Alright, so now that I've finished the first game a month ago, I figure NWN 2 will be a fitting title to close out the summer. You gave me a lot of good advice on the first game Gargaune, are your mod recommendations still firm a year after this thread was made? Anything else I should pick up?
Also, are there any nasty bugs to look out for? Broken quests? Romance obliterations? (Lord knows HOTU had it's share) Other annoyances? I'd rather spend an hour fixing whatever it is before I start rather than mid-thrust into the campaign.
Yeah, I'd say so. I never tried Rusty's fixpack, but I'm happy with my setup, see no need to change it at this point. Ironically, for all its UI issues, engine bugs and dreadful OC, I've found NWN2 to be among the less buggy Obsidian releases where gameplay content and systems are concerned. At least now, anyway.
Two things I'm particularly concerned with are firstly this business with game performance... that degrades somehow if I shut down my PC? Am I getting that right? How bad does it get, because I don't fancy leaving my machine on and putting more time on the components than is strictly necessary in this economy.
The opposite - it degrades if you
don't shut down your PC. And it's not performance per se, just animations. Your OS has an up timer that resets on power cycles and NWN 2's engine has a bug where the longer you go between cold boots, the more animations begin to stutter. It starts being noticeable around 3 or so days in, I'd say.
The simple solution is to just reboot your PC every three or four days while NWN2's on the menu. And I mean
Restart, not Sleep/Hibernate in and out. Even Shut Down might not work if you use Fast Startup (which you shouldn't), so make sure you Restart. You'll notice when the stuttering gets visible, so no worries about that.
Your other options are the NWN2 Client Extension - which I
don't recommend because while it fixes the animation jitter, it introduces massive game stuttering in complex AI pathfinding situations - or the Jade Empire Stutter Fix which I added to this guide back in January on RunningWolf's suggestion. The latter is what I'm using now but it's a .dll from some random archived webpage, so you gotta decide for yourself whether you wanna take that risk.
Separately, you might notice a slight choppiness to camera rotation - this is not related and there is no fix, so just gotta get used to it.
Secondly, I may be misremembering but does NWN 2 do the KotOR II thing where if you bash containers it partially destroys the loot? I seem to remember being told this is the case.
I didn't remember anymore so I had a quick look at turned
this up on the vault:
It seems there is a script that comes with the game that adds random loot to containers, called gp_treasure_op_de. When used as an OnOpen script it generates items normally, but when used as an OnDeath script it adds broken items to the inventory of the destroyed container. It's usually used in both script slots at the same time.
So yes, if you bash stuff open you'd be missing out on generic leveled loot.
Lastly, NWN 1 and its expansions seemed to me particularly tailored to a Paladin main character, is there any such tailoring in this game? Thanks.
Mechanically? I might've taken a Paladin through way back when NWN2 was new, but I don't remember anymore. There's plenty of evil to smite and undead to turn, but I don't recall the base campaign being
tailored for a Pally.
From a roleplaying perspective, the OC suffers from a similar predetermined background as Baldur's Gate. I'm not really spoiling anything if I tell you that you start out as a swamp farmer, and a young, adopted one at that. If you care about that sort of thing and you're going the martial route, a Ranger might be more thematically appropriate.
Edit: Incidentally, I have the retail Gold collection + retail Storm of Zehir. Is there anywhere to purchase a key for just Mysteries at Westgate? I don't particularly want to have to buy the game again.
No, I don't think so. If you want to buy it, you might wanna keep an eye on GOG while you play other NWN2 campaigns and see if it goes on a deep sale.
Gonna play them all because some of the sidequests in NWN 1 OC were quality. Curious if that will hold true for NWN 2 as well.
Eh, worth a shot but just remember, if you start getting frustrated, spoil yourself the rest of the OC and move on to MotB. The worst part of the OC in my book is the second chapter, in Neverwinter proper.
There's no reason to delay that Thayan romance.
Oh, I can think of one reason... Kinda blueish, pair of big white wings, lovely soothing voice. Gotta give Avellone credit, he knows how to troll his players.
By the by, MotB had some excellent VO all around. I don't usually care much either way, but they really nailed it here.
Where is 
But yes, you have one available through the entire campaign.
