I don't really see how anyone can say anything good about NWN's campaign. Maybe if you play a Mage or Cleric. But you play a melee character, like a Rogue or Fighter, the entire game consists of walking into a room and waiting for cleave to end. Whether it be your cleave or the Half-Orc companion's cleave. It was just mind numbing. There's no strategy in there. Your positioning becomes meaningless due to the dance. Your abilities are almost non-existant due to being a melee character in D&D. So it's just auto-attack and wait. At least BG got around this by having a party. Separate the group members, control the casters, micro their targeting.

Some modules, including XP 2, managed to make up for it with decent writing, stories, are design, puzzles, and the like. But basic NWN campaign had the good parts of those too few and far between. A few good puzzles, but not much else.

As it happens, I much prefer NWN with a melee character. :)
With spellers its an endless sleep-buff-battle-cycle.

The writing of add-ons are good-ish only compared to original campaign, too. I've read so many "Hordes is almost Planescape, honestly!" opinions before playing that my fun was quite marred by huge disappointment.

I'm bored of the OC, but for a different reason. I only recently upgraded from a 9 year old machine, and everytime I've tried playing Neverwinter Nights, it's crashed on me before I've made it out of the city. I've tried playing now four times. Four times trying to get through just the first part of the game where you're supposed to find the Waterdavian creatures. Four! I've never made it out. So I am really, really sick of trying to get through this section, though on another post someone else encouraged me to make it out since it gets much better and the scenery does change once you get out of the city.

At least that shows, like the original poster said, that the game engine is addictive as heck, since I've kept trying to get through the game. At least, with my new gaming PC, I'll be able to play through this game.

NWN is good. But its only better for most people because its easy.

BG is good for a challenge and story.

I'd say that NWN's main strength is playing a module online (or via LAN) with a DM running it. This was what it was really designed to be and is great fun - you can then do BG-types stories, and relive the days of old P&P modules. The problem is that getting a group together can be a huge pain for this (though NWNConnections was a great site to do this).

IIRC, the main campaign was really just added near the end of development and is really there to show the engine off. To show what it could do. Single player really doesn't work well, since D&D is designed for a party - each role is so weak and flawed that it needs other people in supporting roles to make up for these problems. Since you only had the henchman, they had to add diablo-esque crates everywhere to make you strong enough to survive. Which then just breaks the feeling of a nice tight old school D&D RPG.

The main problem imho with NWN was that the multiplayer got overrun by people wanting a WoW style mmorpg experience, and since that's easier to jump into, people flocked to it. This wasn't too bad for NWN1, but it caused NWN2's multiplayer to be totally focused on that, to the extend the DM client was broken for ages alongside the broken scripting language. Which is a shame since the DM-style multiplayer is one of the best gaming experiences I've had.