So, I started playing the GOG Complete Edition of the NWN2 original campaign fairly recently, and made it as far as Neverwinter without having a single crash or any performance related issues whatsoever. Since I've reached Neverwinter, I've begun to have freezes during fights that force me to close the game through the task manager, which shows the game as "not responding."

The first time or two that it happened I could have written it off as a minor, infrequent annoyance, but it has been happening more frequently, and the game is now more or less unplayable for me as I'm currently stuck on the first group of enemies in the Back Alley map, while helping the thieves move the wagon through the alley. That is, the game is freezing literally every time during this particular fight now, and since it's (I believe) necessary for progressing the main plot, I'm pretty much out of luck unless I can figure out a way to circumvent the crashes. It's possible I could just keep trying in hopes of eventually getting lucky, as the crashes seem to be semi-random in terms of when they specifically occur, but I'll be damned if I'm going to play the rest of the game like that.

As I said, as far as I can tell the crashes don't occur when I'm doing anything specific-- just while fighting generally. Sometimes it's happened while selecting a different character, sometimes while scrolling the screen, sometimes while clicking an enemy, etc. I have wondered if it could be something specific to the maps or enemies in Neverwinter, since I didn't have any such crashes prior to the city, or if it's the sort of problem that doesn't manifest until several hours into the game. I was just hoping somebody here had heard of similar problems and had some ideas how to prevent them.

I'm on Windows 7 64-bit and playing the game through Galaxy. GPU is a GTX 960 using the latest drivers, processor is an i5 4460. I can provide more info if anyone thinks it would help. Any suggestions would be much appreciated.

All right, good to know. I have had some issues with it but haven't really used it enough to know how stable it is. In this case I don't think it's the source of my problem though, as I tried closing Galaxy and launching the game from the shortcut earlier and still had it crash on me during a fight.

After doing some more googling I came across another GOG forum post, which seems to describe the same problem I'm having more or less exactly:

[Okay, I was going to link to the post here but apparently I'm not allowed to. The topic title was "Newervinter Nights 2 Complete constant freezing," typo included, and you provided some helpful suggestions regarding audio drivers and settings.]

I decided to try what you and others had suggested in that thread, and tinkered with sound settings. For some reason my audio quality settings in Windows were already on the second lowest setting, but I went ahead and put it on the lowest one and changed the sound provider in the in game options to the Direct3D one, from the 2D positional setting it was already set at (the EAX stuff was already off). After doing that, I managed to play for a good while and get through quite a few fights with no crashes.

I feel like I'll need to play a bit more to be sure, but so far it's looking like one of those sound setting changes might have fixed the problem. I'll be away from my desktop for a few days, but once I'm back I'll try playing some more, and mark the problem solved once I'm reasonably sure. Thanks again for the reply, and for the useful suggestions in that other thread as well!

Thanks for the feedback, and good luck.

Also consider using the client extension. I use it, and I almost never get crashes.
http://neverwintervault.org/project/nwn2/other/nwn2-client-extension

Okay, thanks for passing that along. I hasn't seen this.

I've managed to play more and haven't had any more of those crashes, so it does look like changing the sound provider in game or the audio quality setting in Windows fixed this for me. Thanks again for the replies and suggestions.