Baldur's Gate Enhanced Edition

I pretty much bought it Day 1 and played right through it. Never came back, though. While I enjoyed it I felt it was completely overshadowed by the masterpiece that was BG2. Granted they are very different games. BG1 is about the low-level D&D experience which has its peculiar charms.

I think the extreme advantage of ranged weaponry (bows! bows! bows!) and the exploitable fog-of-war creep approach left a bit of a bad taste in my mouth.

What I chiefly remember now, apart from “You must gather your party before venturing forth,” is a few other snippets of voice work: “Somebody get me out of this hellhole!” “Spare no one!” “Shall we continue your lesson?”

Yea, the memories of those will go on forever.

BG2 does start with your characters having more firepower and so the game seems a little quicker I guess.

I would think if you follow the plot and leave out the wandering around you could finish BG1 and move to BG2 in about 1/3 of the time.

Maybe I’ll have to give ToEE another chance.

I’m usually a story person too in an RPG, but if a game has good enough mechanics / systems that can carry it too.

Maybe BG is just a game now where I can only make a little progress per play session before I tire of it, say 1 map clear. I was hoping to play BGEE and then take that character into BG2EE (after a break). I guess I’ll play it by ear and if I feel like stopping then so be it.

Icewind Dale doesn’t have the companion character development of BG but it is a great game. Create your own party and have at it.

I’m also one who prefers controlling a single character over controlling a whole party. It just helps in my mind with the roleplaying aspect, as well as being less busy-work. Luckily, after I hit a brick wall in difficulty with my 6 member party in the first dungeon in Icewind Dale, two friends and I decided to play it through in multiplayer on a LAN. So I controlled a Ranger through the adventure, and I was only a Ranger. And my one friend controlled a Fighter/Mage. And my third friend controlled a Thief.

(Sidenote: The thief got so tired of doing less damage than the two of us that at the end of the game, in the final 10 hours, after playing through the whole 50-60 hours as the Thief, he gave up in disgust and started a new level 1 Paladin. And the Level 1 Paladin almost caught up to the two of us by the end of the game, and not just that, he started doing more damage than the two of us soon after starting too, since we’d found quite a few Paladin-only items through the course of our adventures. I honestly thought his griping about Thieves sucking in D&D was just griping, but after seeing how his Paladin was god mode compared to his Thief, I was convinced).

Thieves can be very deadly in BG or IWD but they do it in sneaky ways, laying traps etc. In a big fight short of plink plinking with a bow they kind of lose their worth. I always liked the dual mage/thief option.

I have solo’d BG as a mage/thief.

There was a big problem in level design in IWD with regards to thieves too. We’d go into a situation, and the two of us would stand absolutely still, while I our thief friend searched for traps, and disarmed them. Except that nearly every place had some traps that you couldn’t disarm. In fact, they were traps that had to be triggered for doors to open and enemies to come in, so that we could advance in the dungeon. It was really frustrating because here’s our Thief, and time and again, he’s basically worthless. He saved us a little damage by finding those little traps, but we knew we had to trigger the big trap, and the enemies would instantly see all of us, and he wouldn’t be able to backstab in most cases because the traps were scripted that way.

Edit: When he switched to being a Paladin, we just triggered all the traps, and those little ones that he’d been disarming weren’t really a big deal at all. We took a little damage there, but in exchange for him not being a Thief, we also dished out much more damage than when he was a Thief.

Yeah, to me the biggest weakness of BG I and II is the D&D ruleset. It was barely adequate for pen & paper games, and for computer gaming – with computers able to generate situational mods and complex systems easily – those craptacular underlying rules stood out like sore thumbs.

I know the early AD&D systems in my bones, so I find the low-level meanderings of BG fantastic and charming, but I would recommend it only with reservations.

Playing it back in '99 pushed buttons I had forgotten were so deeply connected to my brain. Looking at it now, the appeal is a weird little thrill of nostalgia, for a game whose original appeal (for me) was… nostalgia.

Hah! I’d forgotten “Spare no one!” Every now and then I’ll get a sudden flash of “Me onions are waiting,” mainly because what the hell are you talking about, lady?

I recently finished a BG:EE with an undead hunter. Pally. Weird I now see I have this dragonspear add on. I guess Ill roll with it. They still kinda hold up. I saw earlier that It was a “Mask of betrayer” anniversary for NW2. As someone that ran through all of that stuff it would be nice to get a common system. Perhaps this new pathfinder is the right thing? Or the new Pillars?

The iOS version of BGII:EE is down to 3 bucks, at least for the weekend. Which means I just bought it for a fourth time (original version on CD, then on GoG, then enhanced on Steam and now for my iPad).

It’s 2.50 on Android.

I find it a bit tough to play on a phone screen. I could see this working on something just a bit larger like the Switch.

I had no idea about the Circle of Eight mod for ToEE. Will certainly check this out.

It says, on the iOS app store that it’s not meant to be played on any device with a screen smaller than 7 inches.

Well there ya go :)

My beef with all of the games that used this engine and similar rulesets, was that the AI never took into account how many turns were wasted by your party trying to path somewhere, and it happened almost without fail every fight. Watching one of your melee characters take 5 turns to figure out how to walk 3 spaces, while being bombed by AI mages to oblivion was just about rage-quit for me.

The ruleset for these games is bad at best, but it’s horrible when the bad pathing gets added into it.

Massive patch today

Got to hand it to them, the value offered is questionable, but it’s neat that such a landmark all time great game is being updated so it plays smoothly on modern hardware.

I’ve found I have trouble dealing with how weird the character movement is in these games anymore.

That and 2E is a tough sell for me anymore, but really it’s mostly the movement.

This always bothers me as well - I hate that when you click on a location to send everyone to, they halt for a beat and then start moving again, and you do it a LOT in the game, dozens of time while walking from point to point, and you can’t click to walk into the fog of war, which makes it more annoying. That said, I’m able to ignore it and enjoy my time with these games, but I totally understand it being a source of contention. Plus the herky/jerky animations - mostly a problem now as we’ve seen how smooth this can all work/look and that has never been updated in these older games, which is a shame.