Neverwinter Nights 2 or NWN + all expansions?

That is a hard question for me to answer as I did not enjoy the single-player campaign of the original NWN that much, although it certainly was not bad. I DID like the expansions quite a bit more, especially Hordes of the Underdark!

That being said, I definetly prefer NWN 2. The battle system is back to Baldur's Gate's approach (4 party members, nice tactical pseudo-round-based/ realtime mixture) and the characters react to each other and your decisions a lot. The scope of the narrative is larger, although it is still nothing completely amazing. On top of that the character system has new additions from the latest D&D ruleset again (I am no expert on that though).

Some minor annoyances in NWN 2 are unsatisfying camera angles and bad AI of opponents and your heroes (but then again you can control your party's actions anyway).

So if hardware (for NWN 2's higher system specs) and probably a slightly higher price is no problem I personally would recommend NWN 2, but you cannot go wrong with the NWN expansions either if you liked the original campaign!

Hope that is somewhat helpful to you!

NWN is awesome and I really enjoyed it back in the day----snip===However I'd really like to try NWN 2 also... So what do you guys recommend? The expansions or NWN2?BounceDK

well, there are plenty of NWN fans don't really like NWN2 since it forces party companions upon the gamers; it takes the path of BG series (actually sets more restrictions or say "requirements" for how we play the game). So...if you really want to try NWN2, surprise of demise at your own risk ^^

(myself personally, I prefer NWN2 over NWN, which I didn't enjoy back then...hey, I'm a BG guy^^)

Get NWN + all expansions.

Get NWN 2 after they release the expansion pack.

As I have both, right now I'd recommend the NWN + Expansions.

Why? well you will get dozen of hours with original game and more with additional content from expansions. It's a good game that will keep you busy for some time.

The disadvantage of NWN 2 right now? 50$ + if you don't have good computer it will give you trouble running, the new patch did work out some issues, but there are more to fix.

Play first NWN and expansions first, by the time you're done price will drop on NWN 2.

I got my NWN bundle for barely 19$ from Best Buy. Value+price for the bundle over todays NWN 2 is to good to pass.

After you save some money, NWN 2 should be a good buy, as it's a good game as well.

Well I just tried nwn and it wouldn't work with my 8800.. Argh nvidia... Guess I'm forced to go with nwn2.BounceDK

Strange, it works perfectly fine with mine, you have to make sure you have downloaded the game update from it's game menu option.

If you can't you can manually download it from www.bioware.com website, they also have good questions list of known issue if you have problem.

[QUOTE="BounceDK"]Well I just tried nwn and it wouldn't work with my 8800.. Argh nvidia... Guess I'm forced to go with nwn2.Sokol4ever

Strange, it works perfectly fine with mine, you have to make sure you have downloaded the game update from it's game menu option.

If you can't you can manually download it from www.bioware.com website, they also have good questions list of known issue if you have problem.

Personally I had a great deal more fun playing the original Neverwinter Nights and it's expansions than I did playing Neverwinter Nights 2.

In fact, I got quite far in Neverwinter Nights 2 but eventually uninstalled it because I wasn't really enjoying it. Forced linearity, forced companions, performance issues, bugs, not being able to enter most buildings unless they were quest-related and not much replay value all led to me uninstalling NWN2.

NWN 1 + expansions was a far better game and I played through it several times with different characters.

I'd go with Neverwinter Nights 2 without a doubt. I like the party members and group dynamic. In NWN2 you get full control over your companions - the extra "companions" in the original are flat and controlling-err-guiding them is kinda wonky and they're really not needed, in my opinion. This is not to say the original NWN is not good - it's excellent and I particularly enjoyed the Hordes of Underdark expansion.

I wouldn't miss out on the original NWN, especially because it is very cheap now and you may want to give it and its expansions a play through before NWN2's expansion is released in the fall. It's not required - I can only think of two characters, for example, that are in both NWN+expansions and NWN2, and there aren't much more than a few passing references to the events that occurred in the first game during the second. If it's one or the other I'd go with NWN2 - already played through it four times and only went through NWN and two expansions once - that may say something.

***Also, the older "Platinum" version of NWN is the one with only two expansions (Shadows of Undrentide, Hordes of the Underdark), the newer "Diamond" version has both of those plus Kingmaker (Kingmaker, Witch's Wake, and ShadowGuard modules.) Make sure to get Diamond if you decide to go for it, I unfortunately bought Platinum not knowing that at the time Diamond had just been released :(.