weirdlywise: Finding it somewhat strange that no-one's mentioned the NPC/party dynamic so far.
Games like Witcher and NWN feel like walking through a movie, where you get to be the main focus of the plot.
By contrast, BG and BG2 were rooted much more firmly in the traditional AD&D game mechanics, party interactions and freedom of movement.
Anyone remember this phrase?
"You must gather your party before venturing forth..." The strength of NWN was really in the multiplayer game, and the huge number of solo modules built by fans, which in my view often featured superior game-play to the official campaigns.
As far as the game mechanics went, in NWN1's original solo campaign you could only team-up with one other NPC, and this made any type of tactical combat kind of difficult.
Enemies would tend to swarm around your tank character to quickly attack the weakest, or your erstwhile friend would happily run straight through an acid trap you were trying to flag, before falling heroically dead at the feet of the enemy. Oh how the slavering Hordes of Darkness must have laughed their steel boots off!
BG allowed you to build a party of up to 5 NPCs, pause the combat between rounds, give everyone individual instructions, and develop some pretty complex battle tactics - Minsc, Jaheira and her idiot boyfriend to the front - stealthy archers and magic-users to the back.
Of course, it was sometimes hard to keep your party together, as they would quite often fall-out with each other, and you would either have to arbitrate between the two, or inevitably decide which one to cut loose.
This meant that there was an awful lot of re-playability in BG and BG2, and decisions made at character generation had a very real impact on your game experience.
Add to that the huge investment in humorous exchanges, sub-plots, and freedom of movement, and I kind of feel that in moving from BG through to games like NWN and Witcher, we have perhaps lost those elements of creative game-play that lie at the core of the role-playing experience for me.
The emphasis now is very much on stunningly immersive 3D graphics, and cinematically impressive cut-scenes; but it's hard to imagine developers cutting every scene six different ways - just to accommodate Jaheira's rather prudish distaste for Viconia.
In my view, the party is at the core of the AD&D experience - but as RPGs have evolved, this has been sacrificed in exchange for more focused game-play.
[ ok ok ... it's a lot of text, but I got there in the end ... ]
And just like Witcher 3 and BG1 and 2, Larian "cheat" (in my view) by have lots of enemies with archers. This means in one turn, one party member can be picked on and more or less killed first turn! Once out of the tutorial area, I don't think I have fought a group less than 8 enemies! with 4 archers. I currently lost my party to 14 enemies and 8 archers!
