Intro To This Game Is Bad And Its Creators Should Feel Bad© (SPOILERS
HalfOrcBeastmaster
Member Posts: 301
No use sugar-coating it, folks. I've got past it in the past by cheating my way to success, but whenever I tried to get through the prologue and initial chapter of the game without cheating? It's just been torturous for one reason or another.
So bad, in fact, that my attitude towards the canon party (with the exception of Imoen, who is wonderful) has practically succumbed to the Eight Deadly Words.
What are the Eight Deadly Words, you ask? It's a phenomenon I picked up on from those smashers on TV Tropes. (My apologies for any free time you will almost certainly lose if you click on that link.) Those eight words are as follows:
I don't know, am I the only one who feels this way?
(Edit: At the request of @gorgonzola, added 'spoilers' to the title.)
So bad, in fact, that my attitude towards the canon party (with the exception of Imoen, who is wonderful) has practically succumbed to the Eight Deadly Words.
What are the Eight Deadly Words, you ask? It's a phenomenon I picked up on from those smashers on TV Tropes. (My apologies for any free time you will almost certainly lose if you click on that link.) Those eight words are as follows:
- I
- Don't
- Care
- What
- Happens
- To
- These
- People
I don't know, am I the only one who feels this way?
(Edit: At the request of @gorgonzola, added 'spoilers' to the title.)
Post edited by HalfOrcBeastmaster on
3
Comments
Or totally rewrite the game again so that the BG1 cast are entirely absent from BG2, or have minimal interaction. While I think the team succumbed a little too much to wanting to let everyone see their favorite faces again, cutting back strongly on that would have lost the great sense of continuity that fills the game.
The characters chosen are also the ones that make mot sense. Jaheira and Khalid are the two you are directed to directly by daddy Gorion, and Minsc (or at least Boo) is probably the most popular character in Bioware's history (for all the naysayers). The party was always going to trend towards Good, as that is just way games rolled in that era, and you do bump into at least one other classic character if that's your preference anyway.
In the ideal world, if this were a game run by a human DM, it would be far more accommodating of the choices you made in the first game. You would also play each game exactly once, and see a tiny fraction of the content. The DM generally does not waste too much time detailing the parts of the game you do not explore, unlike for a CRPG where every possible choice must be rendered before the first sale.
I feel much more cheated by the willful ignorance of player choice in the Mass Effect series than I do by the limited opening party of BG2 - and I still love that series too.
That said, Dungeon Be Gone seems to be one of the more popular mods, so I think you are not alone.
When SoD comes to the Mac App store I shall be buying on day 1! Until then, I am deep into avoiding spoilers - which will get harder and harder and harder as the community decides more of its doings are common knowledge
Same will be true for folks playing on other non-PC platforms.
a) SoA was sold as a stand alone game, so in the original game it functioned both as a tutorial and to provide a backstory. But......
b) SoA was a also a sequel so there had to be some sort of carry over from BG and TotSC, and at that time "Good/Neutral" alignment was probably regarded as the default option for most players. Which brings us to......
c) The Canon Party - something that I'd never heard of before I joined this forum (many years after ToB came out) but which apparently is (or was at the time) important.
Personally I think Dungeon Be Gone is a very neat solution as it simply bypasses the cause of my irritation and allows me to get straight into the game.
That said, the fact that there is a 'default' party to begin with, is something that could be considered as bad, yes. BG1 had a wide variety of characters (25 in total), but I can see how it would be technically infeasible to provide options for all 25 of chose characters, still introduce new characters in BG2 and have every character still be meaningful. BG2 strove more towards quality over quantity in NPCs. There are much less options to choose from, but each option comes to life a lot more. There was little chance of that being possible if they had to account for practically all BG1 options.
Still, though, it would be nice if there were slightly more options. For example, if PC was evil, or perhaps was below a certain treshold, Jaheira and Minsc could be replaced by Viconia and Edwin, while you could counter the former two elsewhere. It's a little bit too railroaded to start with those three specific NPCS.
I personally quite like them, though, and tend to bring them along on most of my BG1 runs, so I personally don't mind as much.
AFAIK, Beamdog staff have said the new patches and SoD are coming our way, but all in good time - and after the current batch of patches have settled enough to be comfortable moving attention to other ports again (I hope we may be there now). I can wait, BG2EE taught me that! I just need to be vigilant to avoid accidental spoilers
I agree that implementing a check on the alignment when a BG1 Charname is imported and spawning in the cages the BG1 Characters present in the new game that suit better would be a good idea, good point @Thels .
But Bioware did not had it and Beamdog can not change the original content, only add new content.
Consider also that at that time BG2 was a big game, 4 different CD and the hard disks of the time where rather small, more content and NPCs where not an option.
The continuity had to be somehow preserved as BG2 is a sequel. And those who begin with SoA are somehow informed about what happened before the cage.
Use Minsk to help you to get out of there and drop him or let him die at the first battle outside the prison if you really hate him.
Never explore the part of the dungeon with his cage, going there is really not needed. And the chapter can be soloed or played only with Imoen and Yoshi, if you want him.
Install Dungeon Be Gone.
Bioware gave you Viconia and Edwin so there are 4 NPCs from the first game, I would say 2 for the good party and 2 for the evil one. And the starting dungeon is just a very small part of the whole SoA and ToB.
New NPCs was needed, and the CD where full.
I think that you can live with that, and even without that, using Dungeon Be Gone or creating your own NPCs importing the savegame of a multiplayer session, just to get out of there.
He also veers into "funny disabled person". His head trauma or developmental disability or whatever comes across as sitcom style humor. Especially considering that if he has a brain injury, which BG1 indicates that he has, it's kind of unethical to not try to treat him and help him recover. I think Dynaheir mentioned that he seems happier since the head wound, but that's BS because how can she know his thoughts without even asking for his input? She makes a judgement call that he doesn't need treatment without actually asking him.
And he had his quest, the kidnapping of Boo, that was dropped at the last moment when some changes was decided and a relevant role in the plot was given to another BG1 char.
And time is money, people don't work for free, and delaying the release mean to start to earn money later, if not even loose the magic moment where the expectation of the possible customers is really high.
EDIT I add the following.
Is easy to criticize other people but those guys had a great idea, made a game that is in the history of the CRPG, that survived like no others and then resurrected like a phoenix.
Now is easy to sit on an armchair and tell "it could be better cause of this or cause of that".
I see A LOT of things that could have been made better, little things, even the whole chap.1 is a little thing.
I see also some big thing that could have been better, the full plot of the expansion, too linear and boring after the first time.
But I forgive, I had years of fun with this game, worn out keyboards, mouses and CPUs playing it.
Very true on arm chair quarterbacking. A lot of people forget this game is in a few years going to be 20 years old and is still better than most of the crap out there.
Bioware did one hell of a job on it despite the bugs. It was the first ever game to put dungeons and dragons into a visual aspect and let the computer instead of a human dungeon master taking a huge load off all the math for the game play part.
In addition to that this was coded to run on a platform that was about a quarter as powerful as today's smartphones and took your desk to operate.
Beam dog has also done one hell of a job picking this game up, patching it, cross platforming it, and hell, ADDING CONTENT.
Sure jons dungeon is a pain in the ass, sure you can bust through or cheese or skill your way through or even go "fracking critical misses I failed firkraag" to a reload and absolutely trash him.
The replay-ability of the game and the fact that when it was released it was ENCOURAGED for you to mod things (it's in the manual and readme files on how to mod ffs) make this a game that is legendary IMHO.
As others have said, you can get a mod to bypass jons dungeon, and yes you get cannon Imoen Jahira and Minsc to help you through it, BECAUSE in bg1 those were the first people you met.
Even real life mirrors that in a way, your first few friends are your best friends. EBen forgotten realms books... dragon Lance. .. Robert Jordan. .. terry Brooks. .David Eddings. .. they all mirror it, that's why they spill it over from bg1 to bg2.
The great thing about the game? You can change it almost instantly with very little effort once you get out of the dungeon, and it isn't that hard to get out if you don't stop to do every little thing in it.
You wouldn't have pokemonGO or clash of clans or heck... command and conquer if it wasn't for what those 3 games did and if it wasn't for what bioware did to make dnd a reality.... dont believe me? Try do the dice rolls for a coc battle.... try do the rolls for pokemon... You'd go insane....
And yeah... those of us who were here for the beginning of this... playing bg1 on 5 cds then buying tosc then getting soa for 5 more cds then tob for another cd.....and yeah... you leave candle keep or irenicus dungeon and ur "please insert disc x" literally and praying it READS the disc or u lose progress... or hang and gotta restart....
There are very very few games out there that come anywhere near the depth of the bg series or near replay value. (Granted I love nwn flexibility, but I also love trying to come up with some screwy combo in the 2nd rules of bg to have fun with, it's a challange)
Can u wreck it? Sure. Can u enjoy it? Sure. Can u replay it? Frack yeah. Have you got another game anywhere near close to it?
There's a few.... but then challange the fact this was made in the 90s.... where 4mb ram and a 500mhz processor was common.... nothing stands the test of time against this games trilogy. Well... quintilogy? Since beam dogs given 2 extra added contents? ... or is it 3....
I can deal with jons crappy dungeon just because the game is so freaking awesome.
The game utility to configure SOA, if I am not wrong, consider 450 as a super computer, my game was running on a pentium or pentium 2 160mhz....
I actually miss having a computer and playing this on the old GameSpy network. Ahhh the days....
I am fine with the age I have now, don't get me wrong, time takes, but also give, but I would willingly trade some of my WIS for some STR, CON and DEX, someone here know how to minmax in RL?
Put as much effort into life as you do this game (if you DO put effort into this game) and you will find life is easy.
Don't put the effort in and blame everything else. .. well... firkraag will force you to reload.
Only difference is you can't meta game life and there is no reload button.
And I knew about the kidnapping of Boo from the Unfinished Business mod. The problem with it, IIRC, was that it relied too much on visiting multiple maps, interacting with too many characters and their variables, and generally overextended itself much more than any other side quest did, and became unworkable. The last time I played the mod, it was still a very buggy quest and could be impossible to complete.
The armchair quarterbacking is going on because this is a discussion forum for the games, and as the base games are 15 years old and there is nothing new to discuss about them. If people truly didn't like these games they would not be posting on a forum discussing them.
Some posters enjoy critiquing the games and theorising "what if" scenarios. It doesn't mean they hate the game (and the title of this thread is tongue in cheek if you read the OP).
Irenicus' stated goal is to extract your divine essence, but he hasn't quite figured out how to do that yet, hence the need for experiments. Consider, then, the people he's captured alongside you: Imoen, your half-sister; Khalid and Jaheira, who were in the confidence of your adopted father Gorion; and Minsc and Dynaheir, sent from Rashemen with the explicit directive to research Alaundo's prophecies. These are all people who would have information about Bhaal and his divine essence, possibly even more than you do (since you've been busy fighting Sarevok).
Even if your character never traveled with any of them, they're still of interest to Irenicus himself. So I've always roleplayed the Chateau as throwing in temporarily with these people I've never met, but who the crazy wizard clearly believes know something about me; as soon as we're free and clear, I can dump them at the nearest tavern and make my own decisions again. (Or not, if I really do believe Irenicus is right about how they're connected to me.)