Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition

This game captures a feeling most RPGs can't today. 10/10.

90% of my playtime here is on the Arelith server, which I can't recommend enough. Custom content and tuned balance for whatever you're looking for. A game to jam with your irl friends, a place to meet random folk and develop long intimate character relationships, and a way to satisfy your 3e munchkin brain.

The community modules are very creative. This is an excellent platform for storytelling.

Incredible Persistent World servers compliment a fantastic game that STILL receives new modules to this day.

My time to Hobbitmax.

This was one of the very first PC games I ever played. My dad helped me get set up with a character when I was about 7 or 8. My dad and I don't have the best relationship, but our mutual love for video games, D&D, and D&D-related video games is something I really treasure. Having played Baldur's Gate 3, seeing how far D&D-related video games have evolved in the 25+ years since the release of NWN is nothing short of awesome.

The game is a classic. I would love to see a NWN 3 in modern graphics with modding tools as seen in NWN1.

I've played NWN since around 2005, was on the family computer and is a big reason I am into D&D today. I have beaten the game at least 3 times from prologue to end of Underdark. I have not seen any new content but the classic game runs way better than it ever did! I am only just into the second chapter as of writing.

I play a dwarf cleric and will till I die. Human monk is the best beginner character imo to just get used to the game. It's "a lot of reading" but its good, there is silly comments, jokes, and every companion has a story to figure out. There is no way points or quest markers but the game is pretty linear and is not open world, so getting lost is not likely. You might miss side content if you focus on the main story but you will never get everything done in one play through.

You cannot really romance characters and they do not really interact with each other until the second expansion pack, so if you are looking for Baldurs Gate 3, you'd be disappointed but if you're open minded and willing to work with BG3 great great uncle there's a wonderful game, story and fun to be had. I am 100% biased and love this game to bits.

So much content and customizability. Online coop was easy to set up for the wife and I, and there's tons of community content and support still.

As one of the original Dungeons and Dragons players all the way back to when I was 12 years old I have to say this is one of the greatest games of all times. I remember when they first started advertising for this game, I was literally drooling for almost a year before it came out and I bought it on the first day it was out. I also nearly destroyed my right arm playing it. To this day my mouse hand has never been the same. It's really simple, if you don't love this game then you don't love D&D and you probably don't like RPG's.

It's felt so good to go back and progress through my childhood game I could never beat. So many things I remember clear as day, and so many new things I'm experiencing for the first time. This has been a relic I will cherish for sure. Doomwind dlc I'm excited to get to but they don't make games like this anymore. Highly recommend!

Neverwinter Nights is great OG of early 3d CRPGs. There isn't really anything else like it out there except for maybe its sequel, NWN 2, but that game has certain problems which its predecessor does not.

As weird as it may sound, this game actually aided me in finding a job, which eventually became a career, despite myself not having college degree. Specifically the toolset uses Visual Basic scripting and as a result this becomes a great way to learn some of the fundamentals of coding. I was able to demonstrate this knowledge during an interview, which became one of the deciding factors for helping me to get the job.

In any case, if you decide to purchase this, what you're getting are three pretty solid story Dungeons & Dragons campaigns based on the 3rd edition ruleset. Story-wise it takes place not long after the events of Baldur's Gate 2, but over a decade before the Spellplague which ushered in the much maligned 4th edition setting. For newcomers to DnD, who may have become interested in Forgotten Realms and Faerûn from playing Baldur's Gate 3, the setting should feel really familiar despite that game taking place 120 years after this one. Bear in mind that unlike other more recently developed games that share this setting, Neverwinter Nights is not turn-based, but rather has the DnD rules translated into realtime, operating on 6-second "turns" in much the same way that the old Infinity Engine games were constructed.

Some notes on the campaigns:

Original Campaign [OC]: While not at all bad, this is the worst of the bunch. Players are summoned to Neverwinter by a paladin of Tyr to aid in combating a magical plague called the Wailing Death. Takes 50 - 70 hours to beat, more or less depending on how thoroughly you explore and how long it takes you to read through the dialogues.

Shadows of Undrentide [SoU]: This was a pretty substantial leap in quality over the Original Campaign. It included a new setting with a few entirely new tilesets: specifically, the snowy town of Hilltop and its surrounding wilderness, and the Anauroch Desert and its ruins. New subclasses were made available and the level cap was raised to 30—however, with the Player Character starting at level 1, you will only reach ~level 15 depending on which class you pick and whether or not you multiclass. SoU was the 2nd best out of the bunch, and can take around 20-25 hours to beat.

Hordes of the Underdark [HotU]: This was generally regarded as the best of all three campaigns. It was a direct continuation of SoU—it makes sense to import your character. While visiting the city of Waterdeep your gear is stolen by a Drow assassin, which ultimately starts you off on a quest that has you getting lost in the Underdark and eventually takes you to some other unexpected locales. The level cap was raised to 40, but starting with a character around level 15, you can expect to end this one around level 30. Takes about 20-30 hours to beat.

In addition to the three campaigns developed by BioWare, you're also getting free access to the near infinite user created content that has built up over 23 years as of this review. Some of this custom content is intended to be experienced online with lots of other players also engaging with the game world in a kind of "MMO Lite" type of experience—these larger multiplayer-based custom modules were called "Persistent Worlds" by the community. So if you end up finding one that you like, in a sense you have a miniature MMO without a monthly fee or predatory microtransactions.

With that out of the way, it should be said that the gameplay itself is not very polished—this was true even back when NwN first released, and it still holds true today. The early levels can feel like a slog to get through, with your melee character attacking once every 6 seconds and missing half the time in a derp-dance of death while epic battle music plays in the background. Or alternatively if you roll a caster type character, many of the early spells will feel a bit underwhelming. While the old Infinity Engine games (Baldur's Gate 1&2, Icewind Dale, etc) where much the same in this regard, they made up for it by giving you a party of up to 6 characters. In contrast, Neverwinter Nights is mostly going to involve you managing a single character, probably with just one other "henchman" tagging along, performing actions almost entirely via AI. And while this game can also be experienced online with up to 64 total players [or 255 for the Enhanced Edition], the default campaigns are not balanced around being played this way.

While moment-to-moment gameplay isn't always particularly great, there is a ton of depth for theorycrafters to sink their teeth into. Under the hood, driving all the systems, is a relatively faithful recreation of the 3rd edition DnD ruleset and as a result there is a ton of content for both roleplayers and powergamers alike. If you want to create a fictional background for a character and then shape them around that fiction, you have a vast array choice at your disposal, even without any mods. Alternatively if you want to run the numbers, do the math, and create a character so powerful it "breaks the game," that is also possible.

I could go into the toolset and how it is so ingeniously robust, and yet extremely easy to use for the less artistically inclined, but this review is already getting too long. So I'll leave off with saying that it is also possible to lose hundreds or even thousands of hours attempting to create your own campaign module.

TLDR: What are you waiting for, just buy it already!

solid 8/10

still a decent DND RPG, even as dated as it is.


Non-TLDR:
I keep it quick. i played the original for probably 200-400 hours, maybe even more.

i loved to generate a scenario / custom gear character via aurora and then play the main game in a specific way. (i.e wizard of a specific school, druid of a specific build) etc.

ofc. you could just make "instant kill everything"-gear, but with the exception of hit-rate the game is insanely well balanced.

pro:
- fun
- expansive character design
- decent story
- well made character and NPCs

con:
- does not hold up to BG in terms of pathfinding
- loot is sometimes quite disappointing
- inventory management is inferior to BG
- graphics are somewhat dated, though they still hold up.
- balance is borked, though not as bad as the 1HP imp a room before a 10k HP dragon in BG...

Others:
i think overall - even as dated as it is - it is a good RPG with a lot of build choice in the frame of DND. the menu and handling of spells is quite fun, though the learning curve is higher than for example in BG.

so more choice and less linear, more open areas than bg, but at the same time less easy to get into mastery.

An old school action RPG that gets (a weirdly large amount) of frequent-ish updates from the developers?

And there's well over 20 years of fan-content made for the game with their own modules?

And there's the Dev tools to make content in the game super easily?

If I gave this anything less than a 10/10, I'd be lying.

The graphics are serviceable.

The default story "the wailing death" is good, but not really outstanding.

But other modules made for the game like "Kingmaker" are absolute BANGERS that will keep you on your toes as this game's storytelling and character-driven moments are surprisingly deep at times.

Granted, being an old game you are going to hear the same 10 or so voice lines for characters for every given interaction... especially walking everywhere.

Even with all that, 20 dollars is a steal, and this game goes on sale all the time.

I used to play original NWN about 20 years ago and while I didn’t even finish the main campaign, I spent a lot of time on persistent role playing servers.

Today, I can safely say that it was the best multiplayer experience in my entire life. No game has ever managed to replicate such a great toolset for admins/game masters, especially in the DnD setting.

Thankfully, NWN is alive and well, and there are quite a lot of people who are still hungry for some classic online DnD sessions.

First game i bought for myself and probably will never remove it from the center of my physical collection (honor place)

Old-school D&D3.5 implemented extremely well for its age, and a massive, still-thriving online community.
Grab CEP 2.0 off the workshop and dive in to the multiverse, or even jsut go through the singleplayer campaign or play it with a friend or two.

Loved it back with the Silver Edition in 2006, love it now.

A fun game with lots of variety and re-play-ability

Awesome game with tooons of content. great value:)

I love this game, the expansion packs are much better than the Original Campaign, but due to playing through this in college I even have nostalgia for that. This is also the game that keeps on giving with literally thousands of hours of user created content that you can download for free. I also like that the enhanced edition works more easily on modern computers, and Beamdog keeps releasing new, though small, features through patches.

One of my childhood favorites. Still holds up to this day, in my opinion - I absolutely love the music, the story, the dialogue and the exploring. Would recommend to anyone who loves old-school RPGs!

I was gonna say how much I love this game, then one time I tried to play it on Mac OS. It ran just fine, the frame rate is consistent and all, I spent about 4 hours in it, making a pretty good progress, until the next time I opened it, all my progress I made on my Mac are just gone, the files just appeared to never existed, I don't know when it is deleted since I routinely clear my Trash can. Losing 8 hours of progress really took the fun out of me, the screenshots I took are still there but all my save files just appeared that they never existed.

Don't let my Steam account fool you. I started playing this game about 3 months after its release in 2001 and religiously played it an average of 3 hours (usually more) EVERY SINGLE DAY (only a slight exaggeration) until about 2014 before picking it back up again in 2018. With the average fatherly, working man experience I did not have time to put into the game.

That's nearly 15000 hours of playtime. 14k of those hours were probably on the same Persistent Worlds of Arelith, Amia, and World Serpent Inn.

This game is the best translation of tabletop role-playing to a digital experience, and to my great surprise, it still has a strong player base. The games dated, but the Persistent Worlds that are still alive are living, growing things.

If you want to do some actual, good old-fashioned ROLE PLAYING, then this is the game for you.

This game is still going strong after this long. There is a reason it has had such a long run!

It's OLD, like twenty years old, but although the game mechanics are rough the story and the UI still stand up well to most current CRPGs.

My favorite game. Ever. With EE, almost infinite modules and PRC8 additions (thanks the team) it's a treasure trove for a roleplayer and a character-builder like me. Countless sleepless nights of theorycrafting and leveling up my toons.

The game is cozy, beautiful (despite looking dated) and charming.

I have played NWN since 2004 this is the best rendition of D&D for a video game ever created. It features something that no other game has, a DM client added with a toolset to create your own adventures and even persistent worlds. The custom content for this game is extremely vast and the multiplayer community is very welcoming to new and old players alike. I recommend this game to anyone that wants to play D&D in video game format and wants to enjoy a pen and paper style experience with their friends.

I think we can call this game an anomaly. Here we have a game where the devs gave us the same tools they used when creating the campaigns. Not many games can claim that. And because they gave us the tools, this game is still relevant 20 years later.

An old classic that had (if not has still) a huge active following. Beamdog's commitment keeps the engine running on modern hardware. A premium module even debuted a few days ago. While it was fun, it was short. But for 9 bucks, less than a dollar an hour? Yeah I am down for that.

Once you're finished with the entire original campaign [OC] (entire meaning the two "pretty darn good" expansions), go to Neverwinter Vault, and enjoy the thousands of available hours of available adventures. Not to mention there are quite a few live persistent universes out there, if thats your game.

Have your own idea? Create it!

I recommend the PRC mod. With a little work, you can implement that into the original campaign(s) and replay them with new interesting classes and skills. With more work, you can integrate it and the CEP into anything. And I do...

As for your next adventure after the OCs, if you want adult situations, language, and a damn good story, I highly suggest "A Dance with Rouges". It is pretty darn surreal. Very good writing in an age where we are plagued with boring DEI non-triggering emotionless dialog. It may have you falling in love with some of the characters you interact with and others you hate with the dying passion of a thousands suns.

Very good game, I never played D&D but I got hook by playing this game. I also had a friend that explained me how things here and there works! Really nice game, it is slow paced game ( OC ) but worth playing.

Excellent game with a strong community. This is 3e at its peak. Granted, the graphics aren't great compared to modern games like Baldur's Gate 3, but I find the minimalist style charming in its own way. Add to all that the fact you can have one character go through every storyline, a constant never ending adventure. What's not to love?

Old but gold. Thoroughly enjoy this game, particularly the Hordes of the Underdark expansion :))

Its a great starter

I love the feature to easily mod one of my favorite games!

вот это легендарные игры рпг neverwinter nights 1-2 и арканум балдура 1-2 ice wind rpg , dragons and dungeons игры , какой балдур гейтс 3 блин смешно вот это были истеные ролевые!

This is an awesome throwback to D&D 3.5, the RP on Arelith is so fun! This is an older game but the content never ceases to entertain and I am excited to play the new content releasing soon!

经典，没啥好说的，冲！

in depth story and inclusion of a race usually not used, spoiler if you haven't played it.

The game of a century, from my point of view. I'm returning to it now and again, enjoying it every time.

This is so cool and still fun to play.
I recommend getting the Neverwinter Nights Module Installer Toolkit and downloading old D&D 2e and 3e adventures to play. Also, the AUrora Tool Set works in NWN EE!

Loved getting back to NWN with PRC 5.0. And thanks to the unpaid engineers keeping the game alive!

Made a video about the game:
https://youtu.be/QErbfnTK47g

The original version of this was game was GREAT. Fitting of Steam horishness that I'm forced to give a down vote.

This 'new' version seems to be hiding content behind extra $$$.
I asked the forums here, but the nerds kept lying and wouldn't answer honestly.

Therefore, I recommend you go find another version. It will look the same, but have more content.

It's showing it's age, and if you're not using an external source of info or don't know the DnD rules, you can be pretty lost at times.

But damn is it fun to play a Bioware classic. Also the option to make your own journal entries in the quest journal is something really small but neat.

Classic Bioware goodness. It was a great story I replay every few years, and I'm never upset or disappointed. It gets better with time.

One of (if not) the best roleplay platforms I've ever had the pleasure to try. I've spent all my hours in multiplayer, playing in persistent worlds like Arelith and Ravenloft. These persistent worlds players are able to create are a gem that you can rarely find anywhere else.

Good story lines and great game play.

Game fails to start.

It's old, but for what it is it's really good. You definitely buy this game for it's 20 years worth of community content and pw servers online. So far I've had a blast.

A Fantastic classic game; very fun crpg love it!:)

The best D&D based game before Baldur's Gate 3

I have a few hours on it by now. To make a long story short, enjoy the game for what it is currently used for, the multiplayer persistant worlds that are made, rather than the single player. The single player is 'alright' by today's standards, but it is a full DnD experience through and through, filled with plenty of fun mechanics to match. Most would say it is 3e DnD, but, much like Pathfinder, this iteration strays a little bit and does its own things with it. Some things don't translate well for a game released back in '02, so, they had to improvise. I do wish as a gripe that all classes got 1 more skill point to account for Discipline being a skill, but that is it. As a seasoned veteran of DnD i cannot get enough of this game, I didnt even have nostalgia for it when i first started playing, so I had no rose tinted glasses for it.

A classic old school D&D rpg that you MUST play.