If you weren't playing multiplayer, you kind of missed the point of NWN. A digital tabletop equivalent, it was incredible. I also played on some very good persistent worlds. Some of my fondest gaming memories are marauding as a Stormlord, being the servers main villain.
The OC was just poorly done. SoU and HotU were both good. I have played custom modules and they were all very high quality too. With proper placeable use, even the games shabby aesthetics can be ameliorated. Still, its strength lies in the multiplayer. Sorry for those of you that missed the boat. I imagine it was like Ultima Online. You got to experience it in its heyday or you didn't.
I never got to play it in multiplayer, no. Didn't have the internet for multiplayer games when NWN came out, and I didn't get into pen and paper until the late 00s, at which point I'd play it either IRL with friends around a table or online through programs like OpenRPG, a predecessor to stuff like Roll20. I first experienced NWN as a single player RPG, and as such it is a complete failure in every imaginable way.
But that's the weird part. If it were an online only game, sure, I would have just ignored it. But it isn't - it also pretends to be a single player game, while its systems are inherently designed for multiplayer in a way that makes them utter shit in single player.
And while there are some good modules - I like A Dance With Rogues, Swordflight, and Almraiven - they are dragged down by how utterly trash NWN is as a single player game.
A Dance With Rogues and Almraiven work because they were designed for rogues and mages respectively, so the challenges you face are intended for those classes. D&D is a system that relies heavily on different classes fulfilling different roles in the party, but since NWN is single character only, you can't design challenges for rogues, wizards, and fighters in the same module because the player will only have one of those classes.
Swordflight, as great as it is in its design, suffers heavily from it. I played it as a multi-classed fighter-rogue and encountered so many frustrations with my AI companions. Crossbow chick would often get herself killed by attacks of opportunity provoked by shooting her crossbow in melee range. Later I recruited two spellcasters who would always waste their spells on trivial encounters and have none left for the boss fight. Just terrible. Any campaign with challenging encounters you're supposed to tackle as a party rather than a solo character becomes a pure gamble on your AI companions not committing suicide.
In Knights of the Chalice 2 I often had to reload a fight half a dozen times because of how ridiculously hard it was... yet I kept having fun with it, trying to out-spellcast the enemy and disable his highest damage-dealers before he could do the same to me.
Meanwhile in Swordflight, I often had to reload a fight half a dozen times because my AI-controlled party members acted so ridiculously stupid, they often died unnecessarily. It was frustrating and not fun at all.
