Neverwinter Nights 2 is one of my favorite games—if you want to know why you should play it, I’ve got a separate write-up here. Even though NwN2 released in 2006 after the dawn of the Xbox 360, it’s aged more poorly than many of its contemporaries and even predecessors, making it harder and harder to recommend over the years until now.
I’m happy to say that Aspyr did a great job on its remaster, and this is the version of NwN2 you should play today—whether as an old fan coming back or a first-time player. It’s just $10 more expensive than the $20 complete collection on GOG (the original is not available on Steam), and offers a smoother, more adaptable, and more user-friendly experience that crucially has full compatibility with old mods and fan campaigns. Most transformative for me has been bringing NwN2 on the go with my Steam Deck.
How is it on Steam Deck?
Deck Heck
Neverwinter Nights 2 is a very mouse and keyboard-oriented game for many reasons:
- It’s Party-based.
- Features real time with pause combat.
- With an isometric camera by default.
- And it’s weighed down with all the hardcore RPG complexity of Dungeons & Dragons’ foreboding 3.5 edition ruleset.
NwN2EE has been Deck-verified since before it was even announced, but that little green check can have a lot of variance, and I was worried NwN2 would feel unavoidably stepped-on and compromised when played with a gamepad. Thankfully, it never quite demands the same level of micromanagement as the OG Baldur’s Gates and finds a nice groove with gamepad controls. Basically, it plays like Knights of the Old Republic.
The keyboard shortcuts squashed on a pad definitely make my brain heat up like it’s trying to remember fighting game combos: Pause, a character menu, change target, hotbar select, party select, and swapping camera modes are each assigned to a button, but I’ve gotten used to it. A more minor gripe: It feels clunky that selecting a party member or hotbar action doesn’t take you out of their sub-menus automatically. You have to press right trigger, select a party member, then press right trigger again to start controlling them. I’d like to see a menu option to streamline that added in a patch.
But we’ve come a long way since the days of received wisdom being that PC complexity can’t work on a gamepad. NwN2 Enhanced feels great with a controller. Little complaints aside, I can’t imagine significant improvements to the system Aspyr implemented.
Performance has been great on Deck for me, a fairly consistent 60fps, though I was amused to see two inexplicably framerate-killing zones from the original game still made the fan spin up and the fps chug (it’s definitely better here though). My only complaint on this front is that NwN2EE is a bit of a battery hog: Sub-three hours on an original Steam Deck for a game whose min-spec GPU is the 13 year-old GTX 660. Far from a dealbreaker, but something I’d like to see further optimized.
Remaster upgrades
Facelift
I was hard pressed to notice a visual upgrade when I was just playing NwN2EE on my Deck, but it sunk in when I swapped between the same save in the OG and Enhanced versions on my desktop: The textures are pleasingly crisp now, and the UI finally scales well to HD resolutions instead of getting unusably tiny.
Comparing the same area of Neverwinter’s Merchant Quarter side-by-side with the original, I also got more consistent performance in the Enhanced Edition. I didn’t have time to invest in significant hardware testing and comparisons, but I noticed that the remaster was actually demanding less CPU usage overall, and spreading it throughout the various cores and threads more efficiently than the original.
Aside from scaling better to higher resolutions, NwN2EE’s UI is more or less unchanged—it’s less friendly and intuitive than the OG Baldur’s Gates or Neverwinter Nights 1, let alone modern RPGs like Pillars of Eternity or Baldur’s Gate 3.
But the remaster does feel better on M&K than the original. It’s hard to pin down, but camera control in the original NwN2 always felt bad to me, no matter how I adjusted sensitivity settings in-game. In the Enhanced Edition, the m&k camera controls are smooth and pleasant, if a little too zippy by default.
Mod and save compatibility
Perfect continuity
Most impressive out of the whole remaster: Mods, fan campaigns, and even old save files from the original all work with NwN2 Enhanced Edition. Previous go-to CRPG preserver Beamdog managed that with its remasters, but I wondered if Aspyr would have the same touch. I needn’t have worried.
Enhanced Edition saves can’t be brought back to the original game, which makes sense, but I was tickled to see the save file I started right after BG3 came out pop up automatically when I installed NwN2EE on my desktop. Cloud save support has been notably issue-free for me, with my progress on my Deck seamlessly unified with halfhearted playthrough attempts from a few years ago. The only cloud hiccup is that saved characters (for taking to different campaigns) aren’t saved in the cloud. You need an actual in-game save to transfer them between devices, but that’s a minor hurdle.
The mod compatibility really brought a smile to my face. I tested two: Remove Level Adjustment, an essential quality of life fix that does away with D&D 3.5’s level handicap for certain races like Drow, and The Maimed God’s Saga, a well-loved fan campaign.
Both worked without a hitch on Steam Deck, though I have run into a minor crash issue with The Maimed God’s Saga: If I load my save from the main menu, NwN2 crashes back to SteamOS. If I load another save first, then TMGS, we’re good. The only other problem was doing a lot of file management with the Deck’s trackpad instead of a mouse, plus digging deep due to how SteamOS buries some game files.
For the level adjustment fix, what is simply dropped in “My Documents / Neverwinter Nights 2 / override” on Windows has to instead get routed to “home / .steam [a hidden folder] / steam / steamapps / compdata/ 2738630 [the game’s numerical ID in Steam, found in its store page URL] / pfx / drive_c / users / steamuser / Documents / Neverwinter Nights 2 / override.” Sweet merciful Christ.
But that’s a Steam Deck problem, not a Neverwinter Nights 2: Enhanced Edition problem. This is a fantastic version of one of my favorite games, an Obsidian and D&D classic that really deserves its flowers. This isn’t a flashy graphics overhaul, but a competent, measured, and effective clean-up job, one that leaves plenty of eccentricities in place. Your party members still have the dumbest friendly AI I’ve ever seen in an RPG, but I don’t know if I’d want it any other way.
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