Icewind Dale

[Anonymous No.5408579]

Can I get a lengthy elucidation on this game
How similar is it to other Infinity Engine games?

[Anonymous No.5408586]

More combat-based and not as story-driven as Baldur's Gate.

[Anonymous No.5408592]

>>5408579
Compared to BG, it's even more oriented around combat and, although the writing is more sparse, it's also more mature and less jokey than the one featured in BG. Lack of companions and their potential zany personalities and conflicts reinforces this.
It has, IMHO, the most beautiful graphics and sound design of all the games, with the best voice acting overall, amazing portraits (I always backport these into BG) and most interesting locations.
It's generally been a go-to game for fans of RTwP combat and munchkinnery for a long time (and a lot of people dropped it when they weren't motivated by the overarching theme of a hack'n'slash campaign), but BG sorta surpassed it on that front due to the Sword Coast Stratagems mod squeezing the most out of the fairly limited AI scripting available in IE.
All in all, a worthy title to play, particularly if you just finished Baldur's Gate and feel like your favourite parts about the game were the combat.

IWD2 is pretty good too, but not retro. It runs off the 3rd edition of D&D proper, and as such it has even more complexity involved for powergamer types. It's a bit harder to get ahold of nowadays, but it's a quality game as well; it didn't get much recognition because, mainstream-wise, it released next to Morrowind and NWN, a lot of people felt IE was outdated, Interplay was going bankrupt, and grognards thought Black Isle Studios (generally revered as masters of worldbuilding and writing) can do better than a hack'n'slash game whose plot was reportedly written by J.E. Sawyer alone in 48 hours, presumedly on the back of a pizza box.

Pic unrelated, I just like feet.

[Anonymous No.5408730]

>>5408592
Excellent description.

Icewind Dale is top comfy.

[Anonymous No.5408751]

>>5408592
To be frank, I could never get into IWD. I guess for me it was TOO combat heavy.
I kinda like the balance BG managed to struck with story/gameplay.
IWD grew boring for me after a while - it was one of those "why am I doing this" situations. But to each it's own.

[Anonymous No.5408757]

>>5408751
Yeah, it's one of the less popular IE titles even though the craftsmanship is great, just not a lot of people are purely in it for mechanics. I fully understand your position.

[Anonymous No.5408780]

Really love this game
Just put this up on my wall

[Anonymous No.5408806]

>>5408592
Aerie is so cute

[Anonymous No.5408995]

>>5408579
I've only played Baldurs Gate 1 and 2 plus expansions to compare it to. It's a really, really good game, there are hundreds of hours of enjoyment to be had of it.
Messing about with the AD&D rules system to try and craft the most efficient party of killers is tremendously entertaining in itself. (I recommend trying to get through with a party of 3 or 4 - I used a Bard, Paladin, Thief/Mage and Ranger/Cleric)
On top of the party crafting, micromanaging your party's combat tactics is also fun and challenging, there is enough story and dialogue to keep you interested without getting in the way of hack and slash and there is of course a shit tonne of cool loot to find and experiment with.

[Anonymous No.5409005]

Beamdog is a guilty of a number of different crimes. Here are the major ones.

1. The Enhanced Editions are essentially a collection of free mods that had existed for nearly twenty years. Beamdog gathered them all up, slapped "Enhanced Edition" on it and resold it as a new product. There's very very little in the Enhanced Editions that wasn't already out there, and most of it is stuff you don't want (like obnoxious character outlines).

2. The games didn't sell so well and the originals were still far outselling them, even twenty years after their release, so Beamdog had EVERY digital distributor stop selling the originals and ONLY sell the Enhanced Edition. If you want to buy a digital copy of the originals now, they're "bundled" into the Enhanced Edition. Now these scumbags can claim sales from people just wanting to buy the originals as their own.

3. The infamous 600+ bugs on launch. The game is still riddled with bugs (as even a perfunctory glance over their forums show) but the fact that it took nearly two years for them to get a game that had been working fine for 20 years to reach playability after launch is telling of their wild incompetence.

4. This is where we get to the ones that really piss people off. Beamdog couldn't just remaster the game, they had to fuck with the content too. New dialogue for existing NPCs like Jaheira, Viconia, Safana, Kivan, et cetera was written in to make the characters more progressive and leftist friendly. Beamdog shills will argue that "adding content isn't changing content XDDD" but it is when the new content changes the core personalities of the existing characters. This is in addition to adding a slew of their own LGBT (hitherto there were none in Baldur's Gate) NPCs, all flooded with OP attributes and magic items to encourage people to play them despite their cancer.

5. Siege of motherfucking Dragonspear.

[Anonymous No.5409015]

>>5409005
pasta aside Icewind Dale: EE is probably the only good EE since there wasn't really any writing for beamdog to butcher in the first place

[Anonymous No.5409021]

>>5409015
Didn't they fucked up balance in it with all additional shit or something?

[Anonymous No.5409054]

>>5409021
>balance
>DnD ruleset
pick one

[Anonymous No.5409072]

>>5409054
I hate this argument because it implies that just because a system isn't perfect then you're allowed to fuck around with it with no rhyme or reason just because it's broken. It's like saying "wizards have the strongest spells ad utility so I guess it doesn't matter if you just CTRL+Y through the game, it wasn't balanced anyway".
>>5409015
IWD:EE is a haphazard "let's throw shit from BG2 at it' conversion that runs into a ton of problems:
>game wasn't built around dual-wielding at all, but here it's shoehorned in, which is already bad news for a game that loves its physical characters and has no HLAs
>Insane difficulty is much easier, and if your entire reason to play IWD was munchkinism and challenge then IWDEE is so much easier overall
>so many of the BG2(:EE) kits are utterly broken in IWD (Archers, Dwarven Defenders)
>issues abound with the way the IWD1 special bard songs work with Bard kits
>removed Character Arbitration button
>BG2 proficiency system doesn't lend itself very well to a game where much of the loot is RNG
It's just not a very faithful version of the IWD experience.

[Anonymous No.5409282]

>>5409015
It had an awful optimization.

[Anonymous No.5409640]

The unofficial expansion Trials of the Luremaster is fantastic. I hope most everyone has played it. Is it part of IWD EE?

[Anonymous No.5409748]

>>5408592
>It runs off the 3rd edition of D&D proper,
And suffers for it. Initiative doesn't work, the iterative attack penalty completely fucks fighters, and so does the damage resistance some enemies have. Fixing all of IWD2's problems would involve porting the entire fucking thing into the IWD1 or BG2 engine.

Take it from a fa/tg/uy; 3rd edition was a mistake.

[Anonymous No.5410085]

>>5409748
As the author of that post who's also a fa/tg/uy, you're horrendously overstating the impact of the tabletop 3rd edition on its video game adaptations. NWN doesn't have weak martials and neither does IWD2. I have no idea how to interpret the "initiative doesn't work" issue considering that it wasn't exactly transparent in other RTwP games.
Due to IWD/NWN restricting caster playstyles (no flight, no mobility spells, no scry-or-die tactics) and the available Wealth-Per-Level guidelines being extremely generous (your party gets a lot more items than a tabletop party of their level is expected to do), especially towards martials (most of the available artifacts are magic weaponry or potent consumables) the playing field between martials and casters is extremely fair in IWD series overall.

Across whole of D&D, martials excel at doing massive single-target damage. IWD games (including 2) get that part right, and it's even more pronounced in the Heart of Fury mode, where the inflated HP levels really support having a solid, consistent source of on-demand physical damage.

If we're going to argue for IWD2 being better on BG2 engine on the grounds of martial mechanics and damage resistance, well - BG2 mechanics are *really* lopsided towards dual-wielders (due to "more attacks = always better" rule, as well as Improved Haste abuse; there's nothing to account for using a two-handed weapon, and shields are trash due to sharp diminishing returns on AC) and fighters only get a damage resistance mechanic from a high-level ability (all the way in ToB), so mages outstrip them in that regard all the way (and synergize better with uber items like Cloak of the Sewers [Rat / Mustard Jelly form], that gives you 90+% damage reduction to given elements (including physical damage) and still applies effects like Fireshield or Blade Barrier).

Take it from a fa/tg/uy, but I can't say I agree. None of the IWD2 flaws you posit are in any way related to the 3rd edition of D&D.

[Anonymous No.5410113]

>>5410085
Oh, and for that matter - ToEE (+ Co8) doesn't suffer from any glaring martial character weaknesses. Neither does Pathfinder: Kingmaker, the newest derivative of the 3.x formula. The video game grounds (magic mainly used for combat utility and its "gamebreaking" utilities like scrying, divination, and sheer convenience vastly downplayed and the massive bias of the system towards keeping the warrior gear up to date) do a good job levelling the playing field in all of these games, and 3.x edition feats also give martials ways into battlefield control or AoE damage without having to use consumables.

Of course there are weaknesses to this approach and this isn't a high praise of 3E, I just don't see the grounds for your argument.

[Anonymous No.5411562]

>>5408780
that's pretty based anon,

[Anonymous No.5411762]

>>5408579
RayHound is bad.

[Anonymous No.5413319]

>>5409640
>unofficial

It was official, but for free.