Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition

Genre: RPG

Players: 1-64 Co-Op / Competitive (Online)

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Review:

Note: Included in Dungeons & Dragons Bundle along with Baldur’s Gate and Baldur’s Gate II: Enhanced Editions and Planescape Torment and Icewind Dale: Enhanced Editions.

After the release of the now-legendary Western RPG Baldur’s Gate on PCs in 1998, developer Bioware followed that game with multiple other similar games using the same game systems, also using the Dungeons and Dragons license but telling different stories set in different areas of the same world. The first game they made to use polygonal graphics was Neverwinter Nights, first released on PC in 2002. The game was subsequently given a remaster on PC and Android in 2018, including all of the game’s expansion content, with a port to consoles, including the Nintendo Switch, coming a year later.

If you read my review of the Nintendo Switch ports of Baldur’s Gate and Baldur’s Gate II Enhanced Edition and Planescape Torment and Icewind Dale: Enhanced Editions, you’ll know that I felt that those collections both suffered severely both for being old games built around old mechanics designed with the PC in mind, and the 2D graphics of those games had aged really poorly. So the question with this release becomes, does it make a difference that this is the most recent of these games to get a remake, and the jump to 3D polygonal graphics?

Welllll… sort of…

I will say that it is a huge improvement not having to constantly fiddle with the zoom function and choose between not seeing any detail in the world and characters, and not being able to have a good sense of your surroundings. But as poorly as the 2D graphics of the other games in this series of Enhanced Editions have aged, I’d argue that the 3D graphics in Neverwinter Nights have fared worse than any of them, save for perhaps the original Baldur’s Gate.

Neverwinter Nights was never an impressive-looking game to begin with, but time has only made its flaws more noticeable. Extremely low-poly characters, bland textures, a featureless sky… however, despite how absolutely archaic this game looks, for some reason it still has frequent framerate issues, with the game at times even stuttering. It is honestly baffling to me how a game that looks this terrible can perform this poorly. Also, while the prior games thankfully let players change the text size, there are only two text size options here: small and microscopic. Oh, one other thing – each time I fired up the game, it made me re-watch the game’s long (and ugly) opening cinematic. Ugh.

And while every one of Bioware’s games up to this point featured a stellar story and world-class voice acting, this time I felt that what was on offer was at best “okay”. The story starts off well enough, with the city of Neverwinter besieged by an undead plague and the queen’s attempts at researching a cure dashed when her academy comes under attack from mysterious forces. Unfortunately, the characters here feel somewhat flat compared to the prior games, and that renders much of the game feeling somewhat generic. And while the voice cast here isn’t horrible, it simply isn’t anywhere near the caliber of the earlier games in the series. I will say that both of these issues seem somewhat better in some of the expansion content, at least.

If there is one area where this game is markedly improved over the other games in this series, it’s the controls, which make the transition to the console much more smoothly this time, although there’s definitely still a learning curve here. It definitely helps that moving a character around a 3D environment is something that feels more at home on a game controller than the earlier games designed around the player constantly being able to click anywhere on the screen.

That said, the controls here are still overly-complicated, requiring players to navigate multiple menus just to do simple things, and even something like buying and selling at a shop can feel cumbersome. As with the prior games, Neverwinter Nights really could have used touchscreen controls in handheld mode, and like the other games, there is no touchscreen support to be found here. Neverwinter Nights does at least improve on the other games by having online multiplayer support for those who want to quest with friends. Oh, and I should also mention that the game’s acclaimed Aurora content creation toolset is nowhere to be found in this version, though I suppose that should come as no surprise.

Here’s the thing, though – Neverwinter Nights first came out in the same year as The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, a game that was already far more ambitious in its massive world and epic story, and today those looking for a Western-style RPG on the Switch can get The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim or The Witcher III, both which far surpass Neverwinter Nights in every way, which really makes this a game only for diehard fans of the original.

Make no mistake, Neverwinter Nights still has a lot of excellent RPG gameplay to enjoy, but you have to be willing to look past a lot to get to it. You have to look past the extremely dated graphics and jarring framerate issues, you have to be willing to look past controls that, while better than the other Enhanced Editions released beside this game, are still pretty cumbersome and user-unfriendly, and you have to look past the other more modern games in the genre that do the same sort of thing this game aims to but much, much better. If you’re a fan of Western RPGs who can look past all of that, you may find this game has a lot to offer you. Otherwise, you’re better off skipping it.

tl;dr – Neverwinter Nights is a remastered port of a 2002 Western RPG originally released on PC, and while this game made the transition to console better than the other games in this series, it is still extremely dated in its graphics and controls, and the story feels lacking compared to the prior games. There’s a lot of quality RPG content here if you’re willing to overlook the many, many ways this game has aged poorly, but most would be better off sticking to more modern games.

Grade: C+

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