Go for the eyes, Boo!
Jan. 6th, 2013 09:23 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ladyofastolatI'm playing the new enhanced edition of Baldur's Gate. The BG series is almost certainly my Best Game Ever (though Thief: Deadly Shadows runs it a close second) and I must have played BG right through at least 4 or 5 times before, over the last dozen years or so. I've not played it for a few years, though, so I jumped at the chance to play with a shiny new tweaked version.
It's very much a tweaked version of the original game, not a brand new version. Playing it feels like playing the old familiar game, but with a lot of annoyances removed, and a bit of extra stuff. Changes that I've noticed thus far include:
- Instantaneous loading of new areas, which makes random exploring of town houses a lot less annoying. The old game never seemed to load anything like that fast, even on my modern computer.
- Beautiful shiny high resolution. Everywhere looks so crisp and lovely! You can zoom in and out with the mouse wheel, as in Neverwinter Nights (something that deep down I apparently expect every game to do; I keep accidentally scrolling through my weapons in first person shooters as I try to zoom out.) I default to very zoomed out, with my characters as tiny dots on a large map, but can zoom in during confusing battles.
- All of those small gameplay improvements that were introduced in BG2, and whose lack always made BG a somewhat frustrating experience to play after BG2 came out:
Inventory management: gem bags, scroll cases etc., and better stacking of arrows (in 80s, in this case)
Doors and cases showing up when you press Tab (which always seemed to me like something of a cheat, but a very welcome and useful one)
Faster walking speed. Yay!
Points for learning spells and doing thiefy things
Plus a few new ones:
Different colour circles for each party member, for easier identification
Little icons appear on your party's portraits to show their current action in battle
- New side-quests. My character levelled up to level 3 at the point in the plot at which I normally reach level 2 (i.e. when reporting in the Nashkel Mine quest), because there are so many more xps floating around. There's not a huge amount more to do, but there are people willing to give xps for doing some of the things that you always did - e.g. killing random monsters in the wilderness, some of which now drop possessions that people want returned to them.
- New NPCs. There are 3 new party members, although I'm generally ignoring them. There's a monk, and I played a monk in BG2 once, and found them useless at low levels (which I will be for the entire game) and ridiculously overpowered at high levels. Another is an evil half-orc thumpy person, and I play with a good party. The third is a wild mage, and I've got her in my party currently, but only until I get a better mage. Wild mages have a 5% chance of catastrophic spell failure, which sounds rather scary.
- The Black Pits: a new challenge, separate from the main game, which sounds like a sort of arena/survival mode thing, with waves of hordes. I'm waiting until I'm higher level before doing this one!
I'm very much enjoying it. I've always preferred BG2 to BG, and always will, because I find it more interesting to be higher level, and I like all the extra characterisation that the NPCs get. But this enhanced edition has removed most of the gameplay reasons for my preferring the second game.
In addition, in one respect, I now prefer BG. BG is full of enormous wilderness maps that you can wander through at will, meaning that there's nothing stopping you from stumbling on a high level dungeon when level 1, which I did once. (It was terrifying!) BG2 has focused maps which only appear when the relevant big quest is given to you, and there's much less free wandering around. Intellectually I preferred the BG way of doing it, but given the very slow walking speeds of BG, and the low resolution meaning that you only saw a tiny part of the huge maps at a time, I found all the endless wilderness wandering rather arduous, and in practice preferred the focused maps of BG2. But now that I can wander through the maps a lot faster, I'm back to preferring the BG approach.
The reviews say that the game came out very buggy, but I've not had any problems, perhaps thanks to an enormous patch that came out a week or so ago. The reviews also say that many of the gameplay improvements were already available via free fan-made mods, and recommend going that route instead, but I've been a little wary of mods, after I modded a BG2 so heavily that it ended up breaking beyond repair about 90% of the way in. Plus, the people behind this enhanced edition are talking about doing a BG3, and therefore I want to give them my support and money.
Back to smiting evil!
It's very much a tweaked version of the original game, not a brand new version. Playing it feels like playing the old familiar game, but with a lot of annoyances removed, and a bit of extra stuff. Changes that I've noticed thus far include:
- Instantaneous loading of new areas, which makes random exploring of town houses a lot less annoying. The old game never seemed to load anything like that fast, even on my modern computer.
- Beautiful shiny high resolution. Everywhere looks so crisp and lovely! You can zoom in and out with the mouse wheel, as in Neverwinter Nights (something that deep down I apparently expect every game to do; I keep accidentally scrolling through my weapons in first person shooters as I try to zoom out.) I default to very zoomed out, with my characters as tiny dots on a large map, but can zoom in during confusing battles.
- All of those small gameplay improvements that were introduced in BG2, and whose lack always made BG a somewhat frustrating experience to play after BG2 came out:
Inventory management: gem bags, scroll cases etc., and better stacking of arrows (in 80s, in this case)
Doors and cases showing up when you press Tab (which always seemed to me like something of a cheat, but a very welcome and useful one)
Faster walking speed. Yay!
Points for learning spells and doing thiefy things
Plus a few new ones:
Different colour circles for each party member, for easier identification
Little icons appear on your party's portraits to show their current action in battle
- New side-quests. My character levelled up to level 3 at the point in the plot at which I normally reach level 2 (i.e. when reporting in the Nashkel Mine quest), because there are so many more xps floating around. There's not a huge amount more to do, but there are people willing to give xps for doing some of the things that you always did - e.g. killing random monsters in the wilderness, some of which now drop possessions that people want returned to them.
- New NPCs. There are 3 new party members, although I'm generally ignoring them. There's a monk, and I played a monk in BG2 once, and found them useless at low levels (which I will be for the entire game) and ridiculously overpowered at high levels. Another is an evil half-orc thumpy person, and I play with a good party. The third is a wild mage, and I've got her in my party currently, but only until I get a better mage. Wild mages have a 5% chance of catastrophic spell failure, which sounds rather scary.
- The Black Pits: a new challenge, separate from the main game, which sounds like a sort of arena/survival mode thing, with waves of hordes. I'm waiting until I'm higher level before doing this one!
I'm very much enjoying it. I've always preferred BG2 to BG, and always will, because I find it more interesting to be higher level, and I like all the extra characterisation that the NPCs get. But this enhanced edition has removed most of the gameplay reasons for my preferring the second game.
In addition, in one respect, I now prefer BG. BG is full of enormous wilderness maps that you can wander through at will, meaning that there's nothing stopping you from stumbling on a high level dungeon when level 1, which I did once. (It was terrifying!) BG2 has focused maps which only appear when the relevant big quest is given to you, and there's much less free wandering around. Intellectually I preferred the BG way of doing it, but given the very slow walking speeds of BG, and the low resolution meaning that you only saw a tiny part of the huge maps at a time, I found all the endless wilderness wandering rather arduous, and in practice preferred the focused maps of BG2. But now that I can wander through the maps a lot faster, I'm back to preferring the BG approach.
The reviews say that the game came out very buggy, but I've not had any problems, perhaps thanks to an enormous patch that came out a week or so ago. The reviews also say that many of the gameplay improvements were already available via free fan-made mods, and recommend going that route instead, but I've been a little wary of mods, after I modded a BG2 so heavily that it ended up breaking beyond repair about 90% of the way in. Plus, the people behind this enhanced edition are talking about doing a BG3, and therefore I want to give them my support and money.
Back to smiting evil!
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Date: 2013-01-06 10:53 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-01-06 01:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-01-06 09:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-01-06 02:22 pm (UTC)One of my biggest issues with BG was the party AI when it came to tight spaces. I can remember spending ages trying to get us out of a narrow corridor in some cave or mine, and shouting at my monitor in total frustration. Has that been fixed as well?
I never did really play BG2 again, although I did start it a couple months ago. I couldn't get into it. Instead I replayed Star Wars KOTOR 2, and in fact I still am, playing it now as Dark Side. And I'm thoroughly enjoying it. :-)
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Date: 2013-01-06 09:07 pm (UTC)I've not noticed any problems with people getting stuck in narrow corridors, so I'm fairly sure that's fixed up to BG2 levels, at least. (This is one of those things that you only really notice when it doesn't work. When it works fine you just don't notice it.) The pathfinding is still pretty bad, with the characters at the back of the party often deciding to wander off in the wrong direction, but that's liveable with as long as you expect it, and keep an eye on it.