Thoughts on Trial of the Luremaster and Heart of Fury?
Just started HoF and did the first little quest running around talking to a bunch of people for the Dunn family and found Lonelywood dull and the quest needlessly edgy.
After talking to the Dunn's wife at the inn I immediately took the transport to TotL, now that expansion is looking like it's just going to be room after room of gimmicky enemies, weird loot distribution and lackluster writing.
Can anybody vouch for either expac getting better / matching the main campaign in the long run?
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I guess what I should have also asked was, does HoF end up leaning more towards dark fantasy or high fantasy?
The cuck / cheating stuff in the Dunn quest and general focus on the economy in dialogue are red flags to me that it may be leaning more towards dark fantasy, which I'm not a fan of personally.
You mean Heart of Winter.
Heart of Fury is turbo difficulty level.
TotL was a free expansion added as an apology because HoW was too short. I think it's meant to be the ultimate challange megadungeon. Never played it properly, because I don't play ICEwind Dale for fookin' desert adventures.
HoW:
-Expansion has some kind of level scaling. It might give weird difficulty results. I was never able to disarm traps in it, lol.
- Lonelywood is great. Great mood. Great break between dungeons. It's cool to see town progress when you return to it. Greatly done meat and potatos of cRPG design. I looooove it.
- I would argue HoW is peak IE visuals. Beautiful.
- Dungeons are rather dull. Beautiful but dull. Very little opportunities to walk away from liner path. But there is some.
- I suppose it's darker slightly? It's not anywhere near "edgy". They were going for FAR north adventure with some Avellone old wise woman mysticism. Because Avellone loves old wise women more than Miyazaki loves witches and young girls reaching adulthood through hard honest work.
It's comfy like a warm blanked during a cold dark winter. Play it for the mood, because it doesn't have much else.
Not a DnD player by any means, as a matter of fact I'm not sure how I completed my first playthrough. I must have picked the default party because DnD rules are alien to me. That said, I'd like to replay IWD as an excuse to go through Heart of Winter, thanks to you. I love Ravel Puzzlewell, I think she may be the greatest character ever written. What race/class should I pick to solo? Don't feel like building a team. Perhaps another character to make the journey less lonely? Any guides for players unfamiliar with DnD?
I solo'd IWD1 and all expansions as a paladin.
>see evil
>hit evil with sword
>simple as
Not sure if soloing HoW is a good idea.
It has same kind of scaling sadly, I'm not sure how it is calculated. Probably av. level.
What's the minimum party size to go through HoW?
1, like all IE games
One is enough. You can kite most enemies either individually or in small groups and you can rest for 65535 hours between encounters.
TotL is fricking annoying and I would never go through it again. Did the full game as a solo paladin.
Interesting, I didn't even get far enough in to know that you would be sticking around lonelywood, I'll give it another try then on a slower day
>Heart of Fury
It's literally in your picrel you mud-eating neanderthal
Heart of WINTER
heart of Fury is the difficulty setting
HoW is a great expansion but you made a mistake going straight for ToL
ToL requires a pretty high level party to complete
Also ToL has one of the most brutal (i.e. best) dungeons in crpgs evar
Had no idea what TotL was, went in IWD blind, was so frickin hard at the level my wife and I got teleported there that I used the console to leave after getting our asses handed to us. Came back at a later time. HoW was cool, but the dragon at the end was disappointing. I really enjoyed the dwarf side quest and making an ice warhammer for my own dorf. Peak soul. Voice acting was top knotch.
>making an ice warhammer for my own dorf
based dorf player
Played two dorfs on our run. Fighter/Cleric was the leader of our party, and a Dwaven Defender was our brain damaged wall of axe chomping. My wife played a gnome Mage/Thief and b***hy elf Avenger.
Grog from Vox Machina ended up making a cameo when we went back to TotL just because I was tired of getting b***h slapped. Made him with eekeeper based approximately on this stat sheet
Probably the best the IE games ever got in terms of gameplay.
I've always wanted to play IWD 1&2, have owned both games for years, but the thought of creating six characters is just too intimidating. I can barely make a single player on BG. Are there any pre-made characters that you can download somewhere?
Have you actually tried launching them?
The games comes with premade parties
Bro what the hell, making characters is fun and easy.
Download some artwork for inspiration and customize the portraits. Counter-intuitive but the extra work may make you excited to roll the characters to go along with the pictures.
Wings too small. She'd never get off the ground. 2/10 would not adventure with.
There's a whole pre-built default party already there. Just run with that and replace one of them with your preferred self-insert or whatever.
And that's why we are stuck with this shitty setup of 1 self-insert original character + shitty developer OC companions.
Something I like to do sometimes is start with a couple of characters then add more as I go. It does make the start of the game more challenging, but you also get more experience and level up faster. It can also be less daunting to add a couple people at a time.
Thanks guys. I didn't realize there was a premade party. I read somewhere that you needed to make 6 characters and that filled me with existential dread so I never even installed the games.
>IWD games look vastly different from BG games in a much better and more beautiful way
>IE combat is an awful unfun clusterfrick and the IWD games are nothing but combat with basically zero story or dialogue
Worst old game monkeys paw for me.
>IE combat is an awful
admittedly BG1/2 combat is not great, IWD's 1/2 combat is better
>basically zero story
you are ever stupid beyond redemption or haven't played the games
>page 7 overnight on a slow board
so who got angry at which thread?
>admittedly BG1/2 combat is not great, IWD's 1/2 combat is better
IE combat is not awful (and I have typically found the reasoning for this opinion to be brainlet tier stuff) but BG1/2 and IWD1/2 combat is exactly the same. Its the same system.
They only differ in encounter design and yes arguably IWD1/2 have better CED than BG1/2, but really a matter of preference. IWD 1 and 2 both feature horde based encounter design. BG2 centers around mage battles and big magic monsters often requiring some keyhole soluti
IWD1 has a better story than BG1 and IWD2 has more branching dialogue and stat checks in dialogues and branching dialogues leading to different responses than BG1 and BG2 combined. I'm not joking. The writing in IWD1 is incomparably better than BG1's dumb mish mash of ren-faire talk and 90s sitcom exchanges.
The only reason brainlets think IWD is devoid of a story is because either A) they never actually played it (the usual case of people having strong opinions on old rpgs) or B) because it doesn't center around a munchkin stand-in for the player.
come on dude, be honest. the story in iwd is not very good. it's fun, the art is way better, and has some good encounter design, but the story is not very good.
also, I like the ren faire feel of bg1. that's literally what people conceived of as medieval before people became obsessed with Black folk in game of thrones
Both BG1 and IWD1 have relatively simple themes that center around defeating the big bad before it can do bad things. The difference is BG1 is badly and carelessly written, with inconsistent tone and throwaway NPCs, whereas IWD is written competently with a consistent tone, much higher quality of writing and successfully weaves in realmslore. I reiterate, the difference in quality is incomparable. Go open up any random string from BG1 and then compare with a randomly selected string from IWD1, and "be honest".
the reason people like bg1 is because you have a clear enemy who is threatening you, it is interesting. the iron crisis is a realistic historical type of plot, which is interesting, by the way. the enemies you encounter are actually capable of killing you. you have agency in how to investigate them in the city, and the city being one of the first open world games is also to its benefit
realmslore is schlock so who fricking cares
in iwd, everything important happens offscreen as an excuse for you to go to another dungeon and kill more people. then there is 'le twist' about someone that you never even have met during the course of the game. its tonally consistent? yeah sure. who cares man. it sucks.
I dont care which people LIKE more for whatever reason, just as so many redditors love BG2's "writing" because it makes them #1 munchkin and has ROMMAAANCCEES. Twilight is an infinitely more popular book than Heart of Darkness.
I am telling you, IWD1 and 2 have *objectively* better quality writing. And ironically, for all the shit people talk about the series being "only" combat compared to BG2 apparently being this amazingly deep arr pee gee, IWD2 has more branching dialogues than any other game in the IE pantheon, including even storygay beloved PST.
Some other factoids, IWD has a lot of checks for PC race, slightly more than BG2, whereas BG1 has *none*. IWD2 has something like 4x more. IWD2 overall has far more varied checks for things like race, class, alignment, religion, stats and so on.
I agree that IWD 1 and 2 have a well written story, and I love the options that IWD2 throws at you for class choices. I always assumed that happened more in the early game than later, especially as it's so dungeon crawly, but I've never finished it so I can't say.
I wouldn't be prepared to call its writing better outright than the other IE games, just different and with different goals in mind.
>here is the big bad, which is supposed to give you agency for adventures
>oh you are not going to see him or hear from him until fairly late game
>yeah do this random iron shortage thing you have no intensive to participate in instead
>ah-ha the random thing we made you do is actually related to the big bad, bet you didn't expect that!
>also here is a completely moronic rationalization of you can't go to certain areas
no it's not good
>intensive
incentive
BG1's theme was 'comfy low level adventure' which is why it had tonal shifts. Admittedly some of the silliness is stupid in retrospect but it was clearly the devs having fun with it, which is hard for me to fault even though I'll happily bash Larian for what they did to BG3
>BG1's theme was 'comfy low level adventure'
the regular assassination attempts and looming threat of iron crisis kinda spoiled the comfy mood
>the regular assassination attempts and looming threat of iron crisis kinda spoiled the comfy mood
I guess I can see that, but it didn't for me. There was an ebb of flow of tense and serious adventure versus comfy adventure, mostly because of the freedom you had and the interspersed light hearted and occasionally silly stuff. I think you only have to go to Beregost and see the FMV introducing the town to see how the devs really wanted to bring D&D and the setting to life, at least as much as they wanted to tell a specific story. They didn't want to grip you with a tight narrative and never let go like BG2 and the IWD games.
>BG2 centers around mage battles and big magic monsters often
these sorts of fights are same and boring
>The writing in IWD1 is incomparably better than BG1's
Patrician taste
>be honest. the story in iwd is not very good.
it's simple and probably not stellar, the thing is BG1's story and writing is even worse
BG2's writing is not good either and I'm tired of pretending otherwise
In my experience, more branching dialog and skill checks means a worse story(and game). It's such a cheesy way to fake roleplay
if you like linear railroad just stick to watching movies
You can have reactivity without dumb dialog trees and skill checks. You homosexuals are so limited in your concept of what's possible that you can't even conceive of a game that isn't stupid.
L O L
this ain't a jarpig thread anon
get the frick out and back to your press A games
If all you can think of as an alternative to cheesy branching dialog is a jrpg, you are the problem.
enlighten us
Why not try it for yourself? It's an obvious mental exercise. Imagine systemic reactivity that does not require hard-coded branching or rote skill checks. NPCs have personality models and maybe goals/motivations. They respond to actions and changes in the environment(things that matter) and only rarely to cheap words and dialog. Skill checks are replaced with scaled ability to modify environments. Should not be hard to imagine.
Oh sorry I though you were going to mention an actually implemented mechanic from a published game, but now I see you are just enjoying the smell of your own farts, please continue, but i don't think I'll stay to participate
You could have kept your mouth shut in the first place and avoided the embarrasselment.
You have two typos in words 'you' (should be 'I') and 'your' (should be 'my')
Name one game that does this. How would you even implement what you mentioned?
I find the combat fun in BG. But that's partly because it's inserted in a compelling enough story. As a pure challenge to go forward from a room to another I just don't see the appeal. Honestly never understood why Icewind dale 1/2 garnered any fame. Like, you can still create a full party in the bg games from scratch and roleplay the six of them, it's not hard to do. What's even the point of playing icewind dale?
IWD games have a nice old-school tabletop campaign feel to it
I personallyl prefer bg and bg2 because the dungeon design is better, and there are interesting combat encounters. the wizard fight where he casts teleport field is fun, for example
but some people don't like dungeon crawling like in 2e where you have to check for traps, determine enemy weaknesses.
iwd is just straight up fighters in the front, throw fireballs at hordes that outnumber you, you better do it right or they eat through your fighters.
really, a good tabletop campaign has both types. but when black isle made iwd they were probably trying to appeal to the diablo crowd, because most people find bg and bg2 somewhat dull. "reading spell descriptions?" imagine some person actually reading these days lol
>the only time his writing is good is when it's good
Great criticism
>What's even the point of playing icewind dale?
New content. When you have finished BG1 like a dozen times you can appreciate that, even if it's worse.
BG1&2 combat is very easy, IWD made it at least moderately difficult by scaling sheer volume of enemies you're facing (which happens to be the only way to scale D&D encounters)
Isair and medae in icewind dale 2 are really hard. I always have to ask the old gods for help.
People say planescape had the best story but I think it merely had the best writing. Iwd2 had a better story, it just wasn't as well fleshed out. It's also extremely relevant to our current political climate.
The religious revival we're currently experiencing is basically us reaching out to destroy our own legion of the chimera, which threatens to enforce egalitarianism at any cost (lol!).
You're really putting effort into your shitposting.
I'm not sure that's a good thing.
I only have the highest quality shit posts at darias
>(which happens to be the only way to scale D&D encounters
No, the right way to design the encounters in either series would be frequent enemy support casters with per-encounter tailored scripting among the usual melee dudes. Mid to late game, these casters should have some decent defensive contingency spells you'd be required to strip away or work around.
2e has all sorts of ways of scaling encounters. even a pack of gibberlings is dangerous because of disease, getting overwhelmed, and the fact that the casters have limited protections
not every game has to play like bg2 or 3e
what's the point of playing wizardry?
it's pure dungeon crawling
how is the EE?
The legion of chimera
Remember to do your best every day to resist our own Isair and medae
Protip: irl isair and medae are Barack and Michelle Obama
Michelle obama actually is a troony. Barack Obama is a literally gay bottom
We've by the legion for almost 12 years. Bidens terms are just more obama.
Make sure to vote for trump in the primaries and general. Show your support pureblood
Well, as far as conspirational theories go this isn't the most outlandish one, not by a long shot.
It's also hard to find out who exactly wrote Iwd2. I have a hard time believing it was avellone or sawyer. It does not read like an avellone game at all.
I think it had some really red pilled proton channer as a writer. And sawyer was to busy balancing numbers to understand the story context
They definitely do now though. They have never included ice wind dale 2 in any of their remasters for a reason. It's soft censorship.
>proto channer
I always got the opposite impression actually. that isair and madae were written to be somewhat sympathetic.
that's how they get you. they say "this behavior is evil, but if there hadn't been discrimination in the first place..." then after a few years they transition into "the murderer is the one who is right"
that's the impression I always got from it. they get soapboxed too much for me to think the author wasn't sympathetic
as a kid I definitely viewed them as the good guys. Now as an adult I realize I would most likely simply be one of their victims so don't really like them much.
When you get to koldahar again in Iwd2 theirs that whole segment where they explain isair and medaes back story and how their mom was killed and they where run outta town etc etc
Iwd2 deserves better than to be forgotten about but they always do when porting the infinity engine games. What a fricking pity most people only know iwd from the first game cause to be honest iwd1 is a 3/5 at best. 2 is really taken to another level thanks to the story and villains. Their basically like the main characters since your party is made by you
>Iwd2 deserves better than to be forgotten
At this point I wish they'd just run the enhanced edition off of BG2's engine like they did for bg1 and iwd.
I don't even want an enhanced edition. can't they just make another arena type expansion without the unskippable 20 minute OC cutscenes and terrible writing?
I literally just want to make some builds and fight some monsters.
I prefer dungeons and neat stuff. I liked the black pits but it was boring after a playthrough.
me too. but I already played through all the dungeons in iwd2
like, all they have to do is drag and drop preexisting assets into an arena, and maybe slightly reprogram some of the stats, and I will give them money. what the frick is wrong with them
they're probably afraid it would take money away from bg3, which is just unfun to play
>we used to have the technology to make Iwd2
>unfortunately now it’s lost and we can’t go back
Hahaha haha. 🙂
>just lost the source code
They just lost the source code, or so the official word goes.
>really red pilled proto channer
??? Go outside
Best mood and probably best OST of the Infinity engine bunch. I replay it every now and then with that improved HoF mod that doesn't just add flat +80 hp +500 levels to monsters.
I never understood how anyone could have possibly enjoyed that. it doesn't even remotely play like dnd at that point. prebuffing gets tiresome. people just abuse summons. why even do it
>it doesn't even remotely play like dnd at that point. prebuffing gets tiresome. people just abuse summons
so it plays like Pathfinder instead?
is that how pathfinder plays?
that sounds absolutely horrid. does pathfinder tabletop play like that?
I like how 2e has certain spells that dispell buffs, no save. it makes the whole buffing thing more manageable, and there is some counterplay
>is that how pathfinder plays?
Summon abuse is only limited to few classes, but pre-buff bloat is very much a thing.
Tabletop experience will vary from group to group, so you can't really generalize, but build autism and buff/bonus stacking is inseparably baked into the system.
thanks. I hate it already. a game for bean counting nerds
it's the hardest difficulty setting, what did you expect?
of course going through it should require cheesing, abuses, repetitive but effective tactics and everything that goes with it
The ost in Iwd2 is amazing
I understand planescape is in a league of its own. Nothing really ever will compare it was made by repressor for trannies. But Iwd2 is above bg2 and I'm tired of the latter getting so much undue praise. It's actually quite constrictive with it's alignment system and party members. The soundtrack is inferior. As is the story. As is the art. As is the level up system (3.0 > ad&d)... About the only thing bg2 has over Iwd2 is quantity.
French fries vs steak
Also what a game to go out on. Black isle was a class act
i really hated this game, i thought it was boring as frick but at least the combat was a bit more challenging than bg2
but i guess the main reason i hate it is because the weird time-travel segment got softlocked and i didn't notice until after i saved over and i had to replay like 4 hours...
the plot was awful though, and those two dumbass demons are completely 100% unsympathetic
>3.0 > ad&d
You are out of your mind.
3.5 > AD&D > 3.0
I hate that HoW 'upgraded' Icewind Dale to Baldur's Gate 2 sprites (which look stupid in the setting), and at the time it had annoying frame rate issues on my machine that the base game did not. But it was cool besides that I suppose. In those dark and beautiful days, more spells and a higher experience cap were a big deal
IWD2EE never ever
good
I liked Heart of Winter, I thought it was pretty good. I never did Trials of the Luremaster, because it was like a patch or something that came out later. I never really had any desire to go back and play the games again, it was a turbulent time in my life, and I lost my saves. I might try it again soon since it's been over 20 years and I have fond memories of the feeling and vibe of the whole area, the snowy and icy locations felt so cozy, and then there was Kuldahar.
I wont comment on "writing quality" as all IE games are pulp fantasy at heart, Torment perhaps slightly less so, which works for them.
However the simple fact that in both IWDs you're on a very strict path forwards simply in terms of locations makes it feel much, much more constrained. They feel much more like simple dungeon crawling combat games for this reason. And I love them for it. And I like the other IE games too.
Just started this for the first time, are you supposed to min-max your stats? I tried to not to make my guys too OP on purpose and am hoping it won't bite me in the ass. Playing on core rules or whatever it's called
optimizing makes the game faster but you can beat it with pretty much any party
Just keep in mind that the game is very combat heavy and that basically every second enemy is an undead.
I used cntrl 8 to get all 18s on my last playthrough with 4 pc team on core and had issues. But admittedly my wife is terribad and she was the mage/thief and avenger. My cleric/fighter and dwarven defender did fine but only so much you can do when your squishies keep dying. Lol
I also started a run recently, (with 6 paladins, despite having last played an IE game nearly a decade ago, that being like a third of BG1). Anything I should look out for (besides traps) and what level should I go to Heart of Winter?
Traps are pretty weak. HoW doable starting at level 10-12 but TotL is kinda hard.
Make sure you have fire / acid damage for trolls.
>Anything I should look out for
remember to make them boys proficient in different weapon types
there are only so many two-handed swords +4 per playthrough
easily done with arrows + there are weapons that deal fire damage that you should have by that time
absolute madlad
Anyone have any experience installing EET + IWD 1 and 2?
>EET
Yeah
step 1 get education
step 2 get training
step 3 get employment
boom, you are a EET
Fellas i only played Bg1 and Bg2,what series i should play next in the dnd setting,icewind or neverwinter?
play IWD1, skip IWD2, skip NWN1, skip NWN2, play MotB
>skip NWN1
I haven' played them in almost 2 decades but IIRC the expansions were fine. +8 weapons excluded.
oh yeah IWD2 is also completely unbalanced, you should just never play wizard because you don't learn any new spells on level up and scrolls are so rare that you are almost always have a terrible spell list.
I had slots on my wizard for almost the entire game that i had no spells for or only had awful and useless spells for...
just play sorcerer
>you don't learn any new spells on level up and scrolls are so rare that you are almost always have a terrible spell list
>Sawyer was the lead designer for the Icewind Dale II video game
The balance man strikes again.
If I were gonna replay it I would just cheat in scrolls for whatever I wanted and then pay the gold cost as if I’d bought them