Awor Szurkrarz said:
Storyfag said:
Awor Szurkrarz said:
visions said:
Pelvis Knot said:
I actually liked BG1 mostly because of low level + those empty maps. Those gave me the feeling they aren't there for me, but because of their place on the Sword Coast, with their set of problems that had nothing to do with you.
I liked the rumors - about Prism, or the guard captain that went berserk - they just said west of Naskhel or east of Beregost, it was up to you to go find them if you wish. For me it really added to the atmosphere and the feeling of a living world (NPC schedules would've helped even more).
This is basically what I like the most about BG as well; that the way the setting was used feels fairly down to earth (disregarding the "you are the son of the murder god" thing, which is more of a main plot, than setting issue).
Same here.
And here. Call it a hiking sim if you must, but it was a damn good hiking sim with RPG elements
Too bad they don't make tabletop hiking sims like that any more. Just fucking LARP simulators like Oblivion and FINO3.
And too bad that BG2 dropped the hiking part, was full of ugly dungeonpunk locations and babushka doll quests with fake choice dialogues.
I actually find dungeonpunk far more interesting than generic medieval themepark, which isn't quite down to earth either and is fucking inconsistent, as you have ubiquitous magic (you can even find scrolls on some random, low level mobs, so no it's not rare), divine interventions, resurrection, shitload of supposedly sapient, highly aggressive races that seem to only exist to provide adventurers with XPs, and fail to either get exterminated, exterminate others, integrate to at least certain degree or let the area stabilize down as permanent itzistan with all settlements either strongly fortified or ravaged by gnolls forming halberd rape gangs and shit.
From what I've seen of BG2 it's at least somewhat creative in terms of locations.
Another thing, wilderness in BG1 sucked (so did dungeons, but that's another issue). There were some nice and memorable wilderness locations - like exterior of Firewine, and landscapes admittedly looked pretty purdy, but most of the locations were arbitrary in that they were discrete, relatively small and unremarkable chunks of explorable nondescript terrain surrounded by days of walk worth of presumably the same unexplorable terrain. They was no logic to them, they looked as if they were simply thrown in for the sake of having moar locations.
Finding an NPC/location/quest hook was never an issue, because it simply revolved around uncovering one discrete locale, then moving to another until something interesting was found or you ran out of locations. It was completely different from exploring a handcrafted continuous world like Morrowind or even Wizardry 8, or world with discrete landmarks with huge amount of wilderness in between like in Fallout or Daggerfall. It was derp.
To add insult to injury, isometric view is completely shit for exploration, especially combined with relatively small maps with explicit 'unexplored' shroud. You can't get lost, you aren't rewarded for perceptiveness or cunning (there were hidden items in BG but they tended to be just unremarkable hidden hotspots you had to just hit with your cursor to detect - cue sound of furious mouse-swinging), the exploration boiled down to just wiping the black off the map and visiting all edges to limit the amount of manual walking in the future in excatly the same way as it was beneficial to always try and find all the nearby locations in oblivious, so that you could fast-travel without restrictions.
Oh, and then there was the famous BG pathfinding.