Baldur's Gate & Baldur's Gate II Mod Thread

[d1r]

Does original BG2 still work or are you forced to buy the EE?

Still works, though a lot of modders moved on. And there are some nice new mods out there.

 

[Robber Baron]

And there are some nice new mods out there.

Such as?

 

[Cryomancer]

Guys, after finishing M&M VII, I plan to play BG 1/2+ToB and honestly, is only here that playing in "play" on steam don't launch the game?

 

[d1r]

And there are some nice new mods out there.

Such as?

Some quest mods like Shades of the Sword Coast (Tangled Oak Isle, Ooze's Lounge, and more), some great looking UI mods like Swankified HUD, some new features (like the implementation of specific IWD spells that couldn't be intregrated into vanilla BG before) for Sword Coast Stratagems, and much more.

 

[Sunri]

I finished BG I EE with stratagem mod and realized that some NPCs are immortal if you don't trigger their dialogue I tried to kill Sarevok with toxic cloud off-screen and after all his friends died he was still running with 1hp I had to reload and fight him without cheese is this EE thing? Or mod addition, I don't remember this happening in original.

 

[Melcar]

Probably a bug. Crap sometimes happens when you install mods.

 

[chuft]

Looked at my BG2 install with all the mods in place. Copied it to this computer in 2019 when I built it, after stopping my playthrough of BGT when I hit the Team Sarevok bullshit BGT puts in. Tempted to continue BGT after using Ctrl-Y to bypass Sarevok the God.

Reminder of the massive undocumented difficulty increase BGT makes to Sarevok's team

Baldur's Gate & Baldur's Gate II Mod Thread

 

[d1r]

Looked at my BG2 install with all the mods in place. Copied it to this computer in 2019 when I built it, after stopping my playthrough of BGT when I hit the Team Sarevok bullshit BGT puts in. Tempted to continue BGT after using Ctrl-Y to bypass Sarevok the God.

Reminder of the massive undocumented difficulty increase BGT makes to Sarevok's team

Baldur's Gate & Baldur's Gate II Mod Thread

Baldur's Gate 2 with SCS will be a complete nightmare. Be ready for that (unless you powergame like crazy).

 

[chuft]

I don't use SCS. I tried it and it made BG1 an absolute nightmare, with high level ogre mages ambushing me at level 2 around the Gnoll Fortress, and the mage in the tent at Nashkel TPKing my party with no-save Color Spray at point blank range. Restarted without it, much more fun. I don't get why people like SCS, but I guess they reload a lot, which I don't.

Interestingly SCS overwrites the files that BGT uses to overpower Sarevok's party, so that particular fight is much easier in SCS.

 

[d1r]

There are some really nice things that SCS adds to the game (more intelligent AI behaviour, improved encounters like the alternate Bandit Camp fight), but its big flaw is that it's not really friendly towards people who don't powergame. The game expects you to be top geared for almost every encounter, and that playstyle certainly is not suited for everyone. The thought alone of fighting that Lich in the Graveyard catacombs just for Edwin's quest (that can start very early on) or the whole Vampire guild fight against Spell level 9 vampires in Chapter 5 gives me horrible shivers.

 

[ga♥]

Overly dramatic take on SCS. Even with SCS you can still cheese like crazy most encounters.
(unless you guys mean BGT difficulty spikes, that I never tried, with SCS).

 

[chuft]

I don't like to reload. Battles should be winnable on the first fight. I ended up spending so much gold on Raise Deads that I could not buy items and it was a power death spiral. Wasn't fun. No drama, just want games to be fun.

 

[Chippy]

I was able to do most mods that expected powergaming. But it was effort and effort isn't fun. There's always that mod that breaks the rules though that you're supposed to know the secret handshake for. They can fuck right off. Like mods that have spells bypass scrolls of magic resistance. It was meant to be an antimagic globe, I remember using them to shut down enemy casters in vanilla BG. And the price you paid was that there wasn't many of them.

Of course this really messes with the narcissism of modders, so they have to nullify the antimagic globes.

 

[chuft]

There are also errors. BGT used the BG2-TOB file for Semaj so when you face him in BG1 with Sarevok, he just kills you with Flesh to Stone and you go straight to end screen, you don't even see what it was because it was a contingency that fires the second you see him. It also used both time of day and duration of travel instead of one or the other for doing random encounter spawns on the BG1 map so you would get attacked by twice the enemies you were supposed to, not nice at level 2 to get attacked by groups of ogre mages with friends. Both of these have been corrected in newer versions of BGT thanks to my "drama."

 

[agris]

I don't like to reload. Battles should be winnable on the first fight

This was always the inherent tension with the IEs, especially the BGs. People who played the games for RTwP combat faggery with all the options that Ad&d allowed for and great build customization through robust itemization; vs the proto-biowarian audience playing the Imoen romance mod.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Battles should be winnable on the first fight. Having to learn fights by dying first then reloading is absolutely terrible design.

BG even offers an example of how to show a player what is coming up without forcing a reload: there are petrified statues before you fight the basilisks. This is good design.

 

[chuft]

Unlike say Fallout 1, BG has Raise Dead. Fights can be tough, they can kill party members, they can drain your potions, scrolls, and gold, but you should be able to win them without prior knowledge, and without losing so many guys that you are going backwards in the power curve.

Games without something like Raise Dead are sending the implicit message that reloads are the Raise Dead.

 

[agris]

Battles should be winnable on the first fight. Having to learn fights by dying first then reloading is absolutely terrible design.

It's not clear what you're saying here.

Are you implying that SCS battles are not winnable without reloading to "learn fights by dying"? That SCS set-piece encounters are unwinnable on the first fight? Do you think all players should win all battles on the first fight, or just some players? Is chuft one of the players who should or should not win all battles on the first fight?

How is losing a fight with SCS installed, reloading, and improving your tactics based on your failed attempt different than literally any other game wherein you do not beat every encounter upon the first attempt?

 

[Shaki]

SCS is highly customizable, and even on harshest settings all fights are still winnable on first try if you have a competent party and aren't a retard. It mostly just improves AI, and gives enemies some of the same tools that you have at your disposal, so you have to actually use your brain when facing them. It's far different from mods like Tactics or Ascension, which make enemies stronger with insane stat bloat, random immunities and OP cheat abilities no one else has access to.

I can't imagine replaying BG2 without SCS. After you get some basic knowledge, vanilla might as well not have any fights, you autowin everything. First playthrough on vanilla is cool, because while pretty much every enemy has a braindead easy counter, finding them out and learning how to abuse these supposedly powerful foes, is fun. But after you played through it once, it offers 0 challenge on subsequent runs, because enemies never adapt, never react, and cheese strategies work with 100% success rate. You get a mace of disruption and just whack demiliches to death in 2 seconds. You get a shield of balduran and beholders are free food forever. Illithids? Throw a Mordekainen's Sword at them, and close the door, done. (Skeletal summons also work ez) Shadow dragon? Turn into a fucking Mustard Jelly and watch it do nothing to you. Or just cast some greater malisons/lower resistances and chromatic orbs/FoDs, kill it in seconds just like any other dragon and 99% of other "epic" enemies. You can also go pick up Carsomyr and just rightclick through the rest of the game. You can buy "protection from" scrolls and to autowin any mage/undead fight at any point. And don't get me started on all the cheese potential with traps, or project image/simulacrum, or SI: divination/abjuration. BG2 has so many absolutely fucking broken items/spells/tactics, making replaying vanilla just not fun once you learn about some of them.


SCS, by removing a lot of these cheese strategies, tuning down some broken items, and giving enemies same tools you got + "intelliegence" to react to what you're doing, makes multiple playthrough still interesting, requiring occasional brain use and forcing you to click different buttons in some fights, instead of flying through the game on autopilot. Also as I said, it's highly customizable, so you can make it exactly as "challenging" as you want.

 

[chuft]

Being an old school pen and paper AD&D player, the idea of reloads is just silly unless I run into something unfair (i.e. bad game design). The game has difficulty settings for those who want to replay at a harder level.

I finished BG2 once, in 2001 or whatever it was. I don't need some insane difficulty mod for people who like powergaming and cheese and replay it over and over instead of trying new games, and have all the encounters and enemies memorized.

 

[chuft]

SCS is highly customizable, and even on harshest settings all fights are still winnable on first try if you have a competent party and aren't a retard.

I believed this kind of nonsense until I tried it and got TPK'd in Nashkel by a no-save color spray when I entered a tent. Real tactical. Real bullshit is more like it.

 

[chuft]

Looking at threads I posted elsewhere, part of the problem was using BGT as well, because it uses BG2 spell effects, and characters who are affected by Sleep or Color Spray in BG2 do not wake up when hit. So the tent encounter in Nashkel cannot be won, same as when an invisible ogre mage cast 5 Sleep spells on my level 2 party when they were fighting ogrillons. They just lay there until they are killed. In BG2 this doesn't happen because you are at high level, but in BG1 part of the game, it's impossible.

 

[Shaki]

SCS is highly customizable, and even on harshest settings all fights are still winnable on first try if you have a competent party and aren't a retard.

I believed this kind of nonsense until I tried it and got TPK'd in Nashkel by a no-save color spray when I entered a tent. Real tactical. Real bullshit is more like it.

Oh no, enemy mages can use same spells as your mages, what a bullshit

 

[rusty_shackleford]

SCS is highly customizable, and even on harshest settings all fights are still winnable on first try if you have a competent party and aren't a retard.

I believed this kind of nonsense until I tried it and got TPK'd in Nashkel by a no-save color spray when I entered a tent. Real tactical. Real bullshit is more like it.

Oh no, enemy mages can use same spells as your mages, what a bullshit

Actually, it sounds like it was using the IWD version of Color Spray. BG's color spray is pretty useless. I don't believe either work RAW.

 

[chuft]

SCS is highly customizable, and even on harshest settings all fights are still winnable on first try if you have a competent party and aren't a retard.

I believed this kind of nonsense until I tried it and got TPK'd in Nashkel by a no-save color spray when I entered a tent. Real tactical. Real bullshit is more like it.

Oh no, enemy mages can use same spells as your mages, what a bullshit

SCS makes the conjurer in there level 6, so he is immune to yours, while your party gets wiped out by his. Have you even played?