Neverwinter Nights 2: Enhanced Edition is good on Steam Deck, but what about Nintendo Switch and Switch 2?
Ahead of its launch today, I've been playing Neverwinter Nights 2: Enhanced Edition on my Steam Deck, ROG Ally, Nintendo Switch, and Nintendo Switch 2 via backward compatibility to see how Aspyr's new release scales across handhelds, how it feels with a controller, online multiplayer impressions, my Steam Deck recommended settings so far, Nintendo Switch 2 and Switch performance impressions, and more.
This release is quite notable because there is no version of Neverwinter Nights 2 available to buy outside of GOG right now, and that version doesn't have controller support. This new Enhanced Edition from Aspyr follows Neverwinter Nights Enhanced Edition handled by Beamdog and ships with the game, expansions For my testing, I've also played a bit of the online multiplayer with Scott, who did our full review of the game. Read it here.
Neverwinter Nights 2: Enhanced Edition PC graphics options
Neverwinter Nights 2: Enhanced Edition on PC has a few graphics options included. These are screen resolution (800x600 to 4K) with support for 120fps in my testing, anti-aliasing mode (Off, MSAA x4, and MSAAx8), texture quality (low, medium, high), shadow options (I'll cover this below), gamma correction, toggle bloom effects, toggle showing lights carried by companions, and toggle v-sync. The shadow options are a bit weird. If you select off, it disables shadows. This is straightforward. Setting it to low means characters drop shadows. Setting it to high means all shadows are enabled. Setting this to medium means the environment shadows are turned off.
When you play on a display or device that supports above 60hz, you can select a resolution with a 60hz target or up to whatever your monitor or display supports. This is the only way to limit the frame rate in-game that I see. There is no dedicated frame limiter.
Neverwinter Nights 2: Enhanced Edition control options
I was most curious about Neverwinter Nights 2: Enhanced Edition's controls. Before getting into the options available, you can swap between controller and keyboard & mouse input options on the fly. The interface will change based on your input method. When using a controller or playing on a handheld with button controls, you can adjust camera and movement sensitivity with their own sliders and also toggle vibration on or off. You seemingly cannot rebind the buttons when using a controller on PC.
When using keyboard & mouse controls, you can rebind various options across movement, gameplay, camera, and more in the key mapping menu that appears when you use the mouse or press a button on the keyboard. This input option also lets you adjust various interface options relating to displaying horizontal and vertical hotbars, display modebars, and many more as you can see in the images. There are three interface options that are common to all input options: tooltip delay, showing health on portrait, and a confirmation for buying and selling.
You can also adjust camera options for both the Strategy (click to move) and Character (direct character control) modes going over inverting camera directions, toggling ceilings on or off, toggling object fading for anything obstructing your view, and enabling the target marker for movement to be visible in Strategy mode.
Neverwinter Nights 2: Enhanced Edition Steam Deck impressions
Before getting into the visuals and performance, Neverwinter Nights 2: Enhanced Edition is Steam Deck Verified already. This was a good sign at least for controls, and I'm glad to report that as someone who never played Neverwinter Nights 2 before, I got used to the controls within a few minutes of playing. The tutorial is great and I think the developers have done a good job translating the gameplay to a controller.
Neverwinter Nights 2: Enhanced Edition supports the Steam Deck's 16:10 aspect ratio and has Steam Cloud support. As for performance, it varies quite a bit. When running the game at 800p and the maximum possible settings which means using MSAA x8, high textures, and high shadows, performance was fine indoors, but moving outdoors with alpha effects and many NPCs together in battle caused the frame rate to drop a lot. In fact it went from 90fps indoors to between 40 and 80fps.
On retesting this at the lowest possible settings (no anti-aliasing, shadows off, and textures set to the lowest), the frame rate dropped from 90fps to the low 70s near fire or any particle-heavy scene in the four different locations I used to test across the game and a few of the expansions.
Neverwinter Nights 2: Enhanced Edition Steam Deck recommended settings
Note that when you make any changes to anti-aliasing or screen resolution, you may need to reload your save file for the changes to reflect in-game. I aimed to have textures at high, but ended up with shadows at either medium or low for the best possible experience on the Steam Deck screen. A 90fps locked experience is not possible since alpha-heavy situations or even very busy combat encounters with many NPCs result in the frame rate dropping.
I also ended up manually capping the screen refresh rate to 60fps at 60hz on Steam Deck OLED here because the in-game resolution options weren't helping with 60 or 90hz options. Note that these settings are just based on about ten hours of testing. I will be revisiting the multiplayer post-launch and will update this if I notice anything out of the ordinary with performance. Right now I'd say the best possible experience on Steam Deck at 800p involves using textures at high and shadows at medium or low depending on whether you're playing offline or online. As for anti-aliaisng, it wasn't as much of a detriment to performance as shadows so far. I used MSAA x 4 on Steam Deck and was happy with the 60fps experience with some headroom.
Neverwinter Nights 2: Enhanced Edition Nintendo Switch performance impressions
Neverwinter Nights 2: Enhanced Edition runs at an uncapped frame rate on Nintendo Switch and lacks good anti-aliasing. The latter isn't too noticeable on the smaller screen, but it is very visible when playing docked. What is noticeable is the low resolution textures for certain objects. The frame rate can hit 60fps, but it is rarely there and almost always feels unstable unless you're indoors. In fact, even in the multiplayer lobby which is a closed room, the performance on Switch isn't perfect. I noticed the load times are also a lot worse than the Steam version on my Steam Deck and ROG Ally. An optional 30fps cap on Nintendo Switch would've been ideal, but it not having any frame rate cap and supporting up to 60fps right now is a boon for playing on Nintendo Switch 2.
Barring the performance and visuals, Neverwinter Nights 2: Enhanced Edition's controller support is good. It takes a bit of time to get used to, but I was happy with what the developers have implemented so far. I would've liked touchscreen support for the Strategy Mode control option. One last thing to note is that Neverwinter Nights 2: Enhanced Edition does not support video capture on Nintendo Switch (or Nintendo Switch 2). You can only capture screenshots.
Neverwinter Nights 2: Enhanced Edition Nintendo Switch 2 backward compatibility impressions
While Neverwinter Nights 2: Enhanced Edition's performance isn't great on Nintendo Switch, it plays a lot better on Nintendo Switch 2 with much faster load times and smooth performance even outdoors in the few hours I've played so far. Note that I had access to the Steam version since last week, but only got Nintendo Switch code a day prior to this article so I've not had as much time with this version. It definitely feels a lot better on Nintendo Switch 2 across the board thanks to much smoother performance.
I've included a load time comparison below. As with my Switch 2 backward compatibility articles that you can read here, I keep mashing the A button to speed things up as much as possible and skip any splash screen logos.
| Test condition | Nintendo Switch | Nintendo Switch 2 |
| Dashboard to title screen | 19 | 15 |
| Starting a new Mask of the Betrayer game | 26 | 4-5 |
| Loading a save to Harbor Loop | 56-59 | 22-23 |
Note: All load times above are in seconds.
As you can see, Neverwinter Nights 2: Enhanced Edition for Nintendo Switch benefits quite a bit when played on a Nintendo Switch 2, especially installed to the internal storage with load times. If you have the option, I don't recommend playing Neverwinter Nights 2: Enhanced Edition on Nintendo Switch, but the backward compatible experience is good so far, at least handheld. If you want to play on TV or a monitor, I recommend getting Neverwinter Nights 2: Enhanced Edition on another platform.
What I'd like in a Neverwinter Nights 2: Enhanced Edition Nintendo Switch 2 upgrade
While Neverwinter Nights 2: Enhanced Edition is quite good in handheld mode, the docked experience is not great with the sub 1080p visuals and poor post-processing to clean up the image. The load time improvements are good, but I'd really like to see a native Switch 2 version deliver even faster load times, a higher resolution in general, better texture quality, proper mouse controls, and potentially above 60fps in a performance mode since it already hits 60fps easily via backward compatibility so far.
Neverwinter Nights 2: Enhanced Edition multiplayer on Steam Deck and Switch
I was able to test a bit of the multiplayer with Scott, our reviewer, who was playing on his PS5 while I played on my Steam Deck. The multiplayer setup works as it should, but you need to pay attention to the matchmaking region option in Neverwinter Nights 2: Enhanced Edition on Steam. Ensure you set it on Steam to the same region in-game as the region your friends are playing in on console.
This matchmaking region option doesn't seem present on consoles in the pre-release build on PS5 and Nintendo Switch. When testing the Nintendo Switch version in online multiplayer with the Steam version played on Steam Deck, I noticed the Switch version takes a lot longer to load and this will affect the overall game loading for everyone playing in that session.
My Neverwinter Nights 2: Enhanced Edition Steam Deck recommended settings above are mainly for solo play. In multiplayer, I noticed performance was a bit less stable and I'd recommend using the low preset for shadows to ensure better performance. Pre-release, I just wanted to make sure the multiplayer was functional on Steam Deck, PS5, and Nintendo Switch and I can confirm it works across those well.
Neverwinter Nights 2: Enhanced Edition on ROG Ally
On ROG Ally, I wanted to see if Neverwinter Nights 2: Enhanced Edition could run at 1080p with a 120fps target. My ROG Ally is set to 5GB VRAM. Beyond that, it has everything running on the public and most-updated versions for Windows 11. When running in the 30W turbo mode and everything at maximum, the busy location of Harbor Loop ran at about 40fps. MSAA x 8 is obviously too much for this.
I tried turning off anti-aliasing, but still using the highest setting for textures and shadows. It didn't help much as expected because shadows are the major performance killer here as I found out when testing the game on Steam Deck. Turning off both shadows and anti-aliasing resulted in about 10-20fps more on average, but 120fps wasn't possible.
I then tried running at 720p with everything set to the lowest possible values. This led to frame rates in the 80s range. If you play on ROG Ally, I recommend aiming for a 60fps experience by playing at 720p. I didn't spend too much time with it, but I tested this across four different situations and it held up well. As of now, it seems like Neverwinter Nights 2: Enhanced Edition runs better on Steam Deck at similar settings when compared to the ROG Ally. I'll be doing a bit more testing on this front post-launch.
Dungeons & Dragons Neverwinter Nights 2: Enhanced Edition launches today for PS5, Xbox, Switch, and PC (Steam and GOG).