Good
:1. Battles can be difficult and sometimes extremely difficult - AWESOME! You actually need to plan out party builds and battle strategy as a result.
2. Overland map - good. Your "map" is now fully explorable with unique terrain (..rather than point n' click destinations). Load times are not nearly as bad for me (on a modest system) as others have been complaining about. Usually within 30 seconds except for spawns on the portion available with EL 15-17 opponents. If you have the attention span of a gnat and/or a system that should have been recycled quite some time ago, look else-where.
3. Skills - *vast* improvement. There is so much going on here that it would be difficult to correctly gauge just how far the system has been improved upon. In conjunction with a multi-player party system and the alteration to "resting" and character death, it actually feels more like D&D (..though it still isn't turn-based or provided as an option.. BOO! ).
4. Disable Traps, Set Traps, and Open Locks - good. Though these do fall under the heading of "skills" generally, they are improved upon in some more specific respects. Disabling traps and opening locks now provide experience points. There are also high damage potential traps in-game in a few critical locations and on more than a few chests. Additionally, you can now craft traps and set them that are strong enough to actually harm or even kill something - traps that even decent evasion/reflex save-type characters might have a difficult time with. (..unfortunately though the "weak" variety for the first 1/3rd of the game is pretty much useless when you might want to actually use them.) (..An irritating aspect here was the average "roll" for trap disabling seemed to be skewed in favor of the trap - with critical failures and "1's" happening all to often even with a purist Rogue.)
5. Dialogue checks - *vast* improvement. This is of course also integrated with skills generally. Again however, the improvement here is significant - each party member has the *potential* for their own dialogue check based on skills. This tends to increase the personality of characters in your party - even your own "made by you" characters. It also increases their utility beyond simple offensive/defensive tactics. Here I give the developers "prop.s" - they put in quite a variety of different dialogue in-game, that probably wasn't at all easy to do. Unfortunately its also let down in-game by a plethora of generic response available to *every* character. (..simply limiting the generic dialogue to the party's leader could have solved this minor nuisance, and a random distributor of generic response would have been better still.) Also, they could have done more, specifically with alignment choices and altering alignment (..see the "Bad" section below).
6. Removal of uber equipment/uber crafting - yeah! Fighters in 3rd edition D&D have been improved with Feats - BUT in previous versions of NWN's 2 they can become "uber" all on their own with all kinds of different OVER-powered equipment - NOT with multi-class perks. Whats the point then of choosing anything other than a Fighter? One of the most disturbing was/is the inclusion of immunity to mind effects. To the best of my knowledge there are only 3 items in-game that offer this - a staff that a fighter couldn't use, and two different versions of umber hulk armor that are only *potentially* offered, and even then its an either/or situation (..you can't get both sets). Like-wise crafting no longer provides either the attack or damage bonuses of before.. AND if you want more damage then you have to be more selective in your enchantment (i.e. with "Bane" weapons). Attribute bonuses are still a little to high here IMO, but reasonably balanced within the game's encounters. Access to regeneration is virtually non-existent. Damage resistance is broken (a bug), and damage reduction is rare and fairly appropriate to encounters. Elemental resistance is still "uber" and available, but not terribly useful. AC crafting *can* be "uber", BUT it again is appropriate to encounters.
7. Removal of Sneak Attack and Critically immune opponents - yeah! Sure, there are a few, but they are generally rare and seem appropriate to the module's progression. There are undead, but they aren't pervasive. (..this in combination with the Rogue's wide variety of skills actually makes the class viable again.)
8. "Front" musical score - fantastic. Actually ALL the music on this particular game is good if not great. The problem is that a fair bit of it is repeated *way* to much. (..in fact for random spawns I have to mute the system or be driven nutty) This is NOT a fault of the composer/musicians though - and frankly just the "front" music that loads with the menu screen is superb, easily the best I've heard in a game in quite some time. Its VERY theatrical and makes me
each time I load up the game now. Mediocre
:9. Basic plot - slightly better than OK. There aren't many plot twists, but there are a few that aren't entirely predictable. It's fairly straight-forward plot with some ambiguity on alignment choices. In this respect then it is more "real" than other modules have been. At the same time though the basic plot just doesn't have quite the "panache" that a developer created module should have. It also has a few cheesy site encounters on the overland map that are purposefully misleading with headings like: "Barrow" (a.k.a. "undead located here"), and then tooling you around with something quite different. Once is OK.. but its more than once and it reeks of "amateur hour".
10. Voice Acting with hireling/cohorts & NPC's - good and bad ='s OK. First of all there isn't a whole lot of it for any one character except Volo. Where voice acting is in moderate abundance - its actually quite good (Volo and Sa'sani) - with voices that "fit" the personality of the character. There are even a few completely non-essential characters with good voice acting (like Na'sirin and the tiefling merchant). Unfortunately there were also numerous uses of certain actors for different NPC's with no real change in voice from one NPC to the next.. CHEESY! Example: Na'sirin's voice seemed to "emanate" from at *least* two other notable "bad guys". (..sadly this along with the pitiful "site depth" screamed *low budget*.) Perhaps worse - Khelgar's voice (and dialogue script) wasn't even close to the original excellent (if stereotypical) character in the original campaign. Voice acting was also hit and miss with the hirling/cohorts, and was overall largely non-existent (..again, LOW BUDGET.) Still, what little there was here *was* different and did make a "stab" at some personality. (..one final negative "comment" here: why in he!! did the Yuan-Ti abominations have normal voices?
)11. The other additions - OK. Races, Feats, Classes, "set" design - not a lot going on here.
12. Character Death - OK. It's still to easy to revive characters in-game, BUT it is more restrictive than before. Similar to, but not as good/difficult as, BG2. It needs work.
13. Resting - barely acceptable. It's much more difficult to rest now than before - however that can be *too* easily compensated for with a modicum of sense with party/character builds (..good Hide and modest Survival). At the same time though its also more restrictive than it should be - if you have immediately cleared out a dungeon you should have at LEAST one opportunity to rest in that dungeon without any negative consequences, as set-up in SOZ that is NOT the case. It needs a lot more work.
14. Spawns - good and bad ='s OK. There are *way* to many spawns on the overland map. Literally every 5-10 seconds there is a new monster spawn that wants to "own" you. The easy remedy to this is a high hide or move silently skill for the character selected on the overland map. Problem here is that its a little *too* easy to overcome the random encounter with a decent party build. On the other hand with a good build its nice to be able to do some "pick and choose" encounter "grinding"/leveling (a.k.a. trolling for experience points). The actual battle itself is also a little too generic. Someone described this as "bowling for monsters" because the monsters tend to "set-up" like the typical triangle shaped bowling pin configuration down a bowling-lane like "alley". Its an apt description. While there isn't a whole lot of variety here, it does provide something somewhat unique to the Neverwinter series: your "game" for a day *could* be constricted to grinding for level - AND allow you a personal life. In other words it may provide you with some level of almost mindless entertainment for a fairly brief period.
15. Crafting system - changed yet again.
It's overall easier (mechanically), but that isn't necessarily a good thing - in that it tends to take away some of the "feel" of crafting your own specialized equipment. Ingredients now seem to be either extremely difficult to find or are little more than an after thought - and that's when they are needed at all. For the most part they aren't needed at all. "Essences" drops are still in the game but don't seem to have any use. The best part of it here though is that a: it's recipe restricted which means that obtaining a recipe can and is more restricted based on encounters and module progression (..though it was only handled moderately well in SOZ); b: you don't have to personally memorize every freak'in recipe you might be interested in (..and it's automatically contained within a book, not strewn across your inventory sheets 
). continued..
