NWN2 module. The campaign was of middling length and decently fun, and the online component works well enough that it isn't something that'll end up with you bashing your computer with a baseball bat. The sheer amount of content and online mod availability together make the value of a product such as NWN2 amazingly high. At the end of the day, a game is meant to be an enjoyable experience -- and NWN 2 does deliver the requisite amount of "fun" to make it worth picking up for your gaming pile.