2.6.5 rant. enough already

kaataden

I rarely bother going public with my grievances on games but this i consider a special case, so please bear a moment with me.

I have being playing this game since literally day one. At this point i know it better than the back of my hand and its original aesthetics are engraved in my brain. Hell, maybe that's the reason i keep coming back to it, cause it is so familiar it feels like home.

in comes you, as a studio, taking credit for refining it and bringing it to a new and young audience.
and i get it.
It had to be done. for its longevity.
and there were some meaningful changes. i mean the LOB one is a welcomed one for someone like me, never mind that it was implemented with the delicate touch of a sledgehammer.
for example i summon my familiar and instead of the 24 hip should get, I'm getting 50-60+.
i leave an npc in the coronet and when i return for him he has 499 hp, better thaco than my ToB fighers. good thing there is a shadow keeper stil, right?

so a new patch dawns on us. never mind the fresh mods installs (btw you broke the soundsets w e i du installs. it have to be done manually. plz fix, need my PST voice lines, can't stand anything else)

but instead of fixing the dreadful pathfinding which would be hilarious if it wasn't so annoying, (good luck having a SCS-ascession-LOB Amelyssan teleport literally on you and neither you or her can move out of 1 pixel while you being beaten to a pulp), or the broken familiars, you go change of all things the colour palettes of clouds?

what the f for? who's asks for these changes and who needs them?
and couldn't you at least pick a colour that already exists in the palette of the original game instead of that murky discoloured sewer dump? talking about cloud kill, death fog, stinking cloud. gj at making it at last stinking? that was the point?

and what about the spider figurines and 4th level spider spawn taking poison damage from cloud kill? is that intended? i don't get it.... it sure worked differently this morning. and what, all spiders are taking poison damage now or just my summons? i didn't test it, care to tell me?
were the new flail of ages flashy graphics needed? by whom?
does everything have to be a projectile? what happened to magic being a field of force not particles, Heisenberg anybody? let me throw some haste on you? i mean come on... get over it already!!!

and my grievance is this? when enough is enough? are your planning on more meaningful changes like this?
at last, will i be able to recognise the game i knew and love?

TL:DR : Gondor is not yours to rule, Steward. if i wanted a groomed beard on my Joconda i would go buy a freaking copy, not go vandalise the original only because "that's how i roll"

fewerlaws

Hi @kaataden , I share some of your sentiment, especially this:

the LOB one is a welcomed one for someone like me, never mind that it was implemented with the delicate touch of a sledgehammer.

That LoB bug where your disbanded-then-rejoined (with a savegame, then reload in between) NPCs get corrupted with +50% levels and 4x their normal HP was fixed in 2.6.5, at least in my games. I agree -- that was a really annoying bug, which required EEKeeper to fix, along with all the corruption to the "Effects" of each character.

I too wish they would update the LoB difficulty, at least by tweaking the globally applied (sledgehammer style!) huge AC-boost for enemies, which applies even in the original BG1, making BG1 LoB for low level characters just awful. It would have been better if the devs had just boosted AC by a percentage, not a fixed amount -- lets say say 30%, but capped at a max bonus of about 7. The formula would be something like this:

LoBAC = NormalAC-(min(7,(10-NormalAC)*0.3))

So if the normal AC for a particular mob in BG1 was 4, then the LoB adjusted AC would be 2 (i.e.. 4-((10-4)*0.3) = 4-2 = 2). If the normal AC were say -6, then the LoB AC would be -11 (i.e. -6-((10--6)*0.3) = -6-(16*.3) = -6-5 = -11). If the normal AC were say, -20, then the LoB AC would be -27 (i.e. -20-(min(7,(10--20)*0.3)) = -20-(min(7,9)) = -27.

While I am really grateful that the game is still being actively maintained and patched, it seems like a lot of development effort is being put into features that don't make much of a difference, just as dart graphics, fire graphics, etc. Do people even use darts anyway since the strength bonus doesn't even apply? In my opinion, the focus should be on how to make the game more replayable. Why not examine the most popular existing mods, and incorporate features from those mods, and make them enableable/disableable from the options menu?

A really cool feature I would love to see would be one to randomize drops, which would make the game even more replayable. This is the appeal of games like Diablo; players never know what is going to drop when they kill a mob. Also, adding areas to BG1 and BG2 that have random spawning mobs every few minutes, like what you have in chapter 10 in ToB, would be fun.

How about giving players an option to have a good or neutral aligned mage NPC with an 18 intelligence? Maybe make the Mechanical Bird usable by Neera to boost her intelligence by 1 point? Or another quest to get her +1 intelligence? Most players would prefer to keep all the permanent +stat boosting equipment/quests (Lum's machine in Watcher's keep) for their main player, but having some +stat items that could only be used by certain NPCs is an interesting idea.

Make wild mages actually a practical option by letting players store gold in containers to mitigate the Wild Surge gold destruction event.

Also, why should Free Action interfere with the Boots of Speed? That is super annoying and doesn't make sense. How should being "Free" to move make you move more slowly?!

They could combine all 3 versions (BG1, BG2, and SoD) of the Infinity engine into 1. Just write some code to merge all the items and objects form all 3 games into 1, then remove the duplicates (except for containers like Bags of Holding, Gem Bags, Scroll Cases, Ammo Belts, etc). I hate seeing duplicate items in the BG code for non-container items. It just looks...messy. Yes, write code to modify code to perform this merge. Works better and is safer when done right compared to manually doing the entire merge. For my previous employer I had to merge 7 forks of code all back into 1 in order to make a large codebase maintainable again. It worked, even though I had to handle hundreds of special cases. In the end the amount of code we were maintaining was 5x smaller! I got it all done in a matter of months. Yes, merging all 3 games into 1 engine would invalidate some item codes, but so what -- just update the documentation at the baldursgate.fandom.com. Having all 3 versions of the Infinity engine merged into 1 would give players easy access to all items from all 3 games in all 3 games.

kaataden

it should be evident by now that everybody desires something different for himself base on how one enjoys his game.

case in point the things that matter to you, there are existing mods that deliver them, the randomizer for example is an old one. as for the wild mage money leech, well then money is of no importance in this game. send jan to steal/sell flamestrike wands and never bother with money ever again? there should be some wild mageing in your wild wild mageing and although the money one is a cheap one, i agree, there you have it...

but i feel my point in the first post did not came across so let me restate it more clearly:

this infinite loop of patches that the devs are indulged in, leave the game feeling like a modded one. expect in this "mod" you don't have the option to choose or customise your preferences. you are stuck with it (and paying for it, go figure). and from a restoration ethics perspective it is totally unacceptable. restorations or refining or whatever you wanna call it should be not disruptive and not destructive to the original piece of work. they should strictly go heavily under the radar and be complimentary not overshadowing.

but lets not get stuck on semantics, whether this is a work of art or this or that. it is certainly not the sistine chapel but i would nevertheless have it stuck somewhere in time. and playing with the saturation levels of the various effects doesn't seem to have an end to it. never mind the mechanics where it seems that tuning with one thing messes something entirely unintentionally.

i don't know what the contractual obligations of beamdog are and what liberty and on what aspects of the game they have but i would very much like them to put a button somewhere in their interface that clearly states:

original game

---

enhanced game.

(which may not seem a great deal to many younger players and i respect that, but at this rate at some point this game will be unrecognisable to me)

and yes I'm old and getting older every day. but i fail to see how I don't preserve the right to play the original game as it was officially released, since i can't even buy them anymore.

and btw what is this all about not being able too kill your NPCs Beamdog the minute i see them. I remember killing Anomen the moment i stepped foot in the coronet cos f.. him but apparently your NPCs are immortal?

So telling of your design philosophies and even more of your own insecurities...

SirBatince

>Steam
>Right Click BG2ee
>Properties
>Betas
>Opt in 1.3

congrats, all your grievances are gone forever