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Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer

Performance analysis, YouGamers recommendations

The Electron graphics engine, developed by Obsidian for Neverwinter Nights 2, is a big step up technologically from its predecessor. It drops backward compatibility, and only supports DirectX 9 with Shader Model 2 and 3. When it was released in October 2006, NWN2 was both incredibly demanding for the hardware back then, and full of various bugs that crippled both performance and gameplay. Obsidian has released a number of patches to fix these issues, and hardware has been getting faster and cheaper - but despite a full year of maturing, all of the game's performance issues still haven't been solved.

The publisher specifies a rather low-end hardware configuration as the minimum for running Neverwinter Nights 2. With all graphics settings except horizon distance turned to the very minimum, the game still stutters at a rate of 10-15 frames per second at a resolution of 1024x768. This is borderline playable, if you use keyboard shortcuts to select targets and don't mind playing in Strategy mode. Unfortunately the game looks rather unimpressive with minimum graphics settings. Shadows had to be disabled completely to make the game run.

Lowest graphics settings. Shader effects are almost identical on all quality settings, but low quality textures and the lack of shadows makes characters and their surroundings look fake.

The publisher's recommended system runs the game with medium graphics detail, but advanced lighting effects and normal mapping had to be disabled to sustain good frame rates.

With the publisher's recommended settings, we were able to get playable frame rates of 20-30 at a 1280x1024 resolution with dynamic character shadows enabled at low quality, textures set at Medium and all quality options like bloom, normal mapping and grass rendering disabled. Processor speed becomes a bottleneck here, as the rendering thread keeps the processor 100% occupied. The YouGamers minimum system describes the most humble system spec on which you can enjoy the game fully. The main attraction of Neverwinter Nights 2 is its beautiful graphics, and improving graphics quality to medium with the various quality options enabled requires a speed bump for both the video card and processor. Luckily today's mid-end hardware can do more than last year's high-end did - a system capable of NWN2 won't break the bank anymore.

The YouGamers minimum system allows you to see the game the way its graphics designers intended, with no effects disabled. Texture quality remains at medium, but self-shadowing adds contrast to characters.

High graphics settings, playable with the YouGamers recommended system. High quality textures and normal mapping are a perfect combination, and give characters and their surroundings much more visible detail.

Finally, the YouGamers recommended system is the best way you can experience Neverwinter Nights 2. As mentioned earlier, playing the game at high resolutions helps the interface clutter significantly, but that also imposes rather steep requirements for the video hardware. Additionally, the processor must be able to keep up, and unfortunately NWN2 gets little to no benefit from a dual core system. A high-clockspeed single or dual core processor is called for. Even with the YG recommended system, Very High quality shadows were too much for the video card to handle. High and Very High shadows are indistinguishable during gameplay, except from a huge frame rate drop.

Get used to that loading screen

Unlike most other 3D engines designed for top-down RTS or RPG games, Electron manages to push out frames at playable rates when moving, tilting and zooming the camera. On the flip side, the maps are tiny on today's standards, and loading times excruciatingly long. I'm loathe to enter a building, because going in takes such a long time and coming back out even longer. Staring at the loading screen at such frequent intervals disrupts the flow of the adventure. The map designers have tried to make your life a bit easier by placing most merchants outside in a bazaar instead of inside shops, but some puzzles that made me go back and forth between areas just drove me nuts.

Page 1: IntroductionPage 2: GameplayPage 3: Single-player CampaignPage 4: GraphicsPage 5: Tech AnalysisPage 6: MultiplayerPage 7: Conclusion and Final ScoresPage 8: NWN2 Retrospective

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