Neverwinter Nights 2 | 
| From: Atari
List Price: $29.99
Buy New: $6.66
You Save: $23.33 (78%)
New (27) Used (7) from $5.74
Rating:  180 reviews
Sales Rank: 2582
Format: Dvd-rom
Platform: Windows Xp
Genre: role_playing_games
ESRB: Teen
Media: DVD-ROM
Edition: DVD-Rom
Autographed: No
Memorabilia: No
Batteries Included: No
Age: 12 - 20 years
Operating System: Windows XP
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 7.6 x 5.3 x 1.3
MPN: 26503
Model: 26503
UPC: 742725265035
EAN: 0742725265035
ASIN: B000E0XX9Q
Release Date: October 31, 2006
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Condition: Factory sealed excellent condition. Ships usually within 1-2 business days. E-mail Confirmation.
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| Features:
| • | Build a character that suits your style of play - good or evil, chaotic or lawful, with any number of skills, feats and professions available at the click of a button | | • | Create your own modules, campaigns, and adventures for your friends - move buildings, terrain, script encounters, write dialogues, create quests and items |
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
Neverwinter Nights 2 returns you to the Forgotten Realms, one of the popular campaign settings of Dungeons and Dragons. Emerge from the tiniest of villages into a sweeping tale of danger and war, chronicling your rise from a peasant to a full-fledged hero of the Realms. The story takes place several years after the original Neverwinter Nights, and reintroduces popular characters and NPCs in a new storyline with new challenges.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 175 more reviews...
 More like a NWN expansion pack November 5, 2006
E. Gatti (Bear, DE USA)
76 out of 103 found this review helpful
The requirements have been seriously jacked up from NWN original and you really get very little for it. The 50 hour new capmaign is decently put together but none of the view options work very well to play the game in realtime. You will spend half the game repositioning the camera. Game plays slow on my machine, which only a year old 2ghz Dell with a gig of ram and I have a reasonably new 256 meg graphics card. Heck, I play Oblivion reasonably well with less than full grahpics, but I can't make this game work and let me tell you.. this is no Oblivion. Graphics are a slight improvement over NWN original but they are bellow par for any PC game I have seen come out in a year. I am very disapointed. Obsidian Entertainment never failed me before, but this game is a failure.
UPDATED: 4/4/2008 - So a couple years have passed and people are still on my case for saying the game doesn't run fast enough. No kidding right. Computers and graphics cards are sorta faster now you see. I doubt a 2005 rig could still play it.. BUT I just got the Mac version on my brand new MacBook Pro and it runs just peachy on max settings so I'd say technology more than caught up with the game. It runs very smoothly now. Of course now the interface and camera action are even more dated, but if you can handle the sorta retro feel of it the game is not half bad. Certainly a lot of love has gone into it from the community since release. I am sure I will enjoy finishing the main quest and checking out the expansion.. if that is actually possible on my Mac anyhow. Sorry I would have updated my review sooner but the PC DVD got scratched and the copy protection wasn't interested in letting me play without it.
If I could change my vote I'd give it 3 out of 5, and 4 if I could just figure out how to make the freaking camera follow me. There has got to be a way, it is just too big an oversight not be in there somewhere.
Oh yeah, the graphics on max settings are MUCH better than NWN 1. Had to scale them down before so I guess I never saw what it was really capable of.
Improvement over original, but not groundbreaking November 2, 2006
Hard Maple (Emmett, ID USA)
60 out of 103 found this review helpful
At first glance, the graphics are on par with Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil. That's not good since that game came out in 2003. But after a little while I've decided they are a little better than that, about 1-2 years advanced from the original NWN (which is 4 years old). But not up to snuff for late 2006/early 2007. Perhaps lesser graphics are necessary for the Toolset, since they need to be mass-producable (sp?). At least this time you can see your cloaks when you wear them without the unstable CEP.
The provided campaign (I'm still in Chapter 2) is rather boring to me. I do not see as being more immersive as someone else said, just less exciting or interesting. But less than half of the original NWN players I've spoken with over the years were not very excited about the original storyline either. Conversation in the Official Campaign are an improvement over the original, but that may be because of the movie animations involved that the toolset probably can't provide to the average module builder. I have only just opened the Toolset, so I cannot yet comment on how user-friendly it is. But it is different from the first one.
My recommendations are thus: if you want a single-player game, wait until the price drops and bugs are worked out (advice for almost all games). If you are the more creative type and are most interested in the Toolset, then I would suggest going ahead and getting it so that we have something to play when the rest of us finish trudging through the OC. For multi-player play, I can't really comment except to say visit the official forums and wait until the first patch is actually ready.
A fun game, if you can tolerate the performance issues... January 27, 2007
Sean Henning (Denver, CO, USA)
56 out of 61 found this review helpful
NWN is a fun, exciting story that is unfortunately swallowed alive by its own technical limitations. I won't say much about the game quality other than to say that long time fans of Black Isle games will recognize the fun and depth built into NWN2, and the story is everything you would expect from the successor to Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, and Neverwinter Nights 1. Sadly, the fun of playing through the story is quickly swallowed up by the frustration of fighting the game's significant technical flaws.
The user interface, and particularly the camera control, is horrendous. Any time you enter one of the game's many tight, swirvy dungeons, count on stopping to adjust the camera angle every few minutes as it gets hung up on seemingly every wall, plant, or chunk of rock within throwing distance. You may miss much of the game's more impressive eye candy as the camera points uselessly off at nothing or grants you an extreme closeup of a patch of dirt on the wall.
Sadly, the technical issues with NWN2 don't stop with the UI. Independent reviews at Gamespot confirm what countless users on Atari and Black Isle support forums are reporting: achieving a playable framerate (> 30 FPS) in this game requires significantly better hardware than that which is "recommended" by the box.
Users logging onto the Atari & Black Isle support forums are consistently reporting single digit framerates in almost all areas of the game. My own impression, based on many hours scouring the forums, and on my own in-game experiences, is that if you have the absolute best hardware available on the market, and you turn *all* of the graphics options down to "mid grade" or lower, you can expect to see about 25 - 30 FPS. If you have the hardware "recommended" by the box, and you turn all of the graphics options all the way down (disabling any optional eye candy), you can expect 5 - 15 FPS, complemented by a constant 100% utilization of both CPU & GPU (is it a bad sign when CPU utilization remains at 100% just looking at the game's main menu?).
Unfortunately, Atari and Black Isle support have left their userbase without a solution to these issues, reporting that they have been unable to reproduce any of the performance problems reported on their support forums. Personally I find it hard to believe they are unable to reproduce what is a seemingly ubiquitous set of problems, but either way they have yet to release a patch or troubleshooting step that has provided a resolution to the many users experiencing significant performance issues with NWN2.
Given the many technical issues this game suffers, I cannot recommend it to any but the most die-hard fans, and even then I cannot recommend it to anyone who's hardware is less than the best the market has to offer.
 The wait is over.... November 2, 2006
J. Nelson
24 out of 54 found this review helpful
...and it was all for naught! I loved the original Neverwinter Nights and was looking forward to this title. All the 'insiders' gave it rave reviews. What were they thinking? This game has a horrible feel. It's absolutely boring and the controls are wanting. (I have a 256 MB nvidia graphics card...still lags after adjusting gameplay options, etc) My system runs the game well, it's just that the game is awful--great hardware can't fix that. The new dialog system is nice and a lot of the other ideas are well-intentioned, but the end product is a very, very boring game. I only hope I have enough time to cancel the Limited Edition I have on order.
Additional comment after edit: It's obvious that these guys put a lot of work into the effort. I truly empathize with them as human beings. But manipulating Amazon's rating system by saying negative reviews aren't helpful while all positive reviews are helpful is obvious and demeans the intelligence of those who read the reviews. Put a demo out like one of the latest reviews suggests. Let people play the crappy game before they decide. Oops...they won't do that (for obvious reasons) Sorry you guys put hours upon hours on an ill-conceived plan. I empathize with you, but you failed.
Pretty bad for a A+ game November 3, 2006
Athol Kay (Bristol, CT USA)
21 out of 50 found this review helpful
Firstly despite having a system with requirements I have to turn all the graphics options way down to make it even halfway playable.
Constant fighting with the camera to get a decent viewing position.
Very very long loading screens. Even for something as simple as going through a door in an inn to get to a upper floor.
Essentially dull gameplay as you HAVE to space bar pause the game endlessly in combat to fight with the camera to even find the next target. Thats just with the fighter I rolled, a caster would be even worse.
Wasn't enjoying endless dialogue cut scenes either. I held out through the starting area hoping that it was just setting the stage and teaching game mechanics. Then the first character you meet outside the start zone is a Dwarven Monk who "likes punching people in the face" and woo-hoo you're in luck because we can trek all the way to Neverwinter together.
Rrrrrrrrrright.
Uninstall. Toss game into the used pile on Amazon. Post review so as not to feel guilty about selling it to anyone without a warning.
2 Stars because it *might* play better on some kind of ZOMG powerful computer.
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