BG.EE LEVEL CAP

ZERSTORER

Hello i'm new to this site and since i'm enjoying playing Baldur's Gate Enhanced Edition, I visited here for help cause i'm upset about a certain problem. My characters are stuck on 161,000 exp and can't get farer than that. Is there a patch or fix I can get to fix this problem? THANKS.

Jalily

The XP cap is intentional, so there is no "fix." There is, however, a mod: http://forum.baldursgate.com/discussion/10212/a-simple-xp-cap-remover

Quartz

Notice how the game is piss-easy for you now? Yeah, that's because you're at an intended cap. Dunno why you'd want to go higher, lol.

ZERSTORER

Why won't I ???? The game isn't finished, so

Malicron

ZERSTORER said:

Why won't I ???? The game isn't finished, so

So WHAT?! Come on, man, the suspense is killing me! :P

Seriously, though, unless you want a rather jarring incongruity between BG1 and 2, large parts of the premiss of the plot of SoA won't make sense with a lvl 30 something CHARNAME. Just an FYI.

elminster

Malicron said:

ZERSTORER said:

Why won't I ???? The game isn't finished, so

So WHAT?! Come on, man, the suspense is killing me! :P

Seriously, though, unless you want a rather jarring incongruity between BG1 and 2, large parts of the premiss of the plot of SoA won't make sense with a lvl 30 something CHARNAME. Just an FYI.

Can you imagine if the expectation for SoA was level 30? +5 weapons for everyone!

But yea generally I view the cap to be silly at this point. Sure some people are going to solo the game and have a million experience +, but others just want to have an extremely slight head start going into SoA.

ZERSTORER

But no Shadows of Amn EE yet eh????

elminster

Nope.

Awong124

With a party of 6 for most of the game, you'd reach about 250k XP for each character without a cap, if you do everything. For most classes that's maybe 1 extra level. For some classes like Ranger or Paladin, that's not even an extra level.

EntropyXII

Ahhh I remember those days.... -looks up to the sky holding his chin- 14 years ago...

My first/second time playing BG and then..."what..? What is this...? What is a 'cap'... noo no no no."

My discovery of Dalekeeper: "Bwahahahahaha yes! YES! I am level 30, I have 25 in every statistic.. I.AM.A.GOD. Where is that bloody dark elf?!?!"

24 hours later....

"Right... bored now... Resident Evil 2 again."


Trust me @ZERSTORER, you don't want to go down that route. Removing level caps and so on might seem like a good idea, but it is the first step on a downward spiral. It *will* probably ruin the game for you.

ajwz

Nothing wrong with removing the xp cap.
Play the game however you most enjoy it.

EntropyXII

@ajwz - I agree. I just thought I'd share my own experience of doing so. In theory it is a good idea. In practice, everything becomes way too easy/boring.

It was a long time ago, but I genuinely remember becoming incredibly bored. That, and a bad experience with an early mod ( @CamDawg recently told me it may have been DSotSC) nearly prevented me from ever touching BG again.

Actually, I don't think I even completed BG1 until BG2 came out. It threw me off the game that much.

-ashamed-

Thrasymachus

Simply removing the experience cap is not going to 'break' the game, assuming that you have a party with 4-6 characters. You might start BG2 one (or at most two) levels higher than you would with the cap. That's not going to make much of a difference in the long run.

One thing that I do like about removing the experience cap is that it makes playing through *all* the areas of the Sword Coast rewarding. With the cap on, once I get close to it (~150,000 exp.), I generally quit what I'm doing (e.g., exploring Durlang's Tower) and head off to confront Sarevok. Wandering around but not gaining *any* experience points generates a sense of futility (IME).

mlnevese

I've been playing with the cap removed since my second playthrough many years ago and I never felt that the extra level, at most, you get makes the game too easy. Really I feel no difference at all.

ZanathKariashi

I lowered the xp cap of BG2 to 161,000....you can still beat the game just fine...it's just a heck of a lot more challenging (It's also possible to solo at that level, with certain classes...but it's much less enjoyable then using a party).

the_spyder

Quartz said:

Notice how the game is piss-easy for you now? Yeah, that's because you're at an intended cap. Dunno why you'd want to go higher, lol.

Unless you are doing something like soloing the entire game, the extra experience you can get won't make material difference. 1 extra level (maybe 2) in most cases. At that point in your progression this doesn't mean 9th level spells or anything uber powerful, so it really doesn't make a huge difference.

it's not like they are using Werebears or anything.

rathlord

I've got a question for you nice people. I'm about to beat BG1 for the first time (played it when I was younger, but never finished) so I'm thinking about making a save to export into BG2EE when that comes. In the mean time, however, if I raised the xp cap could I unlock all of the new spells/everything that was introduced in BG2 since BGEE is in that engine now?

I was considering going into the game files with shadowkeeper and raising all of the monster's levels as well, that way I could continue to enjoy a challenge while also exploring the fun of higher level gameplay. I suppose I could just get BG2 from GOG, but I'd rather wait and give Beamdog my money if possible.

mlnevese

@rathlord You'd need the level 40 mod for that as it restores all BG2 content including High Level Abilities. Also you'd need to give yourself the higher level spells not present in game eithe by the console or using Shadowkeeper.

rathlord

@mlnevese Thanks for the reply. So where does the actual content cut off as far as gaining levels/spells in BG:EE normally?

Edit: 'Normally' not a good word maybe. I mean if I just turned off the XP cap, when would I stop progressing like a character would in BG2?

mlnevese

@rathlord some classes have abilities missing around level 15 up. You can read more about it and download the mod here: http://forum.baldursgate.com/discussion/10900/xp-mod-teambgs-level-40-rule-sethigh-level-abilities/p1

rathlord

Thanks again.

Quartz

@the_spyder

the_spyder said:

Quartz said:

Notice how the game is piss-easy for you now? Yeah, that's because you're at an intended cap. Dunno why you'd want to go higher, lol.

Unless you are doing something like soloing the entire game, the extra experience you can get won't make material difference. 1 extra level (maybe 2) in most cases. At that point in your progression this doesn't mean 9th level spells or anything uber powerful, so it really doesn't make a huge difference.

it's not like they are using Werebears or anything.

Honestly dude I feel like the game becomes piss-easy about the time you hit Level 6.

the_spyder

@Quarts - I am not disagreeing with you. I am only saying that the difference between 9th and 11th isn't significant. Even more so if you are as adept at the game as you are. For players like me, it is a challenge right to the very end. But again, if I could get to 250K instead of being capped at 161K, that wouldn't impact my gaming experience, nor would it make it any easier.

Fubby

I remove the XP cap and its fine. Not progressing is much less fun than having an easy game

Quartz

@the_spyder Oh God did you just call me Quarts? I'm a shiny rock not a unit of measurement.

On-topic yeah, I get your drift. I agree, I just think that people changing the hell out of the game to meet their own interests is a little ... I dunno, lame at a certain point. Little things here and there don't matter but after a while they add up, and eventually everyone is playing a completely different version of the game; then they go on here and try to give each other advice, only to find out that what they knew to be "absolutely correct" isn't because they have this or that mod that changes something without them even knowing about it.

Just a pet peeve really. People can play how they want and that's cool.

Malicron

@Quartz Don't worry, some of us still play vanilla.

rathlord

I usually play a game to death before I consider modding it. I played Minecraft straight from Alpha and didn't bother modding (beyond TooManyItems for creative) until about last year.

Edit: Re-reading that looked kind of off topic. Point being, modding can let you take a game you've played the dickens out of and make it fun again. And once you've enjoyed everything in BG if you're wanting to wait for BG2EE like I am, raising or erasing the level cap can give you access to some fun/new abilities that just add some extra variation/entertainment value.

Heindrich

On related note... Is BG 2 and ToB easier or harder than BG EE? I am getting close to xp cap for BG EE, but I don't have a min-maxed PC, so I'm not exactly crushing the game.

I'd remove the cap if BG 2 was harder than BG EE, to give my non-optimal PC a slightly easier start. Otherwise I'd probably just start BG 2 with 161k xp cos I don't want to make the game pointlessly easy. I know in BG EE the NPC levels are sometimes dependent on PC level, so having an extra level might unbalance the game if ur recruited NPCs are higher levels to match you too.

Mathmick

@Heindrich1988 - The first parts of BG2 are very easy. Even after that, an extra level or two doesn't really make a difference, since you have access to so much content at that point that (a) you'll find something that will suit your character level anyway and (b) you get experience so quickly that the maybe ~50k you'll get from removing the BG:EE cap will be irrelevant.

Even if you do enter the game at some stupidly high level (e.g. you import your 2.5mil xp character from ToB back to SoA), most encounters scale up the difficulty to some degree.

bbear

In BG2, the PC starts w/ 79k exp. I think that is a comfortable starting point. Also, you dont lose exp from the XP cap. The game remembers how much exp you have exceeded the cap.

atcDave

The biggest thing is just that the tactics are very different. In BG2 mage battles get very involved and interesting. Which also means ideal party mix is a little different (mages become more important). But an extra level or two for most characters isn't a huge issue. Towards the end, the differences of a few levels become very trivial.