I'm not even interested in it, because of the bad customer reviews

All I've seen have been 5/5s and 10/10s. Wasn't it made GotY or GotM or
something?

Regardless, I'm not interested because frankly, there's still plenty of room
for improvement -without- making everyone who plays here buy and
install a new game.

The requirements have been seriously jacked up from NWN original and you really get very little for it. The 50 hour new campaign is decently put together but none of the view options work very well to play the game in realtime. You will spend half the game repositioning the camera. Game plays slow on my machine, which only a year old 2ghz Dell with a gig of ram and I have a reasonably new 256 meg graphics card. Heck, I play Oblivion reasonably well with less than full graphics, but I can't make this game work and let me tell you.. this is no Oblivion. Graphics are a slight improvement over NWN original but they are bellow par for any PC game I have seen come out in a year. I am very disappointed. Obsidian Entertainment never failed me before, but this game is a failure.

NWN is a fun, exciting story that is unfortunately swallowed alive by its own technical limitations. I won't say much about the game quality other than to say that long time fans of Black Isle games will recognize the fun and depth built into NWN2, and the story is everything you would expect from the successor to Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, and Neverwinter Nights 1. Sadly, the fun of playing through the story is quickly swallowed up by the frustration of fighting the game's significant technical flaws.

The user interface, and particularly the camera control, is horrendous. Any time you enter one of the game's many tight, swirvy dungeons, count on stopping to adjust the camera angle every few minutes as it gets hung up on seemingly every wall, plant, or chunk of rock within throwing distance. You may miss much of the game's more impressive eye candy as the camera points uselessly off at nothing or grants you an extreme closeup of a patch of dirt on the wall.

Sadly, the technical issues with NWN2 don't stop with the UI. Independent reviews at Gamespot confirm what countless users on Atari and Black Isle support forums are reporting: achieving a playable framerate (> 30 FPS) in this game requires significantly better hardware than that which is "recommended" by the box.

Users logging onto the Atari & Black Isle support forums are consistently reporting single digit framerates in almost all areas of the game. My own impression, based on many hours scouring the forums, and on my own in-game experiences, is that if you have the absolute best hardware available on the market, and you turn *all* of the graphics options down to "mid grade" or lower, you can expect to see about 25 - 30 FPS. If you have the hardware "recommended" by the box, and you turn all of the graphics options all the way down (disabling any optional eye candy), you can expect 5 - 15 FPS, complemented by a constant 100% utilization of both CPU & GPU (is it a bad sign when CPU utilization remains at 100% just looking at the game's main menu?).

Unfortunately, Atari and Black Isle support have left their userbase without a solution to these issues, reporting that they have been unable to reproduce any of the performance problems reported on their support forums. Personally I find it hard to believe they are unable to reproduce what is a seemingly ubiquitous set of problems, but either way they have yet to release a patch or troubleshooting step that has provided a resolution to the many users experiencing significant performance issues with NWN2.

Given the many technical issues this game suffers, I cannot recommend it to any but the most die-hard fans, and even then I cannot recommend it to anyone who's hardware is less than the best the market has to offer.

NWN2 is a great jump forward in terms of visual effects. I find the playability, however to be somewhat lacking. What I find most disappointing is the fact that I feel as if I'm being led by the nose through the game. It's a very linear sequence of scenes that allows for almost no deviation. This is a turn-off in traditional RPGing and it's a turn-off in computer RPGing too.

My other major gripe is the number of NPCs. Having a party of four reduces the player to being a spectator more often than not. I often feel like the computer is playing against itself.

Overall, I think I liked the original NWN better. They should have spent less time of fancy graphics and more time of game/plot design.

Wonder what you've been reading...

for once, Nik's right

And for once Adrian isn't a complete jer- oop, nevermind.