I have found most if not all Infinity Engine games an absolute chore to play - Icewind Dale, Baldurs Gate, etc.
Their stories are alright (although Icewind Dale is basically a dungeon crawler, not much story there), the problem is that DND 2E is kind of bad in many ways, and putting it in a game in that way basically makes it very diceroll heavy, but in a frustrating and annoying way that lacks consequence.
For instance, picking locks. Having a low chance to succeed doesn't mean much because there's no resource cost to endlessly failing.
Trap Detection is basically a case of "walk around until traps magically appear", and if you get unlucky and miss one, that can often mean a TPK. So it's a mandatory skill that also doesn't really have much interesting gameplay associated with it.
Resting is basically a free party heal since random encounters are rare and usually significantly easier than the amount of damage you healed off in the first place (and you can rest again after if you take damage)
Specialising in certain weapon types is pointless because there might only be 3 of that weapon in the entire game, and no nice magical ones. Baldurs Gate players should basically metagame and always get the Katanas skill since there are lots of awesome katanas, and never get the Quarterstaff skill, for instance.
I would describe Infinity Engine games as: Story written by an adult, gameplay designed by a child.
I guess my gripe is more with DND generally sucking than it is with the Infinity Engine, since it's just a recreation of DND in software, but I dunno, it seems to come off even worse than DND for some reason. I guess it's because if I tried to rest 5 times in a row in a real DND game to continually heal after random rest encounters, my DM would slap me. But that's totally permissable in an Infinity Engine game. It's like playing DND but your DM is an idiot, so you can abuse the broken ruleset as much as you want without consequence.
Ive always been a jaded cunt, but I think the last fucks went with Pillars of eternity.
I was there in the thread arguing with half the codex about how shit it was, and nobody fucking saw it, I felt like I was fucking insane. Pointed every fucking flaw months before the game was released and was mocked out of the thread because of it, I saw people like
Sensuki and
Bester actually try, and I saw them broken for it, I saw their dreams of a good game shattered by the hipster trash, go back to fixing your bike sawyer.
Then the game releases and the fucking jew starts censoring reviews while pushing propaganda, in the fucking codex of all places, trying to gaslight people. It was such a fucking shitshow.
And worse part was that this fucking game was the chance to get a decent game inspired in BG 1 or 2, but no, we got a vanity project from black isles coffee kid.
It's okay, you don't need to feel bad for having the correct opinion.
There are a lot of people with cringe takes on here. Part of being on the codex is realising that some people will flame you or hate react your post because you refute their terrible takes. That's part of life.
That said, I am of the opinion that Pillars would have sucked even if it had been a faithful recreation of Infinity Engine games, because Infinity Engine games generally suck (see above). It does have some positives, however. I like how they fixed the completely broken camping system from IE games by making it actually require a resource. Pillars is probably better than people who despise it give it credit for, it at least tried to fix some of the issues in the DND formula. It's just a shame so many of the RPG systems ended up being a confusing mess. What the FUCK is "deflection". I would still prefer Pillars over a game like Icewind Dale because the gameplay is probably marginally better.
I do respect JSawyer for his work on New Vegas, though.
