Although the game's built-in updater appears not to work (it reports that no internet connection is detected, despite downloading updates to the updater program itself) it is possible to get it working to some degree. Using regedit, navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE > Software > Obsidian > NWN2 > Neverwinter > NWUpdate,"
and change the existing keys "Internet Connection" to 1, and "Ping Timeout" to 3000. What this will enable you to do is use the built-in updater to apply the language patch files that you can download from the internet without resorting to a third party app. It still appears to be unable to find the files it needs on Obsidian's servers on its own, but if you place the appropriate .zip files in your NWN2 directory, it will find the appropriate one and install in the the proper order. You will need to exit and relaunch the updater from the main menu after each patch is applied, but you can at least be sure that the patches are being applied correctly and in the right order.
You may need to launch the updater once and allow it to patch itself before the registry key shows up.
You can get the manual patches from
here. Make sure you get the proper language and the proper patches for your version of the game (pcx1 for just the first expansion, pcx2 for both, and just pc for no expansions). Find out which version number of the game you have by launching the updater, then download all of the patches needed to get you to the latest version.
Patch the game to 1.23 to remove the DRM (Added Nov 6/2009).
As of this writing (5/7/09) the latest patch is 1.22.1588, so I stopped patching there.
I installed NWN2 with both "Mask of the Betrayer" and "Storm of Zehir" expansions, and here are the patches I downloaded and applied:
nwn2_pcx2_english_from1201541_to1211549.zip
nwn2_pcx2_english_from1211549_to1221586.zip
nwn2_pcx2_english_from1221586_to1221587.zip
nwn2_pcx2_english_from1221587_to1221588.zip
