Since all your party members are controllable, there's a significant tactical component to battles. Despite this variety, the crux of the Neverwinter Nights 2 experience is the dungeon crawl. Some of the more exotic recruits include a blade golem and a giant spider who inhabit your basement. Like in the Suikoden series, recruitable NPCs are sprinkled around the game's various areas, so it's worth it to pay attention your first time through and remember who to return for. Once obtained you can busy yourself with repairing its various facilities, hiring merchants to peddle wares, implementing tax rates, training troops, improving armor, strengthening the outlying area's infrastructure, and generally making your home more profitable. Acquiring this property isn't a side quest, it's vital to the plot. You'll also find plenty more to do once you're awarded with a stronghold your own personal castle. If you find yourself getting tired of charging through the main narrative, the available side quests are wreathed in enough side narrative to keep them from feeling like repetitive dungeon crawls. Neverwinter Nights 2 features a large amount of voiced dialogue, most of which will pass over your eardrums without inducing a cringe, and occasionally make you laugh along. The plot manages to stay interesting, buoyed by generally strong writing for conversations and the occasional witty quip. Once there, the plot picks up as your various adversaries are unmasked and you can choose a number of paths to move the story forward. From the starting town of West Harbor, it'll be a little while before you reach the city of Neverwinter. Some party members also have side quests you can choose to accept or ignore that involve working out whatever personal issues they may be having, adding alternatives to pursuing main quest. This affects what kind of information that can be extracted from party members during private conversations with them, and ultimately determines whether or not they'll stick with you. Depending on how you choose to go about completing a quest, playing the chivalrous hero or killing everything in sight, you gain influence with those you're traveling with. They all come with unique alignments and personal histories, and frequently pipe up during conversations with NPCs. Though the number of controllable characters will change during the course of the game, you're limited to three main party members in addition to your created character. Still, bringing this back makes the sequel a more enjoyable game to play. Since we've seen this feature before, it really isn't a step forward, rather something that should have been included in the original Neverwinter Nights. This makes playing Neverwinter Nights 2 seem more like the D&D CRPGs of the past. You'll meet quite a few during the single player campaign, all with their own inventories, equippable slots, and the ability to customize their skill allocations upon level up.
The biggest change since the original is the inclusion of fully controllable party members. Four years later, Obsidian Entertainment, those behind Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II, finally released the anticipated sequel. Though it offered online play and a powerful editing toolset with which users could create their own adventures, it stripped out a lot of the single player features that made the previous titles so entertaining. After titles like Baldur's Gate II, Icewind Dale, and Planescape: Torment released, BioWare put out the first Neverwinter Nights in 2002 which brought the sub-genre into 3D. Since BioWare / Black Isle's original Baldur's Gate hit shelves back in 1998, we've seen quite a few high quality games in the same vein. Dungeons & Dragons based computer RPGs have been around for a while now.