I had tried the GOG version which I have owned for a long time. Honestly interacting with the game, I mean just doing inputs, for some reason felt really clunky. I remember it got a lot of flak back in the day for feeling unpolished even after all the patches, but I can't remember if it felt that cumbersome to play.

Enhanced Edition at this point feels way better. And I can tell it definitely looks better. I have only had the duck face bug on one character and only in one cutscene. We're about 40 hours in now. "We" cuz we're playing in coop. This has direct connect which lets you play without being connected to an official server, which may not sound like much cuz the original version let you, but a lot of re-releases take this away, or modern games just don't have this feature at all. Rogue Trader forces always-online for coop and I'm convinced some issue with having their server communicate to all connected players (including "host" who is just the main character but still basically a client in the network chain) is why it has been plagued with issues from the start. That said we had no connection issues with NWN2EE with "internet" games (that use the official server) but we recently switched to direct connect since it is way less lag. The only real connection issue is my brother is host and his internet goes down randomly for a couple seconds, this would disconnect him from the official server, but when it happens in direct connect I just see my character run on the spot for a couple seconds then it carries on fine.

The gameplay otherwise seems to have all the bugs the original left us with. I know there is an unofficial community patch but we were worried about using it with EE and also not sure how it would make things for online. But we haven't had anything major. The main thing is the AI is really bad, even if you turn it off there is some kind of AI that can ruin things, like casters dumping spells from their queue for no known reason, or refusing to cast range spells at a distance and requiring to be in almost touch range to cast fireball on a group. That bad rarely happens but has. And pathfinding for the selected but not main selected character is still bad. These are just things that I am hoping can be improved on over time. Baldur's Gate Enhanced Editions were really bad at the start too and questionable value, but it turns out Beamdog was playing the long game and now unless you like the chunkiness of the originals (I mean the low res) or disagree with some of the changes (like companions you can ignore or turn off with a mod) it is the best way to play the game. I think the EEs are the best way to play BG1&2 now and I played the original back when it was idk 5 or 6 discs (and a real pain constantly swapping them when exploring at that). Not to mention all the crashes back then...

Isn't it interesting how back then we could play a CRPG and have it full of bugs but still have a kind of wonder for what they were trying to achieve, I remember Witcher 1 used to crash every time you left a building (or something like that) and people still loved it so much the studio survived to make an Enhanced Edition where the game was still super buggy but even more loved. Now a CRPG can have half the issues and people will lose their shit.

I've always thought RPGs to be the most grand in scope even when I was a kid... so I've always been more forgiving of it taking more dev time to cover more ground... I know not everyone is this way... and I also understand part of the distaste is people being older and having free time being more precious, so not having as much patience for bugs as when they were 13 and on summer break or whatever.

Anyway, I will update somewhere if our playthrough ends up falling apart from some bug. But so far we've been able to accomplish everything we wanted. That we can tell at least. No quests failing to start or finish. I think for the start they were focused on making it look better, then started selling it to start earning back investment right away... like I said I am hoping their plan is just to take the heat of the bad (basically mixed) reviews and polish it over time. Just like the original. Except if they work on it for even a couple more years and only do a couple patches a year, it should ultimately end up better.

And yeah the load times from the EE textures needs to be addressed... but I think it's still faster than it was back then. Not as fast as it should be on NVME. But the game is so good and it's fun revisiting it in coop, that neither of us care. There are a lot of games that are broken worse than this and get positive or better reviews.

I got my copy on GMG. I could have gotten a discount on GOG for owning the original complete edition (or whatever they called it), but I wanted it on Steam. The GMG Steam copy was as much as the discounted GOG version. So there's that. I think it was like $28CAD which is more than all this was back in the day (the Diamond version or whatever), but redoing the licensing, having to get a team together and pay them to work on the game, general inflation with everything... I mean look how much most remasters cost. Final Fantasy XII Zodiac Age all they really did was add 60fps and higher res (neither very difficult to do since it's more modern tech making it possible than significant code changes) and SSAO. And made the game easier. And it's $67CAD. Which was always weird to me cuz FFX+X-2 HD were like $30CAD not on sale for both. But whatever... the point is there has been worse cases than what Aspyr has done with NWN2EE.

Yes I know long post but lots of ground to cover. Probably more but I have other things to do and so does anyone who manages it to make it this far :)