Neverwinter Nights 2 is another game of BioWare second in the Neverwinter Nights series. It's with D&D rules and the story plays in the Forgotten Realms near Neverwinter. It has decent 3D graphics, requires a strong GPU/CPU combo to play. Using this guide I could install and play NWN2 with wine 0.9.52 plus the additional native dlls of Windows (devenum, dxdiagn, d3dx9_30, imm32, ms vc80 dlls and such) and a little registry tailoring with wine's regedit. Tested it for some couple of hours, configuring 3D options and playing. Works good so far, slower than in Windows although but only a few drawbacks in the graphics with the similar look. One major problem is the small map is not working as you can see it on the shots. I will modify this post later if more things turn out. I have installed Mask of The Betrayer expansion and am playing it - as I've already finished the original one (under Windows).
I could easily patch the game in offline mode to the latest NWN2 final patch set. I only had to download the update zip files (around 240 MB). Combats and such work with good speed. I had to switch shadows off, bloom on, water reflections off, water refraction on. Without these I had some problems with the shaders of the game. Turning shadows off means a large cut on GPU stress and it made the game rather playable with medium look distance in 1280x1024 with my configuration.I've found an open bug in wine's bug tracker. There's a workaround for non displaying maps in outdoor area: http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9193#c15. ("Pressing ALT-ENTER twice...") No luck with indoor though.
The installation of the expansion was pretty straightforward without any errors. To apply the latest patches I had to rename the nwn2_pcx1_*.zip files to nwn2_pc_*.zip to make it work with the offline installation. I've started the campaign with my good old wizard/pale master combination, level 18. Playing the expansion I have not met any critical bug yet. I've patched the game to the latest expansion patch available. One mediocre problem I've found is the rest option getting stuck. I had to restart the game to be able to rest. (I remember that this happened once in plain NWN2 under Windows too.) This occurred only once so far in a gaming of 4-5 hours. Also going to the shadow plane once resulted in the gray shader blocking the view from above. (Restarting the game helped.) So far that's about the expansion.
