Beamdog just gave Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition a big graphical boost

Beamdog have released the latest development updates to Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition for everyone, and it comes with some wonderful upgrades.

As we reported on before during the Beta, several noteworthy graphical boosts have been added to it. These can really change and improve the RPG experience found here. Beamdog are absolutely comitted to making it the best it can be, with this update being the biggest since the Enhanced Edition release back in 2018.

What's inside? For starters, a whole new lighting engine with:

• Physically based rendering (PBR), with emulation of specular reflection, surface “roughness”, Fresnel-effects and gamma correction. All in all, this gives a more realistic and “natural” look.
• Tone mapping that prevents color distortion of bright lights and enables overbright.
• Per-pixel lighting rather than per-vertex of the old setup, yielding much more precise light illumination levels relative to distance.
• Full dynamic lighting, supporting up to 32 dynamic lights (previously NWN effectively only supported 6).

Check out a quick example of the difference some of it can make:

Left old / Right new. See a bigger comparison on this dedicated page.

Plus new water rendering, new grass rendering, plenty of other smaller graphical fixes and improvements. There's also some huge pathfinding improvements, getting stuck on random objects should be a thing of the past. Big improvements to modding once again, like access to the full SQLite API to get into campaigns, modules and the player. Loads more to be found in the patch notes.

Really great to see Beamdog continue to make such a great RPG constantly better. Will be very fun to see what else they have cooking up for Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition.

You can pick up Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition from GOG and Steam.