Which of these classic series is your preference, and why ?

Icewind Dale, there are no gerbiling barbarians that make we want to murder them in the series.

Icewind Dale because the venturing party you form is not centered around a single player character.

Icewind Dale because it is set in a world of snow and ice. I love that and there are to few games with such a setting as it is. Apart from that the IWD series has the more beautiful, fantastic, imaginative levels. I like the art style more too. And in my totally wrong opinion the stories of Heart of Winter and IWD2 are so much better than the story of BG.

That all said, I've played the BGs more often than the IWDs simply because the IWDs are very straight forward. You can't mingle in them, you can't dabble around. You go through them and then you're done. BG (especially BG1) is much more of an semi-open world game so you're simply able to to mix things up and it becomes less tedious.

Exactly. But I really can't say which one is better, because they're so different. But if we make a list comparing the original baldur's Gate to Icewind Dale:

Creature diversity: Icewind Dale wins
Combat: Icewind Dale wins
Environments: Icewind Dale wins
Replayability: Baldur's Gate wins

I like the Baldur's Gate series (BGT) as a whole more than Icewind Dale, but I still had a blast playing IWD. It just depends on what you're looking for. A combat oriented dungeon crawler (IWD) or a semi-open world more diverse game like Baldur's gate.

That said, I didn't like IWD2 that much. It's an ok game sure, but it gets boring fast.

You forgot the music. It's one of Soule's finest works. xD

I really liked the story in IWD2. It's rather subtle and by no means in the front or the driving force but it is one of these stories that Black Isle seems to have favoured so much. You know, where it's not so much about pure evil and pure good and saving kingdom and country but moves more on these personal levels of human behaviour. IWD2 was one of the very few games were I was angry as the end unfolded and wanted to join the villains to march against the good guys.

In comparison to the original Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale wins hands down IMHO (I dislike the first Baldur's Gate alot). But compared to Baldur's Gate 2, well......it's a tough choice. Meaning, I can't decide since both have their ups and downs when compared to each other.

Icewind Dale Pros:

-Can create all of your party members by scratch and make them any way you want.
-The game ends when *all* party members die (as opposed to the game being over if your primary character dies).
-No shoehorned romance to deal with, annoying party members, and bickerings.
-Fights are more varied and interesting.
-Many fights are challenging and keep you on your toes.
-Has alot of fights and action.
-Interesting locations and settings.
-Mages are better IMHO since they have more offensive spells.
-Lacks cheap mage fights.
-Jeremy Soul's excellent music (though there isn't much).

Icewind Dale Cons:

-Thin story since it focuses on action (but that's a given for this series)
-Lacks interesting boss fights.
-No dialogue option to let you know that your weapons are ineffective against certain monsters.
-Not as much music as Baldur's Gate 2.
-Fairly short compared to Baldur's Gate 2.
-No Kits (I'm spoiled with the kits in Baldur's Gate 2).
-No Experience points for reading spells or disaring traps (anyone know of a Mod that fixes this?).
-The expansion is rather dull and uninteresting.
-No special abilities for high level characters.

Baldur's Gate 2 Pros:

-A good story (though there are bits I morally disagree with and it can get too Black & White at times).
-Great boss fights such as Dragons & Demogorgon himself!
-Has a good expansion (though I favor Watcher's Keep the most).
-Kits for variety.
-Experience points for disarming traps and reading spells.
-The Underdark! My criticism for Baldur's Gate 2 is that it lacks variety of enemies and lacks challenging fights (outside of bosses and super cheap mags). But this is not the case with the Underdark, as it has a great variety of challenging enemies and it's a great settng. The first time I went to the Underdark, it felt like I was in Hell! Even Diablo 2's hell levels didn't creep me out as much as the Underdark! Kudos to Bioware fo doing a great job with this area!
-Special abilities for high level characters.

Baldur's Gate 2 Cons:

-Shoehorned romances.
-Annoying party members.
-The only party member you can create is your primary character.
-And if your primary character dies, it's instantly "Game Over" Very annoying at times!
-Very cheap feeling mage fights.
-Lack of offensive mage spells.
-The vast majority of fights are boring (except for the Underdark and it's denizens), though this is remedied in the later parts of baldur's Gate 2 and Throne of Bhaal. I sort of felt the same way. I was really angry with the Ten Towns since I partly blamed them for what happened with Issair and Madae. And if there is one thin that really annoys me is how Faerun treats half races. But I also really liked how they made the story not as black & white (take the hint, Bioware!). But at the end of Icewind Dale 2, I recall didn't feel all that heroic when I understood that had Issair and Madae been treated better (and Half races for that matter), maybe none of the events of Icewind Dale 2 would never have happened. I felt like leaving the Icewind Dale region and never coming back again.

I got some comments:
- You can play BG1+2 with a self made party. Start a multi player game and create all chars yourself. You have to select one of this chars as main char and when this one dies its game over.

I prefer the NPC group members because I like interactions between party members. I wish there were more games like Planescape tornment with really interesting chars. I have no problem with reading tons of text. And I found games with only fighting and no story (Diablo, sacred, . . .) very boring. So I like the baldurs gate series more. But everyone must decide for himself what he likes.

- Mages do not have a lack of offensive spells in baldurs gate. They have tons of options to deal damage. Often (but not always) it is better when your mage casts spells to disable the enemy or to protect your group.

- I play BGT and I disabled the function that you get exp for traps, locks and scrolls. Else I would have gained a level before leaving candlekeep and the game was much too easy. This mechanic also screams to be exploited. You get tons of exp if you learn a spell and if you find the scroll again, forget the spell and learn it again.

- about "No dialogue option to let you know that your weapons are ineffective against certain monsters. "
You have the log. If you hit the enemy and you do not do damage, than your weapon is ineffective. You should know
that some enemies (demons, elementals, golems, powerful undead and some other things) can only be harmed
with magic weapons+x (x= 1,2 or 3, 4 only for the most powerful creatures) and some enemies are immun to some
kinds of damage (missle, piercing, slashing, blunt, some elements). Finding out yourself what is effective against what is part of learning these games.

Overall I probably like BG more, but there are a lot of things I like about Icewind Dale too. The music, level design and scenery is mostly superior to BG, and it's great (but a bit tedious too) to create all party members. I've not yet managed to play through IWD2 as it bored me to tears and I hated the new rules, but the story in IWD is actually pretty good. Some of the locations are wonderful as well, like the Hand and Dorn's Deep.

The downsides is that the expansion isn't much to write home about, and the fighting can get a bit tedious at times, especially in the beginning.

The main benefit with BG is that there are more opportunities for roleplaying and the games have much higher replay value. IWD is pretty linear, while BG1 especially is pretty open and you can do things more or less in the order you fancy.

Some things I really didn't like with BG is the interjection of party dialogue and mostly romance too. Everybody seem to love this, and want it in BG1 too via mods, but I hated it and wanted to punch the screen every time some know wanted to talk to me about God knows what in the same instant the last enemy in a massive battle had barely hit the ground, blood still sprouting from its skull. It often destroyed the immersion for me. Some characters also became a great annoyance, like the incessant screams from Minsc (who I at first loved, but soon enough started to hate due to said "can't turn this off" screams).

But overall the Baldur's Gate games arguably offer a more complete package, especially when it comes to roleplaying. Of course, Planescape Torment leaves them both in the dust in that regard, and BG can't even reach PST's toes in the roleplaying department. But I do find it a bit hard to directly compare these three excellent game series. They're similar in many ways, but also very different due to their different focus and environments.

Icewind Dale by a long shot, BG doesn't even come close. Why?

1) Characters, the enemies in IWD were far more believable than the cookie cutter "I am evil and do evil for fun" "villans from BG. The best was Icasaracht from Heart of Winter, the problem of the southerners encroaching on northern lands and inability to do anthing about it caused her to go mad and desperate. After defeating her, I thought the statue that held Icasarachts soul stone shedding a tear was a very nice touch. I suppose if I tried to defend my home and got defeated, I'd shed a few tears too and I felt sorry for beating her. The twins from IWD 2 were a close 2nd, not welcome anywhere so they try and create a nation to get away from the discimination of others. Compare that to Seravok who wants stuff dead cos it's funny and Jon Irenicus who got thrown out his home for doing bad stuff when warned to stop. Don't even get me started on TOB's villians *shudder*

1.1) IWD didn't have Nalia, automatic plus in my book. I know Anomen gets a lot of hate but his character wasn't out of place. Nalia just made me wretch. "For the needy!" PUH LEEZE!!!!

2) Party customization. Yeah okay, you can customize characters in BG but as was mentioned before, BG revolves around the PC. I prefered handling all my characters in IWD rather than just the PC in BG. Matter of preference, I know.

3) Random enounters, in IWD there were none. In BG, how much sense does it make for a group of 4-6 common street scum with nothing but leather armour and daggers to attack a decked out party of 6 with a hefty bunch of combat experience under their belt. It's just nonsense.

4) Spells. I found it really annoying that in BG, mages where better off filling up their spell slots with things like breach. I hardly ever used any spells in BG cos they were mostly useless. IWD has it's share of useless spells but depending on the situation, a lot of spells had their place. In BG2, breach, breach, breach *sigh*. Oh, and I didn't care much for sequencers in BG 2 either.

5) IWD 1 + 2 combined had much less stupid dialog than a fraction of BG. I've attached screenies so show how cringworthy the dialog in BG really is. Although some of the romance dialog was actually well done, the side quest dialog was actually so bad, I actually took a break from my last playthrough of BG2 a few times. The first and third show black and white moraliity good character are always so selfless, evil is always so selfish. When these dialog option came up, I just wanted to puke. In the second screenie, you dialog options boil down to 2 things I would never say to someone like Korgan, something totally stupid or just insult him for no reason (which is also stupid). These are just 3 examples, dialog like this appeared throughout the game. Thank god the bad dialog in IWD was few and far in between and didn't get in the way of enjoying the game, I wish I could say the same for BG.

6) IWD had better and much more atmospheric music. BG1 and 2 had some goot tracks but they're nothing compared to IWD.

7) IWD had no illusion of role play. Yeah, okay, in BG I could role play a class but I could not, repeat COULD NOT roleplay decisions. It was annoying forced being the do gooder in BG as I don't like do gooder types in real life, why would I like them in a game? In BG I felt I forced to be either a selfless dogooder or a stupid evil bastard. Do gooders always got the boatloads of XP and loots while being stupid got you nothing. Choosing between the do gooder and stupid isn't isn't a choice and it isn't role play. IWD never gave even gave you the "choice" and I felt much better for it.

8) IWD 1 didn't make use of the reputation meter and it was absent in IWD 2 altogether. Seriously, reputation in BG was probably the stupidest mechanic I've seen in a game. If you were a do gooder with a goody party, you could ignore it, if not though, it was obstrusive. It was far too easy to raise it, but if you had non good characters in your party, it would cause problems. It also makes no sense for "evil" characters to like being hated. If evil characters are greedy and love money (as they are so often depicted in DnD), wouldn't they like being able to get higher prices for goods they sell and lower prices for things they buy? It just made no sense. Fortunately, there is a mod that fixes this problem.

I'm sure theres more, but thats all I can think of right now

Actually, in IWD TotLM, there is a person who killed his entire party due to some kind of external force (iirc it was some kind of cursed item or something). As a result, he is feeling suicidal, and begs you to kill him; if you do try to honor his request, you lose one point of reputation upon killing him. Setting aside the morality of assisted suicide, this makes no sense, as there are literally no other witnesses to the incident aside from your own party members, begging the question who exactly you are losing reputation with; are the gods gossiping about this with the rest of the Realms or something?

That minor point aside, I think I have to agree with you on most of your points.

I think that some of that might be Chris Avellone's hand in the IWD series; he seems to love doing nicely subversive stuff that turns a lot of fantasy/standard D&D tropes on their head, like giving villains depth and sympathetic motives (Ravel the night hag as a mentally broken non-threat being driven by love and a desire to free the Lady after being hyped as the ultimate mistress of evil, for instance), and certainly more depth than the Captain Planet nonsense in BG. Xzar and Montaran had a brief glimpse at depth since their goal is to find out who is behind the iron crisis, which would be a good thing to do as it would benefit the realms; however, their inability to realize that the principle of doing "good" things for rewards and prestige (which is how I tried playing my thief) didn't extend beyond that, which inevitably led to them deserting because I decided to play Smart Evil. I kept wanting to find out that Sarevok had some kind of plan being just being an Evil bastard, but in the end even his plan amounted to "because I'm an Evil bastard".

Nalia seemed to have promise as a concept what with her rather, um, insensitive attitude toward the poor yet still trying to help them, she quickly got grating.

No kidding. Having random encounters would be all good and well, but the ones in BG rarely make sense. The only reason the basic bandits had a chance was because they outnumbered us and could have ganged up on the casters to render the party ineffective (not that the AI lets them do that), but when a group of three kobolds think they can take a party with advanced equipment, I headdesk.

You forgot the dialogue after almost getting assassinated in Candlekeep: either (1) lie and say that nothing happened or tell what happened all while acting like you have PTSD. Heaven forbid that my character try to maintain composure while sensibly alerting the guards to the danger of other possible assassins. Admittedly, this is always going to be a problem to an extent with limited dialogue options, as game designers can't anticipate everything, but the way that the two or three options are so diametrically opposed with no middle ground is just silly.

I'm not always a fan of the unrealistically wide-eyed completely altruistic heroic types for a number of reasons that I won't go into, so I always try to find a way to play Good characters who are dicks or Evil characters who frequently help out others (albeit for selfish reasons). Problem in BG is that (a) the dialogue provided almost no dialogue options that fit what I was trying to do (but again, that's to be expected to a degree) and (b) the Reputation system (and, by extension, the party) adopted a Kantian outlook when determining when any given action was Good or Evil regardless of my actual motives.

At the end of the day, though, the big problem with BG, as opposed it IWD, is that it couldn't decide on what it was. IWD was a combat focused game and didn't try to hide it; RP wasn't given any more than the bare minimum of attention, the story, while having some interesting elements, was hardly a tale for the ages and primarily served as an excuse to kill things. BG, on the other hand, was a combat oriented game that had pretentions at being story and RP based RPG as opposed to an action RPG. For a story that was supposedly the driving force of the PC's actions, but the game had more of an interest in getting the player to dive into random dungeons for phat loot and XPs (without which you were grossly underleveled and underequipped for the final fight), the world being almost completely open from the outset harmed any sense of narrative cohesion the game had, and party members, despite purportedly being key characters with respect to the Bhaalspawn (Khalid and Jaheira, for instance) receive no character development (and no, getting magic items in all your slots is not character development) and can't even speak. For all the lip service being paid to RP and player freedom what with providing an open world, the dialogue options were extremely limited in number and complexity,, and trying to resolve things nonviolently seemed to have only been included as a token as attempting to do so almost always meant getting no experience at all when it worked, assuming that the encounter was one where the designers had determined that combat was the only outcome and the RP served only as a precursor to combat with attempts at flexing charisma being only cosmetic in nature.

tl;dr: IWD1>>BG1 because IWD was honest about being an action RPG, while BG was a combat game that tried to pass itself off as a non-linear story-driven RPG with efforts that were unsatisfying at best and token at worst.

While I enjoy both series (as to which one I prefer really depends on my mood to be honest) I often though that it would be really nice if there was a Infinity Engine game that had the same setting and atmosphere as IWD with a bit more balance between story and combat and somewhere around the length of BG2 with a lot of side quests and whatnot.

If there is one thing I prefer in IWD over the BG series it's the setting and atmosphere. There were so many memorable places in IWD: (especially in the first one) Severed Hand, Lower Dorn's Deep, Lonelywood, Gloomfrost...plus there is just something in the cold and harsh northern setting that really appeals to me.
In BG1 almost every place is just some generic forest/seashore/pseudo-medieval Europe settlement. BG2 was better in this regard with Athkatla which had a sort of mediterranean/byzantine feel to it, although the rest of the environments were once again quite bland, maybe with the exception of the Underdark.

We can always hope that Pillars of Eternity will achieve that.