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This may be of only limited usefulness, but if you're struggling with party/character ideas in IWD2, take a look at the pre-generated parties. Each party was designed by a different IWD2 designer and for it to be included, the designer had to play through the entire game with that party. Some parties are more difficult/unusual than others (my party, The Hands of Fury, has a few weirdos in it), but they were all viable.
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Dec 19, 2013 00:32
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kingcom posted:Who was responsible for the 'use the thief with improved evasion as fireball bait' tip because that has gotten me through most of the tough fights in the game so far. Additionally my fighter now grabbed that feat so I drop a haste + protection from fire and have him charge blindly past everything to the spell caster followed by fireballs (please include such shenanigans in PoE).
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Dec 19, 2013 00:57
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SheepNameKiller posted:5 minutes of googling seems to suggest this is bullshit, here's some text from wikipedia: quote:It is popularly believed that maces were employed by the clergy in warfare to avoid shedding blood [2] (sine effusione sanguinis). The evidence for this is sparse and appears to derive almost entirely from the depiction of Bishop Odo of Bayeux wielding a club-like mace at the Battle of Hastings in the Bayeux Tapestry, the idea being that he did so to avoid either shedding blood or bearing the arms of war. The fact that his brother Duke William carries a similar item suggests that, in this context, the mace may have been simply a symbol of authority.
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Dec 23, 2013 18:13
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Sleep of Bronze posted:2e designers had some problems but they recognised how broken Haste could be in the wrong hands much more successfully than the 3e ones did.
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Dec 23, 2013 18:16
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GuyDudeBroMan posted:You are playing the game wrong basically. High level D&D is utterly dominated by spell casters. It's always been that way.
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Dec 25, 2013 07:29
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Zombies' Downfall posted:And that's just going off core content, before you get into the absurdity that is 3E's 10,000 additional spells and 400 additional classes. I think 3E is a much more consistent and clear system than 2nd Ed., but its content errs on the side of accelerating power gain too quickly. Both 2nd and 3E have a ton of non-core content to pick from. Overall, the 2nd Ed. extended material is not as game-busting, though the lack of clear stacking rules can lead to ludicrous combinations.
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Dec 25, 2013 19:10
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Captain Oblivious posted:Jan and Grobnar are two of the most unfunny garbage characters in CRPGs.
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Dec 29, 2013 01:17
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Captain Oblivious posted:Don't be silly Ropekid, Maralie is a disembodied voice not a gnome. http://youtu.be/CCNmq6dJZeg?t=8m6s
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Dec 29, 2013 02:12
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Tezzeract posted:My favorite part of Icewind Dale 2 was the preconstructed group the Stormlords. It felt like I was starting a metal band. Then I started the game and got confused. RIP Stormlords.
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Nov 6, 2014 19:08
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Sleep of Bronze posted:The PHB guide is very careful about this, noting the current world record for the lift and putting only 18/00 of all the 'human' strength scores over it to let you just be that little bit more exceptional. Obviously, they weren't the best at predicting the athletic curve after the 80's though.
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Nov 21, 2014 22:46
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DeathChicken posted:I don't suppose there's a way to stuff a playable Kobold into that game is there? He'd be pretty useless, but I want to recreate Neves' crew from Castle Arcania and dammit, they need their 6 HP wonder.
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Nov 29, 2014 06:18
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Zeniel posted:Icewind Dale on the other hand I'm having a blast revisiting. I do have one question though, why was Brother Poquelin trying to build a giant iron boat to sail on lava? Apart from the obvious reason that that would be awesome.
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Dec 20, 2014 02:33
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I don't remember any of the details of our 3D support on IWD2 except that there were problems with it. Sorry.kujeger posted:Just finished IWD2, and it seems the ending has a slight cliffhanger, or at least a pretty open ending. Was there ever any expansion/sequel being talked about?
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Jan 9, 2015 01:14
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It was about in the middle of production when it was canceled. We had a pretty good number of areas implemented, a ton more to go. Our area pipelines were very slow and fragile and were the first things we improved when we transitioned to Van Buren/Fallout 3.
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Jan 9, 2015 02:10
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Ginette Reno posted:Dragons Eye is probably the hardest part of the entire game. If you can tough it out past that, you'll start to hit the levels and gear where the rest of the game shouldn't be too bad. Dragon's Eye was the first area I ever designed in my career and I was fresh out of a college campaign where every combat was a no holds barred fight to the death. The players had to have myriad prebuffs, contingency plans, and safeguards + well-stocked potions, scrolls, etc. just to stay alive. It wasn't until QA started to report massive differences in their playthrough experiences that I realized not everyone was up for it.
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Sep 5, 2016 17:23
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Woolie Wool posted:"-bellum?" That's an American history term. I love Cicero's De Historia Americae.
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Sep 5, 2016 17:39
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Max Wilco posted:There's an article on RPS talking about Story Mode (less in regard to BG2, but moreso applying the idea to other games), which I think is worth a read. It does not expect that at all and unless you go out of your way to make extra party members at an inn, you won't have a full party until you're already 1/3 of the way through the game. Cool misrepresentation.
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Sep 7, 2016 18:34
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Lt. Danger posted:I don't think they literally meant "immediately". E: The reason I'm annoyed by it is because a sentence later he decries what a terrible design decision it was to allow that in 2015. We didn't have time to implement party AI at launch, nor did we have time to do an in-depth tutorial. We placed companions in certain locations specifically to pace out how quickly the player would need to acclimate to controlling more characters with more abilities. Yes, BG, IWD, and PoE are all pretty hands-off with tutorials, but there is an enormous difference between jumping into BG/PoE and jumping into IWD/IWD2. rope kid fucked around with this message at 23:02 on Sep 8, 2016 |
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Sep 8, 2016 22:55
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Arivia posted:Nah, it made sense back in 1998. D&D had been slipping away from the kill things in a dungeon basis for a decade then. At the same time, Dragon magazine was running Ed Greenwood's Wyrms of the North series, which was the epitome of a design philosophy crafting dragons as individual characters with tons of plots and plans, never to be fought as encounters in a dungeon. A "dragon fight" wasn't really in the cards for D&D like that at that point.
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Sep 10, 2016 23:48
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Unless it was fixed in BG:EE, that sword actually had no special bonuses vs. shapeshiters. The code didn't support that type of bonus until IWD.
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Sep 13, 2016 02:21
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Dillbag posted:Firewine
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Oct 5, 2016 17:54
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Wizard Styles posted:1 Pixel Productions didn't work with IWD2 due to the engine having undergone a lot of weird changes compared to the other IE games for no apparent reason last time I checked.
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Oct 6, 2016 16:22
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WooOOoOoOOhOoooOooOo https://twitter.com/scottfeed/status/787323737771126785
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Oct 16, 2016 03:47
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Mr. Fortitude posted:Oh and Icewind Dale 2 Enhanced Edition I guess. Probably won't play nice though as if I remember right, the way 3e rules were implemented into the Infinity Engine were kind of hack-y so trying to update it might be a nightmare.
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Mar 29, 2017 04:32
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Kirk posted:Wanna come work on it? 
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Mar 29, 2017 06:58
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docbeard posted:Solo Beastmaster?
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Sep 17, 2017 19:10
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ProfessorCirno posted:Drow by the rules can't even be rangers.  Your soul is forfeit.
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Nov 2, 2017 06:49
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In the olden tymes TSR couldn’t stop making new elf subraces. If you include ones introduced in Dragon Magazine I don’t even know how many there were in total.
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Nov 2, 2017 07:38
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BTW, the rules never stood in the way of Bob Salvatore speccing Drizzt out however he wanted to. There's a very early 2nd Ed. supplement called Hall of Heroes that lists him as a 10th level ranger who can sneak and climb like a 10th level thief and does double damage + instant death % to an enemy if he rolls 5+ higher than he needs to hit. In a later 2nd Ed. supplement, he's listed as a dual-classed (??) fighter/ranger with a bunch of other goodies + insane thief abilities (including 5x Backstab). By the time the FRCS hardcover rolls around, he's a Ftr 10/Bbn 1/ Rgr 5 and technically legal, which in 3.X means nothing.
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Nov 2, 2017 17:24
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Cythereal posted:IIRC, what would become wood/wild elves - elves who live apart from civilization in general and build their own communities in harmony with nature far away from cities. The UA elves include dark, gray, high, valley, wild, and wood.
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Nov 2, 2017 17:29
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There is an enormous, astonishingly high volume of fan fiction that involves players/fans extending and filling in the blanks about their characters, their backgrounds, and their motivations. In this and other threads, there is a persistent tone-deafness to the enjoyment that those players take in imagining/developing what occupies the spaces between the text. I'll suggest that players who enjoy blank slate protagonists aren't so intensely dumb that they think the storytelling in those stories is as tight as it is in The Witcher 3 or The Last of Us. If you insist on a "legible tapestry" from a game like Fallout: New Vegas, something like a player giving you their saved game so you could data mine the choices and variables to reconstruct a coherent character, yes that's never going to happen. The motivations exist in the heads of the individual players, as do the individual stories/journeys that they took. However, you can find a lot of accounts where people talk about how their own minds changed re: faction alliances in F:NV. For some people, it was seeing enough examples of NCR bureaucracy and pettiness. For some people, it was Mr. House telling them to wipe out the Brotherhood of Steel. You can't construct a "legible tapestry" of that thought process through the written text and data because it exists in the mind of the player. In a novel, a play, a film, or even a game that cribs its style from films (TLoU), it's right there on the page/stage/screen. The writers construct an arc and through signs subtle and overt communicate how the character moves through that arc. If the people making the story communicate it well, most of the viewers/readers say, "Ah, I see how the dots all connect." However dumb we, the writers, may be, I'll also suggest that we are not so intensely dumb that we don't understand what tools from other storytelling media we sacrifice when we allow the player more and more choice in the stories and worlds we create. You don't need to "buy" character choice as the driver of a game's story. You can ignore the genre of blank slate protagonist game stories altogether. Taking a minor spectrum of games, with F:NV on one end, The Last of Us on the other, and The Witcher 3/PS:T in the middle, I think it's clear that there are different preferences/tolerances to how much choice in character definition players like. Side note: I've had Pillars of Eternity players ask me why they're allowed to pick a bunch of Cruel options and not be restricted from picking Benevolent options later, or vice-versa. Ultimately, that's your part of the story. If you don't think it makes sense for your Cruel character to suddenly be Benevolent, check this out: you don't have to pick that option. But people are complex and fickle and weird and maybe it does make sense. Maybe your character is Cruel but has a soft spot for children. Or maybe they hate racism and take pity on someone who's a victim of a race-driven assault when ordinarily they would grind them under their boot. Whatever story you like to tell yourself is good. That's the whole point.
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Dec 31, 2017 21:33
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Zane posted:i don't think that we've fully developed an aesthetic or a design vocabulary for this form--which builds this coequal participation into its bones--to stand confidently on its own however. This is also not fundamentally a new idea. It's been around conceptually since Borges wrote The Garden of Forking Paths (1941) and in basic practice since Cortázar wrote Hopscotch (1963). These writers originated the concept and early practice of "hypertext" in the western world.
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Dec 31, 2017 22:09
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mitochondritom posted:They have more songs than in BG and also many bard unique instruments to be found. Someone working on Icewind Dale really loved bards. Arivia posted:I made an archer-type fighter in original IWD and it still destroyed the balance. Bows good.
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Jan 17, 2018 15:36
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If it makes you feel any better, none of us were happy with how that turned out. The designer had much better/more interesting ideas for the maze, but technical problems prevented them from being realized.
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Jan 23, 2018 22:59
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Zane posted:When you think about it many of the primary characters of KOTOR II are beset with insoluble ethical dilemmas. Which is a core structure of tragedy as it has been generically theorized I believe. More than a semantic detail, Orestes isn't really cursed; Apollo orders him to avenge his father's death by killing the murderer, his mother, Clytemnestra. Matricide is punished by the Furies and they pursue him until Athena convenes a trial and casts the absolving vote. The Oresteia is Aeschylus' commentary on the perils of retribution and the need for civic justice.
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Feb 11, 2018 23:05
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Plain Bagels posted:Have you considered that the house of Atreus was cursed/doomed from the beginning by Tantalus? And that Orestes' catharsis (which comes from the Greek word for ritual purification necessary to absolve one of committed crimes) breaks his family's curse?
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Feb 12, 2018 17:11
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Sigmund Fraud posted:Why don't people like IWD2? I personally love the art, all the exploring you can do and how there are a multitude of solutions and interactions depending on what kind of characters you have. The combat feels much more challenging and engaging to the 2:ed ruleset. You must want a combat heavy game though, but IMO it's the best game for a multiplayer session as all participants can contribute. Shame it was rushed out the doors and some areas are underdeveloped. rope kid fucked around with this message at 23:11 on Apr 27, 2020 |
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Apr 27, 2020 22:37
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Galewolf posted:IWD 2... feels like a rushed cashgrab if anything.
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Apr 29, 2020 06:29
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Zulily Zoetrope posted:How?? Torn had a lot of difficulties but was still in pre-production/vertical slice (again IIRC, this was almost 20 years ago). But Interplay needed money ASAP, so they canceled Torn and suspended The Black Hound in order to work on IWD2. Feargus, Parker, and Darren Monahan took me and Steve Bokkes into (again IIRC) Parker's office and Feargus said (though he remembers differently) hey we need to make IWD2. We need you and Steve to write the story and basic area overviews in the next two days and we need the game done in four months. I was like cool, never going to happen. Steve and I worked on that story together, he left shortly after and I became the lead designer on IWD2. Unsurprisingly, four months became nine and eventually ten. But anyway, just because it was a crash grab by Interplay doesn't mean that we didn't try our best to make it good and cool. It's just hard to do when you're under the gun like that. Then again, that sort of experience was the norm for me for the first 10 years I was in the industry.
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Apr 29, 2020 22:43
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Max Wilco posted:
It didn't have anything to do with Baldur's Gate and it was never intended to have any association with that series. BG3 was what Interplay wanted to bolt onto it for licensing purposes.
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May 1, 2020 01:53
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