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?
