Icewind Dale The Icewind Dale Series Thread

[abnaxus]

"Biromantic Asexual"

updated my Roguey.txt

 

[Infinitron]

Roguey You need to do this more often.

 

[Roguey]

"Biromantic Asexual"

updated my Roguey.txt

I just wanted a bunch of funny names (as shown here). BA, a hugslutty bard, was my spokesperson when I didn't want to use SJW. Lesi's bemoaned the lack of explicit asexuals in fiction so I created my own.

 

[Lonely Vazdru]

Not counting the expansion, when it comes to content it's slightly better than Dragon Age 2, and counting the expansion, Dragon Age: Origins actually has a much better filler:fun ratio (now that was surprising). Buncha background-art-whores and AD&D/Black Isle fanboys here.

Shouldn't the fact that games that came out ten years later working on more powerful machines barely match ID reflect bad on those rather than on ID ? And who doesn't like background art anyway ?

 

[Roguey]

Not counting the expansion, when it comes to content it's slightly better than Dragon Age 2, and counting the expansion, Dragon Age: Origins actually has a much better filler:fun ratio (now that was surprising). Buncha background-art-whores and AD&D/Black Isle fanboys here.

Shouldn't the fact that games that came out ten years later working on more powerful machines barely match ID reflect bad on those rather than on ID ? And who doesn't like background art anyway ?

DA2 was made in 11 months with almost all-brand-new underlying systems, IWD was made in 14 and mostly added to and improved on what Bioware had already implemented in BG.

I'm saying it made the #8 spot of best rpgs everhttp://www.rpgcodex.net/content.php?id=8869 because of its background art and system/company fanboyism.

 

[Infinitron]

DA2 was made in 11 months with almost all-brand-new underlying systems, IWD was made in 14 and mostly added to and improved on what Bioware had already implemented in BG.

DA2 budget and team size vs IWD budget and team size?

 

[Roguey]

DA2 budget and team size vs IWD budget and team size?

I don't remember who, but someone in the industry once described the game publisher attitude as trying to get nine women to have a baby in one month.

I also liked this post from Josh even though he's a couple of months off.

EA has created or renamed numerous studios branded as BioWare that either had or currently have virtually no company culture in common with the Edmonton studio. Even with the work Edmonton is doing, I think it's hard to say that EA's influence isn't changing the nature of what they put out. Dragon Age 2 was developed in about 9 months. That's a month less than Icewind Dale 2 -- and that was made at a point where Interplay was starting to grind Black Isle into the dust. You don't ask people to make sequels to large RPGs in that amount of time unless you're desperate -- or you really have no regard for their well-being or the quality of their work.

 

[Lonely Vazdru]

I'm saying it made the #8 spot of best rpgs ever because of its background art and system/company fanboyism.

I'm not too sure about the D&D fanboyism aspect, this is the Codex, not Big Bang Theory, but the beautiful background art sure plays a large (and well deserved IMO) place.

 

[DemonKing]

Not counting the expansion, when it comes to content it's slightly better than Dragon Age 2, and counting the expansion, Dragon Age: Origins actually has a much better filler:fun ratio (now that was surprising). Buncha background-art-whores and AD&D/Black Isle fanboys here.

The worst in IWD is nowhere near the worst in DA:O (Deep Roads I'm looking at you) in terms of boring, repetitve trash mobs and level design. Added to the fact that the combat in IWD is tactically much more fun and rewarding than in DA:O, I can't agree with you there.

Yes IWD rightly gets a lot of kudos for its background graphics and music but the actual gameplay wasn't half bad either.

It's definitely in my top 10 CRPGs.

 

[Roguey]

The worst in IWD is nowhere near the worst in DA:O (Deep Roads I'm looking at you) in terms of boring, repetitve trash mobs and level design.

I dunno, Kresselack's Tomb was pretty bad. And Gloomfrost is just an S-curve where you fight nothing but creeply-crawlies followed by nothing but ice golems.

Added to the fact that the combat in IWD is tactically much more fun and rewarding than in DA:O, I can't agree with you there.

Both systems have easy-outs that can make meaningful encounters have significantly less meaning, but DA:O has more set-piece battles than IWD. It's difficult to compare the quality of those but I didn't feel as though IWD's were significantly better.

 

[Roguey]

The next best party sets out on a new adventure. Social justice never sleeps.

 

[Surf Solar]

Seeing how you now spam every thread with this nonsense I may have to consider ignoring you. Shame, I thought you were a good poster, but this retardation gets the overhand

 

[laclongquan]

Dear god~

 

[Cosmic Misogynerd]

The next best party sets out on a new adventure. Social justice never sleeps.

You missed Dark Mistress or something like that.

 

[Roguey]

You missed Dark Mistress or something like that.

I considered it and decided to go with Josh instead to have a token man for dialogue check purposes. Plus giving any Wannika points in diplomacy just feels wrong.

 

[Azrael the cat]

DA2 budget and team size vs IWD budget and team size?

I don't remember who, but someone in the industry once described the game publisher attitude as trying to get nine women to have a baby in one month.

That sounds like the kind of line I might have ran with at about 16 while standing outside a IVF centre. They didn't think it was very funny either:-(

On topic - if you're enough of a massacrist to go on either for a 3rd run, or (more likely) IWD2, then please oh please let me choose one of the following as my pseudio-representative

(a) absurdly low stats that are poorly placed for the relevant class, import me in. (my old avatar was coaxmetal from PS:T but I refused to replace it in the vain hope that they'd bring the question mark back as the standard non-avatar - The Question was one of the few major comics I really liked as a kid (the issues when Moore made a point of him just being a journalist with absolutely no fighting powers, with the highlight being when he starts one issue reading a copy of Watchmen, tries to take on a bunch of thugs Rorsarch+Night Owl style, and after getting his ass kicked and asked 'any last words?' replies 'Yeah. Rorshach sucks.') Then call me Schopenhaer and engage in appropriately despairing and suicidal actions (read Schopenhauer on nihilism - you don't need to read a whole work on it - just take a 2 minute skim through the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy online and you'll get the idea.

(b) absurdly HIGH stats and roll me as late-era Nietzsche (he's in my sig) - obviously as a beserker or class with similar 'ubermensch' form.

(c) ultra high int and wisdom, low charisma, and the poor fortune to be known for dating a famous existentialist to the point that most people call your most famous work 'The Second Sex' an existentialist work, even though it explicitly states it's aim as being to debunk Sartre's theory of Existentialism for overlooking social construction as a means of oppression, and hence being too harsh on women and the socially marginalised when he calls anyone who denies having absolute freedom a coward - she spends her introduction easily summarising in 70 pages what he took about 1300 pages to say in Being and Nothingness, and then spends the rest of the book utterly skewering Sartre's work so brilliantly that you can only conclude that all the critics who viewed her as part of the Sartrean school of existentialism as not actually having bothered to read the work, and instead simply baing their views on the pair's on-again off-again lifetime relationship of non-monogomous coupling. Oh, and call her Simone de Beaviour.

(d) good-to-high stats and roll me as early-to-mid-era Nietszche (as in the whole 'The Enlightment Project and everything we know of as philosophy is doomed to collapse because it's just secular religion with the rug of 'real' religion pulled out from under it...but oh shit, a totally nihilistic Germany in, say, half a century's time might be a really bad thing, and I can't think of a way around it so we're all fucked - everyone charge suicidally because nihilism will screw us all anyway!!!

(e) roll a cleric (preferably high stats, not because I'm a munchkin, but because this guy was the fucking boss) and make him Kiekergaard. He even fits the idea of the adventuring cleric. Half-mad nihilist preacher who came up with near-identical theories to Nietszche at the same time in different parts of Europe (leading Kiekergaard to become as deeply religious as Nietzsche was deeply atheist), left his good job, wealthy inheritence and fiance all because he felt he had some calling to go off travelling and doing good.

(f) roll minimum stats for everything, but give him the entire party's gold and name the character Alain de Botton. I'm not sure what class you're supposed to count as when you're a European noble with massive inherited wealth and no job, who uses his own wealth to self-publish and publicise 'philosophy' books using ideas that other people said more intelligently 50 years ago, in books that are 90% sophistic shite. I'm all for folks without uni degrees contributing, and I fucking love the fact that the anonymous peer-review system means that sometimes an amateur star-gazer or home inventor actually DOES get published in a major science journal for discovering something significant, or that a random girl/guy at home periodically DOES get published in a major philosophy journal because she has talent and didn't need a uni education in order to have some ideas worth preserving in writing. But if you're a massively wealthy heir with nothing else to do, why NOT spend a few years learning the shit you're writing on - especially if you're then going to use your wealth and PR resources to get yourself gigs on breakfast talkshows everywhere as a 'famous philosopher'. Or at least, why NOT put your ideas up anonymously to peer review. Heck, most years there's non-university-educated folk who get published in a major journal, and there's still some non-university-educated guys around with seriously good publishing records who never made a career out of it. Surely you can match those guys Sir de Botton?

(g) Ultra high con, the rest doen't matter, just as long as she outlives all of her friends and becomes so miserable about it that she invents the post-apocalyptic genre in her final book 'The Last Man' (she had wanted to write a biography of her late husband, the famous poet Percy Shelley), but his family refused permission, so instead she wrote an increadibly bleak story of Europe being engaged in a war triggered by alliances upon alliances (basically the WW1 scenario, but in Victorian times), only to get reports of a far-away plague. The middle third has the plague decimiating the soldiers on both sides, effecively ending the war, but leaving the soldiers not knowing whether to stay and die, or try to get back home (where there's already some rumours that the quarantines have already been broken anyway - maybe false rumours at that; one great thing in the book is that you never do know for sure whether the quarantines would have held up if the soldiers hadn't returned, along with a long stream of other measures going wrong - some obvious ones in hindsight that are great in implementation (e.g. think of the mechanics of the water supply through Europe...)
The last 3rd is post-apocalyptic - a band of freezing survivors: the only thing that has worked against the disease is heading north to snow-covered environments. But that's caused another problem - food. It's either find a new land or die of starvation.

Each of the main characters were based on the various liiterary figures from Mary Shelley's bohemian circle of friends, and it's so fucking bleak because she was so depressed at having outlived these men that she was so deeply in love with, her husband in particular (e.g. there's a Lord Byron character who's basically the main character for the 1st third of the book, all full of idealism and the need to 'fight for what is right', whereas the main character for the latter half was essentially her biography-in-all-but-name of her husband Percy Shelley, capturing what she saw as his determination against the impending doom of death, and his remaining an inspiring writer and leader until there's nobody left to lead.

 

[crawlkill]

stuff!

Having been an impossible BG1/2 fan and never played IWD1, I was surprised when I picked up IWD2 and found it to be more of a tactical combat game (...in pre-4E D&D, where most characters had no combat options at all?) than an open-world dialogue-driven game. But at the same time...the writing that -was- there was still excellent. Really the highlight of the title. It was weird to see a game that clearly had the talent to be a BG2 selling itself short as a dungeon crawler. Sounds like IWD1 was the same way: great dialogue not given the central focus it should've had.

My opinion of Chris will forever be clouded by his being goddamn fucking hot though ugh can he just gain two hundred pounds or something so I can think about him clearly. The most negative thought I can have about him is that he's a little spergaciously intent when he's appearing on video, but...that's kind of a positive quality in someone who spends his whole life thinking about the systems we play with.

(also the quote about good game/bad system is not an excuse for not being good/good system is an argument I have about Mage: The Ascension constantly ugh it's like -yes- you -could- just expect players and storytellers to self-police but omg I BOUGHT YOUR GAME couldn't you have just made a system that works instead)

 

[Exar Kun]

What FPS do you guys set your infinity games to? 30 seems to be sluggish, so I set my IWD and PST to 40 which seems to be the sweet spot between sluggish and hyper speed.

Getting fallout to run smoothly on modern systems is so much less of a hassle then IE, at least on my PC.

 

[Roguey]

I play 'em all on 30 since that's what's intended.

 

[Sensuki]

so I set my IWD and PST to 40 which seems to be the sweet spot between sluggish and hyper speed.

Yeh I've pretty much always used 40 since I figured out you could change the FPS.

 

[Grunker]

30 is fine.

 

[Sensuki]

Well playing BG1 at 640x480 @ 160Hz (CRT monitor), 30FPS doesn't look that great, 40 is much better.

 

[octavius]

I don't recall being able to set the FPS of Icewind Dale?

 

[Exar Kun]

I don't recall being able to set the FPS of Icewind Dale?

You can in the config file.

 

[Exar Kun]

Should I be super conservative with gold or is there an abundance of it late game?