Is there a problem with the BG2 starter dungeon?

lollers

Why is there a mod that skips it?

jastey

There are actually two mods.
Because it's a dungeon you have to go through every time so it gets tedious (just like cutscenes and other scripted events.) I wrote a Skip Korlasz' Dungeon for my SoD Tweakpack - not because I think it's needed but because I had to restart SoD often for testing purposes.
I don't know the exact motivation for the first ("Dungeon Be Gone") and also not of the second ("Skip Chateau Irenicus" by @argent77 ), but the latter definitely also had the idea to make it seemless and to give the player the choice to play as much (or little) of ID as they like, which is a nice touch and makes it less boring to play through ID *again*.

dunbar

I installed DungeonBeGone years ago because, although ID is fun the first couple of times, it quickly became tedious (for me) and ate up too much time before I could start a new game 'properly'.
Edited to add: With the mod installed you don't loose out on any of the XP or loot from the starter dungeon.

Pokota

lollers wrote: »

Why is there a mod that skips it?

It's a bit tedious, only minimally relevant to the overarching story (it is important for exploring The Exile's character and motivations, but that just adds to the tedium rather than making it easier to bear), and you have little to no chance to progress in power while you're inside of it. Outside of exploring The Exile's character, there's... really nothing of interest here.

The 23:09 speedrun of Baldur's Gate 2 by Eli Chase starts the game at 1:48 and exits Irenicus's Dungeon at the 4:23 mark - two minutes, 35 seconds. More than 10% of the speedrun is spent inside of the dungeon in question, and that's with (presumably) optimized routing and acting along with a clipping error to skip half of the first floor. Most players won't be that fast, and most builds can't make use of that clipping error.

Now consider that you have to play through it every time you want to mess around with a new build. In BG1 by comparison, you were out the door and in the wild within the first minute once you knew where to go.

Add to that the logistical issues with The Exile keeping a magical laboratory in the middle of Downtown Athkatla (a city that punishes open arcane spellcasting with imprisonment) and... well, it's just a whole bunch of nonsense, really.

megamike15

it just suffers from an rpg issue at the time where your forced to go through a tutorial dungeon before you can start the real game.

unlike something like fallout 1, bg 1 or new vegas where you start in a small mostly optional tutorial area that you can skip if you want.

i don't really mind the bg 2 dungeon as i get it done very quickly and my runs tend to be months apart so it never gets to the tedious stage.

sarevok57

i actually like the first dungeon in bg2, despite the fact i played it a bajillion times but i always think of it as a warm up for whats waiting for me in the big bad world of bg2, plus trying to come out of there with as much stuff as possible and micro managing that absolute crap out of your inventory is always fun for me in that dungeon

ineth

I also think it's a good dungeon.
Definitely shouldn't be skipped by first-time players.

People wanting to skip it on their n-th playthrough of the game, doesn't mean there's anything wrong with the dungeon - it's IMO just a natural property of "starting dungeons" in RPGs, as a consequence of how RPGs work:

• At the start of the game, your party "feels" basically the same in every playthrough: Same few companions, same low character levels, same few items.
• As you get further into the game, different playthroughs start to diverge significantly: You do quests in a different order (and thus at different character levels), choose different long-term companions, end up wearing different equipment, etc. With higher levels, your character's class-specific abilities also become more pronounced.

So, a dungeon/quest in the middle of the game is more likely to feel like a different experience on each playthrough, whereas a starting dungeon feels pretty much the same each time.
And even if it's well-designed, many people will want to skip it by their 3rd time.