Exilian

Off-topic and Chatter: The Jolly Boar Inn => General Gaming - The Arcade => Topic started by: Jubal on March 13, 2022, 08:21:06 PM

Title: Adventures in the Forgotten Realms (Baldurs Gate, Neverwinter Nights, etc)
Post by: Jubal on March 13, 2022, 08:21:06 PM
So, I've been diving into this world lately with a playthrough of Baldur's Gate 1 EE, which is interesting. Some initial thoughts:


Generally I'm enjoying it, anyway - there seems to be a lot of sidequesting around the main plot and I suspect my builds aren't ideal, but it's fun to worth through :)

What're other people's experiences with these D&D RPGs?
Title: Re: Adventures in the Forgotten Realms (Baldurs Gate, Neverwinter Nights, etc)
Post by: Pentagathus on March 14, 2022, 09:24:11 AM
Planescape Torment has an absolutely phenomenal story, would definitely recommend it. Haven't really played any other of these style of games, the gameplay itself isn't really interesting for me.
Title: Re: Adventures in the Forgotten Realms (Baldurs Gate, Neverwinter Nights, etc)
Post by: Jubal on March 14, 2022, 05:19:36 PM
Yes, psyanojim has told me to play PT a few times and it's definitely on my list :) And yeah, I sort of like the semi-tactical gameplay but it's definitely a bit, uh, unpolished in some of these older bits of the genre.
Title: Re: Adventures in the Forgotten Realms (Baldurs Gate, Neverwinter Nights, etc)
Post by: dubsartur on March 14, 2022, 10:08:45 PM
What operating systems is it available on?

I played Baldur's Gate II through several times, and Neverwinter Nights until I got stuck at a dragon fight.  Good times!  From my memory, core AD&D 2e is not a system where its easy to accidentally build a weak character like GURPS or 3e D&D.
Title: Re: Adventures in the Forgotten Realms (Baldurs Gate, Neverwinter Nights, etc)
Post by: Spritelady on March 15, 2022, 10:56:53 AM
Ooh which dragon fight did you get stuck at in Neverwinter Nights? I remember being very frustrated by one in one of the games, then going back much later and loading with a very advanced character, just so I could absolutely wipe the floor with the dragon in revenge!

I've always loved Neverwinter Nights, my dad and I used to stay up late and play it every summer when I was off school or home from university. Sadly, it's become much harder to do non-local multiplayer now, so that's rather come to a halt.

Where can one acquire Baldur's Gate? I've heard a lot about it but not had a chance to play it yet.
Title: Re: Adventures in the Forgotten Realms (Baldurs Gate, Neverwinter Nights, etc)
Post by: Jubal on March 21, 2022, 12:43:30 AM
The enhanced edition is on GOG for not too much money, I guess it's likely on Steam too :)

I've now finished Baldur's Gate! Though the game runs directly on to the in-between-that-and-BG2 campaign, Siege of Dragonspear, which I'm now playing through. The end of the main campaign was... a bit what you'd expect, I guess, you get a big old classic villain showdown boss fight thingy. Boss fights are tricky to balance well in this sort of game setup, because if the boss does have an obvious weakness it can make them feel anticlimactic, and if the boss doesn't, then it can end up being very "who got their spells off more successfully in the opening rounds and managed to shut the others' casters down effectively" - it's definitely the sort of game where if you start doing badly in combat, there's a harsh spiral effect. Generally I felt the campaign did build to the end though, and Siege of Dragonspear feels like it's going to have more voicing & character writing than the main game did which I like (though I have to be minus most of the companions I had in the main game apparently which is frustrating).
Title: Re: Adventures in the Forgotten Realms (Baldurs Gate, Neverwinter Nights, etc)
Post by: Jubal on March 28, 2022, 08:23:44 PM
And I've now finished Siege of Dragonspear and run straight on to BG2, which since SoD is a bridging campaign and it all happens in the same game engine really doesn't feel like there was any gap in the story.

Thoughts on SoD: I really liked it, there are definitely some janky quest design bugs which I'm surprised weren't fixed and things like that, but the characters are really nice, I enjoyed M'Khiin the goblin shaman a lot as a companion. The ending of the main quest feels good, too, it makes for a narratively satisfying conclusion without anything feeling unearned. The post-ending which creates the BG2 segue is... a bit contrived, I guess, and compared to the start of BG2 the things the Hooded Man manages to do at SoD make him seem way more omnipotent than he broadly seems to turn out.

I did have to use a walkthrough for more bits of it than I'd have liked because things weren't always obvious and the game does have a tendency to penalise failure rather heavily if only by making you re-fight certain battles again and again until you get right or lucky. Generally D&D isn't a system that's well built around evenly matched adventuring parties taking chunks out of one another: it's a system built around preparation and working out how to use the tools at your disposal, so a group that has all the tools you have often just comes down to who rolls better right at the start of a fight and manages to e.g. shut the enemy casters down first. I did sort of enjoy it sometimes when I did really hit on a "right answer" to a battle, that said. One of the longest fights was a 1v1 you have to do during the siege itself which given I was a support caster basically meant slapping all the protection potions I owned onto myself then sitting there waiting until the enemy burned through her entire spell list - and then casting my own buffs and starting to do damage, after about five to ten mins of real-world time (I think that duel in-game probably took the characters most of an afternoon!)



So now I'm on BG2. I did NOT EXPECT the
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
and was quite sad about them.

Other than that, I'm enjoying it so far though I miss all the nice kit I'd got stored up in the previous game. I just did the Chapter One dungeon so far, and the Circus Tent quest that's very near to where you start. I get that the Chapter One dungeon needs to be kind of easy, but it does feel like SoD really over-egged the power of the Hooded Man at the moment. Like, he's meant to be this "threatening the devils themselves for power and evil" level guy, and then his home security is five squads of goblins, a few golems, and a couple of squads of duergar? Even considering the assassins have tripped or disabled a bunch of stuff, it's a really lame setup. Like, he clearly has a case of the Xykons in that he expects his own power to do all the work, but even Xykon goes and builds an extraplanar fortress when he really wants something protected. And doesn't let himself get arrested, for that matter.

That said, I thought it was otherwise a good starting run, I like having more djinn around, I really enjoyed the circus tent quest though I'm sure I missed some content, and generally I'm looking forward to exploring Amn more, I think this is going to be pretty fun.
Title: Re: Adventures in the Forgotten Realms (Baldurs Gate, Neverwinter Nights, etc)
Post by: dubsartur on March 29, 2022, 12:41:36 AM
Ooh which dragon fight did you get stuck at in Neverwinter Nights? I remember being very frustrated by one in one of the games, then going back much later and loading with a very advanced character, just so I could absolutely wipe the floor with the dragon in revenge!
I think it was the fight with the red dragon on the "dragon level."  There is an option to pick an unnecessary fight with a smaller dragon instead, but that goes against my principles.  No unnecessary draconicide!

I liked the idea of the 'level builder' in Neverwinter Nights although I never played with it.
Title: Re: Adventures in the Forgotten Realms (Baldurs Gate, Neverwinter Nights, etc)
Post by: luplay on May 05, 2022, 10:32:29 AM
Looks good. Thanks for your sharing.
Title: Re: Adventures in the Forgotten Realms (Baldurs Gate, Neverwinter Nights, etc)
Post by: Jubal on July 13, 2022, 08:54:45 PM
So, I hit a bit of a wall with BG2, largely working out who to have in my party, and that made me take a decent size break before coming back: I'm now a chunk of the way through the game and have eventually settled on Minsc, Aerie, Jaheira, Imoen (was Yoshimo until the bit after which you can't keep him in your party) and Mazzy. I'd considered taking Viconia instead of Mazzy because I find her a really interesting character, but it grates on me that you apparently can't do much of a redemption arc with her unless via romance, and she's not into very short men with very large beards (a category Carduelis firmly falls into).

I'm enjoying the unfolding plot, overall. I'm into Chapter Five and am in the Underdark at the moment. The various sidequests which I did lots of in Ch. 2 were mostly fun, the druid one I particularly liked, the cleric one as well. The Windspear Hills seemed a bit bugged because I didn't meet Firkaag before going there but it assumed I had, then I met him in the Copper Coronet afterwards and it was all a bit confusing. I just wanted to go there to drop off the acorns I'd been given in Ch. 1, not get into all those shenanigans.

As to the main quest, I think the thief guilds' split is kind of interesting but almost underplayed because Ch. 2 can easily end up being so much bigger than Ch. 3. I don't find Bodhi a super compelling villain (I went thieves as my option, probably unsurprisingly). On the other hand, I actually really do like Irenicus as a villain. He seems to have about the right amount of screen time, he's very well voice acted, and he looms over the plot quite effectively in a way that Sarevok in BG1 just flat doesn't. It was a bit annoying in Spellhold that I could 100% tell who Irenicus was well before it was actually revealed but was given no option to do anything about it. I also quite like that Irenicus is very powerful but not necessarily quite the top of the tree, so you do still get cutscenes where he's having to negotiate and talk rather than simply being so uberpowered that all he's doing is giving orders.

There are things I'm less enjoying. Inventory management is getting frustrating, and I swear this time it's not just because I keep picking everything up, it's more when party members keep dying that I end up needing to res them and then reassign about twelve items of gear and weaponry to different slots manually. Also the amount one needs to rest feels bizarre, often it's a case of doing about two rooms of a dungeon then resting because otherwise you'll just not have the spells needed. I'm also finding a bit of a lack of +3 weapons around the place, which seem increasingly to be needed for the higher level enemies.

My other slight annoyance in the game is that Dwarf male cleric seems to get a rough deal on content. You have two romance options, both added in the EE, and they are Dorn, a Blackguard, and Neera, a half-elf wild mage. I don't dislike Neera, but she doesn't really fit with Carduelis, and Dorn I killed already because, y'know, ridiculously evil. Annoyingly one can't romance Mazzy, who is both definitely single (albeit grieving) and in terms of alignment and height would be quite a nice match. As aforementioned I might've tried a Viconia romance, but again not on the options list.

Any of my issues with romance content though pale next to my annoyance at the Strongholds. The fighters get a full-on castle, the bards get their own playhouse, the wizards get an awesome interplanar spaceship thingy... and the clerics get to sleep on the floor in someone else's temple who happens to be of the same good/neut/evil alignment as them. This feels underwhelming, especially if you're not a cleric of the relevant deity (and indeed Carduelis is not a cleric of Lathander). And it's not like there aren't a load of ruined temples around the place, either! There are some very cool subterranean ones I'd happily have spruced up and used myself. I do quite like the "caring for the flock" quests you need to do, and the Unseeing Eye quest leading up to it was great, I really enjoyed that. But all that could have been done whilst also giving the player their own chapel, it's not as if the BG2 map system would be super hard to fit another place into.
Title: Re: Adventures in the Forgotten Realms (Baldurs Gate, Neverwinter Nights, etc)
Post by: Jubal on July 19, 2022, 12:04:48 PM
Aaand that's a wrap on Baldur's Gate (at least the original Bhaalspawn Saga, not diving into BG3 any time yet).

The end/latter part of Shadows of Amn is an interesting one. I liked the Underdark sections a lot, once I was out of the Underdark Ch 6/7 went fairly fast because I'd done most of the sidequests in Ch 2/3. I did do Neera and Rasaad's quests - I wasn't quite sure where the game was going with Rasaad's one, but I sort of liked the ambiguity involved in that. Neera is good fun and part of me is sad that the her-Carduelis thing never really worked out (though I stand by the RP decision not to pursue that romance properly in BG2, it would have stopped me having other characters I wanted with me a lot more).

I think they drop some of the plot a bit too late in Shadows of Amn, though it's quite well plot-paced generally: some of the bits of Irenicus' backstory, whilst it's nice they're hinted at earlier, only really drop into place right at the end and in a fairly unemotional way so they could maybe have hit harder. The ending battles are pretty well played though, I liked Suldanessellar etc.

Watcher's Keep is just a big multi-level dungeon, and like all such dungeons is a bit arbitrary and silly, but I did quite like it. I was actually intending to let the Helmites go at the end, but decided to snark at them first so they moved in immediately and I just sealed them in when asked to. Perhaps I should've done the actual mega-boss at the end, but I'm kind of glad I didn't: it's IMV clearly the Good option not to kill the thing because imprisonment is inconveniencing its evil significantly more.

Throne of Bhaal I think suffered a bit from trying to both be an extension of difficulty for super dedicated players and trying to wrap up the plot relatively fast, which leads to a lot of it being a very gruelling series of boss battles, a lot of which feel kind of arbitrary in their difficulty. I'm sure that's great for people who really like the games for the tactics play, and I kind of like the games for that, just not enough to want to repeatedly throw myself at quite that many dragons who I don't have a huge character investment in. It's clearly intentional that you keep your end-of-BG2 party and there's only one new NPC in ToB, and AFAICT there are no character quests (maybe extensions of some romances but they put so few options in for dwarves that Carduelis stayed single) - so it's very main quest heavy, and you're hitting so many bosses that they start becoming anticlimactic.

All that said, ToB does generally achieve its aim of wrapping up the plot, though I think they could've made the ending choices a bit more diverse/characterful with a little bit of additional dialogue. And the various new challenges are a fairly good "greatest hits" album of the series from a combat perspective. I had a nice moment in one of the pauses in the four-stage end battle where I realised with a sickening feeling that I was out of Raise Dead spells, but managed to work out how to use a potion and a wish spell to cover for that (I was hoping to wish for the resurrection, but actually managed to get "restore all our spells please" which was even better). That sort of "puzzling out how to use the items neatly" is the kind of thing I really like in these games. The new locations are nice too - I'd actually sort of have liked to spend more time in Saradush & otherwise get more human interaction in Tethyr.
Title: Re: Adventures in the Forgotten Realms (Baldurs Gate, Neverwinter Nights, etc)
Post by: Jubal on October 09, 2022, 09:28:36 PM
Annnnd I'm back in the Realms for Neverwinter Nights.

Which I'm not inspired by, eight hours or so in, but we'll see where it goes. So far I've just done the tutorial and first dungeon, I seem to be underlevelled or possibly the game was expecting me to build my character much more based on optimisation and much less on what sounded cool, and the upshot of all that is that I'm finding the bosses in particular a real grind or nigh impossible and am often beating them using slow/gamey methods which isn't very satisfying. Hopefully the story will unfold better as it goes on and I get a bit less underpowered. My character for the main campaign is a charismatic half-orc female ranger called Tercaresse Caraphian who is going adventuring with Sharwyn the bard in a sort of vaguely Witcher vibes buddy duo thing.
Title: Re: Adventures in the Forgotten Realms (Baldurs Gate, Neverwinter Nights, etc)
Post by: Jubal on October 26, 2022, 07:59:53 PM
Finished the NWN main campaign, it was fine and I enjoyed it overall, very classic conspiracy-pyramid stuff which I guess my narrative brain sometimes finds a bit gauche but it's a perfectly respectable way to do a campaign-story. I think NWN's campaign lacks the narrative efficacy of Baldur's Gate, because the player is explicitly a hired mercenary type throughout, so you're repeatedly saving the city for money but all your money is being spent on equipment to help you save the city so it's not really clear what's driving you other than that you're the protagonist, whereas Baldur's Gate gets personal, fast, and remains so (almost overblows it by Throne of Bhaal, but there we are). Also NWN's companions are fine but I guess I found their stories a bit disconnected from anything else that was going on and they came with rather odd pacing which didn't help, which given you only got a single companion with no party interaction made the game feel a bit less narratively driven. I guess part of this is that NWN has multiplayer elements, so part of this is the lack of other actual players in my own game.

The absolute stand-out and runaway star of the show who I will remember this game for was Hrut, Tercaresse's badget companion, who was the funniest thing I've found in games in ages, especially the weird AI thing that caused him to decide any box I couldn't open was a Bad Box that needed to be attacked. And him running away from mummies and hiding in a corner. And many other moments really.

Might do the other NWN classic campaign next? Or move on to try NWN2? Not sure.
Title: Re: Adventures in the Forgotten Realms (Baldurs Gate, Neverwinter Nights, etc)
Post by: Spritelady on October 27, 2022, 07:17:21 PM
I can solidly recommend the second game - I enjoyed it much more than the first!
Title: Re: Adventures in the Forgotten Realms (Baldurs Gate, Neverwinter Nights, etc)
Post by: Jubal on November 02, 2022, 11:59:36 AM
I decided to finish the base game campaigns: the main campaign, The Wailing Death, sits separately to the other pair, Shadows of Undrentide and Hordes of the Underdark, which are meant to feature the same protagonist: HotU, which I've just started, has several companions from The Wailing Death, and annoyingly does not let you input any of your ending details from TWD which is annoyingly immersion-breaking when you had a female Hero of Neverwinter and Sharwyn, her main companion, refers to her consistently as male.

Anyway, Shadows of Undrentide: it is, like most of the rest of NWN in my view, fine. The companions are not magnificent, though Deekin the Kobold who started out as a jester to a dragon is a 10/10 concept which I'm going to mull over repurposing somewhere. I mostly used Dorna as my companion, who besides the excessively stereotypical-Irish accent worked pretty well. I enjoyed Chapter 1 more than Chapter 2 I think: the dragon was fun to deal with, as was Deekin, and the village was nice though human people were weirdly flirty with my dwarf. The interlude was good, that worked well for me narratively and I liked the change of pace and side-questing-for-travel style of it. Undrentide itself... could have done with feeling a bit richer as an environment, I think. The core of the city is tiny and has few sidequests, and the side towers where the core questing happens are conversely enormous and a bit too slow to get through, so redressing that balance and having a few more spots of colour to tell us what Undrentide was actually like for its residents might have helped.

My main character this time is called Mamuka Kvismtleli, and he's a dwarf fighter who hits things with a hammer. His backstory in my head is that he wanted to become an architect, went out to travel and do some architectural studies, and somewhat by accident a) got rather good at clearing out kobolds and minor undead from the ruins he investigated and b) ended up staying with a Dwarf wizard who absent-mindedly assumed he was a pupil at his centre for training heroes and Harpers, something Mamuka was too polite to correct him on. (I do like this guy and a version of him may make his way into some TTRPG stuff of mine sometime).

Anyway, some time later and back from the Plane of Shadow, Mamuka is now trying to deal with the Hordes of the Underdark, and thus far is mostly wandering around bopping various creatures in undermountain on the head with a big fancy hammer. I've got Sharwyn AND Deekin as companions now, with the companion limit boosted to two, which is possibly more bards than I need BUT on the other hand I haven't been given many other options yet and I'm not sure I'm going to be given a rogue who doesn't annoy the hell out of me (side-eye to Tomi) or a functional mage, so I might just end up keeping the backing band.
Title: Re: Adventures in the Forgotten Realms (Baldurs Gate, Neverwinter Nights, etc)
Post by: Jubal on November 10, 2022, 11:31:58 AM
I finished Hordes of the Underdark, yesterday, which gets me to the end of the original game's campaigns.

The ending didn't hugely land with me: having a certain fallen-unfallen paladin betray me *again* just to die rapidly to my hammer felt like a cheap-shot that undermined her arc.

Also, Cania was weird without that feeling earned/without a sense of epic majesty to it, I guess. The first two chapters of HotU worked well for me, as much as I think the Underdark isn't portrayed that well in CRPGs (little sense of the enclosed-ness, often it's just "town, but of evil slavers, and in a cave!") Planar-level D&D is really hard to get right though: how do you make it epic and strange enough while keeping functional things the players need? I'm not sure taking inexplicable demonic creatures and turning them into quarry workers really lands that balance well. Cania's problem is not that it doesn't make logical sense, it's the lack of emotional sense. "Why" doesn't need a logical answer in a hell plane but it needs an idea-driven answer.

Also, the relic of the reaper/Mephistopheles plot was a bit flat. It would have been much stronger if it had been connected to the magic door we had to use to escape at the end of SoU, rather than just being "hey, you start this new game with an obviously evil utility macguffin, bet that won't cause any issues".

Some misc positive points on the other hand...

I think I should probably now wait a while before doing NWN2: NWN1 has a LOT of content, I've not touched the DLCs yet really, but I need to actually spend some time on other projects and things to do, I think. Possibly also go back to some Wildermyth? And I've been saying I'll play some NWN multiplayer with Spritelady so hopefully we'll manage that soon.
Title: Re: Adventures in the Forgotten Realms (Baldurs Gate, Neverwinter Nights, etc)
Post by: Jubal on May 02, 2023, 12:00:38 AM
Well, Icewind Dale was cheap on GOG so I'm back in Faerun. I think the engine is the same as for BG2, by the looks of it. The core gameplay difference is balance: Icewind Dale requires you to make and run the whole party, and I think it does also show (unfortunately) why that's not the commonest system in games. I'm a writer: it's relatively easy for me to impute character into my six lil guys. But IWD makes me do all the work on that and doesn't give me much chance to show who these people are through gameplay.

What it does do, conversely, is dungeon crawling. Really, lots of dungeon crawling, it is quite hard to overstate just how much dungeon crawling this game has in it. That is unfortunately not something the engine is great at. The limited sight and trigger ranges of NPCs, combined with the relatively high standard combat difficulty, mean that there are two dominant strategies: using quicksaves a lot, which I don't enjoy, or - more crucially - fighting very, very slowly indeed. Send a scout out, kite two guys back to the party, kill them, do the same again. You can maybe do this five times safely before your mages start running out of spell slots, at which point you have to leave the dungeon because the risk of a close quarters fight spawning if you sleep in the dungeon is simply too great, and then you can rest, and then repeat the whole thing. I feel like the expectation for the combat balance is based on really quite highly optimised parties: mine isn't, though it's not unoptimised either: it's a very standard D&D party and composition.

In general the plot so far is pretty good, and the setting nice: I like Kuldahar and would have liked more depth and sidequesting and moving between the different places, rather than just knocking off Vale, Temple, Dragon's Eye on a pretty much one by one basis. Kresselack in particular was genuinely quite memorable and had good voice acting and I'd have liked to have seen more of him. One minor annoyance is that the rare dialogue line you're meant to get if you click on the same character too many times actually doesn't take into account when you click off them so you get the characters being annoyed at you *constantly* which is a bit vexing. I really liked the nymph/fisherman quest at the start, I'd have liked to have more stuff like that throughout.
Title: Re: Adventures in the Forgotten Realms (Baldurs Gate, Neverwinter Nights, etc)
Post by: Jubal on May 22, 2023, 02:17:17 PM
OK, I finished Icewind Dale on Saturday, I have a lot of thoughts and most of them aren't really compliments. The first thing I'd ask anyone planning to play IWD is "why", with the four acceptable answers being "I have nostalgia for it", "I really like slow grindy combats", "I am interested in it as a piece of gaming history", and "I have a thing for being punitive to myself about which games I play". There's pretty much nowt here that BG1/2 don't do better.

The thing is: Icewind Dale isn't terrible. It's fine. But it does double down on the thing that the engine does least well, and the thing that takes the longest, namely choppy choppy doom combats. The worst one being the harpy cave in Trials, which I get is meant to be super hard but making things hard by removing control of your party in ways you can't control against is annoying, the sheer numbers are just silly, and ultimately the best strategy for that content turned out to be walk in, kill exactly one harpy with all the most powerful stuff one can throw at it, run away because they won't leave the cave, rinse and repeat. It took probably over ten hit and runs and a couple of hours of gameplay for that encounter, and it did not feel worthwhile once it was done. All that means that it's a game with relatively limited plot that still takes many tens of hours to hack through, which just isn't great as a ratio.

The nature of the limited-characterisation party reduces the story options, exacerbated heavily by two further problems: first, some of the story content is actually really hard to find, I was checking walkthroughs at a number of points in the run and I still managed to miss at least three or four quest endings. The worst culprit here is in Heart of Winter, the expansion section, where the game prods you to get on and go to defeat the final enemy as soon as you've unmasked the impostor, but this locks you out of ever returning to Lonelywood because the final booss fight of the expansion kicks you immediately back to the main game - and also there's a bunch of content in Lonelywood that only triggers when the impostor is unmasked, which the game actively directs you away from. Another culprit in the main story is the guys in the palace of Dorn's Deep where you will almost inevitably talk to one of them first, the conversation always ends in combat even if you try and leave peacefully, and this auto-aggros a second character who has a nonviolent resolution available but is several rooms down and so you will almost never encounter him first.

A second major issue for story and characterisation is that you can't switch who's talking: it's defined by who is at the front of your party. So tactically you usually want your tank, not your squishy little bard, standing at the front. But also if your tank is at the front they have to deal with conversations and the bard often gets unique options and other options are locked by stat things that your tank is likely by definition bad at. This led among other things to the deaths of a bunch of Svirfneblin because my low-INT paladin was only able to use the worst possible command to try and shut down a certain sorceror's golem buddies: the bard, who was standing right there with the manual, would have been able to do it fine. Why some of these things, especially the Lonelywood kickback, weren't fixed in the Enhanced Edition I honestly don't know: the conversation system issue I get might have taken engine changes, though they'd have been hugely worthwhile: but moving triggering the end of HoW to a short mainland conversation with Hjollder would have been a pretty easy fix.

The monster and combat selection, besides being grindy, is done in a way that sucks the effectiveness out of some of its monsters and story beats. You only encounter, for example, beholders once in the game. And it's just seven or eight of them floating around on the top level of a castle for literally no obvious reason at all, with a few more a bit later in the dungeons. Sure, this makes for a tricky combat encounter - beholders are tough and tactically difficult. But also, beholders are good enemies because they're big scary antagonists. I want a beholder to be cackling in my face and calling its minions while it zaps at my party with its various weird eye attacks in our desperate battle. It sort of takes the interest out when you're on beholder number three or four, let alone beholders five through seven. Minotaurs get a similar problem treatment: a minotaur is a big scary boss at the back of a cave, using them as wave attack fodder, even if it makes the combat trickier, undercuts what makes that monster special and worth fighting.

Speaking of being special and worth fighting, we come to the core plots and the antagonists, who aren't awful but are generic and somewhat unexplained. The antagonist of Heart of Winter is the best of the three core plots (Trials of the Luremaster, Heart of Winter, Main Quest): but she could've done with quite a bit more fleshing out. The main quest antagonist is honestly quite dull. The "evil guys being in conflict prevented all this until you killed one of them" is not a bad plot move, but it's not really sufficiently held up, especially in that the first of the two you kill is in no way at all capable of even mildly inconveniencing the actual final boss, and said final boss is incredibly annoying in that most of the point of the boss fight is taking your toys away, rather than challenging you to use them excitingly: his magic resistance is so high that all your exciting barrage of spells are effectively useless and all you've got is throwing cannon fodder while hacking away with your most high magic weapons, and it just isn't a ton of fun. Again, Heart of Winter dooes its boss fight better.
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Also on some of the things that seem fairly core there's just some weirdly inexplicable stuff going on. You find out about the causes of an ancient war from the guy who caused it, who is hanging out in a gnome village selling you squirrels and things. And this isn't a weird undercutting thing, he's actually a fully evil war profiteer who manipulated all sides in a cruel and ruthless ploy for money, and yet for some reason he's hanging out selling daggers to Svirfneblin refugees now? This is never explained, and also you can't go back and tell the undead elves why they're actually all dead which seems like the kind of thing that might be plot important, as there's a lot more humanity and stakes in the elves' side-plot than the actual main cultic plotlines.

I think I need to pause this tirade to check out the good bits. The sidequests are, as usual with many RPGs, far better than the main quest. I got to release squirrels in an ancient elven arboretum, that was great, and the various quests about settling the dead to rest felt very rewarding (though I'd have liked to be able to do more for the souls in the Hand). Generally the characters are not badly written and there are some interesting interactions around the theme of evil infighting. I think the other thing the game does well is location design for the most part. Whilst most areas are too big and some areas (Dragon's Eye) are way too generically dungeony, there are some quite classy and interesting visual design choices. I think Dorn's Deep is especially interesting as a piece of design history, with its bridges over flowing lava, and largely blocky and geometric building designs with large, heavily built sculptures: it feels like a bit of a precursor to the Jacksonian vision of Moria which has become very core to how dwarf architecture is represented since, and it does that style much more than Durlag's Tower in BG1 did whilst still being a few years out from the Jackson LOTR films.

So there's not nothing to Icewind Dale, it's just mainly a 100 hour game that should've been a 30 hour game. And I should probably consider trying to play something a little bit more user friendly next?
Title: Re: Adventures in the Forgotten Realms (Baldurs Gate, Neverwinter Nights, etc)
Post by: BeerDrinkingBurke on July 07, 2023, 01:09:56 PM
Thanks for sharing this Jubal. I had actually felt a pang of nostalgia for IWD recently, and had even contemplated playing it (although I have distinct memories of NOT liking it that much at the time compared with BG1+2). Now I think I'll focus instead of getting into the Pillars of Eternity games.
Title: Re: Adventures in the Forgotten Realms (Baldurs Gate, Neverwinter Nights, etc)
Post by: Jubal on July 08, 2023, 01:34:08 PM
Yeah, I liked the first Pillars game in general, though my favourite of the companion characters had a bad ending which I felt a bit glum about at the end (though I did produce a song (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6OELo67ssQ) out of the annoyance feeling so it wasn't wholly unproductive). I should get round to playing the second at some point. Let me know what you think of them!
Title: Re: Adventures in the Forgotten Realms (Baldurs Gate, Neverwinter Nights, etc)
Post by: Spritelady on August 22, 2023, 05:24:01 PM
This seems a good sort of thread for a more in depth discussion of Baldur's Gate 3 (as opposed to my initial slightly rambly thoughts over in the 'what digital games are you playing' thread).

Has anyone started playing this? I am finding I have a lot of thoughts about it, most of them very positive, but I haven't played the first two games and have no idea how well it holds up in general.

That said, I particularly enjoy the well balanced group of companions that you can add to your party while playing. The spread, not only of classes, but also abilities, personalities and aesthetics means that you have a lot of flexibility in putting together a party that has good options in most situations, and it also lets you put together more specialist teams for some of the harder quests/locations.

I have some minor criticisms, mostly mechanical. There are a few features that I felt would have been useful, and I believe easy to implement, like the ability to scroll up and down floors while moving the camera around. If such a button does exist, I don't know what it is and haven't yet worked out a good way to do it. This has occasionally made it hard to navigate and more frequently made it downright annoying to attempt to target an enemy on a different level than my own, although there are workarounds for this issue.
Note: if anyone does know of a handy way to actually move the camera up and down floor levels, please let me know and I shall retract this comment!
Title: Re: Adventures in the Forgotten Realms (Baldurs Gate, Neverwinter Nights, etc)
Post by: Jubal on August 22, 2023, 06:18:17 PM
I cannot start playing it until my fancy new computer arrives, which has now been ordered so hopefully soon... I'll let you know how it compares to the first two when I get into it! There's a few things I do know: combat in BG1 and BG2 is also D&D based but of course from a different edition, and also is pause & play so BG3 in a sense gives you more fidelity to the turn-based natured of the tabletop game. I am going to be really interested to see how many BG1/2 nods we get when I play through it.

What's your character/any pics? Interested to see who everyone's come up with :)