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Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition Twitter Commentary, Part 8
By Dwip January 18, 2013, 6:03 pm Comments (2) RSS Feed for this post

This is part 8 of my expanded Twitter commentary on Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition. You can find the master list of all parts here.

If you’re just tuning in, there are spoilers below the fold. Go play the game, then come back here.

In my gaming group, being level 5 used to be synonymous with pulling a frontal assault on the enemy base…and surviving, sometimes better than others (and I’m sure the story of the escape from the orc keep is floating around the blog somewhere).

What I’m trying to say here is that I completely steamrolled right over the bandit camp. Wasn’t even a challenge, even Tazok’s tent.

What WAS annoying was Safana’s complete inability to pick any locks on the numerous chests. It got to the point where I had to run away and go do some other combat to level Imoen back up so that SHE could do it.

I made a decision about this time, as you will soon see.

I think this speaks for itself. Beregost needs more darts.

So, here we have a ring that makes Branwen look like a zombie and doesn’t really have any obvious downsides. I mean, why would you NOT like this sort of thing?

Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

Fun fact: I’m a compulsive quicksaver, born of the good old days of flakey power, save corruption, and bad playing skills. I quicksave after fights, talking to people, moving 5 steps, everything. And so not being able to indulge my addiction while waiting on webs is annoying.

More to the point, you probably wouldn’t lose anything if web traps lasted about half as long as they actually do. Invariably, your guys who didn’t get webbed kill all the spiders, and then you get up and get something to drink while waiting for the web trap to go away so you can continue exploring.

And there are a LOT of these things in Cloakwood. It gets sort of old after a while.

It amuses me to no end to wander through druid areas killing all the nice peaceful bears. Unlike days of yore, I don’t really need the xp at this point, I just like breaking game logic.

What makes it even better is that almost all of the druids you meet in the game are complete and total dicks, so getting to laugh at them is a nice bonus.

The Infinity Engine games actually have a really nice set of party formations that you can enter on the fly, and I’ve always been sort of sad that I normally don’t find them all that useful as opposed to properly ranking your party members top to bottom (main character, fighters, clerics, rogues, mages). The one I do use a lot is the one that looks like a snake made of arrows that makes everyone follow the leader. Without it, getting through narrow tunnel dungeons is exceptionally annoying as your guys split off in 6 different directions.

I’m pretty sure I’m not alone here – that spiders and webs thing is excruciating. But what’s funny is that’s really only the second map. The first map is mainly Aldeth Sashenstar and Coran, the third map is filled with druids, the fourth map is mostly just wyverns and bears, and the fifth map is the mines. So there’s an awful lot of interesting stuff going on in the Cloakwood, including a lot of roleplaying opportunities.

It’s just that that whole web trap thing is a slog.

There’s a guy upstairs in the Cloakwood mines barracks who says this, using the bandit voice set when he comes over to talk to you, then does a lot of pleading with you to let him live. Despite the unintentional humor, I’ve never been favorably disposed towards the guy.

This whole 20 minute stretch or so was just full of completely unintentional humor.

And wild surges. This one was particularly amusing, and saved my mood after particularly lengthy stretch of boring hobgoblin slaughter on level 4.

I was sort of expecting a lot of trouble with Davaeorn, since he kills me a lot in almost every game, but he lightning bolted himself while trying to kill Kagain and his 70% electrical resistance.

Obliging of him.

Pretty much every time I come out of the Cloakwood mines I end up performing loot triage. All those spare arrows and bullets? Dump those right over the side. Stripping people of armor to juggle weight limits? All the time. If there’s some encumberance trick to be done, I have probably done it at this point.

I can’t find this anywhere on the internet, but the movie you get when you first enter Baldur’s Gate looks pretty strange. Towers go one way, houses another, the walls maybe a third. I believe I’ve already expressed my moderate unhappiness with the various new videos. I understand why they exist, but I’m not thrilled by it.

Not to get into it too much, but the whole process of using Shadowkeeper to add more darts is pretty onerous given Shadowkeeper’s limitations. Also, Shadowkeeper had a notoriously clunky interface even by the standards of Y2k.

By any sort of modern standards, the city of Baldur’s Gate is lavishly expansive, a full 9 (oops) maps, with I’m not even sure how many inns, side quests, people to talk to, stores, and what have you. I don’t think even Athkatla in BG2 is this big, though they both capture the feel of a large city very well. I don’t think anything since even comes close. Maybe Vivec or Mournhold, and maybe the Citadel in Mass Effect. Even then I’m unconvinced. I hate to keep harping on this whole “modern games suck” message, but you look at this stuff and it really is staggering.

You’re going to be busy for a few hours, is all I’m saying here.

So there are two ways to do the Aldeth Sashenstar quest that begins in the Cloakwood. I usually side with the druids because Jahiera is in my party, but this time I randomly chose to go with Aldeth. Later on he gives you a sort of mini-Seven Suns doppleganger quest that was sort of cool, and from then on is basically your BFF, which was kind of neat. If I had the patience for Infinity Engine modding, I would think this would be a good springboard for a companion mod.

After you spend a couple hundred hours healing your guys, you begin to develop a sort of Stockholm Syndrome with the casting noises. This one especially.

What is this I don’t even

Computer Games - Baldur's Gate Series, Gamecraft Comments (2) Trackback URL for this post RSS Feed for this post
Comments on Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition Twitter Commentary, Part 8
avatar Comment by Samson #1
January 18, 2013 at 9:48 pm

Is that a house full of hostile chickens?!? :P

avatar Comment by Dwip #2
January 18, 2013 at 9:56 pm

Indeed.

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