Icewind Dale The Icewind Dale Series Thread

[Vault Dweller]

I play dungeon crawlers for the story.

 

[Sceptic]

TBH his whole post was a beautiful almost-parody of edgy. "Back when men were real men there was the Gold Box series, but I wasn't even born back then."

The sorcerer was better, but one in the team was enough : I wouldn't have replaced my wizard with a second sorcerer.

Yeah I felt the same too. Having one of each allowed me to load the Sorc with all the nuking spells while the wizard could memorize all the more situational ones that I wanted to have in case I needed them. On a Sorc you wouldn't do that, since you'd never have enough "known spells" slots to learn all of the ones you might want, but as long as the wizard has them all I didn't mind wasting some memorization slots on spells I knew I was not very likely to use but wanted to have anyway.

Sorcs require much more care in pen and paper because all the non-combat spells can be life savers if the DM decides you really should know your Sorc inside out.

 

[Vault Dweller]

TBH his whole post was a beautiful almost-parody of edgy. "Back when men were real men there was the Gold Box series, but I wasn't even born back then."

 

[Moribund]

God, this sucks. I went to all that trouble to make a thread about a specific point about IWD 2 and it gets merged in with all this shit. What a fucking shithole.

 

[Excidium]

Yeah, the mods have a hard on for merging and moving shit around.

 

[Moribund]

I am not proud of any of the games I've worked on, so it's not that surprising that people conclude I'm incompetent from looking at my work.

Damn straight. This is sig material.

That makes me respect him a little more, dpending on how he means it (so long as it's not some copout saying he was forced by evul publishers to make bad games that we get so much of).

 

[Moribund]

Curiously, by the end of the game, which one did you find better - the wizard or the sorcerer?

The sorcerer was better, but one in the team was enough : I wouldn't have replaced my wizard with a second sorcerer.

Sorcerers are a class that's probably vastly better in CRPGs than in PnP, because the very limited number of spells they can know isn't much of a problem when spells are almost only used for combat.

Yeah, you'd never ever get away with playing him as a fireball machine, and a party of all spellcasters would be raped by thieves in PnP.

 

[Erebus]

Forgot to mention it previously, but the pathfinding in IWD2 is terrible. When the whole party is moving and a PC sees his path blocked by another, he'll immediately try to make a huge fucking detour (instead of just waiting for half a second), even if it takes him through obvious traps, groups of monsters, etc.

 

[Jaesun]

ALL of the IE games pathfinding is horrible shit.

 

[Moribund]

It's much worse in IWD 2 because the levels are usually just one long path, so instead of occasional annoyance it's a problem most of the time.

 

[Tigranes]

*shrug* I enjoyed IWD2. As the only 3rd edition IE game I'm glad it's there, especially since if we didn't have another IWD we'd have missed it. It has a lot of flaws like cutscenitis, some super annoying areas like the Fell Wood, but I find in general it has a lot of entertaining IE-style battles, it can be very fun to play Ironman, it has some very pretty areas, and while IWD1 was in general a better game I hardly think there was such a huge gap between the two dungeon-rompers like some people make out. It's a nice flawed gem in a list of flawed gems that make up a great collection.

 

[Wyrmlord]

some super annoying areas like the Fell Wood

Fell Wood was still cool, because it made Wilderness Lore necessary.

Later in Dragon's Eye and the Underdark, there are situations where Alchemy is extremely useful. Or the Black Raven monastery where having a monk was useful.

I like Fell Wood for the reason that it really rewards you for having a diverse party, like a lot of other things in the game. You finally find a situation where someone becomes a life-saver.

 

[sea]

Not to mention that the spells you have access to are fairly limited in applicability. I mean, you've got Magic Missile, Fireball and that probably makes up 90% of your damage output already. Throw in a few disabling skills and that's really all you need. Wizards have much more versatility but when they're still all going to be built as glass cannons anyway, I'll take more pew-pew over stuff like scouting and invisibility.

My memories of Icewind Dale 2 are much stronger than the first game. Better, more developed locations and set pieces mostly. The story was meh in both games and the atmosphere was a lot less consistent in the sequel, but the gameplay, in my opinion, was the best out of all Infinity Engine games as far as combat went. It was also probably the most ambitious just as far as puzzles, environment design, etc. are concerned.

 

[Moribund]

I read somewhere they were making the game before 3rd edition was complete, which is why it was a bit halfassed but I still liked having feats. Regardless, there was a lot more time and effort sunk into it than IWD 1 as far as I could tell. Those stupid gimmicks in every single encounter must have taken a ton of time, but all they added was great annoyance.

I'd like them if there was 1/10th to 1/100th as many like in real endgame fights but it seemed like every orc had to have some scripted nonsense to do to make it "special". They just tried so hard to make everything tension, through the whole damned game.

I play dungeon crawlers for the story.

That's a silly post. I used the worst storytelling but I wasn't really talking about story, just the way they are trying to pace the game, and the annoyances. It's like in UE3 when you have so many popups you want to scream, once you have a big empire. It's just annoying interruption every 2 seconds, the video someone posted expressed it perfectly.

 

[Roguey]

I read somewhere they were making the game before 3rd edition was complete, which is why it was a bit halfassed but I still liked having feats.

3rd edition was released in 2000, IWD2 was released in August 2002 and had a 4-turned-10-month development schedule. The half-assedness is the result of engine and time limitations.

 

[Merkwürdigliebe]

Any tips on getting these games running in multiplayer? How much blood sacrifice is needed to satisfy the machine god and make it run properly? Keep having connection issues when trying to set it up.

 

[SCO]

You know, i don't mind scripted sequences if they are attached on something truly rare, or phenomenally elaborated.

Scripted sequence for TNO death on a alley by Githzerai's as part of a quest solution? Wonderful.

Scripted sequence for being approached by a moron that wants to turn into a zombie? (notice the parallel, probably parody, with a similar quest in torment, where you are not forced to talk to him).

Not fine.

 

[Wyrmlord]

Any tips on getting these games running in multiplayer? How much blood sacrifice is needed to satisfy the machine god and make it run properly? Keep having connection issues when trying to set it up.

You are actually in contact with five other people who want to MP Icewind Dale?

 

[Merkwürdigliebe]

Not that many, we're only 3 so far, so 2 characters per person, though it's not impossible that some others might join. Might try setting up a physical LAN for connection, haven't tried that yet

 

[Executer]

Playing IWD 2 atm cause of this thread, probably my equal favourite infinity engine game along with Torment.

The encounter design is solid, and even the neutered 3rd edition is better than any of the previous 2nd edition games.

Current party is all human, all male (Codex Homogeneous Squad?), running a fighter/barbarian, cleric/paladin mix in, ranger/rogue/monk, bard/rogue mix in, druid/fighter mix in and conjurer. Having a blast.

 

[Volourn]

"party of all spellcasters would be raped by thieves in PnP."

No.

 

[Joris]

Somewhere in this thread i saw a question about graphics and performance issues, but still haven't seen any significant answer. So here it is.
First time i've launched this game with wide screen (haven't tried it without it though) damn it was terrible. Fog of war was something like grid and squares and the game was lagging painfully. No ingame graphic settings have made any difference. Then i occasionally came across those settings in config where bit rate was set to something like 30. I've changed this to 50 and Bah! Not only the game have stopped lagging but surprisingly even fog of war border have become really smooth (In my case it is 1280 x something like 800 and other graphic settings are set to maximum). Now it's really beatiful, and yes, as a small bonus characters now move as fast as a blood felt shark :D
Well, better later than never

 

[sea]

Somewhere in this thread i saw a question about graphics and performance issues, but still haven't seen any significant answer. So here it is.
First time i've launched this game with wide screen (haven't tried it without it though) damn it was terrible. Fog of war was something like grid and squares and the game was lagging painfully. No ingame graphic settings have made any difference. Then i occasionally came across those settings in config where bit rate was set to something like 30. I've changed this to 50 and Bah! Not only the game have stopped lagging but surprisingly even fog of war border have become really smooth (In my case it is 1280 x something like 800 and other graphic settings are set to maximum). Now it's really beatiful, and yes, as a small bonus characters now move as fast as a blood felt shark :D
Well, better later than never

Unrelated problem reported in this thread, but I found this fixed 99% of my performance issues with Infinity Engine games that couldn't be run in OpenGL properly:

http://social.bioware.com/forum/Bal...aracter-portrait-border-glitch-5259025-1.html

 

[Infinitron]

Fog of war was something like grid and squares

http://bitpatch.com/ie_ddrawfix.html

We have a thread for this kind of thing

 

[Ranselknulf]

I played this game through a long time ago. It must not have had much of a story because I can't even remember the ending.

This was the game you run into Drizzt in right? I clearly remember not being able to kill that guy in a game and I think it was this game.

I might have to replay just to destroy him properly this time.