Baldurs Gate 3?

[rk47]

Baldur's Gate III the Dark Incest

Imoen & Bhaalspawn's children undertake a grand adventure to rediscover their parents' deepest and darkest secrets.
Help the twins uncover their dark past before they are slain by the Bhaal-hunters.

Features: Deep, emotionally engaging cast and romance with elves and other species of the Forgotten Realms.

[Sky]

Only if WUA is lead writer on the project.

[Shaje]

We never really knew how many other bhaalspawn there were. I would guess BG3 would follow some of their adventures. Maybe some tie ins with characters like Sarevok or Irenicus....   who knows.

[Llyse]

I thought the whole premise of ToB was that you were the last one and those that leaved had been drained of their Bhaalness already (All this talk is making me want to reroll and play again)...

[koro]

Hoo boy, this is going to be something. Playing a freshly-installed BG1+2 using BGT now, and I'm heading from Beregost to Nashkel. Still mostly level 1 (Garrick and Imoen are 2) and I get ambushed on the road by a band of eight bandits and four kobolds, all armed with bows. Garrick (who I switched to a Jester for giggles) and Xzar die instantly from the focus-fire, Jaheira goes down right after, followed by Imoen, leaving Charname and Khalid to desperately try to kill the constantly-retreating bandits.

[Ingmar]

Khalid didn't just run away? 

[koro]

It's possible he and the bandit were retreating in the same direction!

I'll probably have to take a detour to High Hedge and see about teaching Garrick and/or Xzar Sleep, but I'm kind of running up against the time limit before Khalid, Jaheira, and Xzar leave because I keep forgetting this isn't NWN2 and I keep tapping Z instead of Tab to highlight stuff.

Oh, and it's 10 bandits and 2 kobolds, and this fight is guaranteed on this screen transition from the road to Nashkel, so I must win this fight to get there.

[Sjofn]

KHALID IS AWESOME DAMMIT

[koro]

I like Khalid!

...I just like his wife a lot more~

[Llyse]

KHALID IS AWESOME DAMMIT

Better part of Valour!
Better part of Valour!  

[koro]

And now I have to reinstall everything thanks to Demivrgvs being a lazy asshole and not uploading the most current version of Item Revisions onto the main Gibberlings3 site, followed by taking down the hotfixes for the version that is that would then correct the crashing problem I have.

[Sjofn]

KHALID IS AWESOME DAMMIT

Better part of Valour!
Better part of Valour!  

 

[rk47]

Ahahah I still remember that. I'm kinda sad they gave him the offscreen death treatment in BG2. What the fuck Bioware. I know he's a shitty fighter, but I want him along.

[Ingmar]

He shapes right up with some Gauntlets of Ogre Power.

[Zetor]

Yea, most BG1 melee fighter types need either gauntlets of ogre power or gauntlets of dexterity to work well. I seem to remember them having better stats in BG2, except for paladin dude who had a really bad dex score.

[rk47]

Irrelevant. He has Carsomyr. 

[Teleku]

Ahahah I still remember that. I'm kinda sad they gave him the offscreen death treatment in BG2. What the fuck Bioware. I know he's a shitty fighter, but I want him along.

But they had to get rid of him somehow so you could freely romance the hot wood elf chick!

[koro]

Yea, most BG1 melee fighter types need either gauntlets of ogre power or gauntlets of dexterity to work well. I seem to remember them having better stats in BG2, except for paladin dude who had a really bad dex score.

A lot of BG1 characters get some really shitty ability scores. Clerics get it the worst: none of the five Clerics in BG1 have above 16 WIS, and two of them barely have positive WIS scores. If Quayle were put into 3rd edition, he wouldn't even have enough WIS to cast divine spells.

[Ingmar]

He comes so late in the game you'd never switch to him anyway, that's the other big problem with most BG1 companions.

[koro]

Yeah, there are a bunch of interesting characters that you're unlikely to ever use because they come so late. Pretty much any party member introduced in Baldur's Gate itself is too late to make much of a difference. Even the Cloakwood NPCs are pushing it. Mods help this a lot, of course. My current playthrough is going to be looking like:

Charname: Berserker, to dual to Cleric in BG2
Yeslick: I'll be using Jaheira prior
Xan: Level1NPC'd into a Fighter/Mage from his previously nigh-useless Enchanter and had his unfitting 16 CHA bumped down to 10 and his STR and CON boosted by 3 each
Coran
Quayle: Moved from Chapter 6 Wyrm's Crossing to the Nashkel carnival and given a few WIS to throw him the slightest of bones
Garrick: Given the Jester kit and otherwise unchanged; I'm actually debating whether or not to keep him as Jester or switch him to Skald. Skald's tempting, but BG1 is pretty much the only level range Jester's bard song will ever be useful at

So not the most oddball party (Yeslick and Coran are both very common and "safe" picks), but not my nth Charname/Khalid/Jaheira/Minsc/Dynaheir/Imoen party or Baldur's Gate: Wherein Kivan and Kagain Carry Four Other Scrubs Edition.

[rk47]

meh, mostly boring ppl huh. Try a bunch of weirdos you meet in the forest, like that evil druid and drow cleric.
There's also shar-teel. Try an all female party  except you. Keep the Ho-Ho-Trains alive in the Forgotten Realms.

[Llyse]

Xan is useless hilarious, part of his charm is trying to find useful non-evocation spells...

"While party leader I shall endeavour not to get ALL of us killed" 

[Merusk]

meh, mostly boring ppl huh. Try a bunch of weirdos you meet in the forest, like that evil druid and drow cleric.
There's also shar-teel. Try an all female party  except you. Keep the Ho-Ho-Trains alive in the Forgotten Realms.

Viconia was awesome enough to become a romance in BG2. She was in my BG1 party as the cleric I previously mentioned. 

There was no evil druid so I assume you didn't mean Jaheira, but Faldorn.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Baldur%27s_Gate_characters

[Sky]

I seem to remember them having better stats in BG2, except for paladin dude who had a really bad dex score.

My favorite game was when I played a complimentary paladin kit to that dude's. He made a hell of an off-tank, we used to just rip through stuff (with archer support, of course!).

[Ivanneth]

I thought the whole premise of ToB was that you were the last one and those that leaved had been drained of their Bhaalness already (All this talk is making me want to reroll and play again)...

This was my understanding as well. The remaining spawn being stripped of their powers makes me wonder where random teleportation guy (I think you run into him in Saradush) ended up, and if being unable to teleport anymore put him in a bind. Maybe his story will be a side quest in BGIII.

As for Xan - the only time I've kept him in my group all the way to the end was when my character was a low int, half orc barbarian and the idea of Xan haggardly running after a 7' tall idiot saying, "we're all doomed..." made him too amusing to replace.

[koro]

meh, mostly boring ppl huh. Try a bunch of weirdos you meet in the forest, like that evil druid and drow cleric.
There's also shar-teel. Try an all female party  except you. Keep the Ho-Ho-Trains alive in the Forgotten Realms.

I actually really dislike Faldorn, so I never use her. Viconia and Shar-Teel I've used a lot, surprisingly.

An all-female party isn't out of the question, though.

[Sjofn]

Ahahah I still remember that. I'm kinda sad they gave him the offscreen death treatment in BG2. What the fuck Bioware. I know he's a shitty fighter, but I want him along.

I seriously refused to play BG2 at all because of this. I never would've finished it anyway (I never finished the first one, after all), but I spurned the shit out of that game for killing Khalid. I was even more irritated when I heard you could mack on his wife. HAVE SOME RESPECT FOR THE COWARDLY DEAD, PEOPLE.

[koro]

For what it's worth, the Jaheira romance in BG2 is handled fairly decently for what it is. Unless I'm seriously misremembering it, you're actually at each other's throats for the first part of it and it shifts into a grudging respect and then something deeper. So you're not simply throwing yourselves at each other like in the Aerie romance or... well... every other Bioware romance since then.

Come to think of it, the Viconia romance is similar in its not-throwing-yourselves-at-each-other-ness, which may explain why people tend to prefer Jaheira and Viconia, and nobody likes Aerie.

[Lucas]

Coming to the iPad ! (along with screenshots showing a mysterious figure playing the game on that platform :P)

http://www.baldursgate.com/news/2012/03/21/baldurs-gate-enhanced-edition-for-ipad-3/

[koro]

In other news, I'm not sure who on the Item Revisions team made the monumentally silly decision to put this little baby on Bassilus - the evil cleric in BG1 that a level 2 party can kill with relative ease - even with SCS installed:



...but I feel like my Fighter with 3 stars in Warhammer ought to be thanking him for providing me with the best Warhammer in BG1 after about an hour of play.

[Sheepherder]

The fuck?  Did they not read the item description?

All of the romances in BG2 piss me off.  "Sorry bitch, I know you want to jump me, but I'm a little busy being the god of murder here.  Could it wait until after I'm finished cleaving skulls?"  Oh, and they're all elves.  And one of them would have some explaining to do were she carded.

[Quinton]

I never played BG back in the day.  This thread resulted in me buying a copy from gog.com and I'm enjoying it in all it's unforgiving AD&D 2nd Ed Rules splendor.

[koro]

The fuck?  Did they not read the item description?

Was the Rift Hammer in PnP? I've only seen it in NWN2, where it functions kind of similarly, though I haven't read its description there.

The hammer is hilarious in the Nashkel mines with Kobold spawns cranked up, though. Two dozen kobolds all swarming Charname, failing to dent his -3 AC, and then the hammer procs and the game chugs while it processes the damage calcs, death animations, and xp rewards for fifteen kobolds suddenly exploding.

Edit: And switching Xan to a Fighter/Mage in order to get more than some slight novelty use out of him has been, ironically within character for him, a dismal failure. His Moonblade (which I did not realize was actually a +3 weapon; I switched him to F/M assuming it was only +1) requires 16 CHA from him to equip, which means I can't in good conscience keep his CHA at 16 to equip the sword while also boosting his CON using the points I would've otherwise taken from CHA. Even with 10 CON (his base is 7) and level 2 in both Mage and Fighter, he only has a grand total of 11 HP - completely unworkable in pretty much any combat situation, as SCS' archer AI will ensure that he gets targeted first out of anyone.

[cironian]

It's even more OP when you consider that most sources of AoE damage are balanced by hitting friend and foe alike, so that you have to be careful.

This thing might have a place near the end of BG2 when you are crazy powerful anyway, but putting it at the beginning of BG1?

[koro]

It's actually in BG2 as well, deep under the city where you do the Unseeing Eye quest, its item listing replacing a stock +2 Warhammer.

To be fair, the guy you get it from, Bassilus, is supposed to be a huge challenge for a BG1 party with SCS installed (which Item Revisions is balanced around): he's a level 10 Cleric who even comes with two Flamestrikes, three casts of Hold Person, two casts of Animate Dead, and a cast of Draw Upon Holy Might memorized, among a few others. Even with SCS installed, pre-buffing enabled, and even fucking up the dialogue to kill off most of his skeletal allies, he still went down like a ton of bricks with my party almost entirely at level 2 (Imoen had dinged 3 from the Hobgoblin group just before), never getting off more than a single Sancutary spell when he got down to 1/3 HP that he promptly lost when he started to cast Dominate on my Berserker PC, who was raged and thus immune anyway.

In all honesty he should've wrecked my shit, but I guess I got lucky. He did manage to nearly kill Charname and did manage to take out Eldoth with the hammer proc, but that was less "level 10 Cleric stuff" and more "being hit by a +2 warhammer with a 4d4 AoE damage proc when you have 16 health".