Icewind Dale is an interesting game, with some good points and some bad points.

The good:
* Can create your entire party. (I prefer this style of RPG to the style where you get pre-made characters with their own personalities.)
* Game avoids some of the low level AD&D issues by having enough side quests in the starting town to take you to level 2 early. (This is very unlike Baldur's Gate 1.)
* Bard has some rather interesting songs.
* In the Classic Edition, you can create new characters mid-game, replacing older characters; unlike in IWD2, doing this doesn't make your other party members level up too fast, so no need to cheat just to keep the game balanced.

The bad:
* Real time with pause combat.
* Only way to move characters is to click on a spot and hope the pathfinding does its job; this becomes particularly obnoxious when there are traps and enemies in the same area.
* Some of the Enhanced Edition changes (including some of the "bug fixes") are rather questionable.
* Too much random treasure generation.
* Still has some AD&D issues, like blind weapon proficiency selection (you have to choose a weapon type to focus on, but you don't know what weapon types are well represented; the EE actually makes this problem worse by splitting proficiencies), and the fact that stats can't (easily) be improved once the game starts, meaning that you might start intending to dual-class, but then realize later that you can't and it's too late to fix that.
* Wizards (and Bards) don't learn spells at level up, and scrolls are scarce, so such characters can easily end up without critical spells, or even without any spells of the new spell level they just gained access to. (Worth noting that Clerics don't have this issue.)

The other:
* Combat feels better with the AI disabled. This is especially true if you have a bard in the party.
* Game balance and enemy composition heavily favors Clerics in this game. (Seems every classic AD&D title favors some class; in BG1, it's archers (fighters with bow proficiency); in BG2, wizards (and sorcerers); here it's clerics. (Dungeon Hack also favors clerics, albeit for slightly different reasons.) For IWD1, what I would tend to do:
* Definitely at least one Cleric. Maybe even more than one, because the game favors them so much (though an even better approach might be to take a smaller party so that your Cleric reaches a higher level, making Turn Undead more powerful). Many areas of this game are *filled* with undead. (There's a reason Rangers can't just choose "undead" as a favored enemy; the category is sub-divided because there are so many of them. Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous has a similar situation with demons.)
* There really isn't a Cavalier type here, at least not in classic IWD, and there's no mounted combat, anyway.
* Because scrolls are scarce, the Bard, if used, should replace the Mage, as there aren't enough scrolls for 2 arcane casters. Note that Bards eventually get access to level 8 spells (at level 29, IIRC), and in classic IWD there are only two level 9 spells, none of which are that great (and both are Conjuration, so some specialists may not have access to any spells of this level). Also, Bards have some neat songs in this game, and they level up faster than Mages, making the spells they do have available more powerful.

Thanks a lot for the detailed description. I've played Dragon Age Inquisition, so it's a great comparison point. And yeah, DAI, if I remember correctly, was originally supposed to be an MMO but deep into development, they decided to make it single player. But it's still quite visible in the game what the original intention was.

I might get Amalur eventually, when I'm starved for action RPGs, but doesn't sound like something I want to grab right now.

IIRC in Temple of Elemental Evil it was turn based combat, and rather nice. I would love to have that instead of real time, where in the end you have to micromanage everything for critical fights.

Back in the day it was published that one could edit the files with a text editor and add to the number of nodes for calculation of the path. The original number was rather low to accommodate potato computers. Dunno if that is feasible now, or whether the number in the EE comes already optimized.

Thanks for the great advice! Maybe I botched the name and instead of Cavalier it was named in other way. It was a subtype of paladin that could not use ranged weapons (but throwable axes are OK).

The bit about the Bard and the Wizard not being in the same party is really helpful! Thanks! Maybe I take it instead of the Wizard and keep the Ranger. Thanks again.

Correct. One issue, however, is that each character can only level up 9 times during the entire game. Also, the game is reportedly buggy. On the other hand, it does have item creation, which is a feature I like to see.

Icewind Dale turns 22.

Holy shit, I remember getting boxed version on release date...

In classic IWD, there are no subclasses or kits.

In the EE, the classes from Baldur's Gate 2 are present. Notably, this includes the Sorcerer, which unlike the Mage, learns sells through leveling up (instead of scrolls); hence, the issue of scroll scarcity does not affect them. You do need to know which spells are worth choosing, but this does allow you to choose critical spells before the scroll would normally become available. (In other words, the issues with mages and learning spells end up with the sorcerer class, once added to the game, being favored; note that this is also the case in IWD2, where Sorcerers are in the original release.)

Just checked to refresh my memory.

It might have been a plain Paladin then the first time (it was on Classic). For the next walkthrough I was considering the Cavalier as a kit of Paladin. I liked the pluses and the minus is really just not using ranged weapons, but even so, you can still throw axes. Overall not half bad. Of course there is no mounted combat, the Cavalier does not ride to battle but walks, alas

(as an aside, have you tried the horses in the Mount & Blade series, that alones makes it worth, and games with much larger budgets still have not matched it... Yes, it is a firs/third person action game, a very different beast)

Again thanks for the advice on bards/wizards and now sorcerers. This helps.

Now in EE the dwarven Fighter has the chance of becoming a Dwarven Defender, but I wonder if it is worth it or just a fighter without the kit would do.

About clerics and druids, some guide said that druids were powerful in IWD, but still I missed wearing a metallic armor, and the transformations, I used them in order to survive, not because I especially enjoyed them. Maybe I missed something. Your remarks about clerics being powerful in IWD are very interesting, most likely I will go cleric this time.

The eternal pain of knowing that the IWD2 source code is lost to time and it'll never get an enhanced edition.

Ouch.

¿Maybe some day in someone's basement, a copy appears? A copy that someone kept but did not say so because it was unlawful to do so? Maybe one day this copy appears in a basket at the door of whoever has the right to make an EE? With a sign, "Please take care of this baby"?

One can dream
Hey, just found this:

Apparently, some guys are working on reverse engineering IWD2

For context:

https://www.reddit.com/r/baldursgate/comments/u3rc12/icewind_dale_2_enhanced_edition/

Then:

https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/79872/icewind-dale-2-enhanced-edition-is-here-and-the-red-chimera-group-is-looking-for-playtesters/p1

They were asking for play testers. Dunno how far they have gone.

It looked nice till this line:
"This mod also fixes the major issues many players had with the original Icewind Dale 2: you no longer have to solve tedious, cryptic puzzles to complete certain areas"
It changes way too much, in my opinion.

Wow, How convenient. They also should implement a "press here to win" button.

Ikenfell actually does this, and I think Ara Fell does as well.

The catch is that you need to go into the options to enable this feature; otherwise, it isn't available.

(Can be useful for those who just want to play the game for the story, or who want to level up quickly but still want to fight the boss for real. Now, if only games (RPGs in particular) would provide a similar option for the story sequences, and perhaps for puzzles, it would be good.)

Yes well, but I was just trying to be sarcastic :)

I 100% agree here, as playing CRPGs should be for all CRPG fans, not just an elite few; I mean, one of the major contributors to the CRPG dev crash was that it was too exclusive a club, as a lot of potential CRPG fans were put off as the bar was too high for entry, and that there just not enough elite gamers to keep the companies afloat!

Thankfully, games like the Orig sin games/Solasta/The pathfinder series treat all CRPG fans great as they have accommodated CRPG fans both for the casual and the masochistic alike!

There also comes the added benefit of having a much larger pool of people that buy their games, giving them the needed finances to continue making more games, and staying in business.

Sure, one can argue that the souls/rogue genre is doing quite well with player difficulty/exclusivity, but that is an entirely different genre of RPG, CRPGs do not require cat-like reflexes and adrenaline-based gameplay, I mean, that's not the target audience after all; so for the non-twitch and cerebral/managerial gamer, CRPGs are a much better fit!