Neverwinter Nights 2: Storm of Zehir Preview

Wired's Game|Life blog has a new preview up for NWN2 expansion Storm of Zehir, focusing on the party mechanics of the game.
Combat, interaction with the world, and leveling your characters all use basically the same mechanics that NWN fans have enjoyed since the first NWN game, only now you're able to see the world through the eyes of three additional people.

Say your rogue happens to be wandering through a dungeon and you happen upon a group of zombies. In Neverwinter Nights, this would precede a long, dangerous fight with the undead, but in NWN2: SoZ, assuming you were smart and added a cleric to your party, you can simply switch over to your cleric with a single button press or mouse click and cast Turn Undead, before switching over to your Wizard to nuke the abominations in a fiery explosion.

This versatility extends beyond combat as well. If you (hypotheticaly) happen upon a vain woman who can only be convinced to help your party if you stroke her ego, but your main character lacks the charm to woo the lady, it's a simple matter of switching to whichever of your party members happens to be the most suave and carrying on the conversation that way.

At first glance I was convinced that this new system would make the game incredibly easy, but instead it serves to make SoZ more easily resemble the pen-and-paper Dungeons & Dragons games from which the computer series was spawned.