Baldur's gate

Just wait a while, I have a feeling it's gonna get better

Hit the space bar, issue your commands one by one, hit the space bar again. I completely suck at micromanagement in games, but I never had any issues in any of the Infinity Engine games. Yes, sometimes I would pause every few seconds to make sure all the spells are timed correctly, but that's how the game was intended to be played.

With that said, the original BG is the weakest of all Infinity Engine games. You should at least use a mod like BG Trilogy to play it in the BG2 engine and a mod that swaps the "you need to gather your party" voice for silence, and maybe look into some other mods on top of that. The writing really isn't as good as later games, and you start at level 1 and don't get to level up very far. Magic users can be a real bitch at the start of the game where one saving throw alone can make a big difference in how the combat plays out. In BG you start at a higher level already, and in Icewind Dale 1 & 2 the challenges is better balanced and you can level higher than in BG1.

Great games, best crpgs available at the time they came out for people wanting a 2E ADnD translation. They were critically acclaimed at release and are still fun to play if you were alive at the time and know what to expect.

Either set the game to pause after each turn, or get in the habit of pausing after each discrete set of actions you queue up. It's based on a turn based PnP game so people coming into this at the time that had the interest expected and understood this. You've got to get acclimated.

They go exactly where you click. Path finding is improved in later games by shift-click queueing. You can also hit the select all button to highlight everyone before clicking a destination. You can also leverage the mini map to help out.

It does a great job making all of the information you need available to you. It's designed for non-modern resolutions. Grab a UI mod, there are plenty.

It's not an arpg

I just can't seem to play this fucking game. Controls suck, perspective sucks, dialogue reading sucks. Even combat system most of the time is letting go of your team, because its impossible to control them all at once or give some basic command to not fuck up. In normal games your characters go where you click, in this game you need to click 3-4 times on a location to register a movement, and don't forget to fucking select them all every time! I am not even talking about times when they stuck in each other during combat!
My eyes fucking hurt from this shit interface. Its not fun. The game is plain boredom of clicking and waiting. And sometimes spamming spells. Every fucking arpg in existence has better controls than this shit, fucking diablo has better controls. Baldur's Gate sucks to its very core.

FFT

I need to remember this. Already have Temple of Elemental Evil installed and i really like it.

I guess i'l have to fuck with pause button somehow, maybe get the mods you mentioned too.

I'm sure it will.

Good joke.

Elaborate?

Baldur's Gate is not a good game, let alone a good RPG.
Your choices don't matter and for something that is real time, the combat is glacially paced. How the fuck they managed to make the combat slower than a turn based game is beyond me.
The worst part is that Bioware never got good at this. The only RPG with passable combat made by Bioware is Jade Empire. Everything else is either derivative trash or just continuing the flaws that existed since BG1.

If you played it there's nothing to elaborate.
Limit your stupid ass to only pausing "now and then", let's say once per 10 seconds and tell me how great it is.

You need to play Shadow of Amn.
Honestly,. the first Baldur's Gate is shit.
Low level campaigns are fun only in actual tabletop games, in videogames you don't have that thrill because you can just go "quickload" "quicksave".

You're playing them on normal difficulty, right? Unless you did some retarded shit like downloading SCS for the first time, both BGs on normal require very little pausing at all. You most likely fucked up the customization of your characters or are using wrong spells

Thx Mark

No, I'm not playing them. I played them years ago. Shit then, shit now.

BG1/2, IWD, NWN1/2 are all only good with friends.

If you want a good CRPG, go play Fallout 2.

I'm waiting for the punchline. Unless you're playing some scripted out the ass tactics mod or are straight up autistic there's little need for pausing or combat micromanagement. Most of "the meat" comes from prep work; positioning, traps, buffs. And if some fucker does bite the dust - resurrection is cheap as dirt.

But this thread is Holla Forums on /tg/ tier and you're looking to vent, anyway.

I want to cum in Dorn

No fucking shit
90% of the enemies are fodder that respawn the moment you go offscreen.

Boy, you sure showed those gibberlings and xbarts, huh?

You know what would have made Baldurs Gate immediately an order of magnitude more fun? Giving it the fucking controls from DA:O. It may have better story and better pretty much everything else, but the party movement options of BG and the inability to assign tactics is just annoying. Toggling between party members and having the current party lead control things would be far more convenient.

In any case, you're better off playing pen and paper than any of these.

Faithful to the source material, too.

Yeah, because you get haste (or class kits) on level 1 in vanilla BG. :^)

Never played D&D in your life?

It doesn't
BG1(and 2 to a lesser extent) are typical Bioware tripe. DA:O as a whole is better than both of them apart from the MMO esque combat.

Seconding. 3.5E and later were intentionally turned into slogs, but the average AD&D encounter is fast as shit. Even something like a "boss" battle doesn't honestly take that long.

The long part is the set-up between fights, and that all really determines on how much your party infights. The group I've been DMing for started off slow as shit as they were being introduced to the game, but now that they all understand the rules and finally wised up to appointing a party leader, it only takes maybe three hours to clear a small dungeon.

DA:O falls into that typical Bioware tripe as well. BG isn't much better, but it at least holds a marginal edge. Though how much of that you credit to them using another source material versus them having been better at the time, that's where the question rises from.

It does but some segments and quests are done in a way where your choices actually matter unlike anything in Baldur's Gate.
IMO DA:O is better than BG1 based on the existence of the Landsmeet alone.

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I too love superior nippon rpgs user. I mean, who seriously wants to waste their time manually distributing stats so they have the freedom to build characters how they want, right? I'd rather have the game progress my stats for me. Bonus points if I get to play as angsty teenagers.

The big difference between the two is that DA:O gets most of its stronger points from points in the main quest. I'd say the most "memorable" scene in the whole game is when you break through the siege of Denerim and take your last party, and I'll admit, the overall sound and environmental design of that point made it stand out more in memory than any BG scene.

The biggest issue comes in the form of the things along the way. DA:O has a few decent side quests, but almost nothing really of note. On the other hand, BG has lots of little interesting things to do on the side like helping an apprentice mage turned into a chicken or whatever, and are generally a lot more sensible in the context of the main quest than the way DA:O implemented the ones in it. Further, there's the fact that, being Bioware, a lot of the "good" things in DA:O were just done first in BG. Going from the newer game to the earlier one make it especially hard to notice.

Then again, if we're speaking strictly side-quests, then even fucking Oblivion manages to beat out any Bioware game, so I suppose that doesn't mean a whole lot.

Only homebrewed erotic furry larps based on twilight, mlp and 80s euro dungeon porn. Honest.

Character building was faster, too.

And Skyrim has literally infinite quests? Give me a break.

Most decisions that were actually important were either retconned in the shitshow that was DA2 or were of the make this all important decision that carries no weight what's so ever variety. Because that's the Bioware way.

Both BGs were very much on rails and that the first game starts like a stock module or how most of the narration in BG2 comes from cutscenes doesn't help, either. DA has a much weaker setting but makes more of an effort to make you care for what's going on. And I also like that windowdressing but I have no illusion of it being more significant in DAO than in any a telltale game.

Except in bg's great rtwp encounters are slow as shit, especially at low levels

How is that relevant at all?

Good thing I was talking about DA:O then eh?

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Because that's a worn out bullshit claim you regurgitated there which I'm mocking with a different bullshit claim? Would you feel more comfortable if I used a Molyneux reference instead?I really love the whole ((,eh)) and ((,huh)) thing though, really conveys the bitchy

You know a game has meaningful C&C when shitting on someone's faith and personal creed can be usually fixed with a generic gift. Why didn't someone hand the darkspawn a pepsi? :^)

So you think your choices in Dragon Age Origins don't matter?
Have you actually played the game or are you just wasting my time?

6 seconds to wait after each miss, dumbshit.

Waaay too obvious OP

You have to think of in terms of when it came out OP. It's basically a prototype of an isometric RPG, it obviously will be a little cranky and aged.

I personally consider the games quite comfy, but at the same time a little bit boring because of how much time you spend walking around and doing quite… well insignificant shit at the very beginning.

Never got any further than the bandit camp but had some fun, the maps are full of quests and surprises but I've always felt like they were far too small for my taste. All the small additional quests were too short for my taste and everything else seemed to be just very small and short scenes. But can you really blame that game for it? It was one of the first games of this type so they haven't yet perfected everything.

Baldur's gate is the storyfags favourite

a more gameplay oriented game is Icewind Dale. If you enjoy the crpg combat and don't really care much about the story, try that one out.

If you don't care about the gameplay then don't even bother with the series.

Obviously not, I mean who even plays anything other than assfaggots and retail WoW in current year?

It's windowdressing. A story telling technique to help you immerse. Same as Kotor, same as JE and same as ME. Because that's the Bioware way. You want meaningful choices? Let's talk vidya with exclusive routes featuring different end destinations.

Git gud? Coup de grace can't miss.

You mean the thing not present in BGs?

Are you retarded?
What is Fallout?
What is Darklands?
What are Ultimas?

Read my post again you nigger, I said that it was one of the first ones. I'm saying that it is A PROTOTYPE, not THE PROTOTYPE.

STOP

Absolutely, that thing. Worst. game. ever.EVER

And you're wrong, how hard is that to grasp?

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BG2 is the best game of all time. OP should stop being such a semen-addicted bullying victim contrarian faggot and just enjoy a great game without being butthurt for once in his sad life.

If you like turn-based combat you should kill yourself btw, rtwp is the best system for party-based combat.

Most memorable part of DAO was Ostagar camp imo. They should have designed the rest of DAO like that but they didn't. Rest of the game lacked atmosphere and that sense of being a somebody. You were just a generic adventurer on a quest after Ostagar again. Bioware was doing the whole Bioware formula thing to the game's detriment.

DAO not only suffered a large lack of decent sidequests, it also had the major problem that under the storyworld logic you had a strong incentive not to go sidequesting. Even your party members would chew you out for it, but it was all RP-tier shit because the developers were too chickenshit to attach real consequences to faffing about like an idiot while a rampaging horde of darkspawn are incoming, so you had to ignore your complaining partymembers because even though their complaints were made sense the game was only going to reward you for wasting time doing these stupid things. Baldur's Gate to my understanding had much stronger sidequests complete with their own levels though.

Epilogue slides don't count. And most of your choices have minimal or parallelized consequences. Choosing between elves and werewolves or mages and templars were hardly even choices, since only sociopaths would pick the latter given that the game was browbeating you with ideal solutions and you had to deliberately volunteer the kill-em-all solution to get the other faction to join you.

Git gud, OP

Rtwp is a fucking admission that real time is shit for managing a group vs another group and they tried to bandaid that with pause.

IE games are only pseudo-RTWP anyway. It's basically turn based with free movement and without any kind of initiative system. Which is a pretty nonsensical combination when all it means is that you waste time kiting for a few seconds every time you run out of actions.

The first one seemed pretty boring, feeling underleveled and not having many abilities didn't help either. BG2 was fucking excellent.

Not true, actually. Weapon speed determines who gets to strike first. There's also a sneak attack bonus for attacking in the first round on flatfooted targets.

True, I forgot speed factor was a thing. But I don't remember it ever being relevant. Being able to cast at any point in a round is vastly more important.

Nah.
There's no turns.

Is Pillars of Eternity good? It's been catching my eye lately.

Icewind dale is superior to Baldurs Gate 1 in every way possible though it takes a good understanding of the mechanics of Baldurs Gate to get into and understand. Baldurs Gate 1 is even pretty shitty in terms of story but I still had a lot of fun with it. It's not as bad as some are making out, I really enjoyed it and have 100's of hours into it, but the story can get really dry, only when you delve into it, taking it at face value and not paying a huge amount of attention to it makes it more than bearable. It was the first game like that I ever really played though (this is only back in 2013) and I don't think I would of enjoyed it so much if I had played a bunch of others like I have now, pretty hard to go back to it when the games that came after dominate it. It is worth going through just so you have the context of the story and keep your character for BG2 and getting used to the games systems. But Icewind Dale really is superior if you are going for combat and gameplay you get to create your entire party from scratch as well and the game just lets you RP as much as you want as the story is streamlined to the max. I pause in those games in every fight, I always thought thats what you were supposed to do, you and enemies are going to drop really fast and its just not optimal and pretty dangerous to leave your characters sitting around doing nothing whilst you quickly try and give someone else there moves. You need to be aware of a lot of things to get through the fights decently and not just have to spam camps all the time.

Dragon Age: Origins is such a good game tbh I fuckin love it. My only gripes with the game are the over americanisation of the game world and culture, all the voice actors are shit except a few in your party, I'm sorry but a fuckin dwarf should not have an american accent; absolutely fuckin stupid. Even when they try to put on a foreign accent they fail, it sounds so contrived and dull, combining this with the bland and garbage visuals just made the game hard to look at, hear, and walk through. You can tell so much that is trying so hard to emulate a typical fantasy setting and european folklore and it just fails because it feels so forced like they don't understand what its all about, instead they just took the elements from every other fantasy and tried to clusterfuck them together into a huge amount of overused cliches. Its what I hate about Mass Effect as well they could of gone down the star trek route where it feels like a future Earth but instead its simply America in space - fucking shit. Their games are self-indulgent and unintelligent, they fill it with their immature preferences and opinions and end up smearing over what can be very well done. They actually put a lot of effort into the lore but failed to execute it entirely within the game, same with all there shit, every good bit of lore and world building is found in their shitty glossaries and encyclopedias. Fuck you BioWare

on a side note can we please share black mages?

Casting time is also a thing and the main reason why Robe of Vecna is so unbelievably game breaking.

Of course not and he should be whipped for suggesting otherwise.

Any games where you can be a kobold? Asking for… a friend

The goblinoid, the furry or the reptilian kind?

The latter i guess. How does it vary from the first

For the same reason japs draw orcs as pigs and why Birthright: The Gorgon's Alliance or Diggers doesn't fit your bill. Dwarf Fortress does, though. Also tails.

Dark Sun did everything better and came before BG. There were tons of great DND crpgs before Bioware, you know.

Fallout is ~cavalier oblique~
iirc 8 was the only isometric Ultima, the rest are all top down (without counting 9 ofc)

Only if you've never played a TRPG before. It's the devs tried their hardest to make the game require as little strategy as possible.

If you go in to Baldur's Gate expecting fast gameplay, you'll never enjoy it. And BG1 is average because low level AD&D 2E is pretty terrible, and there's barely any character development of your party members.
BG2 fixes both of those latter things.

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Speak for yourself user.
I homebrew that shit until it's fun as shit.

the trilogy mod definitely helped me retroactively go back and enjoy BG1. Durlag's Tower is a great dungeon from that game - maybe the only bit I remember. Also if you don't also have the widescreen mod, you're definitely going to be in for a bad time.

Welcome to the world of rpgs

Where is that pic from?

Reminder that Dragon Age was never good

I'm more often than not fine with RTwP and I disagree. The only games I know where it works well enough are UFO: Aftermath/shock/light.

Everything is designed with a turn in mind tho. Movement, attacks, casting.

It's better at being a CRPG than unmodded BG1.

BioWare games are an insult to RPGs in general

Wow, you're really raising the bar there, faggot

Dial down the defensive buffs, fam. Unless you want to argue that BG1 is worse than bad. I hate that game and yet I'd have to disagree.

Source?

The ability to move when it's not your "turn" is designed with a turn in mind?

I meant the amount of distance chars can cover but you are correct there. Not sure even NWN2 got this right, although both NWNs definitely restrict movement at least partially because of turns.

fighter/thief master race reporting in.

this game is so easy to solo.

Also not good != bad. It just means it doesnt progress beyond the mediocre. BG entirely on its own is pretty mediocre, it's just that unlike DA:O it's the (somewhat unnecessary) intro to a better title

No, the meaningful part of that post.

Ehh, okay. It's just that maymay phrase is almost exclusively used to say that something is shit nowadays.

If you mean that BG1 is a bad CRPG and an average "dungeon" crawler while DA:O is an average CRPG with some highlights here and there, then I agree.

I just thought it was kind of a retarded comparison to make. BG is clunky as all hell, but it was Bioware's second project after shattered-fucking-steel, a game everyone forgets even exists. If they managed to make a geniunely worse product than BG1, that would be pretty pathetic (and now they've made several)

Well this IS a conversation stemming from shitposting. I'm not sure what sort of keen insight you expected from that. I just wanted to remind people of the sort of strategy Bioware/EA had for Dragon Age from the start

I mean that I'd rather play BG2/ToB than DA:O, and that while BG1 progresses narratively into those two, DA:O progresses narratively into certified trash. BG1, at the very least, benefits from being looked at as part of a whole, while the whole detracts from the mediocrity that is DA:O

I don't really give a fuck about what category they fit into, because that doesn't make them more or less fun to play relative to each other

Implying it was BioWare who made ME2&3 or Assdromeda.

I don't expect anything at all, tbh. I just put in effort if I feel like it.
DA:O fixed their mechanics and the scripts are finally good enough and even great with mods. And the scripts are very much relevant if you want to play on a higher difficulty.
Also if you ignore the autistic influence system, the discrepancy running off on sidequests while the world burns and so on, the setting is enjoyable, muh origins, characters are decent for a high fantasy, fade is interesting even though they did so little with it, SOME of your fucking choices actually affect shit. It's not much, since we're talking CRPGs here, good scraps is the best we tend to get, unfortunately. Especially at this stage of devolution the industry is going through. It's not half bad is what I'm saying. H-hold me.

Why? For me it's about equal chance. Both mechanics and fluff are about on the same level. Except characters in DA:O, in total they're even weaker, but then muh origins. Shame they didn't focus properly on them.

Without heavy modding and/or BGT it's a torturous slog tho.

Yeah, but I've never played anything past it and never regretted the decision.

Can't agree with that. Both are standalone games, nevermind TotSC and DLCs, respectively. They can and should be judged on their own merit.

I'd recommend playing Icewind Dale and Icewind Dale 2. The gameplay is far better in those games. You do need to utilize what items are available to you. I'd also suggest paying attention to how spells grow with your character, and which spells will be good in different situations. You should be able to clear most maps without resting more than once. If you cannot, then your group is shit.

Forgot about the gifts. I can't fucking grasp how they both made them work right (the unique gifts that lead to character sidequests) and use them as shitty influence buffs.

This game also has much better portraits than BG, or any other RPG honestly I love IWD's portraits

Founders and some writers left, but if you're suggesting every single designer, lead or writer left between DA:O and the downfall you're going to have to provide some proof

Was gonna go through this point by point, but it ultimately boils down to the big 3: Setting, Characters and Combat

Combat never gripped me. Not a big fan of "watch the AI do it" shit, and I found fights to be really sterile and lifeless. BG1 had brutal diceroll results, but I never had issues like that in BG2, and instead got to have a few entertaining fights here and there that boiled down to reassessing what resources I had, swapping some weapons around, and forming a sort of slapdash counter to what I had run into (but I also did Watcher's Keep early)

I found the characters equally stale. They're paint by numbers Bioware archetypes, and it's further along in the cringey-snark transition than I'm willing to put up with. Some of the conversations were okayish, but Alistair is cancer. Bioware seemed to think that the best way to deal with their cardboard cutout fanfic husbando character was to insert him into every important event in the story, while not preventing him from continuing to be a pissy bitch. I dont remember minding Sten all that much though.

Setting-wise, the fade was cool but there wasnt enough done with it (same goes for origins, but only a few of the origins were cool, and they were all made worse by being forcibly shoved into the same narrative rather than being part of their own games), but I have trouble giving a shit about a setting in which I don't particularly care about any characters.

I found it serviceable, but not great. Theres a few spots near the start (random crit kobolds as a thief) that are a bit hellish, but it's not unbearable

I'd also like to point out that your basis for DAO being "average with some highlights" is that it's better than something you describe as a "torturous slog" (but it's not bad though). Seems a little inconsistent

No, but they do tie into how your choices actually don't matter overall because Bioware decided on a Canon(tm) story

"You are the child of a god in a world-spanning fight for dominance with your half-siblings! The End :^)"

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Evil characters work well in both games. I'd recommend playing with such a group and adding a sorceress with necromancer spells.

I don't get why everyone hates Dragon Age 2 despite being the most redpilled game Bioware has ever released.

80% of the game is reused assets, it's obvious very little effort went into that game. Don't you remember how every cave in the game was the same? I played DA2 long time ago so don't remember it well but IIRC reactivity, C&C and combat were worse too. Also it was released on the same year as Witcher 2, which beats it in every way possible imo

How does the existence of Bioware team members from DA:O (191 of them) prove the idea that Bioware did not work on the downward spiral titles?
Mac Walters was specifically a writer on several prior Bioware titles (including being 1/4 of Jade Empire's credited writers). while also being the fucker who tanked the ending of Mass Effect

Mass Effect 3 credits:

Mass Effect 2 credits:

Dragon Age 2 credits:

Further, of the DAO team:

If the implication is that not enough people got carried over, then the DA:O team wasnt really Bioware either. Unless I'm just misunderstanding the point you're trying to make here. There's just been a steady decline of the core team, as opposed to a complete dropoff, from DAO forward. Anything you have to say about the ME:Androgynous or DA:Cisquisition team must also be said about a substantial portion of the original Dragon Age team, while 0 BG team members are implicated and very few from NWN are

Also how is it redpilled when every character in it is a degenerate? Or is that the point you're trying to make?

You don't have to rely on scripts. If you completely ignore them you're just going to hit spacebar even more often than in BG games.

Eh, Durlag's Tower is the only part of BG1 I straight up love and you know how it is.
Yeah, higher level fights are much less repetitive and more enjoyable overall, plus area design in BG2 is leagues better than in the first game.

Ranged weapons, fam. Also anything that can't wear at least some chain is going to suffer at least until level 6 or 7 which is BG2's starting levels.
Also constant respawns right behind your back once you lose vision of respawn spot. Holy shit, I hate that game so much for MMO-tier respawns. Sure, farming Vampiric Wolves is easy enough this way, but it's still absolute cancer.

No, wasn't comparing the two games at that point. And there's a reason I've put them into different categories - I expected a playable CRPG out of BG1. I'd play DCSS if I wanted to die a lot while not doing much else.

That's only the story tho. The characters only really come into existence in BG2, mechanics change enough to set them apart (ranged spam, horror, sleep, silence etc. become useless or next to useless in BG2, for example). The only thing connecting the games are different (better) character stats and a few more/better items if you import. You can literally read the manual or even play the tutorial and learn everything of value BG1 has, story-wise. You can't even fucking decide to not flood the mine and give it over to the BG city authorities which is suffering from iron shortage, you are railroaded every step of the way.

It's interesting to see the correlation, yeah. I wonder how many of those are designers and people who control in which direction the development goes. Artists didn't necessary do a bad job, for example.

That only means that Holla Forums doesn't simply proclaim a game as good simply because it is redpilled or anti-gay or anti-SJW.

Okay, to answer my own question: not a lot, and neither in case of DAO or ME.

It's not as clear-cut as you'd think it should be. But, for the most part, people responsible for design and writing didn't work on the newer series. More vague as far as production goes.
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I guess this is a point in favour of those arguing that ME and DA:O were the beginning of downfall.

NWN also has Attacks of Opportunity, but because everyone shuffles around during combat to make it seem more exciting, AoO happen all the time for no good reason.

It's just unmodified d20 roll and there are several ways to completely ignore it. As for reasons they also fire off flatfooted or otherwise disabled targets, using potions and items or unmodified casting and ranged attacks in melee.

The only reason for shuffle situations is because you're running corners to hide and they're trying to follow.

How's DA2 any of those things?

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Sure, and that's also pretty shit

I whored them out, but that doesn't stop flaming crit arrows from randomly exploding low health party members. I simply took it as an inevitability and slogged through

Re: the series
It's not about being able to gather info about B12 for a B2 playthrough, it's about BG1 clearly having at least one sequel in mind . It's like talking about how Fellowship of the Ring can be judged as a solitary book. You can certainly try to do so, but you're very clearly judging an unfinished story

Also those mechanical differences are just standard DnD scaling tier. In low level encounters in standard DnD, whether ADnD or 3.X there's plenty of shit you can do to end a fight quickly that just isn't feasible when you start getting into high level encounters with resistances and more hitdice. Going back to the LotR analogy, it's a bit like saying that the narrative style change in return of the King makes it a completely different (and thus separate) book. It's still describing the same scenario with the same characters in the same setting, it's just that shit's happening proper now and we aren't subjected to a ratio of 10:1 for faffing about to actually getting shit done.

Re:railroading I dont think the point was narrative complexity or branching paths. These are nice things if done right, certainly, but very few games manage to pull them off, so I'm not terribly bothered if a game decides not to strive for that upper echelon, particularly when it's a company's first attempt. I'd rather get a solidly run rairoaded module than a free form campaign with a dm who clearly can't handle the workload that brings, and who then shit's the bed and comes up with dumb arbitrary results

Sling + (tower) shield is nothing if not criminally underappreciated. More so since it shares proficiency points with other "missiles" in BG.

Don't do that.

Because it's a shit game…? Level re-use is an unholy abomination. Story is non-existant. Sure, there is a sequence of events, but nothing that can be described as a plot. Level scaling makes a joke out of both combat and loot now. All the characters act like retarded sitcom characters and several characters were derailed from DAO (Isabella, Merill, Anders - it's like they all suddenly suffered brain-damage and became goofy one-track nutters). I mean, it's a pile of garbage in every respect. The story is complete shit. The gameplay is complete shit. The levels are complete shit even without all the awful re-use. The characters are cripplingly retarded. The graphics are fucking ugly. The itemization is an abomination. There is simply no good reason to play DA2. None whatso-fucking-ever.

That reminds me, tactical interface has gone to complete shit since DAO. DA2 doesn't even have a fucking hold position command iirc and both DA2 and DAI have zoomed in "tactical" cameras that fail to give you a proper birds-eye view of the battlefield. DAI also has a major case of fucking ceiling camera so if you go indoors you can just expect a painfully zoomed in camera where you can't see fucking anything because the tactical camera was built as a goddamn afterthought to appease old-school players and was never actually tested to see if it was functional or usable. The only saving grace about how bad the tactical camera is is that the combat is a retarded joke too so you probably won't need it. In fact you can frequently let the AI play the fucking game for you since the combat is so damn worthless.

DAO at least featured a few decent combat encounters here and there although I know in patch 1.04 they fucking stealth-nerfed the grease fire combo to make the tower of ishal encounter with the grease fire trap into a retarded little joke instead of an actual fucking threat. 1.02 also caused a boatload of problems with its whole dex-to-damage thing. Suddenly you had fucking max dex characters with ginormous defense scores who could never get hit and it was totally viable because dex-whoring now boosts your attack damage instead of making you a useless fucker who does no damage. Bioware had the nerve to claim that this was "as originally intended" in 1.02 when the old Bioware forums had the devs confirm the exact fucking opposite: that dex was not supposed to boost damage at all and all attack damage should remain strength-based. So DAO has the dubious fucking accomplishment of patching the game to make combat worse than it was on launch because they were fucking with mechanics they didn't understand.

Anyone knows what is the artists of IWD doing now?

Bg1 isnt worth playing at all, bad low level gameplay, bad art, but bg2 is goat rpg thanks for reading

The main fun in baldurs gate is finding ways to break the game and overpower everything actually.

That is usually the fun in an RPG. I particularly liked the spell sequencers/triggers in BG2. I was actually eble to kill a certain character who is scripted to teleport away with them