Best way to play PST/IWD?

Kaxon

In spite of having Torment and Icewind Dale on my shelf for about 10 years I've never gotten around to seriously playing either of them. What's the best way to play them in this day and age? Would you use GemRB? Or a mod for increasing the screen resolution? Any other essential mods?

kamuizin

The best way, is with your hands !

But jokes apart, for PS:T follow this guide

Planescape: Torment with thunderpeel2001 install guide work pretty well, it's buggy but a lot less bugged than the vannila game. And as much people use this guide, it's easy to solve the problems.

For IWD i don't know, some of the mods on the guide above can be used in IWD for example. If you have Neverwinter Nights 2, you can instead install the Icewind Dale 2 mod from Nexus. This mod install an adaption of Icewind Dale in the Aurora engine using the Neverwinter Nights 2.

Be adviced that i didn't played Icewind Dale with Aurora engine from nexus mod.

CrazedSlayer

I havent played much of IWD, however, PS:T encourages you put as much of your skill points in your Wisdom so you get bonuses to your experience, which lets you level up faster. I played as a mage, so I tended to pour my stats into Intelligence and Charisma, because each of these unlock a great depth of variety in how you approach quests, resolve conflict and uncover new information that gets you more experience. PS:T is easily the best game in terms of offering non-combat solutions for problems that arise.
As for mods, I followed the guide listed here:
http://www.gog.com/en/news/mod_spotlight_planescape_torment_mods_guide/
Modding the game is pritty much essential, as the game would screw up whenever spell animations appeared. This will also alter the resolution to your specifications too. I mostly did it for the fixes, and for the expanded content that the vanilla game had trouble showing me (characters talk to eachother alot more post-modding).

Kaxon

Thanks for the tips. I'm planning to do Torment first because overall it seems like people like that one more. Seems like the guide should cover it.

For IWD it's impressive people ported the entire game to another engine, but I didn't actually like the Aurora engine so I'll probably stick with regular mods if I get there or maybe try out GemRB.

Necdilzor

I recently played Torment for the first time, I recommend it to you! Get to the end

HaHaCharade

I think IWD vanilla is fun enough

FrozenCells

Kaxon said:

In spite of having Torment and Icewind Dale on my shelf for about 10 years I've never gotten around to seriously playing either of them. What's the best way to play them in this day and age? Would you use GemRB? Or a mod for increasing the screen resolution? Any other essential mods?

There's a bunch of PS:T mods on spellholdstudios.net. I'd recommend all of them. And do play them on their original engines, IIRC GemRB has focused mostly on the BG series and (iirc)support for the other games is not up to the same level yet. I'd say go for PS:T because it's a more unique experience. IWD is a very pretty hack'n'slash but, it's a hack'n'slash. If you get a kick out of tactical combat then it's worth a spin but PS:T puts you in quite a bizarre and alien universe and gives you novels and novels worth of information to immerse yourself in. Just learning about the gameworld in PS:T is more fun for me than IWDs constant hordes of enemies.

Stargazer5781

I'm doing a playthrough of Icewind Dale right now. I recommend installing Heart of Winter and Trials of Luremaster. I also recommend installing the Icewind Dale tweakpack, but to not install any of the "cheating" tweaks - focus on the bug fixes.

http://www.gibberlings3.net/daletweak/index.php

I also recommend installing unfinished business

http://www.gibberlings3.net/ub_iwd/

And the widescreen mod if needed

http://www.gibberlings3.net/widescreen/

There are no NPCs in Icewind Dale. If you don't care about that, just make your party however you want. I really like NPCs, so if you do too, I recommend installing the NPC mod.

http://www.pocketplane.net/mambo/index.php?option=com_content&task=blogcategory&id=174&Itemid=122

That's the setup I've been playing with and the game is wonderful.

Kaxon

Cool... I got the fixpack and widescreen mod installed, along with Heart of Winter and the Luremaster stuff.

Stargazer5781 said:

There are no NPCs in Icewind Dale. If you don't care about that, just make your party however you want. I really like NPCs, so if you do too, I recommend installing the NPC mod.

http://www.pocketplane.net/mambo/index.php?option=com_content&task=blogcategory&id=174&Itemid=122

I like NPCs but I'm not that interested in a random person's homemade NPCs. Do you know if anyone's made a mod to transfer over BG NPCs? That would be pretty cool, even if they didn't have any new dialog... just having their voice sets and portraits would make it feel less like having six soulless adventurers.

Zeckul

My install order (I just did this recently):

1) Base fully patched game (IWD1 + HOW + TOTLM)
2) 1pp: Extended palette entries
3) 1pp: IWD animation fixes
4) 1pp: High quality music
5) G3 Fixpack (recently updated to v3)
6) G3 Tweakpack (my picks for maximum convenience, use what suits you):
- Weapon Animation Tweaks
- Force all dialogue to pause game
- Add bags of holding
- Stores sell higher stacks of items
- Multi-class grandmastery
- Max HP on level up
- Identify all items
- 100% learn spells
- Make bags of holding bottomless
- Unlimited stacking of everything stackable
7) Widescreen mod - 960x600 (best for a 16:10 monitor - for 16:9, use 1072*603). This is a custom resolution, add it to your video card drivers. If your drivers don't allow this, use the lowest one that respects your aspect ratio (1280x800 for 16:10, 1280x720 for 16:9).
8) Unfinished Business:
- I installed everything except Marketh's Ring.

diggerb

Is it just me or is Stealth in IWD messed up? If you don't hit the stealth button at the right time it waits for the next round to start before kicking in... Is that a balance feature ensuing thieves don't get too powerful? Is there any mod that makes stealth function more like bg?

Oxford_Guy

I've been playing a few "warm-up" partial games of BGT-Weidu, to test out some character builds and parties etc., but don't want to get too far into BG, in case it spoils the fun of playing BGEE when that's released (its been a while since I did a complete run-through), so in the meantime I've bought the Icewind Dale package off GOG and thought I'd give this a go to fill-in the time befoee BGEE goes live.

I'd like to try to fairly unmodded, but will install the fixpacks and widescreen mod, and perhaps Unfinished Business and the NPC mod, the latter in particular sound interesting.

Does anyone have any other tips for playing Icewind Dale? Are there any good spoiler-free guides, for example?

I did notice that GOG have a mod guide here:
http://www.gog.com/forum/icewind_dale/mod_guide

ajwz

Although I would never recommend this for any other game, I'd say that the first time you play ps:t, it's actually better to play with a guide.

Aegir_Fellwood

ajwz said:

Although I would never recommend this for any other game, I'd say that the first time you play ps:t, it's actually better to play with a guide.

Shame on you! lol

Your first PST playthrough should without a doubt be played without any guides (or mods) - Nameless One has no idea whats going on, and neither should you. Imo the whole story, atmosphere, and mystique is gonna be lessened if you don't complete it "blindfolded"

cory5694

i actually did the same thing and am trying to play PS:T for the first time and i went into it without knowig anything except there is a lot of dialogue. so i had no idea how to build my character haha

VedwintheTyrant

I generally don't advocate for guides myself, but I used one a few times the first time I finished PS:T and I think it was a good idea. I had played it before, but I couldn't get hooked on the story because I kept wondering which of the gazillion NPCs you had to talk to and which were there for color. I found that having the guide meant I could focus on the story and not on trying to second guess the quest structures. It's an amazing game, and I was able to experience it more fully because I had a guide.

agris

Are any of you able to run IWD with 3D acceleration enabled? I can run the original CD based version with 3D accel on my home computer fine (Win7 64, i5, ATI 68xx) but a friend with literally the same version with the same mods can't get it to run correctly with 3D on his older, and I would think more compatible, system (WinXP 32, AMD Athlon, ATI x800x AGP).

trinit

:shakes fist: how dare you have PTS for ten, TEN years and not play it?! begone from this place, berk, and come back when you finish it!

khm- kamuizin posted the install guide you need, and i recommend the game as one of the best out there (IMO), hope you will enjoy it.