Baldur's Gate The Baldur's Gate Series Thread

[DraQ]

Morrowind combat better than anything than fucking cancer

It's pretty awful due to execution and exacerbated by poor AI and bad no encounter design, but the underlying idea is fairly sound and at least it has proper system for the type of game it tries to be (solo, exploration-centric RPG using own mechanics) rather than being party based DnD (natively TB) crammed into faux-RTS clusterfuck.

those 5 or 7 adventuring parties you fight in BG1

...are 5 or 7 out of fucking legion.

About everything else is uninteresting, overabundant and pointless on top of bad combat system and those several encounters still suffer from clusterfuck RTWP and IE's inability to even react to strategic AoE nuking or summons when out of sight is in the same league as MW AI's handling of player's levitation.

Morrowind combat better than anything than fucking cancer

Well, it's better than combat in Arcanum.

No its not. I never fail to cast "harm" i cant say the same about low level magic in morrowind

You must love Oblivion, then. You never fail to cast spells there either.
Or to hit the target.

Everyone is a winrar!

Walking around killing shit without purpose is very close to something like Oblivion or Skyrim.

If only BG had Skyrim's content density.

Never heard of the "your game is shit because it has too much optional side content"

No, it's more "your game is shit because it has too much boring content".

I prefer "too little content masquerading as too much content".

The content density on those areas is fine, it doesnt feel cluttered and it feels like you are actually travelling around.

You should try Oblivion.
It doesn't feel cluttered at all.

Hahaha. Except that Fallout 1 got low key right, BG1 didn't. It's not just "modern guhmhzrz hwadwrp" who don't like BG1. Those wilderness areas really were a pointless bore. Fallout 1 was low key but it didn't have an exaggerated amount of shitty content.

Fallout 1 is a great game, but the way it's structured (with the world map travel) it doesn't really lend itself well to exploration, in my opinion. You basically find locations of interest by talking with NPCs, or by passing near them on the world map, and then go there, and the locations themselves are condensed, like say a settlement or a cave or whatever. So it's really not the same thing as being able to roam around within the world and explore.

Actually, one of the problems with BG is that it fails to establish consistent player contract. It tries to be both a storyfag game and an open world one in very conflicting ways.
Wilderness areas may feel like you're travelling around, but they are spread apart by 4-8h of marching through generic wilderness most of the time, so they work more like condensed PoIs, except they too are just blocks of generic wilderness.
This is unconductive to the exploration as well, because if BG was truly structured as an open world game it could have afforded being too large to explore thoroughly forcing player to be on a lookout for interesting stuff, but BGs boxed-in maps can be methodically cleared and searched from borders in or using any other strategy (largely thanks to spurious fog of war as well) because they are structured like condensed PoI maps, except without actual PoIs.

Player may feel like they can treat the game as an open world and explore freely, except the game will not let them through without really specifying the reason if it doesn't want the player in, for example, Cloakwood, despite it being a major landmark and a large area that has absolutely no reason to be hidden or physically inaccessible, the PC just won't go in there because.

Sure, failing to establish consistent contract isn't only BG's problem, for example TES series has been suffering from it since Bloodmoon (open world VS tightly controlled experience - through means like excessive scripting and unpickable locks), but I don't think I've ever seen the case of it being as pervasive as in BG.

Well, that's what I am talking about. The Glow is a dungeon or post apocalyptic take on a dungeon. So you get the Glow on your world map (usually from an NPC), and you go there, and then you are inside a dungeon, doing dungeon-type things, i.e. fighting, finding cards, progressing to deeper levels. While technically you might be exploring rooms, floors, etc, this is not the kind of exploration explorefags long for, it's dungeon crawling. Fallout does a great job of giving the player these interesting locations, but it does not really scratch the exploration itch, where people want to have large spaces to roam in and find cool stuff.

By waving mouse over it.

BG 1 wilderness areas allow a sense of discovery, that was at least I think the intent was. Discovering shit feel better when you feel you did a journey to get in there and that I give to BG 1 fanboys but the problem is, if I gonna waste alot of time to get in some places, sometimes passing by random encounters on the way, I expect the pay off gonna be good and many times it wasn't.

There is also the fact that that "finding" stuff involved no skill on part of the player, it depended purely on patience and/or dumb luck.

Sure, you have the illusion of exploring the whole Sword Coast but the lack of content/low quality of content (jesus, Firewine bridge, the gnoll stronghold and the Ulcaster school with respawning mobs when you just look to the other side, Nesshkel mines four levels of the same trash mobs and the forced travel on all maps of boringwood forest can kill you.) start wearing you down and by the time when you reach the ancient dwarven mines and the game start improving your will to keep playing is at a really low level. When I played BG 1 fpr the first time, I remember stopping at the ancient dwarven mines and leaving the game for months before having the will to finish it.

Gnoll stronghold was actually on the upper end of the scale (vanilla BG) when it came to being interesting which is rather depressing.

Heh fair enough. I honestly left Morrowind for years because I couldn't be fucked getting to Balmora or figuring out what a silt strider was. The combat against a mudcrab was so shit I uninstalled.

Not sure if retarded or just edgy.

What I am when I enjoyed BG1 exploration but not F3, FNV or Elder Scroll games exploration?

You wouldn't like the answer.

- the time limit hurts the exploration aspect as it forces the player to stick to the main quest and not explore the world at their own pace

It's good for exploration because it precludes mechanical clearing of the map while still allowing purposeful searches.
It puts player back in the business of playing the game as opposed to abstract mechanical map clearing strategy.

- as already mentioned before, the abstract world map abstracts the exploration out to such a degree (zig zagging your moving dot across it "explores" areas) as to make it a marginal element of the gameplay at best

BG is just as guilty of it due to 8h gaps between most of its maps. They are isolated, boxed-in islands within the gameworld rather than parts of expansive continuous whole. It's just that unlike FO's maps they are void of content.
Zigzagging your characters across individual maps in BG1 also explores them in a completely abstract manner by uncovering the fog of war.

But really for me, the second point, i.e. the fact that Fallout's exploration is done via the world map and then you come to these condensed locations pretty much precludes it from being considered a great exploration game.

BG's exploration is done entirely through world map (except there is no way to miss a location) and helpful fog of war in conjunction with maps' borders. If FO isn't a great exploration game then BG1 simply isn't one at all.

 

[Lhynn]

Oblivion wont let me take 3 steps in a wilderness area without running into some fucking wolf DraQ, the fuck are you talking about?

 

[meanwhileInPoland]

do you actually believe that someone reads those walls of text that are nothing more than excuses for you to post or ?
btw i couldnt fail to cast spells in bg2 and its a game with best magic system in crpgs

 

[Delterius]

Oblivion wont let me take 3 steps in a wilderness area without running into some fucking wolf DraQ, the fuck are you talking about?

When we talk about content density in BG1's wilderness we don't actually include generic encounters in the equation. Mostly because BG1 generates those automatically by fog of war.

That said, thinking about all the Xvarts, Hobgoblins and Wolves you get to befriend in that game you might as well argue that BG1 was excessively cluttered with content. Over four hundred hours of gameplay, some would say.

btw i couldnt fail to cast spells in bg2 and its a game with best magic system in crpgs

You failed your casts in Morrowind? Git gud and use the right amount of spell power. Spell making isn't even expensive. If there's anything abysmal in that game it is melee combat.

 

[a cut of domestic sheep prime]

There is also the fact that that "finding" stuff involved no skill on part of the player, it depended purely on patience and/or dumb luck.

Unlike Skyrim...

edit: and ffs you could fail to cast a spell in both BG and Arcanum.

 

[Eyestabber]

I stopped bothering after the guy decided to throw the "Oblivion Card". 17 years of butthurt? Seriously!? Oblivion? For realzies, bro? 'Kay.

 

[pippin]

On the other hand, it's still quite tough to realize BG was released 17 years ago

But the bit about Morrowind is true, though: if you are failing, it's because you aren't reading the fucking manual. That doesn't excuse the Xvart Village from being one of the most boring encounters in the game, though.

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

Actually, one of the problems with BG is that it fails to establish consistent player contract. It tries to be both a storyfag game and an open world one in very conflicting ways.
Wilderness areas may feel like you're travelling around, but they are spread apart by 4-8h of marching through generic wilderness most of the time, so they work more like condensed PoIs, except they too are just blocks of generic wilderness.
This is unconductive to the exploration as well, because if BG was truly structured as an open world game it could have afforded being too large to explore thoroughly forcing player to be on a lookout for interesting stuff, but BGs boxed-in maps can be methodically cleared and searched from borders in or using any other strategy (largely thanks to spurious fog of war as well) because they are structured like condensed PoI maps, except without actual PoIs.

Player may feel like they can treat the game as an open world and explore freely, except the game will not let them through without really specifying the reason if it doesn't want the player in, for example, Cloakwood, despite it being a major landmark and a large area that has absolutely no reason to be hidden or physically inaccessible, the PC just won't go in there because.

Sure, failing to establish consistent contract isn't only BG's problem, for example TES series has been suffering from it since Bloodmoon (open world VS tightly controlled experience - through means like excessive scripting and unpickable locks), but I don't think I've ever seen the case of it being as pervasive as in BG.

What you call failure to establish a consistent player contract most people would call a compromise between being sandboxy/open world and story-driven, and I really don't see the problem with it. As you yourself admit, lots of games do it, GTA games for example have large parts of the world closed off until you get to a certain point in the story.

Likewise, I really don't see the problem with abstractly adjacent zone maps. Yes, there are a few hours of traveling between some of them, but they are all thematically adjacent, so if one ends with mountains, the other will begin with mountains and so on. This gives it a sense of continuity. It's a bad idea to view those zones as points or locations of interest, because they are not, they represent the (scaled down for practical purposes) entirety of the world both with interesting things and with the space around them.

- the time limit hurts the exploration aspect as it forces the player to stick to the main quest and not explore the world at their own pace

It's good for exploration because it precludes mechanical clearing of the map while still allowing purposeful searches.
It puts player back in the business of playing the game as opposed to abstract mechanical map clearing strategy.

It is a self-evident fact that most people do not enjoy doing things when they are in a rush to do other things, I don't know what else I can add to that.

- as already mentioned before, the abstract world map abstracts the exploration out to such a degree (zig zagging your moving dot across it "explores" areas) as to make it a marginal element of the gameplay at best

BG is just as guilty of it due to 8h gaps between most of its maps. They are isolated, boxed-in islands within the gameworld rather than parts of expansive continuous whole. It's just that unlike FO's maps they are void of content.
Zigzagging your characters across individual maps in BG1 also explores them in a completely abstract manner by uncovering the fog of war.

Well, if zig zagging your dot on a map and moving your characters across gorgeous highly detailed representations of the game-world are at the same level of abstraction to you, then what else can be said.

 

[MilesBeyond]

What you call failure to establish a consistent player contract most people would call a compromise between being sandboxy/open world and story-driven, and I really don't see the problem with it. As you yourself admit, lots of games do it, GTA games for example have large parts of the world closed off until you get to a certain point in the story.

Likewise, I really don't see the problem with abstractly adjacent zone maps. Yes, there are a few hours of traveling between some of them, but they are all thematically adjacent, so if one ends with mountains, the other will begin with mountains and so on. This gives it a sense of continuity. It's a bad idea to view those zones as points or locations of interest, because they are not, they represent the (scaled down for practical purposes) entirety of the world both with interesting things and with the space around them.

Yeah I'm inclined to agree. There are some definite flaws with BG1 (like its bizarre fixation with communicating its storyline almost entirely through scrolls - and in fact going so far as to make arguably the single most plot-relevant scroll completely inaccessible if you happen to do something that's completely logical from both a roleplaying and gameplay perspective) but the complaints being brought up here are just... weird. What strange criticisms.

But I guess that's the magic of niche communities - you see some oddly specific comments. I remember on a different forum seeing someone complain about how Arcanum was a shit game because they felt Gnomes should be magically inclined rather than technologically inclined.

 

[DraQ]

do you actually believe that someone reads those walls of text that are nothing more than excuses for you to post or ?

If I merely wanted an excuse to post "" I'd simply quote random retards and respond with witty one-liners.

btw i couldnt fail to cast spells in bg2 and its a game with best magic system in crpgs

You're just butthurt over the concept of skill-based failure because you're a consoletard at heart.

Spoiler

< link relevant

 

[meanwhileInPoland]

do you actually believe that someone reads those walls of text that are nothing more than excuses for you to post or ?

If I merely wanted an excuse to post "" I'd simply quote random retards and respond with witty one-liners.

btw i couldnt fail to cast spells in bg2 and its a game with best magic system in crpgs

You're just butthurt over the concept of skill-based failure because you're a consoletard at heart.

Spoiler

< link relevant

Skill based failure you mean spam the cheapest spell you have to get your destruction skill to at least 50-70?Skilled as fuck also calling someone a consoletard while being himself the biggest skyrim apologist on the board

So much shit talking when it could be summarize with simple :
Bg combat > morrowind combat
Morrowind exploration > bg exploration

 

[DraQ]

There is also the fact that that "finding" stuff involved no skill on part of the player, it depended purely on patience and/or dumb luck.

Unlike Skyrim...

Actually, yeah, unlike Skyrim. Vanilla Skyrim sorely lacked unique loot but even in vanilla there are chests and valuable items hidden in out of the way, seemingly inaccessible locations, and since even in vanilla stuff like daedric or dragon-scale/bone remains rare even at high levels an extra chest does matter.
What Morrowind achieved via levitation Skyrim does (albeit in somewhat lesser form) via whirlwind sprint and ethereal form.

The thing is that in both you have to actively parse your environs and look for stuff - in Tribunal you can even miss the only loose daedric cuirass in the entire game while looking straight at it without the game resorting to cheap bullshit, while in BG fog of war and highlights on mouseover do all the parsing you need and all so all the parsing you can do, because phat lewt might just as well be hidden in the middle of random tree or in few pixels of peasant's field without any way for the player to learn that.

I stopped bothering after the guy decided to throw the "Oblivion Card". 17 years of butthurt?

Not ours, though.

Seriously!? Oblivion?

Deep down you know it's true.

 

[a cut of domestic sheep prime]

Wut. The lame ass ability puzzles in Skyrim were so repetitive and obvious that after encountering one, the rest could be done in your sleep. Hell, BG had numerous puzzles that were a lot more intricate, varried and interesting. The only difference is that you didn't have a 3D environment to obscure things, but don't give me shit about actively parsing environments. You can easily notice everything important or useful in Skyrim even if you are half way into a damn coma. And so what if you don't notice X chest with X randomly generated item of lameness? You can still keep going and it won't make a bit of difference. "Oh, whoahohoho! I found an iron dagger in this cleverly hidden chest! I've gotsta to update my journal, nigga!"

No, BG had actual value to most of the exploration - be it in experience points, unique items, or interesting quests. Ironically, its 2 dimensional gameplay gave a far more 3 dimensional exploration experience than Skyrim with its cookie cutter items, bland quests (yes, even blander than the blandest BG quests), and dull npcs ever could.

Is it a hiking simulator? No. Get the fuck over it already.

Edit: and dragon scale and bone may as well grow on trees in vanilla, wtf are you talking about? Just kill more dragons. There are more of them in Skyrim than pigeons in real life.

 

[Eyestabber]

and since even in vanilla [Skyrim] stuff like daedric or dragon-scale/bone remains rare even at high levels an extra chest does matter.

 

[Athelas]

What you call failure to establish a consistent player contract most people would call a compromise between being sandboxy/open world and story-driven, and I really don't see the problem with it. As you yourself admit, lots of games do it, GTA games for example have large parts of the world closed off until you get to a certain point in the story.

This argument only holds value if you think the GTA series are well-designed games.

Likewise, I really don't see the problem with abstractly adjacent zone maps. Yes, there are a few hours of traveling between some of them, but they are all thematically adjacent, so if one ends with mountains, the other will begin with mountains and so on. This gives it a sense of continuity. It's a bad idea to view those zones as points or locations of interest, because they are not, they represent the (scaled down for practical purposes) entirety of the world both with interesting things and with the space around them.

Of course it's abstracted, the argument is whether it's better than Fallout's method of abstraction.

Like I said before, the difference isn't so much in how maps are handled, but the effects on gameplay. In Fallout, if you don't want to get radiated as soon as you enter the Glow, you have to stop a ways before you enter the Glow on the world map and take Rad-X, and then proceed to the Glow. There is nothing like that in Baldur's Gate.

 

[Gnidrologist]

Itt: arguing which is better, piss or shit.

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

This argument only holds value if you think the GTA series are well-designed games.

They are, but that's not even the point. The point is, lots of sandbox games that are also story driven do this sort of thing.

Of course it's abstracted, the argument is whether it's better than Fallout's method of abstraction.

Better is subjective. Some people prefer highly packed content, others like to wander around and explore. For the latter, BG1's method is better, but obviously there is more than just the world structure that goes into how good a game is.

Like I said before, the difference isn't so much in how maps are handled, but the effects on gameplay. In Fallout, if you don't want to get radiated as soon as you enter the Glow, you have to stop a ways before you enter the Glow on the world map and take Rad-X, and then proceed to the Glow. There is nothing like that in Baldur's Gate.

Umm, how is this different from you having to prepare your party for any particular obstacle in BG1? For example, memorizing or buying protection from polymorph before visiting that basilisk area?

 

[Somberlain]

Like I said before, the difference isn't so much in how maps are handled, but the effects on gameplay. In Fallout, if you don't want to get radiated as soon as you enter the Glow, you have to stop a ways before you enter the Glow on the world map and take Rad-X, and then proceed to the Glow. There is nothing like that in Baldur's Gate.

I don't think Fallout is a particularly good example of that kind of gameplay either. To quote Per Jorner's Near Ultimate Fallout Guide:

There's one location where you have to worry about radiation (which means the total number of Rad-X you have to chew in all of the two games is equal to 2).

 

[Athelas]

Umm, how is this different from you having to prepare your party for any particular obstacle in BG1? For example, memorizing or buying protection from polymorph before visiting that basilisk area?

The example I gave wasn't about enemy encounters, but about the perils of exploration of environments (entering an radiated area).

There's one location where you have to worry about radiation

Well, (the first) Fallout is a small game, and the Glow was big enough that you needed multiple Rad-X IIRC.

 

[Somberlain]

Umm, how is this different from you having to prepare your party for any particular obstacle in BG1? For example, memorizing or buying protection from polymorph before visiting that basilisk area?

The example I gave wasn't about enemy encounters, but about the perils of exploration of environments (entering an radiated area).

Why is the "perils of exploration of environments" even relevant? When it comes to playing the game, there is no difference between entering an area with deadly radiation and entering an area with deadly petrification gazes. Especially when both areas need similar kind of preparation.

 

[Athelas]

Umm, how is this different from you having to prepare your party for any particular obstacle in BG1? For example, memorizing or buying protection from polymorph before visiting that basilisk area?

The example I gave wasn't about enemy encounters, but about the perils of exploration of environments (entering an radiated area).

Why is the "perils of exploration of environments" even relevant? When it comes to playing the game, there is no difference between entering an area with deadly radiation and entering an area with deadly petrification gazes. Especially when both areas need similar kind of preparation.

You can't buy Rad-X at the Glow. You would need to travel back to the Hub, and the game has a time limit. Also, entering the Glow without Rad-X means you become irradiated, and you can die while traveling back on the world map. You will need RadAway to reverse the radiation.

In Baldur's Gate, you can rest in the wilderness to memorize petrification protection spells at any time.

 

[Somberlain]

In Baldur's Gate, you can rest in the wilderness to memorize petrification protection spells at any time.

You may not have learned Protection from Petrification, you may not even have a mage in the party. Of course, you may happen to have those, just like you may already have Rad-X in Fallout while you stumble upon the Glow.

 

[Athelas]

In Baldur's Gate, you can rest in the wilderness to memorize petrification protection spells at any time.

You may not have learned Protection from Petrification, you may not even have a mage in the party.

Yes, and...? You have ample access to both mage companions and scrolls to teach them that spell. There is no time limit or anything.

 

[Somberlain]

You don't get those scrolls or mages from areas with basilisks, just like you don't get Rad-X from the Glow. Also, there is a time limit in Baldur's Gate (after Marek poisons you), but it's just as irrelevant to this subject as Fallout's time limit.

Both games have dangerous area(s) which require(s) item/spell which you may or may not have when you first enter.

 

[Athelas]

I'm not sure why you keep replying to me with stuff that has nothing to do with what I talk about in my post. I mentioned the Glow not because of the dungeon itself, but because of how it tied into the world map travel. Before that, I mentioned about half a dozen reasons why I thought Fallout handled exploration better.