Adventures in the Forgotten Realms (Baldurs Gate, Neverwinter Nights, etc)

[Jubal]

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...

• Mamuka and the background as an architect I wrote for him are being imported into my main TTRPG setting. I enjoyed playing him a lot (he ended up with Harper Scout as his prestige class which seemed appropriate).
• The gelatinous cube bit in the underdark was great - adding 3-dimensionality & much more the feel I wanted.
• Deekin continued to be adorable throughout and was responsible for basically all the good dialogue in the whole game.
• I begrudgingly liked the difficult politics with the Illithid: unlike a lot of "no good options" stuff in RPGs it felt actually earned and logical that you had to choose between breaking them and the risk to Lith Mythallar.
• Bumping into & fighting a certain creepy dwarf in hell worked well for me - I think Cania might have worked better if "but you could rule this place!" was pushed more at the main character.

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.

[Jubal]

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.

[Jubal]

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?

[BeerDrinkingBurke]

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.

[Jubal]

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 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!

[Spritelady]

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!

[Jubal]

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