Off-topic and Chatter: The Jolly Boar Inn > General Gaming - The Arcade

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

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Jubal:
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).

Jubal:
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)two major BG1 characters killed off offscreen before you start the first dungeonand 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.

dubsartur:

--- Quote from: 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!

--- End quote ---
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.

luplay:
Looks good. Thanks for your sharing.

Jubal:
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.

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