I've never really heard anything positive or negative concerning the single player campaigns of these 2 games. I've seen the games on lists like "Best Ever RPG games" but they basically say the games are good because of the user created modules. I was just wondering if the single player Campaigns are good or bad or why I've never heard about them. I have heard that The Mask Of The Betrayer is really good but other than that nothing. This is the reason why I never bought them but even if the games are good but not great I would a tleast try them out. Thanks for any info.

I would play both of them and decide for yourself.
Both of them work as an extended tutorial in getting to know how things work.

So here we go:

- NWN Original Campaign - bad, especially considering other D&D computer games. A lot of hack'n'slash, scarce and simple dialogues, very little side quests, random loot (you won't get any unique artifacts unless you make one, only the standard +1, +2 and so on), poor NPC interaction (you can't change your teammates inventory, you have no influence on their ability development, only one companion at a time). It's worth at least one playthrough, because NWN is still fun, even with all these flaws.
- NWN Shadows of Undrentide - better than the OC, but still not great. A lot more role playing, more side quests, random loot reduced to a minimum, better storytelling, you have more influence on your companion (you can fully modify its inventory and can do some basic changes in its development). Flaws? It's much shorter than OC, it won't take you past 14 level, only three companions available.
- NWN Hordes of the Underdark - now this is what we're talking about! Very good storytelling, great and interesting items, very interesting characters, good dialogues (which include descriptions similar to a book), longer than SoU, epic levels, epic enemies, you can have two companions in your team. You can see BioWare's glimpses of genius in this campaign. But still, BG2 and PT are out of reach. Be sure to play SoU before HotU, because HotU is a direct continuation of the first.
- NWN2 Original Campaign - NWN2 is a better game in overall than NWN (in my opinion). The story is only fine, but the gameplay is a lot better than in NWN. You have full control over your party, there are a lot of NPC to recruit, you'll acquire your own keep which you can develop, there's a world map finally and you can choose where to go, no random loot, nice dialogues. If you had a choice to play only one OC, I'd suggest NWN2 without any doubts. It's a much better successor to the BG series than the first game.
- NWN2 Mask of the Betrayer - masterpiece! I'm not kidding here. The story is so great, that it reminds me of Planescape Torment quality. What more, we have fantastic and very original NPC's in our team. Writing is so good that it reaches boundaries rarely seen in computer games. It's a continuation of NWN2 OC, so I don't have to say that we reach epic levels, fight epic enemies and find epic items. One of the best RPG's in history of gaming.
- NWN2 Storm of Zehir - it's not so good here unfortunately. Quite bad story, standard quests, not too detailed dialogues, not interesting locations and NPC's. Pros? We get to create most of our party, game relies more on exploration than other campaigns, it has some economic nuances (we get to run our own trading company). And that's it.
- NWN2 Mysteries of Westgate - a quite good D&D campaign. It doesn't reach the quality MotB, but it's still decent. We get to visit an interesting city, there's some nice mystery from the very beginning (the mysterious mask), quite interesting characters. Don't expect something out of the roof, but it's well worth playing. One of the biggest flaws is lack of a mage in your team unless you create one (only three companions to recruit) and the campaign is quite short.

That's it! If you have any other questions, feel free to ask. :)

All worth playing IMO.

The NWN OC gets a lot more grief than it deserves. As mentioned it's the tutorial for the game. Especially early part of Chapter 1, and it is particularly chapter 1 that is kind of lame. It gets better in Chapter 2 and 3. But at the time people were expecting another Baldurs Gate and it simply isn't in that league, plus it's NOT a party based RPG but a single character plus sidekick (which I actually prefer) so that is another reason some people were let down.

I actually enjoy the OC more than Shadows of Undrentide which I find tedious.

Hordes is the one most people really enjoy, as it's an epic level trip into the Underdark.

NWN 2, I just don't like as much. It's has crazy crafting that shifts the balance of power away from your character, to his crafted weapons. I just checked my final MoTB save from NWN2.

My best crafted weapons was +7 with +4D6 Acid +4D6 Fire and + 4D6 electrical damage (though my offhand was slightly less nuts).

The NWN2 OC and MoTB are well worth playing, and I really liked Mysteries of Westgate too. Storm of Zehir I found very tedious, but many others loved it.

Both games pretty good but also very different. Nwn1 is single player with idiot AI mercenary(both in levelling and it it ability to collect every single trap on its way), NWN2 is a party rpg with bigger party. Which, if you let AI control them, means that ypou'll have more then one fireball dropped on your head at once xD

NWN OC is kinda not very good. Its story pretty standart and your character pretty much has no reason to be there. If you played Oblivion, it somewhat similar - its npc story while you are just muscle who run around doing stuff. It has some decent parts, like obligatory Bioware CSI style which in my personal opinion the best part of writing in OC. Its decent in term of gameplay but other then that its not very interesting. Fun to play once, but I doubt you'll ever return to it. Also its insanely easy to abuse in turm of gameplay since you often can run out of location in the middle of fightm, reast, heal and teleport back.

NWN SoU... I just don't like it. It is somewhat better written, but short, jump around locations a lot and not very good in providing different playing style - there is not much loot for different playstile, some of locations feels like pretty much decided for either someone who buff himself or for charisma paladin(fudging balisisk room!) since failed roll means instant death. It is ok, and have some decent moments, but I personally found it annoying

NWN HoU is pretty great. It is somewhat classic hack&slash style companion but with pretty fun story with good characters. Its not depest story, but it is really good time so worth a playthrough. It is siquel to SoU but pretty much only in term of main character so if you grow tired of Undertide and decide to skip it, you won't loose much of context

On technical NWN is pretty well coded, there are not many bugs, but some balancing choises are strange, like Pale Master do not providing caster level progression pretty much becoming useless for mage characters. In addition there are few just stupidly powerfull feats like Devastating critical

NWN2 OC is somewhat strange. Its really unbalanced in term of encounters, filling itself with undead and construct enemies which pretty much kills dex builds, sneak attack builds and save or die necromancy builds ingame. Story is somewhat stronger then in NWN OC, there are several plotlines that interact together and try to utilise theme of "what is hero and what makes hero" but it was severely cut preproduction so some plotpoints dropd outright, some left hanging and some have weak ending. Alse "rock fall" style epilog after final battle... yeah...

NWN2 MoTB is pretty awesomely written. It is somewhat of a "remake" of Planescape Torment with talks about human nature, what it means to be human, what can change men and suffering of being a human. It has very good characters , interesting setting. But it also much more restrictive in turm of rest and has rather annoying "survival" mechanic. It make sence in game and rather simple to keep under control, but not everyone is fun of such mechanics. Also Obsidian made one step forfard and filled companion with fey and elemenals as a bonus to undead. You cant crit them, you cant sneak attack them - dex character and crit characters once again are not welcomed

NWN2 SoZ is "open world" style adventure. Best part of it is that you can make your own party of 4 character, so you can make classic party with well developed roles(in other even if you are playing 4 charisma barbarian and you have a bard in party, you still be the one do the talking). But overworld map is a bit slow and pretty much force you to combine ranger with rogue for one of your four characters

NWN2 MoW is pretty good, It is short and it indeed lack decent mage character. But it is a price for module being quite unlinear and having a lot of ways to go around

From technical side nwn2 is a mess. It has bug on bugs on bugs. Some of them usefull(expose weakness for example always hit even if it say that it missed, warlock on epic ignore all form of magic resistences with basic blast feat), some of them bad(warlock has only half of character level to beat spell resistances with invocations, expert tactisian does nothing, some warlock invocation does nothing) and some are... bizarre...(wierd is subject to death immunity while not being strictly speaking death spell) On other hand NWN2 brough a ton more classes, allowed to get forth class, brought many race variants, totally revamped bard class and other fun stuff. I'd say building character in nwn2 is significally more fun then in NWN1 dew to more fun stuff you can play around with. If only two biggest companions in NWN2 wasnt filled with crit and death immune stuf...

P.S. As for crafting in NWN2 I'd say many people overplay its power. For example unless you go grinding for essences andsd buing up whole shops itn the end of cpompanion you'll most likely have just enough essences to craft ONE +7 weapon with 15d6 elemental enchantment. Just one and nothing more. So if you decided to re enchant your monk boots to +8 dex, then re enchant this cloak for charisma... well, suddenly you cant make broiken weapon anymore. I'd say weapon crafting in game is more there for covering those who made a weak character who need this weapon to push forward, with decent character having absolutely no problems without crafted items or with just few re enchanted armor pieces

The NWN1 OC has a relatively weak plotline rife with plotholes and little in the way of memorable characters, and the content it does have is spread incredibly thin over an absolutely massive world. Even the smallest of dungeons are absolutely sprawling complexes. The problem is that the vast majority of these areas are padded out by copy-paste combat encounters that quickly get repetitive. The campaign wouldn't have been bad if it had kept the same amount of content and just cut the filler. Smaller areas, fewer completely identical combat encounters. There are some legitimately interesting side-quests and story arcs, but there's just so much filler that it's diluted to utter blandness.

Shadows of Undrentide is my personal favorite campaign in the series and goes hard in the opposite direction: short and packed with content. The plot is more interesting (although it still has some pretty egregious plotholes) and significantly better written, the characters are more interesting, and most importantly the content is much more distilled. When you walk into a new area there are actual interesting things to discover, not an ocean of copy-pasted combat encounters.

Hordes of the Underdark does the epic level adventure beautifully well. It takes the same style as SoU and continues it with ever increasing threats and stakes. Again it avoids the copy-paste issue and ramps up the interesting areas and story arcs. Overall it's a superb adventure and it really shows how far the team came.

The NWN2 OC is something I have a love-hate relationship with. At times it has moments of utter brilliance where the pacing and narrative are perfect, but there are other places the campaign is exceptionally weak and tedious. Much of act 2 in Neverwinter falls into the same pitfalls as the NWN1 OC with copy-paste combat encounters, made worse by the fact that the brakes are slammed on the plot and you're stuck spinning your wheels for an entire story arc. It's one of those campaigns I often want to revisit because of all the good parts, but I'm often turned away when I reach its tedious weak points.

NWN2 Mask of the Betrayer, however, picks off beautifully. It's a much stronger story with significantly better pacing and a much more consistent level of quality throughout. As PeterScott says the game balance can be completely destroyed with crafting. I find ignoring crafting and relying on weapons drops to be the best way to keep some semblance of balance.

Storm of Zehir is one of those campaigns you can really only play once. It has a fantastic world to explore, but a huge part of the campaign's attraction is discovery and exploration it loses its appeal once you've already played through it once. Many of the areas don't actually have anything in the way of choices of how to handle them, so if you've played through it once you've already seen most of what you need to. The XP curve also gets wonky if you use stealth to avoid random encounters; I reached the final boss as a 12th level party (you're supposed to be 20th) in my first playthrough. Avoiding random encounters left my ludicrously underleveled.

Actually recommended max level for SoZ is around 14. Its quite low level adventure xD

if you make a hack and slash character then yes nwn1-oc gets old fast... a Bard, Druid or Sorcerer will be harder to play and a lot more interesting
this game was made after BG when everyone knew how to make solid rpg characters but I have lost count of how many people try to fight the Cloaktower golum... first timers always grab an Axe and charge!

The story and dialog is absolutely horrible, especially the parts related to Dexter because you know he's a villian as soon as you meet him.

Oh yeah, the loot system is horrible, too. Thousands upon thousands of chests, barrels and wardrobes with minuscule amounts of gold.

Yeah, you can push it even harder(it is possible to reach 30 lvl in SoZ abusing some respawn, but even SoZ description mention "take you to level 15 and above" so 15 is stated lowest possible max lvl but you can finish it at 14 with a decent builds with well desegnated roles

NWN2 was boring compared to NWN1, and there was some kind of camera issue with it that made it frustrating to play. NWN1 didn't have that issue. NWN1 also had a better soundtrack, which makes a bigger difference than you'd think at first.

Thank you everyone for the replies. Never Winter Nights enhanced edition was $5.00 on Steam last week so I bought it. Yeah I've heard over and over again that MOTB is a masterpiece as well as one of the best rpg ever. I was going to buy NWN2 just for that. I just found it weird that no one really talks about the singl player campaigns at all. I figured they were just okay and not as good as the other Infinity Engine games. And Planescape Torment is one of my favorites.

Regarding NWN1, it's true that the best campaigns are player-made ones (Elegia eternum is must-play for any RPG fan imo). However, the official campaigns are also pretty good imo (even the classic campaign).

NWN1's strength is that, due to the insane number of official and unofficial campaigns, the amount of gametime you can sink in that game is comparable to an MMORPG. Also you have persistent worlds, which are an entirely different beast.
The funny thing is that there are even modules which change the final acts of NWN1's classic campaign, which goes to show the difference modules make in the game.

NWN1 also has the advantage/disadvantage of being solo-oriented, instead of controlling an entire party (as someone who was introduced in the genre by Fallout, I prefer solo-based cRPGs instead of party-based cRPGs).

NWN2 is a more classic rpg experience. I never completed the classic campaign or storms of zehir, so I can only give advice when it comes to MotB, and it simply is great.
Regarding storms of zehir, I only know that it has great encounter design and "meh" plot (apparently it's aimed for players looking for a combat-oriented campaign).
Lastly, regarding mysteries of westgate, I didn't even know it existed until recently so I don't have anything to say about it.

Advantage in my book as well, even though most of the first cRPGs I played were party based (Bards Tale 1 on C-64, Baldurs Gate 1 & 2.). Though I played PnP D&D before any cRPG and that everyone played 1 character. Unless someone was away, and everyone hated having to play that guys character along with their own.

For me Role Playing is about playing 1 character, not a squad of them. I just find it tedious controlling other characters.

I loved NWN since the moment it came out. I played the OC about thee times through before any good third party mods or expansions came out.