List Price: $29.99Amazon.com's Price: $26.15 You Save: $3.84 (13%)as of 11/23/2009 14:24 EST
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Amazon Minimum Age: 144 months
Binding: Video Game
Brand: Atari
EAN: 0742725276253
ESRB Age Rating: Teen
Format: DVD-ROM
Item Dimensions: 12575070525
Label: Atari
Manufacturer: Atari
Model: 27635
MPN: 27625
Number Of Items: 1
Platform: Windows
Publisher: Atari
Release Date: May 06, 2008
Studio: Atari
Features:- Bundle includes: Neverwinter Nights 2 and Neverwinter Nights 2 Mask of the Betrayer
- Singleplayer or online multiplayer
- Over 50 hours of gameplay
- Create your own adventures and share them with your friends
- Play your adventure as the Dungeon Master
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
Neverwinter Nights 2 Gold combines Neverwinter Nights 2, the sequel to one of the best-selling and genre-defining role-playing games ever, and Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer, which allows you to advance to epic levels (above 20) and choose from over 100 spells.
Average Rating: 
Rating:  -
It might be enough to just sum up what many others have said -- it's buggy, unstable, and often feels incomplete. It takes many unnecessary creative liberties with 3.5 D&D mechanics. It seems to run more slowly than it should, even with graphics turned down.
I've tried to play this game many times and like it. I love 3.5 D&D, I loved NWN1 and loved one of its expansions (sorry, Shadows of Undrentide), and I thought I was in for another good experience. Instead, the game features a boring storyline, frustratingly bad character models, a very counterintuitive modding system, and a serious lack of forethought in regards to balancing game mechanics. Playing through the first 5 levels or so of a Warlock is an achievement worthy of a medal. Or god forbid you decide to make a character in the original campaign with one of the two new base classes from MotB -- you get no starting equipment! To boot, half the Cleric buff spells just don't do what they say they do (let alone what they're supposed to do in 3.5), lots of spells are in the wrong school or have saving throws added for no reason, and plenty of fun, old-fashioned core spells just aren't there. On top of that, even if you find one or two spells that you really like and want to just fill your prepared slots with them, you can't! They still haven't implemented the simple ability to fill a slot with a lower-leveled spell. For the non-spellcasting types, staple feats like Power Attack still function like NWN1, where they have a fixed cost and return. Some of the fun PrCs, like Pale Master, were hit so bad that they're useless.
Let's say that you want to download one of the many high-quality mods that can fix some of these issues. If more than one of them modifies the dialog.tlk file, then guess what? You can only have one of them at a time! If you want to use mods that are easy, drag-and-drop affairs, then you have to make sure that no two mods are modifying the same .2da file, or else you'll have to find another program to merge them -- and I couldn't find any that worked. If you want to use mods that are in hakpaks, which don't have the .2da problem, then you'll have to open them individually with the toolkit and assign them to modules a la carte. And you're still out of luck if more than one of them want to make changes to dialog.tlk. AND you have to manually back up your old dialog.tlk in case they patch the game again, although I doubt that it would happen at this point or even make a difference in the long run.
I know a lot of the mechanical complaints are just as pertinent to NWN1; however, NWN1 was the company's first 3e D&D game, and NWN1 had a more engaging story and overall a much better gaming experience. If nothing else, the in-game cutscenes were vastly superior in the first game. Remember Mephistopheles walking through the vast expanse of corpses as they were reanimated in his wake? Nothing nearly as awesome to be had here. Now, I'll admit that Mask of the Betrayer is marginally more fun than the original campaign, but it's still not as good as the first game. Right as soon as it starts to get really fun, they introduce a new meter for you to keep track of, with scaling debuffs and everything. It's like I bought a new D&D game and they forgot to mention that I would have to play through the entire campaign as a spiritual vampire. If the rest of the campaign wasn't so linear I might not have minded so much, but I really hate being railroaded, just like the quests to gain entry into Neverwinter railroad your alignment in Act II of the original campaign.
Overall, I'd have to give it 2.5 stars for fun, but it's really not worth the time or money. NWN1 and the expansions are much more fun, more forgiving of older computers (which is sad, as my desktop is just ahead of what was cutting-edge when NWN2 was released), and these days they're probably a lot cheaper too.
Rating: -
My computer pretty much meets the minimum specs for this game, but my processor speed is a little slow. I do have a quad-core processor which usually makes up for the speed requirement in games. Advertized minimum spec processor speed is 3.5 GHz, recommended 4 GHz. Amazon doesn't state this in the ad I recall reading, and it's a good idea for potential buyers to know.
The game experience is a different format than the original -- several new character classes, new customizing options. You don't choose in-game portraits yourself like in the original.
Gameplay experience is generally great, except for some periods of lag-like slowdowns I attributed to my slower processor. learning curve with party selection modes took some time.
The expansion "Mask of the Betrayer" gives more race/class options and ability options. I am impressed with the Planetouched races.
In the original NWN game I used to have a lot of trouble getting back to desktop and then returning to game [on returning to game, I was unable to use the mouse or any keys to progress further in the game]. This problem was never solved with any patches.
That problem doesn't exist in NWN2.
Rating:  -
I bought the gold edition thinking all the bugs were fixed.
First I downloaded and installed a ton of extra patches that took so long, I just left the machine running for well over an hour (8mg download speed)
Then when creating characters, some of the bodies were missing. I loaded the game and would be just a floating head, or body with no head.
I deleted and reinstalled the game. I didn't patch it this time and everything appeared to work fine. I tried to complete the very first quest in the game and couldn't. Eventually I searched online and found that the first quest had a bug and you needed to download a patch to fix it. So I did that and then my head disappeared again, along with my armor etc.
In the end, the most satisfaction I got from the game is snapping it too pieces.
BIOWARE, please don't sell licenses to Obsidian, they SUCK
Rating:  -
Gold includes the both the original game as well as the mask of the betrayer expansion.
The I recommend playing NW2, then Neverwinter Nights 2: Storm of Zehir Expansion, then Mask of the Betrayer for reasons listed on the review for Zehir. Of the three games, Mask of the Betrayer is definitely the hardest.
One of the things that makes the Mask of Betrayer difficult is the Spirit meter. If you decide it's not worth playing with the Spirit Meter you can instantly reset it to 100 with the following cheat:
DebugMode 1
rs Ka_se_init
Overall I liked the story better than the original NWN, but not as much as the Bauldur's Gate series. NWN2 maxes at level 20, MoB at level 30. When given the chance I'd probably eat the bear if I played it again. There's lots of crafting in these games, but I was too lazy for that.
Rating: -
Pros: The main quest has an awesome story, like it was part of NWN1. The character crator is nifty, the graphics are nice, I didn;t run into any bugs. BotB wasn't as interesting a story, but it gets points for being unique, you know, like getting to be a zombie-pirate in a NWN premium mod, only this one has portals & a parallel town, a bit like Silent Hill I suppose. What Obsidian & Ossian don't deliver in the way of premium mods can be aquired from the NWN2 Vault (user-made mods website),
Cons: The cons go to the other premium mods/expansion packs for NWN2 that aren't part of this package. They lack story & play more like Heroes of Might & Magic, only you can avoid the random encounters. Comparing them to NWN1's awesome extras is like comparing a pile of rocks to a plate of frash baked cookies. Mysteries of Westgate did finally come out (no thanks to Atari) but reviews clam that it plays just like Storm of Zahir. Concidering that BioWare turned it focus on Dragon Age after BotB came out, I'd say that the premium mods/expansions were an afterthought.
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