Installing NWN2 Complete from GOG into a Wineskin Wrapper

Installing NWN2 Complete from GOG.com in a Wineskin

Playing the Windows version of Neverwinter Nights 2 on a Mac without the use of Boot Camp or a Windows OS installed can be done through the use of a Wineskin.  A search on Google will result in several Wineskins that have been created for NWN2 as well as my own created in 2012. In 2012 I installed NWN2 Platinum from DVDs into the Wineskin.   Nowadays though it is far more likely that anyone purchasing NWN2 will purchase NWN2 Complete from GOG which includes the NWN2 expansions and is fully patched which simplifies installation significantly.

These are the instructions for creating your own NWN2 Wineskin and installing NWN2 Complete from GOG into it using the current version of Wineskin Winery.  If you do not want to use my wrapper then you will need to download Wineskin Winery so you can create your own. Either way you will need to purchase and download NWN2 Complete from GOG.com.  This will be enough to run NWN2 the game, but unfortunately the NWN2 Toolset will not be able to be used because it remains incompatible with Wine (the underlying technology used in a Wineskin).

If you do not want to bother with Wineskin Winery you can download the Wineskin I created for NWN2 from Google Drive and unzip it and skip Step 1 entirely.  The file is 265 MB zipped and does not include NWN2.

Note: The current version is from August 2016 and uses engine WS9Wine 1.9.15. If you are using the 2015 version (which used engine WS9Wine 1.7.55) and are having crashes when opening the console then you may want to upgrade to the 2016 version.

Step 1: Configuring a new Wineskin wrapper for NWN2

First create a new wrapper using Wineskin Winery. I used Wrapper version Wineskin 2.6.2 and Engine version WS9Wine 1.9.15.

When creating the new wrapper you may be prompted to install mono and gecko. You can if you want but I do not believe they are required for NWN2. Unfortunately installing mono afterward is problematic if you choose not to install it now.

After the creation of the wrapper has completed you can find the wrapper in the Finder and then double-click it to open it.

Click the Advanced button to see the Advanced options.

Go to the Go to the Options tab and uncheck the option "Map User Mac OS X folders in wrapper".  Leaving this left checked would result in the NWN2 campaigns installed in the wrapper being ignored in favor of whatever you have in your Mac OS X Documents folder. Also check the "Option key works as Alt" option so that the Alt key will work properly.

Then go to the Tools panel and click the Winetricks button.  Winetricks allows you to install whatever Windows packages and libraries into the wrapper that may be required for the application being used.

Using Winetricks search for and install:

directx9 (you will be told by Winetricks that you can and should use other versions such as d3dx9_36, but for NWN2 I found that the others do not work, so install directx9)

dotnet20

vcrun2005

Close the Wineskin.

This step should not take more than 15 minutes or so. The Wineskin wrapper created should be about 670 MB.  You can also just download and unzip my wrapper and skip step 1 entirely.

Step 2: Installing NWN2 Complete into the wrapper

Put the wrapper that you created in Step 1 above or downloaded and unzipped from my site in the location that you want the application to be.  Bear in mind that the Wineskin wrapper will contain files that change as you play, so it will not remain static.  Also it will be over 13 GB in size initially and probably grow with usage.

Double-click the Wineskin wrapper you created in step 1 or downloaded from my site. Click the Install Software button.  Click the "Choose Setup Executable" button and navigate to the setup...exe that you downloaded from GOG.com (mine is setup_nwn2_complete_2.2.0.10.exe) and click the Choose button to begin the installation of NWN2 into the wrapper.

In the Neverwinter Nights 2 Complete Setup dialog click the "Options" button in the lower left corner. Uncheck "Create desktop icon" and check "Check file integrity before installation". Check the checkbox at the bottom for accepting the EULA (if you want to see it first just click the Install button without first checking the EULA acceptance) and then click the Install button.

The install will first verify that the GOG files you downloaded are not corrupted. If they are then it will fail and you will have to download them from GOG again before retrying this step.

This step will take a while depending on the speed of your computer and hard drive. On my 2010 Mac mini it took about 30 minutes for the installation to complete.

The step completes with a Runtime error which can be ignored.  Then exit the install by clicking the Ext button. Wineskin will then prompt you to specify the startup executable for the wrapper. In the pulldown select /GOG Games/NWN2 Complete/NWN2Launcher.exe and then quit the Wineskin wrapper.  (From then on when you double click the wrapper it will launch NWN2, so if you want to change the wrapper configuration you will need to right click on the wrapper and select Show Package Contents and then double-click the Wineskin.app icon.)

Because the NWN2 Complete package comes fully patched there is no need to update or patch the software after installation.  It will be on the last version of Windows NWN2 which was 1.23.

Double click the wrapper icon to play the NWN2 original campaign, Mask of the Betrayer, Storm of Zehir, or Mysteries of Westgate.