This is the battle - here and now. It is not the anticipated battle between Oblivion and Gothic 3 for superiority in the seemingly endless battle between the Elder Scrolls and Gothic series. No, it is a much more basic battle for the RPG genre - and it is between Oblivion and Neverwinter Nights 2. It isn't about whether or not they are good games - both are excellent - but what they mean to the genre, and what they say about the future of the genre.

But let's start talking about Neverwinter Nights 2 by talking about the original Neverwinter Nights. That game was amazingly successful, despite being in a position that suggests disappointment - it followed on the heels of the beloved Baldur's Gate series, was the subject of much pre-release hype, and promised to break new ground in several new areas at once. Yet after four years, two expansions and six premium modules, the game is still enormously popular as a single player and multiplayer experience, as well as maintaining myriad persistent worlds and fan modules. The toolkit has been used to create modules so large and deep (such as the recent Darkness Over Daggerford) that they rival full RPGs released by commercial studios. Yet the original campaign released with the game shows up regularly on 'most disappointing' lists for hardcore gamers, many of whom put in several hours a week playing the game in modules and multiplayer sessions. For them the original content created by Bioware was more of a demo of some possibilities than an interesting story worthy of carrying the game. Indeed, through the years the original game has been in continuous development, with tremendous amounts of community support. That is the legacy that Neverwinter Nights 2 inherits.

Neverwinter Nights 2 looks to make advances in all of the same areas as the original - strong single player content, solid multiplayer experience, excellent toolkit and support for all aspects of the user community. It is very successful as a game and as a sequel. As a game it is solid and fun, delivering dozens of hours of interesting and challenging role-playing. The role of a sequel is to feel at once new and familiar, fresh and accessible. Neverwinter Nights 2 does an excellent job of bringing new things to an existing and well-established genre - you get the same action-packed turn-based combat, interesting story and characters as before, but the roles of the party members are much greater than before. Indeed, for the first time since Baldur's Gate 2 you feel like you are really leading a party of disparate individuals requiring your attention and adding to your experience.

One significant difference from the original game is the use of the updated AD&D 3.5 rule set. The changes here are not on the scale of those made between the version 2.0 and 3.0 rule sets - which was reflected in many of the character and class differences between Baldur's Gate 2 and the original Neverwinter Nights. Changes to the rule system this time are largely about balancing the characters. For example, people who played a Sorcerer in Neverwinter Nights could change all of their spell choices every level, and also casting haste spells would allow them to cast extra spells per round. Now they can only change spells occasionally, and haste doesn't impact spell casting. Indeed, haste has been significantly limited - you can no longer have items that are permanently hasted, similar to items that cast a permanent light source; instead items allow you to cast the haste spell multiple times a day, similar to other enchanted items.

The next difference is in the graphics and performance. There is a clear progression in the look of recent Bioware and Obsidian games from Knights of the Old Republic to KOTOR 2: The Sith Lords, and now from Neverwinter Nights to Neverwinter Nights 2. Each game looks better than the last, but the performance suffers greatly. It isn't just the absolute performance either - it's the relative performance, or the way a game looks compared to how it runs on a computer that meets the recommended specifications. The original Neverwinter Nights looked and performed very well even on systems just passing the minimum system requirements. The sequel, however, is a pig. It is certainly better looking that the original - or even the more recent KOTOR 2: The Sith Lords, and the details and environments are nicely done. But even on systems exceeding the recommended system requirements, the performance is not very good, with frequent drops in frame rate. It is possible to get solid performance by tweaking your settings and figuring out your system bottlenecks and getting good performance, but for too many this game is just frustrating in terms of performance.

Playing NN2 is very similar to the original in terms of character creation, advancement and progression through the story. You create a character based on all of the usual D&D characteristics - gender, race, class, skills & feats, and so on. You can modify the appearance of your character, but if you are looking to spend thirty minutes making your character's chin look like your favourite TV character then you should just return to Oblivion now. Once you are ready to explore, the game begins. You start off as a simple villager in training with one of several local residents, depending on which class you selected during character creation, and proceed through a Harvest Fair section that also serves as a tutorial. From there the action immediately picks up and you need to put your new skills into practice. The game is turn-based, but you can play it almost entirely as an action RPG if you choose. You can click the ground to move to a location, or use the 'WASD' keys to walk around in third person mode. You attack simply by clicking on a hostile target, or you can select a special skill or spell to use on an enemy. You have an action queue that displays four items at a time, but that can stack commands up to eighteen deep. This is very useful late in the game when you need to make sure one of your party is carrying out a particular task while you control characters engaged in combat.

The party system has changed considerably from the original game - and entirely for the good. Well, perhaps there is one downside - if you are a spellcaster then you will find that your familiar is much more ornamental than your previous true companion. That is not a major loss though, especially since you get a party of characters instead of the henchmen from Neverwinter Nights. This means that they all are fully developed characters with needs and wants that you must work with - in the original game there was a side quest to get at your henchman's history in order to gain special powerful items. Some of the characters you meet up with are fairly ordinary archetypes, but there are several very interesting characters that definitely spice up things on your travels. And similar to some of the better party based RPGs, your companions don't always agree with you - and aren't afraid to say something! The influence system shown in KOTOR 2 is used to great effect here, as your standing with certain characters impacts quests, obtaining items and even the end of the game! There are some issues with the dialogue with party members though - outside of triggered time when you can have certain discussions, they have little to say, but that won't stop them from repeating the same conversation over and again.

The story is very good overall, but is nothing surprising or particularly innovative - there is no 'Revan moment' here. But that doesn't make the story a failure - in fact, it allows breadth in other areas. As mentioned before, the characters in your party are interesting, with distinct personalities and histories that add to the experience. Also, there are a number of major elements of the game that are more about expanding gameplay than adding to the story (I'll not spoil it here, but suffice it to say one of these also features in the 'Darkness Over Daggerford' module for NN). There are romantic options for male and female characters, but evidently only heterosexual choices (sorry Juhani lovers). The romance is only slightly different from the typical quest-oriented romance found in most RPGs, as it is your actions and decisions that decide what will happen.

Although many people complain about the system requirements and performance, a more divisive issue is the sound. More specifically, they complain about the reuse of audio assets from the original game. The soundtrack is once again varied and stirring, with sweeping themes appropriate to each situation and location. While the music and voices are new and very well done, the sounds of spellcasting and other effects are identical to those from the original game. Does this matter? It depends on your view of what should be in a new game and also your opinion of the original Neverwinter Nights. If you loved the original then this won't be an issue - unless you feel strongly that a sequel should not have anything carried directly from its predecessor. In my opinion the sound works very well throughout the game and I welcomed the familiar themes.

The gameplay is very linear - both in terms of the story progression and the area layout. There are a few puzzles that suggest non-linearity, but for the overwhelming majority of the time all you need to do is talk to a few people and move to different areas and you will get through the main quest in forty to sixty hours. Is this good or bad? That really depends on how you play the game and your personal preference. Personally I prefer more actual non-linearity, but who just wants to play the main quest anyway? The greater joy in role-playing games comes from exploring every nook and cranny, every last possible side quest available to test your character. Since Neverwinter Nights 2 is alignment and class-based, each character can have a significantly different game experience - not everyone is going to want to walk in the footsteps of a Paladin as I did on my first time through, but trying different combinations of class and alignment allows you to experience a greater depth out of the game.

My personal preference is towards single player gaming over multiplayer. So after completing the game for the first time I immediately looked for some user-made modules to download. There are already a few, and while they are certainly not of the size and scope of much of the work that has recently been done on the original Neverwinter Nights, they look and play perfectly - and give me great hopes for excellent modules coming out soon.

Of course, much of the life expectancy of a game is due to multiplayer. For role-playing games this often consists of playing single player campaigns cooperatively rather than using computer controlled characters. Other times, players create custom campaigns especially for group exploration and combat, with one person playing an active 'dungeon master' similar to pencil-and-paper role-playing games. Still other times, 'persistent world' servers allow players to join and leave as time allows, maintaining records of all player activity and world states. Neverwinter Nights excelled at these, and the sequel looks to deliver similarly. The limited co-op I played ran excellently with no signs of lag or other problems. There are some persistent world servers starting up already, albeit with limited content - within a few months the entire mod community should be thriving.

By now it should be clear that Neverwinter Nights 2 is a game that I really enjoyed, but also one that I have some niggling concerns about. My biggest concern is that the performance and system requirements will turn potential players - and module developers - away from the game, and it won't have the reach and long life of its predecessor. I also wish that the developers had made the game feel more open, and the story more intriguing, but these are small concerns. I heartily recommend getting this game to anyone with a beefy enough system to run it - it will reward you with dozens of hours of gameplay and tremendous replayability through the single player campaign, as well as through online multiplayer and user-created modules. It is the type of game that you will still have on your system three years from now, with extra modules and content piled all over the place. I am further heartened by the obvious commitment Obsidian has already shown through their extensive patches to date - each one significantly reduces the bugs and problems while also improving performance and taking user suggestions into account.

At the beginning of this review I spoke of a battle - between this game and Oblivion. While I greatly enjoyed Oblivion, I have always felt that the design decisions and changes from earlier games made it more like a console action game and less like a PC RPG. Specifically, the lack of choice and consequence throughout the game removed the feeling of playing a 'role' and taking part in a living world being threatened by denizens of evil. That isn't really a shot at the game - it is designed in a way that you could simultaneously be the guild leader in the 'Cheese Lovers Guild' and 'Cheese Haters Guild'. For fans of traditional role playing games it is a significant concern - again, not so much because of Oblivion, since many of us who have concerns about it have put in well over 100 hours and feel we got our money's worth and more. The concern is that given the popularity and influence of the game, every new game bearing the RPG moniker is instantly compared to Oblivion, with similarities being regarded as positives - even when they are elements that were criticized widely in reviews.

Why is this a concern and what does it have to do with Neverwinter Nights 2? It is a concern because there are very few 'traditional' role-playing games made anymore - most are action RPGs, hack-and-slash adventures that look like Diablo or Oblivion, with simple quests spoon-fed to players and explicit map systems making completion as simple as killing everything between point A and B. Neverwinter Nights 2 can play like an action RPG in some ways - a characteristic that brought the original game simultaneous praise and criticism - but underneath the hood there is a fully implemented turn-based party system RPG that shares much with games like Baldur's Gate 2. These games ask you to actually play a role - to be good or evil, lawful or chaotic - in other words, they expect you to become a person within the game world and assume a full set of moral and behavioural characteristics that you will strive to maintain throughout the game - even if it means skipping quests, losing experience and being unable to make use of a particularly cool bit of 'phat lewt'. Your Paladin won't likely find himself in the brothel, while your rogue will find herself losing bits of conversation in distraction at the nice watch on the jacket pocket of the local innkeep. I personally hope that both types of games can continue to be made - but reality tells me otherwise. In the real world, a game that sells tons of copies by appealing to action gamers, FPS fans and RPG fans alike on both PC and console platforms will definitely turn on more light bulbs in the minds of publishers than a relatively strong selling PC-only game with little appeal outside of traditional RPG fans. I see the success of Oblivion translating into fewer games like this gem, and placing more onus on independent developers like Jeff Vogel at SpiderWeb Software to carry the ball for fans of traditional role-playing games. I hope I'm wrong and that in a few years time I will be playing sequels to Oblivion, Gothic and Neverwinter Nights again in the same year. Until then, I need to get back to toasting some Githyanki with fireballs from my female Sorcerer named Trislyn - wish her luck!

Reviewed by Michael Anderson for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).