Played on insane-with-no-damage-increase, chaotic-neutral fighter/thief that was created just for SoD. You start with 64 000 xp, totsc cap was 161 000. You also start with pretty shitty items, If I'd have imported I'd have been packing lots of wands and potions. And the neutral party starter party was not to my liking, 2 casters, Neera and Jaheira. I was going to go mage/thief, wished I had.
Enjoyed it a fair bit. The AI is much better than any of the vanilla IE games, ranged try to run from melee, they switch targets to lower AC members if they're within range, they use potions well and they focus fire the shit out of anyone who gets Held/stunned/unconscious (this is the way to go if they're trying to beat the player, but SCS always had this: "Enemies above a certain minimum intelligence will usually prioritise opponents who are not stunned, held or otherwise helpless. From their point of view, they're fighting to win, and if they kill all non-helpless opponents they can finish off the helpless ones at their leisure. (They will, however, finish off nearby vulnerable opponents in preference to chasing up distant ones.)" which makes it more fun in my opinion, a long disable on the PC is a game over screen in SoD). They seem to love that they can get a lot of characters on screen, every group is ~10+ enemies, most of which have decent accuracy, low health, and annoying on-hit effects or powerful CC, so bring your fireballs/oils/wands
.
The way you move about the game world isn't very BG-y in my mine though. Where BG stands apart from the other IE games is the huge amount of optional-areas/quests, a fair few of which it's not the best idea to tackle the moment you hear about them/can get to them. This doesn't have that at all. Each chapter has a set of maps you can go between with a bunch of side quests within them. You do the quests as you receive them, eventually complete the chapter quest, those maps can no longer be traveled too, you now have a new set of maps for the next chapter. More IWD than BG in my opinion.
Was not a fan of the writing for the most part. Main quest and all involved were interesting enough, perhaps not Skie, as she never leaves the "annoying" phase when she probably should have to give her ending weight (just have her do something useful in the siege, maybe call back to the conversations you've had with her). The Baldur's Gate portion near the start is quite bad though, fetch quests everywhere. And the stuff that's relevant to BG2 beginning isn't particularly interesting, they could have dropped that BG baggage and had a neat dnd adventure about battling a misguided crusade (then they could have done stuff like have a variety of endings, as they wouldn't have to be in a state where BG2 makes sense). In fact, what you know at the point of the final area makes you (a bhaalspawn) being involved incredibly stupid, should just leave the party and send the other five to end it, less trouble. As for side quests, I especially enjoyed the Lich dungeon, Cyric Temple (semi-side area, you have to go here but you don't have to do the more interesting fights/finish it), vampire hunters, ghost dragon shit and fully scouting dragonspear (I think this was optional, felt like I could have gone back earlier than I did). A lot of the dialogues suck though. Constant attempts at humour (the "stoner" in Baldur's Gate in the beginning is standout horrible, a long back and forth and he was voiced. Almost put my head through the desk) both from your dialogue options (shows the superiority of full dialogues being shown to the player, the type of responses I see and don't click remind me of nonsense my character often ends up saying in dialogue wheel games) and NPCs. This was in the old BGs as well I suppose, but it was often just an NPC that blurted shit at you then you walked away. Here, it's usually with quest givers and during an actual conversation with them. Clumsy exposition dumbs abound as well. Finally, you often (optionally, I think) find yourself infiltrating the crusade (the enemy) camps and it's extremely poorly done. At the beginning of the game it's established they have pictures of you and your name, yet for these bits you just walk in and say "I'm here to join" or "I'm with you guys, I'm new" and in you go (probably based on charisma, don't know). You can even give your name sometimes (worse, it's often the only reasonable choice, other than "You're dead FIGHT!") and that leads to some "amusing" dialogue like "OH WOW THAT'S SO WEIRD JUST LIKE THE GUY WE'RE LOOKING FOR WAT A COINCIDENCE HAHA". Fucking hell. Could have thrown in some magic disguise shit for these moments at least.
Companions I ran with were: Minsc, Dynaheir, Goblin shaman, Corwin, Glint. I don't like Minsc, but I wanted a good mage and his charge is the only one and they come together. Also, his 2 stars in longbow and 2h swords is to my liking. The pair of them have a quest involving another witch/beserker duo, but with them, get this, THE WITCH IS THE SCATTERBRAIN AND THE FIGHTER IS SENSIBLE HAHAHA! I liked the Goblin a fair bit, she seems old and bitter and her humour, when it shows, is dry. I did the Corwin romance, pretty shit just like the BG2 ones, declarations of love/attraction seemingly from nowhere. She's alright though, dedicated soldier type, her dialogues usually short and to the point. Except when it gets around to her child, then she goes into long rants on the troubles that come with being an absentee mother or something. There's also this one moment where she brings up kids ("do you have kids?"), you answer, she starts talking about hers, you comment, she says angrily for some reason and says something like "How did we even get on to this?" which made me laugh a lot. Glint is meant to be scatter-brain-funny, Minsc/Jan-y, I don't really like it. I called him my right-hand gnome at some point then he got upset that I "looking at other people" and I had to give him a speech about how I can't commit to just him
, I completely missed that he wanted to bang somehow.
What is quite cool is the constant references to your race/class/party members in dialogues/quest solutions. I think IWD2 is the only IE game that really did this to this extent before. It's quite neat that my fighter/thief could help train some soldiers by noticing one wasn't great in a straight fight, so she could focus on dodging behind them and backstabbing, or using the goblin shaman to calm/talk with spirits. There's also multiple solutions to a lot of quests, something that wasn't really present in the old BGs. Here, you can often (seemingly), say, side with the vampire/lich and kill his enemies for alternate rewards and a rep drop. This is also useful as it would allow Evil parties (where the NPCs leave if your rep is too high) to function without resorting to senselessly slaying a random innocent.
Bugs I encountered:
Neera (I've not played with EE before, I hate this person. Minsc is definitely a developer favourite, this "kooky" shit is everywhere) had a quest to make a potion, the first four(?) updated my journal each time, but the final did not and every time I talked with her she acted like there were still ingredients to turn in. Quest remained unfinished.
I used the "talk to" command to try to talk to party members every so often. This sometimes led to them repeating old conversations, or saying something that seemed inappropriate for the area (the goblin said something like "they look like goblin work, these traps are deadly" right after I recruited her).
In the Boareskyr Bridge chapter ending there's a variety ways to handle the situation, one of which seems to be report back to camp and march to battle with them. The woman in camp tells me to report to the leader of the camp (Duncan?) but he wasn't there. Forced to do one of the other solutions, then the camp people just turned up in the battle.
There's a bit where a guy repairs some boots of speed, you use them, take damage (from falling over? Wasn't clear) and then return to him to ask for a refund (or not). Journal says the boots are now useless IIRC, but mine still worked and I never took damage again.
CTDs. The UI would disappear, the GAME OVER cutscene would play, the LOAD QUIT popup would appear, then CTD. Happened maybe four times.
There was a clumsy link to the quite dull IWD main antagonist. This has to be a bug, because why the fuck would someone pick this guy of all the options, jesus fucking christ. His skills include narrating and absolutely nothing else.
_O:
