I never want to be an RPG gatekeeper—I want as many people as possible to find out what makes these games so great. But their inherent crustiness can make my old-head RPG favorites hard to recommend to people who haven’t already bought in. I’ve got a lot of friends I recommend Disco Elysium to, but not very many I tell to play Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura.
Thankfully, Aspyr’s remaster of one of my favorite crusty RPGs, 2006’s Neverwinter Nights 2 from Obsidian, has finally pushed it into the ranks of “games I can credibly recommend to a normal person.” No more crashing when you try to change the resolution, no more unreasonably tiny UI past 1080p, just a game that works (and works well) on modern systems—including the Steam Deck.
At $30, I also think it’s a pretty amazing value, offering four classic RPG campaigns—including one blow the doors down all-timer—totaling somewhere north of 135 hours to beat. And that’s before you factor in a mod scene that, while never as big as the original Neverwinter Nights’, still put out some pretty stellar RPG experiences.
The best
I’ll start with the real dinger, the thing you’ve probably heard of if you’ve heard of Neverwinter Nights 2, Mask of the Betrayer. NwN2’s 2007 expansion is a moody, thoughtful, unforgettable RPG in the vein of Planescape: Torment, Knights of the Old Republic 2, or Disco Elysium.
It starts right after the lackluster cliffhanger of NwN2’s base campaign, seeing your character wake up in a tomb thousands of miles away with a mysterious wound in their chest and an all-consuming, metaphysical hunger.
MotB trades the comfort food fantasy slurry of The Forgotten Realms’ Sword Coast for the underexplored frontier between Rashemen and Thay, far to the east. This land has a society of Viking-like warriors led by matriarchal witches on one side of the border, and evil nerd wizards with ugly tattoos who believe in slavery on the other. Are the Red Wizards of Thay alt-right? Much to consider.
Similar to KotOR 2 and PS:T, Mask of the Betrayer squeezes a grown-up, thought-provoking story out of an inherently playful, wish fulfillment-oriented world by taking it absurdly seriously, and following its ideas to their logical conclusions.
MotB fixates on The Forgotten Realms lore tidbit that atheists are consigned to a horrific fate on dying, absorbed into a great wall surrounding a city of the dead, aware of every second of the ordeal until their souls are erased forever. An indeterminate amount of time before the start of Mask of the Betrayer, the high priest of the god of the dead led a crusade to tear this wall down, and the aftershocks have something to do with your current predicament.
MotB is also an extremely reactive game, with dialogue that takes advantage of your character’s skills, and vastly different story outcomes depending on your choices. While it lends itself to telling a moving tale of humanism and forgiveness, that makes actively choosing to be an evil psycho bastard all the more delicious.
The rest
But all four of NwN2’s official campaigns hold a special place in my heart. The original campaign is a wonky, uniwieldy thing, with a first third that gets bogged down in some serious RPG early game dogwater, and a final act that zips to an unsatisfying conclusion, the team at Obsidian clearly having run low on time and money.
But the middle bit is so good. You’re put on trial for a massacre you didn’t commit at the beginning of act 2, leading to one of my favorite questlines in any RPG: An open-ended mission to gather evidence proving the conspiracy against you, followed by a massive dialogue puzzle where you use all of your crunchy D&D character skills to go Ace Attorney mode on an oily prosecutor during your day in court. Afterwards, you take control of a castle town in a surprisingly deep management minigame where you upgrade and fortify your keep, recruit and equip soldiers, and decide what kind of feudal lord you want to be.
The 2008 expansion Storm of Zehir is an open-ended, tabletoppy sort of experience, letting you build a full party of four from scratch. It starts out in the refreshingly bright and tropical environs of Chult, a dinosaur-inhabited jungle peninsula far to the south of Neverwinter and Baldur’s Gate.
It eventually transitions back to Neverwinter, letting you see some familiar locales from a new perspective while your original hero is off doing Mask of the Betrayer. My favorite part is coming back to that keep you built and fortified to find it under new management: Your amiable and bumbling companions from the base game. One of the best parts of SoZ is its gorgeous 3D world map, which feels like a prototype of the one we would see in Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire ten years later.
Last is definitely the most unsung part of this already unsung RPG: Mysteries of Westgate, an expansion developed by external studio, Ossian. Ossian has its own interesting RPG pedigree, having been founded by former BioWare producer Alan Miranda with development on Mysteries headed by author and NwN modder, Luke Scull.
MoW has a similarly pleasing, tabletop sensibility to Storm of Zehir, offering a deep cut into The Forgotten Realms that feels more like an episode in an adventuring life than a fully contained chosen one drama. Mysteries of Westgate takes us to the titular piratical hive on one of The Forgotten Realms’ inland seas, and offers a great deal of dialogue-based skill checks and reactivity to player choice—always the quickest way to my heart.
And after all this time, I’ve only just scratched the surface of the mod scene for Neverwinter Nights 2. My first stop will be The Maimed God’s Saga, a clerics-only adventure that seems to take a similarly deadly-serious approach to the Forgotten Realms’ silly religions as Mask of the Betrayer, to the adulation of those who have played it.
After 20 hours in Neverwinter Nights 2: Enhanced Edition, I’ve fully committed to it being a Neverwinter Nights summer. More and more people are saying that it’s the Summer of NwN, in fact, and who am I to tell them that they’re wrong? If you want to be with “what’s it” as opposed to “what isn’t it,” it’s time to roll up your sleeves and roleplay as some manner of Orc Paladin or Genasi Red Dragon Disciple. Sorry kid, it’s not my call—it’s the Summer of Neverwinter Nights.
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