AFAIK, there are three different possibilities to play multiplayer:
You and your friend play through the official campaign and/or and the first expansion Shadows of Undrentide, or a user-made adventure that specifically allows for multiplayer (not all of them do). The second expansion Hordes of the Underdark might be possible to play through in multiplayer, too, but I heard there are some issues. Of the DLC, I think only Pirates of the Sword Coast and Infinite Dungeons officially support multiplayer.
You and your friend log onto a so called Persistant World (PW), which is like a mini MMO, an online world created and hosted by users which is usually accessible to everyone, so you might run into and interact with other players. Some of these are more action-oriented with pre-scripted quests, others are strictly roleplay, meaning you are meant to stay in character and not talk about meta stuff while playing. Sometimes administrators may take on the role of NPCs or monsters and entertain you.
You and your friend either join another group or run your own game in which one of the users assumes the role of a dungeon master, taking control of NPCs and monsters and creating an adventure for the other player(s).
The more common options would be 1. and 2. In those case, you will both control your own character and you can form a party and fight together, but theoretically you can also split up whenever you want to (even while remaining in the same party) and explore on your own. In case 1. one of you will open an online game and host it for the other player to join (anyone who owns NWN can do this, you don’t need anything else or any particular knowledge), in case 2. you will both join the server of the according PW team. Note that in case 1. the pre-written adventures will often assume that the NPCs are always talking to the same character as the hero of the story; it’s not perfect but it works if you agree that one of you is the main character doing most of the talking for the main quests, or if you can live with the occasional confusion now and then. ;)
I just played through the bulk of it, and it was quite good at first, but it started feeling very samey pretty quick. And now I’m so OP that all the gigs and missions I’m doing now are a dull cake walk. Just wading through dismembered viscera. I can’t even remember the last time I had to pop a heal…
But admittedly, I can understand that you don’t want to create something where you are pretty sure enough media illiterate idiots will not get that the fascists are NOT supposed to be the good guys.
Just look at Helldiver 1/2, couldn’t be more in your face about it, and yet there’s still people not getting it.
Hollis-Leick and narrative director Craig Sherman pushed back on some of the “do’s and don’ts” they received from Games Workshop about Space Marine vocabulary. They deviated from the suggested phraseology to make Titus and his comrades sound less “strange and antiquated”, less like the Spanish Inquisition, and more like soldiers from real-world present-day militaries. “Space Marines don’t necessarily say things like ‘dismissed’,” Hollis-Leick observed. “There’s a line in the game where Acheran says ‘company dismissed’ and they really wanted me to change that to ‘brothers, attend your duties’, or something. But it’s three words instead of one, and if that model was applied to all of the language in the game, I really strongly felt that people wouldn’t get it.”
Gonna be a whole lotta really peeved 40k ultra fans…
I had an argument shortly after the great migration. Someone had posted a video essay on something gaming related and the person I responded to was adamant that a video couldn’t be an essay. It was a two hour deep dive into the topic, with graphs/journalistic photos/news video snippets, and the video info section had a citation list longer than your arm.
This person couldn’t understand that just because the creator had decided to present their essay in video format, didn’t mean it wasn’t an essay. All they had to say basically boiled down to:
only stupid people watch a video this long when you could read the equivalent amount of information in less than half the time.