Baldur's Gate is still awesome.

[Margalis]

A fitness model, American Pie actress and 7 of 9...ok.

I guess I can't make fun because I know who all three are without having to look them up.

[Broughden]

So did anyone play ToEE (Temple of Elemental Evil), which was bugged all to hell on release?
If so how does BG/BG2 compare?

[Tebonas]

Favourably

[Ironwood]

I still say the Engine on ToEE was the fucking business.

It's the ONLY proper port of D&D that I've really seen.

That said, they chose the wrong module to code and the bugs were quite literally on par with KOTOR 2.  As in a totally fucking unfinished game.

[Broughden]

I still say the Engine on ToEE was the fucking business.

It's the ONLY proper port of D&D that I've really seen.

That said, they chose the wrong module to code and the bugs were quite literally on par with KOTOR 2.  As in a totally fucking unfinished game.

Oh it was horrible. Depending on what class you chose to start with the game would crash out in the first 5-20 mins.

[Tebonas]

The bugs were too abundant, the story was kind of meh, it was too short and streamlined (no great incentive to explore). Only the battles were better.

I don't know about it being the only proper port. I still have a soft spot for the gold box titles.

[Ironwood]

Any system that can handle tumbling, dual weilding, attacks of opportunity and all the rest of that old/cool shit (delete as appropriate) gets the thumbs up in my book.

The combat engine was the total biz.  Further, having mages able to actually scribe scrolls from the outset meant that it was no longer 1 magic missile and that's you through with fighting unless you brought your crossbow.

Coup De Grace after a failed throw against sleep ?  I'm loving it.

[WindupAtheist]

So did anyone play ToEE (Temple of Elemental Evil), which was bugged all to hell on release?
If so how does BG/BG2 compare?

Dunno about BG2, but I've never been able to crash BG1 on my system.  Not even when I was running around with an uber-hacked character, teleporting into places three chapters early and insta-killing major characters.

EDIT:  ToEE may have all that fancy stuff, but BG has giblets!  I don't know how hitting someone really hard with a sword makes them detonate in a shower of bloody chunks, but it's pure awesome.

[Ironwood]

Hey, please don't mistake anything I say as anything other than PURE 100% UNCUT LOVE for the Baldurs Gate series.  Hell, I'll even shower Icewind Dale with liberal amounts of Jizz.  Though Icewind Dale 2 was, in fact, the exact same game and I've no idea how they got away with that one...

[Tebonas]

Easy, its an honored tradition. There are many RPG series where the sequel is just the same game with a different story. Hell, I don't think SSI ever changed their engine all the way from Pool of Radiance to Treasures of the Savage Frontier.

[Ironwood]

Well, yeah, I get that.  But IWD2 was THE EXACT SAME.  Even down to the dungeons, monsters, bosses and whatnot.  It was like '20 years have passed but mysteriously a band of adventurers find themselves doing the exact same shit as last time, except with Sorcerors.............scroll screen'.

Um.

[Jimbo]

I had installed the Circle of Eight mods to fix all the crashses on ToEE.  It is great, plus they had editors if you wanted to buy low level stuff and equip your party.

Linkage:  http://www.ataricommunity.com/forums/showthread.php?t=501212

[WindupAtheist]

So in IWD, the party is all player-made characters, right?  Do they talk at all, BG-style, or are they like Dungeon Siege's personality-free battledrones?

[Rasix]

So in IWD, the party is all player-made characters, right?  Do they talk at all, BG-style, or are they like Dungeon Siege's personality-free battledrones?

Battledrones.  But the game is pretty much just a straight battle-to-battle, story-lite dungeon romp.

[WindupAtheist]

If I get the urge to play a dungeon-crawling killfest, is there a compelling reason I should bargain-bin IWD and not just throw in Diablo 2?  Curious.

Anyway...

For some reason I never got into it.  Probably because I kept getting my party wiped out by that first asshole with the magic missiles.  Not fun.  I am sure it was my fault somehow, since everyone else loved this game.  I think it is actually installed on my machine, waiting for the day when I suddenly realize what my error was.

If you mean that first asshole waiting to kill you at the steps of the Friendly Arm, yeah, he's a bitch.  One nice thing about playing an evil party was that I already had six well-armed characters by the time I got there, and that guy died in a hurry.  If it's just you and Imoen, though, it can be tough.

What you do is have one of your characters stand down in the courtyard where a bunch of guards are walking around.  Then you send the other up to the steps, and as soon as you hear the "Hi friend!" that tells you he's going to approach, you have them run back down to where the first character is.  Once he walks over, completes his dialogue, and attacks, have Imoen hit him with her magic missile wand to burn through his mirror images and/or disrupt his spells, while any guards in the area also aggro on the guy and pelt him with arrows.  Quick-save is your friend.

You'll be ambushed by assassins repeatedly throughout the game, but once you have a few well-armed party members, most of them are pretty easy and have nice loot.

[Rasix]

If I get the urge to play a dungeon-crawling killfest, is there a compelling reason I should bargain-bin IWD and not just throw in Diablo 2?  Curious.

More tactical oriented battles? A six character hand-crafted team of eventual badasses?  Love of hasted, dual wielding warriors tearing through a group of lizard men?

The combat experience presented by both games is rather different.  Sometimes you just want epic BG/BG2 quality battles (there's some really cool fights in IWD/IWD2) and none of that bothersome plot (ok, there's some plot, but that's not what you play the game for).

[Polysorbate80]

One nice thing about playing an evil party was that I already had six well-armed characters by the time I got there, and that guy died in a hurry.  If it's just you and Imoen, though, it can be tough.

I play most of these style of games "backwards".  That is, I start with a full custom party, or I perhaps leave a slot open to temporarily pick up characters if they're required for the plotline.  None of this wandering around finding the people I need.  I save that for a second run-through to get the flavor.

[Ironwood]

If I get the urge to play a dungeon-crawling killfest, is there a compelling reason I should bargain-bin IWD and not just throw in Diablo 2?  Curious.

More tactical oriented battles? A six character hand-crafted team of eventual badasses?  Love of hasted, dual wielding warriors tearing through a group of lizard men?

The combat experience presented by both games is rather different.  Sometimes you just want epic BG/BG2 quality battles (there's some really cool fights in IWD/IWD2) and none of that bothersome plot (ok, there's some plot, but that's not what you play the game for).

And weapons.  Some nice equipment in that game, some of which was totally random drops.

[WindupAtheist]

The D&D combat system annoys the shit outta me, particularly at lower levels.  Too much "enemy misses five times in a row, ruins your shit on the sixth" and "save vs pwnage failed, instant death" bumfuckery.

[Strazos]

If I get the urge to play a dungeon-crawling killfest, is there a compelling reason I should bargain-bin IWD and not just throw in Diablo 2?  Curious.

More tactical oriented battles? A six character hand-crafted team of eventual badasses?  Love of hasted, dual wielding warriors tearing through a group of lizard men?

The combat experience presented by both games is rather different.  Sometimes you just want epic BG/BG2 quality battles (there's some really cool fights in IWD/IWD2) and none of that bothersome plot (ok, there's some plot, but that's not what you play the game for).

QFT

Though some of the really high-end mage battles in BG/BG2, particularly with the Throne of Bhaal , were really irksome. You had to chew through a LOT of spell defenses. If you didn't have the right spells at your disposal at that moment, you were screwed.

[Merusk]

Spells? What're those? 

Bhaalspawn-SMASH

[WayAbvPar]

The D&D combat system annoys the shit outta me, particularly at lower levels.  Too much "enemy misses five times in a row, ruins your shit on the sixth" and "save vs pwnage failed, instant death" bumfuckery.

Fair enough. But if you are basing your game on D&D, shouldn't you be as faithful as you can to the source material? If you don't like D&D, playing a D&D game and not liking seems like a self-fulfilling prophesy.

[WindupAtheist]

I generally like D&D games, at least the ones I've played.  I just don't like the fact that the primary goal in the original design of the combat system was keeping it simple enough to be operated by one guy behind a cardboard screen with a handful of dice.  Go ahead and give me the "source material" in terms of characters, settings, and story.  But THAC0 and all that crap?  That isn't "source material" that's mechanics, feel free to rip it out and replace it with something better now that it's being run by my PC and not Larry the DM.

[WayAbvPar]

Then it just becomes "Generic Fantasy Game X" with some proprietary settings. The entire game is based around the combat system; the rest of it is just filler.

[WindupAtheist]

I don't know about anyone else, but I enjoy BG for the story, the characters, the interactions, and the branching conversations.  Maybe you just really like seeing musty 1970's tabletop game mechanics played out with 1990's sprites, I dunno.

[stray]

Agreed. I kind of touched on this in the NWN2 thread.

[Strazos]

Using the D&D battle system is easier than making up something new to govern how things work in your game world.

There, I said it.

[shiznitz]

There is something beaetiful about a game built around a 5% increment. Imagine if EQ-type games had spectacular failures/crits 10% of the time? People would hate it and love it.

[Fabricated]

I keep checking back in this thread in the vain hope of someone finding some magical patch to make BG2 work on my PC again.

[Yegolev]

I check back hoping for a derail.

[Strazos]

I keep checking back in this thread in the vain hope of someone finding some magical patch to make BG2 work on my PC again.

I don't understand why it Doesn't work.

[WindupAtheist]

Does it work for others of you on XP?

[Strazos]

BG1 does. The main menu had some messy graphics, but the actual game worked fine.

[WindupAtheist]

BG1 works flawlessly on my XP system, it's 2 I'm curious about, because I want it bad.

[Fabricated]

For me the game crashes whenever I equip a two-handed weapon for some reason. The crash fixes thread on Bioware's forums says to disable 3d Accelleration and run the game a the same resolution your desktop is set to. I've done both of those things, it doesn't help.

I've tried running the game in 95, 98, and Win2k compatibility modes as well. No dice.