The chat window occasionally locking over the button prompts, meaning you can’t talk to anyone or attack anything until you bring up the chat and put it away again. Some items not working when you try to assign them to a quick slot, meaning you have to manually activate them from your inventory. Pausing and selecting the map only for it to sometimes not open (meaning you have to do it again). Those are the more major examples there are plenty of smaller ones. The game glitched out and didn’t give us the option to talk to them, leaving us stuck in a situation where we couldn’t go back through the door to leave instead, we found our helper character constantly saying “I can do this” and punching hell out of the door to no effect at all. There are wild stutters all over the place, it almost constantly feels like it’s chugging and in some situations in particular – such as one of the premium modules that starts outside a burning house – it completely collapses and begins to resemble a website’s screenshot gallery instead of an actual moving game.įor example, there’s a scene in the Prologue where there’s a short fight in a stable, then you have to talk to two NPCs before you can leave the room. It aims for 30 frames per second, but hits its target about as often as a seven-year-old footballer doing a crossbar challenge. Shadows appear out of nowhere, draw distances are abysmal in outdoor scenes and the text is occasionally pixellated and hard to read.īy far the biggest victim, however, is the frame rate.
While you can forgive the low-poly designs of the characters and environments – it’s too much to ask for everything in the game to be rebuilt – there are other issues that really could have had a bit more time spent on them. To be clear, Neverwinter Nights was never a looker in the first place a review on GameSpy (RIP) from back in 2002 stated that the game already looked dated at launch, saying: “you can tell this game has been in development for five years”.
Make your way through all that and there are 10 ‘premium modules’ – these are the aforementioned extra adventures that used to be sold separately, but now they’re all available as part of a single free download. There’s an absolute shedload to see here, too as well as the main adventure itself you also get the two major expansion packs that were released for the game, Shadows of Undrentide and Hordes of the Underdark. Once you eventually get into it, it can be extremely compelling and hours will become mere dust. This is classic BioWare, from the days before dodgy alternative endings and grindy Destiny rivals. The writing is brilliant and genuinely amusing at times, the soundtrack is brilliant and the environments – though clearly showing their age now – still do a good job of getting across the idea that this is a living, breathing world. Neverwinter Nights absolutely deserves the praise it got back in the day, and at its core, many of the factors that contributed to that praise are still here. Look, just stick with us here.įirst, let’s look at the positives. It’s extremely distracting, but you’re enjoying their company, so you pretend not to notice.Ĭould you keep that renewed friendship going, though? Would you be able to invite them over to your house, or go to the pub with them, or join them in an anti-government protest if you knew that every time you were with them, their eye would keep falling out and splashing weird eye fluid everywhere? That’s our problem with Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition. Now imagine if you and your newly-reunited chum went out for dinner to catch up, and while you’re sharing old memories and happily discovering they haven’t changed one bit, you can’t help noticing that their eyeball keeps falling out and landing in their soup. You spent ages with them back in the day and over time you just drifted apart, but now you’re finally face-to-face with them again and you realised you’re delighted to see them after all this time. Imagine if you bumped into an old friend you hadn’t seen in 17 years.