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Icewind Dale seriesI wont recommend it(53 posts)(53 posts)
(53 posts)
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This is my favourite topic
Posted October 15, 2013
For anyone finding IWD too difficult to enjoy, I warmly recommend using mods. Especially the Tweak Pack gives you options to smooth out those bumps for you, like endless stat rolling or rest limitations.
Posted November 22, 2013
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deathknight1728: Its still too fucking hard. I mean the enemies you face in Baldurs Gate and Planescape are but a fraction of what you have to face in IWDale1. Its just brutally imbalanced and some of the enemies are impossible for any party. I rolled up a really good party with good stats and yet the enemies you face are just frustrating.

I played IWDale 2 a while back and that game like this one is crap as well. You can't expect people to get through games where you got to be 100% right all the time.

The makers of the game just littered each lvl with enemies regardless of their stats and abilities. It doesn't take a lot of smarts to know that the game wasn't properly finished.

I took my rogue through the lvls in stealth and all I found was enemy upon enemy upon enemy. In planescape and BG, there was at least some interaction and talking involved.

This game is a good reason why Black Isle went bankrupt.
Sounds like you really suck at RPGs. IWD 1 & 2, while they have a few challenging moments, are FAR from being very difficult games (*chuckle* you should try Nahlakh (though you probably could not stand the graphics). Maybe the most difficult CRPG ever...) and trust me, I am not one of those gamers who sets difficulty settings to 'Very Hard' or 'Impossible' levels because I hate turning games into work.

As for your absurd criticism against games with full party creation, please...just stop it. Most traditional RPGers do not see creating characters as some sort of laborious task they have to get through as quickly as possible. Creating characters is half of the game! That is where your strategy kicks in.
Don't get me wrong, I had fun with Baldur's Gate 1 & 2, Pirates of the Western Sea and most of all Jagged Alliance 2, but these are a sort of change of pace thing. Most of the time us old school RPG fans love to sit and spend an hour or two creating characters then playing those characters. I personally think the optimal style is like what Wizardry 8 did where you create six and can recruit 2 more.

I personally do not usually give a rat's @$$ about 'story' in RPGs or extensive dialog nonsense (especially 'Romances' ) and 'banter' between PCs is only enjoyable to the extent the developers put into the feature, in terms of well written lines of dialog and good voice acting (see jagged Alliance 2, Baldur's gate 1 & 2). For many games (especially Japanese 'Console style RPGs') it is just an annoyance.

In short, you can roll up the best stats possible for your characters but if you are not a good player the stats won't help you.
Posted November 27, 2013
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SkeleTony: Sounds like you really suck at RPGs. IWD 1 & 2, while they have a few challenging moments, are FAR from being very difficult games (*chuckle* you should try Nahlakh (though you probably could not stand the graphics).
I do not suck at RPGs, and I feel secure in saying that IWD is a pretty difficult game, but most of that difficulty arises from the flaws of the Infinity Engine (poor pathfinding, no way to accurately gauge distance for spells, isometric perspective making it impossible to tell if a character is able to fire/cast a spell into another room, etc.). Even if those flaws were fixed, however, the challenging "moments" were so pervasive that labeling the game as a whole as difficult is hardly unwarranted.

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SkeleTony: As for your absurd criticism against games with full party creation, please...just stop it. Most traditional RPGers do not see creating characters as some sort of laborious task they have to get through as quickly as possible. Creating characters is half of the game! That is where your strategy kicks in.
Don't get me wrong, I had fun with Baldur's Gate 1 & 2, Pirates of the Western Sea and most of all Jagged Alliance 2, but these are a sort of change of pace thing. Most of the time us old school RPG fans love to sit and spend an hour or two creating characters then playing those characters. I personally think the optimal style is like what Wizardry 8 did where you create six and can recruit 2 more.
Fun fact: creating a character in 2nd edition AD&D takes all of five minutes. Granted, that time goes up exponentially if you try to min/max your character (which I have no tolerance for both on the grounds that it is too time consuming to the point of feeling like work and ultimately has a negative impact on role-playing), but doing the basics of filling out a character sheet is pretty stream-lined. One would think that an automated program would make this go faster, but any time saved by not having to fill out a sheet by hand is eclipsed by the awful way character creation plays out in IWD. Want to go back to change something? You need to delete everything you have done up to that point, possibly including stats. There is absolutely no reason that I should have to delete my stats because I think that my current roll is better suited to another race/class, yet IWD makes it so that if I decide that I want to do something as simple as change my character portrait, I need to start all over again. That makes me agonize of each choice far longer than I should, and when you multiply that by 6, I start tearing my hair out. And that's just the first game; I barely got past IWD2's intro and promptly quit once I realized that I'd need to actively diagram feat trees out to make characters that the game would't chew up and spit out.

As for sitting around for "hours" creating characters... no. The only way that I can ever imagine spending this much time on character creation is if I am trying to min/max, a process that I have limited patience with for a number of reasons, the most relevant of which being that it takes far too long and feels like work, a sentiment that OP seems to share at least somewhat. Bottom line, not every gamer has as much patience as you do for spending hours of preparation before actually playing a game. If this is what you enjoy doing, then more power to you, but do realize that not every person approaches an RPG in the same way you do before you start passing them off as "absurd".
Post edited November 27, 2013 by Jonesy89
Posted November 27, 2013
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Jonesy89: One would think that an automated program would make this go faster, but any time saved by not having to fill out a sheet by hand is eclipsed by the awful way character creation plays out in IWD. Want to go back to change something? You need to delete everything you have done up to that point, possibly including stats. There is absolutely no reason that I should have to delete my stats because I think that my current roll is better suited to another race/class, yet IWD makes it so that if I decide that I want to do something as simple as change my character portrait, I need to start all over again. That makes me agonize of each choice far longer than I should, and when you multiply that by 6, I start tearing my hair out. And that's just the first game; I barely got past IWD2's intro and promptly quit once I realized that I'd need to actively diagram feat trees out to make characters that the game would't chew up and spit out.
While I agree that having to nuke your rolls sucks if you want to change your class/race/alignment/proficiencies to something different during character creation, I'll just point out that in-game you can change your portrait, sound set, color scheme, and bio. You just pull up the character sheet and click on the 'Customize' button towards the bottom of the page. That will allow you to change those aspects, at least.

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Jonesy89: As for sitting around for "hours" creating characters... no. The only way that I can ever imagine spending this much time on character creation is if I am trying to min/max, a process that I have limited patience with for a number of reasons, the most relevant of which being that it takes far too long and feels like work, a sentiment that OP seems to share at least somewhat. Bottom line, not every gamer has as much patience as you do for spending hours of preparation before actually playing a game. If this is what you enjoy doing, then more power to you, but do realize that not every person approaches an RPG in the same way you do before you start passing them off as "absurd".
Different strokes for different folks, definitely. But take note that the OP's real criticism that the game sucked was because he couldn't get through the game with a two character party that contained no magic users.
Posted December 17, 2013
You need to approach to ICWD as a "Baldur´s Gate Tactics", the game has RPG things ok... but is a "TACTICS" game, like Final Fantasy Tactics to the original FF games, or Fallout Tactics to Fallout.

If you change your mind about this, then you are prepared to enjoy it, is an awesome game I just finished it for second time days ago, I really LOVE the game. Even if like you, by far, I prefer Baldur´s Gate, Fallout or Planescape Torment.

RPGs with story are much better, but "TACTICS" rpg games let you enjoy strong combats with super strong characters, and is more about "customize" your characters and the "team", a thing I also consider VERY funny.
Post edited December 17, 2013 by YaTEdiGo
Posted December 17, 2013
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YaTEdiGo: You need to approach to ICWD as a "Baldur´s Gate Tactics", the game has RPG things ok... but is a "TACTICS" game, like Final Fantasy Tactics to the original FF games, or Fallout Tactics to Fallout.

If you change your mind about this, then you are prepared to enjoy it, is an awesome game I just finished it for second time days ago, I really LOVE the game. Even if like you, by far, I prefer Baldur´s Gate, Fallout or Planescape Torment.

RPGs with story are much better, but "TACTICS" rpg games let you enjoy strong combats with super strong characters, and is more about "customize" your characters and the "team", a thing I also consider VERY funny.
Fair enough. It's a combat game (albeit it does a questionable job of informing the consumer that), and as such should be judged by the combat. The only problem is that once we do that, all the flaws of the Infinity Engine that were present in earlier games start popping out of the woodwork and proceeding to act like a bunch of hooting dickholes. The pathfinding, even after increasing the number of nodes, still results in combat units (both when engaging in melee and ranged combat,) taking the most asinine paths to their enemies, sometimes trying to travel 180 degrees in the opposite direction to find an alternative path that doesn't exist, even if the obstruction is a moving friendly who would have gotten out of the way i a second. Since there is no discernible way that I have found to gauge distance in game (something that, yes, is told to the players in PnP D&D), there is no way to reliably tell if your long ranch attacks will allow you to attack from safety or require the unit to move forward out of cover into danger; similarly, this inability to gauge distance prevents reliably gauging the radius of AoE spells, making it impossible to reliably target a group of enemies or avoid hitting the party. Underlining everything is the fact that the RTWP combat as opposed to pure turn based makes combat an unmitigated mess, exacerbating the pathfinding issues as units have to plan around the position of units that are already in motion as opposed to stationary units, and generally results in combat devolving into a clusterfuck when instead of dictating an action for the unit to take and forcing them to commit to that action (again, faithful to AD&D 2E), the player can and often will break off the action, resulting in occurrences that are damaging to the party (ordering the party to fall back and only then realizing that you just caused the wizard's spell to fizzle by giving the command and that even though the game is paused, there is no way to go back on that decision in that regard), and in long running combats it is amazingly easy to accidentally neglect a unit without being prompted to give an action for that unit to take (which would be done in a turn based game, and is how PnP D&D is run).

So, even judging IWD as a combat game, it's not very good.
Posted December 17, 2013
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Jonesy89: So, even judging IWD as a combat game, it's not very good.
You know, I can see what you're saying here, but I honestly have little issues with figuring out how far away to cast a spell to avoid catching my party in it, nor do I have much problem with the combat with a judicious use of the pause button. Sure, I've sometimes fizzled a spell due to needing to move the caster out of harm's way, but that's not a common occurrence in my experience and is just part of combat. The pathfinding sucks in the IE games, I'll certainly agree on that, but I personally find the combat in the IWD games to be very good and a helluva lot of fun. Different tastes, I guess.
Posted December 17, 2013
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Jonesy89: So, even judging IWD as a combat game, it's not very good.
I agree with all that issues, I suffered them. But I think is because we play the game pretty "fast" at least if you take your time you can control all that, the problem is it can be really annoying sometimes check every action, and it would be better if the game control many of that problems by itself. So yes, it´s not a "solid" experience, but is still full of possibilities.
Post edited December 17, 2013 by YaTEdiGo
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Icewind Dale seriesI wont recommend it(53 posts)(53 posts)
(53 posts)