Does anyone <i><b>NOT</b></i> suffer from Restartisis?

Heindrich

Restartisis appears to be endemic on these forums. So much so that I am starting to wonder if it's a "cool disease" to have, and some people are deliberately contracting it to fit in. :P

I mean as far as diseases go, symptoms like "cannot stop starting new Baldur's Gate playthroughs" is not so bad... Though "being unable to finish a Baldur's Gate playthrough" is a pretty horrible consequence.

Anyway, does anyone here actually NOT suffer from the condition? Or am I the lone golem somehow immune to the effects of this affliction?

I am not saying that I have completed every playthrough I have attempted, but I've never given up for the reasons Restartisis sufferers normally state. (I have only given up where I've messed up my game somehow, and when I restarted, I did it with the exact same character.)

In fact because I am typically only interested in a very specific kind of character to fit a particular roleplaying theme, I have only played with 2 different Charnames so far, and it doesn't bother me at all. There are so many difference choices, NPCs and tactics that I could try that I don't feel the need to constantly change Charnames at all...

Don't burn me... XD

Tresset

I suffer from this a lot. I still have yet to finish a complete run of both games with one character in EE.

CrevsDaak

Well, I don't suffer it much, I tend to lose the saves, I don't restart because I want to try another class, I restart because I loose a save or something like that.

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Kamigoroshi

I don't!

Well... at least not until the next patch for BG2:EE comes out. My general practitioner warned me that a recrudescence of restartitis will be inevitable at that point.

MacHurto

I have to admit it is contagious. I have always finished every playthrough and now after all these threads, I am wondering to skip the end of the current one (still sendai and the dragon guy left) and start a new one. Anyway, I will see it through before my next berserk dualed (as soon as he wakes up at Chez Irenicus) to Mage. Not possible to dual to sorcerer :-(

TwoWayFinesse

The trouble is you're thinking 'wish I could have backstabbed that guy' or 'an inquisitors dispel magic would have squished that mage like the bug he is' or some such, or you want to see how some of the NPC's you've seldom/not used would fit in and react with some others.

So always thinking about different party compositions or Charname classes.
Either that or I must be bored at work anyway.

Having said all that, my current dual beserker / druid isn't doing badly at all. Apart from the 1.5 million XP wait I'm currently in to advance one level - I thought mages had it tough!

Kalesra

It depends. When it's been a long time since my last playthrough, or if I've just installed some new mod that adds a substantial amount of fresh content, or if I have a really cool concept that I'm excited about, I will usually manage a complete playthrough (though, usually just of BGII and/or ToB). But when I've just finished a playthrough, sometimes I feel this sense of deflation. I want to recapture the excitement of playing and it's just too soon, but I refuse to give up. So I roll like 5 or 6 characters which I play for a few hours each (minus the Irenicus dungeon--thank goodness for Dungeon Be Gone). Then I get sick of it and just leave well enough alone for a few months, by which time I'm refreshed enough to play again.

I have to say though...I have never played a game from beginning to end anywhere near as many times as this one. It's rare for me to play a game twice, and if I do there's usually a gap of at least a year in between. So despite my occasional fits of "restartitis" it's amazing how well a game I've been playing nonstop since I was a kid is still able to suck up hours of my time.

FinneousPJ

I don't suffer from this.

jackjack

I complete playthroughs, I just start several new ones in the meantime. I always have a primary Charname, plus a stable of alternates. When I fire up the game, I invariably know which one I feel like playing.
Edit:
My primary is Jack-Jack, a Jester, still in BG1, definitely going through the whole saga. 9/10 times he's who I play.
I have a BG1 alternate, Vonotar, my new Cleric/Illusionist, based on a villain from my favorite series of fantasy books. If I enjoy him enough, I'll take him into BG2.
Finally, I have a BG2 only alternate, Jerrol, a cheesy Halfing Fighter/Shadowdancer.

Wanderon

I don't suffer with it at all - it's an intentional playstyle for me - I enjoy it.

Iseleth

I only play Keep-to-Throne complete playthroughs. And only one character at a time. I never start a new game if I haven't reached the end of the previous one.

What is odd is that I restart a lot when playing other RPGs, but never this one. I just like developing and roleplaying the same character throughout the story.

Nonnahswriter

I've always had this problem; it's not just Baldur's Gate.

MMOs, Skyrim, any game that lets you create a custom character... I guess it's because I have so many character concepts in my head that I want to explore all of them! Maybe it's a curse for being a writer (and I usually add way too many characters in my written stories too... Gahhh, it's a disease!).

jackjack

That's definitely part it of for me - my whole life is about playing many different characters, sometimes several in the same night.

Heindrich

@Nonnahswriter

Hey I fancy myself a writer too :P Not published anything yet... but I'm young! Still got time... I created too many characters too, tried to tell the story from too many perspectives, which is typically a bad idea... except when George RR Martins broke every rule in the book and somehow created a masterpiece.

Anyway in gaming I'm totally different. I don't typically replay single player games too often (BG is an exception), and there's typically something very specific that drew me to a game. In Diablo 3 about 500 hrs of my 550 hrs were spent on Wizards, and about 450hrs spent on 1 single Wizard, with 50hrs on the perma-death hardcore mode Wizard. I only rolled other characters as trade mules.

Stargazer5781

This is common? Hmm. I've never had this problem.

Twani

I just have so many different CHARNAMES in mind, so many ideas for characters. Also, whenever a new romance mod that peaks my interest comes out for BG2, I just have to play it and create a character fit to romance that person (though I am so behind on that).

I'm a writer, too, in my way (though all I write for is boring magazines- wee I'm anon I can say thatttt), and I just have so many ideas for characters. I can't imagine playing the same character over and over. That would be boring to me. Even if my character is the same class, race, and alignment as the last, they'd still have to be different in personality in someway to keep me going.

But then I come up with another character idea, and I'm starting another new game.

Nonnahswriter

Heindrich said:

@Nonnahswriter

Hey I fancy myself a writer too :P Not published anything yet... but I'm young! Still got time... I created too many characters too, tried to tell the story from too many perspectives, which is typically a bad idea... except when George RR Martins broke every rule in the book and somehow created a masterpiece.

Pfft. Rules are made to be broken! >:D

(Unless, you know, you break them badly. >_>;; )

ChildofBhaal599

i only suffer from this if I put down a game for a while. if I stop playing and come back I then end up feeling like I want to make a new character to start fresh from the start rather than continuing

jackjack

Nonnahswriter said:

Heindrich said:

@Nonnahswriter

Hey I fancy myself a writer too :P Not published anything yet... but I'm young! Still got time... I created too many characters too, tried to tell the story from too many perspectives, which is typically a bad idea... except when George RR Martins broke every rule in the book and somehow created a masterpiece.

Pfft. Rules are made to be broken! >:D

(Unless, you know, you break them badly. >_>;; )

They say the best writers know all of the rules by heart, so that they know precisely how and when to break them.
The why, of course, is left up to the artist.

Quartz

@Stargazer5781

Stargazer5781 said:

This is common? Hmm. I've never had this problem.

http://forum.baldursgate.com/discussion/30289/possible-cures-for-restart-itis

Schneidend

I suffer from a very acute case of it now and again. But, my strain of the disease might be worse, given that it usually causes me to recreate the same characters and do things slightly differently.

iAmGoatBoy

I get it to a moderate degree. I've only done a full playthrough (I think) three times and for each of those completed games, I have maybe two or three that I've abandoned somewhere between Candlekeep and Cloakwood. Usually it's because I've decided I don't like the particular character build I'm playing or I've made a mess of their proficiencies. I don't do this to a silly extent though, and once I reach the city of Baldur's Gate I'm in it until at least the end of BG1, if not the full saga.

recklessheart

I play from BG1 all the way to TOB with the same character, in one full run through of the story. As a result of this intense play style, I usually only play BG twice a year, or thereabouts. If I get bored of a game, I have never restarted a new one, I just delete that save and let the game rest for a few months, and then come back to BG1 and start up a new character. I wouldn't define that as restartitis, I think.

Dice42

I only tend to restart if I've been away from the game a while and prefer to start with a fresh character instead of trying to remember exactly where I am in the game.

Other games differ, I've restarted Skyrim numerous times. I did restart my first ever play through about half an hour in, because everyone was trying to kill me because I attacked a chicken...
In Skyrim I like trying different characters, it's the first time I've really tried to roleplay in a PC game rather than playing myself. I imagine when BGEE comes out on Android I may do the same there too

Troodon80

Disregarding testing—I never restart once the game has begun, nor do I edit or modify any of my games.

Edit: I know, I'm boring.

Tarlugn

It is a question of management, and how the character progresses - I loaded BG:EE from Steam last week, and I just made my first trip to Nashkel mines and back with an evil party led by my RDD. The problem I foresee in my effort to colpete the game is starting too many new characters, never finishing with any of them due to the lack of drive and focus in my actions due to dividing my time among many new PCs. I thought to solve this by taking one of the new npcs to each of my teams, so that I could have a good, bad, and neutral walkthrough - something I value high, when compared to Diablo 2, where the lack of dialogue options and like 2 quests make the game less roleplay-oriented as the BGs are.

iAmGoatBoy

Tarlugn said:

compared to Diablo 2, where the lack of dialogue options and like 2 quests make the game less roleplay-oriented as the BGs are.

LOL roleplaying in Diablo! Admittedly I'm not a big RP guy myself, sticking to broad "paragon of virtue" or "history's greatest monster" styles in BG, but I can't imagine RPing anything beyond "guy who kills thousands and thousands of monsters and really likes powerful gear", in Diablo

Lemernis

I do not suffer the affliction. I do finish the great majority of the games I start--easily 90% I would guess. If I abandon a game it's because it turned out not to be fun as I had hoped, i.e., not enjoyable enough to continue. And that does happen now and again because I like to try different things out. But I don't feel any compulsion whatsoever to complete a game that I'm not particularly enjoying. That's different from getting bored with the game in an ADD-ish way because I want to try this or that new idea (the grass is always greener in other pastures).

The other reason I might sometimes fail to finish a game is that RL demands make it impossible. Then I'm faced with a question of whether to resume a game I left uncompleted many months ago. I can remember a couple of BGT games that were fine concept-wise, but nevertheless started to feel like a slog. Usually under that circumstance I will just start a fresh game instead.

Even when I have a lot of time to play, a run through the entire saga typically takes me 3-4 months. In the last few years I stopped trying to do that. The constant battle after battle and increased funneling of the game play starts to feel increasingly tedious to me somewhere around the Underdark--and I'm much less a fan of BG2(EE) compared with BGEE. I just play one game or the other now.

Tarlugn

iAmGoatBoy said:

LOL roleplaying in Diablo! Admittedly I'm not a big RP guy myself, sticking to broad "paragon of virtue" or "history's greatest monster" styles in BG, but I can't imagine RPing anything beyond "guy who kills thousands and thousands of monsters and really likes powerful gear", in Diablo

Indeed! After the wielding the buriza-do-kyanon like a machine gun with my amazon strafing, making it to level 90 and yielding then to the tediousness which is the Magic Find in Diablo... something else I appreciate in Bgs too in comparison to D2 is that the gear I want/need is reliably acquirable, and doesn´t demand such a heavy time investment of mindless slaughter in the same area, with the same monsters, over and over again - I did complete D2, with all the difficulities, but only with that one character - this mostly due to my amazing luck of having a random mob drop me a Lange Briser in Nihlathak´s Temple on normal difficulty, and later a Buriza-Do-Kyanon from some other cannon fodder in Mephisto´s Durance of Hate.

ZaknafeinBaenre

I do not suffer from restartitis at all, though I do understand the temptation.