Good Old Games - Baldur's Gate 2 Released

blatantninja said:
The first dungeon is really designed as a tutorial for people that didn't play the first one, so it is kind of boring. There is a mod that let's you basically skip it. If that is what is dragging you down, I highly recommend it.
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Nah, I'm a bit of a completionst - and I wouldn't mind going through the dungeon again for the complete experience.

My main issue is that I don't like starting a "high-level" character and encountering all these NPCs that I haven't interacted with in the first game.

That's because I completed BG1 with my own party, and I really want to experience the famous characters like Minsc and the others, from the beginning.

It's my brain and how it works. It must have it all ;)
 
DArtagnan said:
Not sure why, but the first dungeon kinda bores me - and I don't really get the sensation of a big freeform game, and it seems more like a linear tightly woven story which is the opposite of what I got from the first Baldur's Gate.
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That's a perfectly normal feeling. The first dungeon is supposed to be a tutorial of sorts, but it is indeed a bit dull. I recommended BGII to friends of mine and they quit playing just because of that dungeon.

One thing to keep in mind is that BGII is indeed a little more linear than the first game. It doesn't offer as much opportunities for non-linear adventuring as BG1 did. But it's that combination of linear story and the large amount of nonlinear quests that make the game so satisfying IMO.

DArtagnan said:
Just can't seem to find the time, and I have this problem of not being able to get back into a story-driven game after just a week or so without playing.
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That is indeed a problem. The entire saga is HUGE. I first played it during a 2-month from school. I played Planescape: Torment, Baldur's Gate (without the expansion), Baldur's Gate II and Throne of Bhaal without stopping. Good times, good times. I never managed to complete Throne of Bhaal though. I suck too hard for that.
 
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DArtagnan said:
Nah, I'm a bit of a completionst - and I wouldn't mind going through the dungeon again for the complete experience.

My main issue is that I don't like starting a "high-level" character and encountering all these NPCs that I haven't interacted with in the first game.

That's because I completed BG1 with my own party, and I really want to experience the famous characters like Minsc and the others, from the beginning.

It's my brain and how it works. It must have it all ;)
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Yeah, I'm the same way. One mod I really liked was the one that added in all the NPC's from BG1 that were left out of BG2. Unfortunately, it really just added them in without any meat in the additional dialogue or quests related to them, but it was nice to have the option of playing with them.
 
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Anyone try Baldur's Gate Trilogy? I always played Tutu because it had a few mods that I liked although I hated the freaking green water. Sometimes degreenifier worked sometimes it didn't.

I've seen some decent mods being offered for Trilogy as well. Anyone have a preference?
 
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I prefered Tutu. I tried the BGT, but I had trouble getting it to work.
 
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I didnt get very far in BGII either, Dart. I'd just finished the original game and Totsc content, and headed right into BGII thinking it was full-steam ahead. It wasnt.

The artwork is supposedly better in BGII, but strangely I found myself liking BGI graphics better. I Maybe it was the month spent playing it. So I turned BGII resolution down a little bit, and trudged around the starting dungeon awhile... the end.
 
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xSamhainx said:
The artwork is supposedly better in BGII, but strangely I found myself liking BGI graphics better. I Maybe it was the month spent playing it. So I turned BGII resolution down a little bit, and trudged around the starting dungeon awhile… the end.
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That's odd, BGII is one of the best looking 2D RPGs ever for me :p I was slack-jawed when I saw the improvement over BG1 (Not that I don't like the graphics in the first game, mind you).

Perhaps you just need to get used to the different style?

Anyway, I HIGHLY recommend you get through that first dungeon, as it is in no way representative for the entire game IMO.
 
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I thought that the artwork was far more detailed in BG2, BUT, I preferred the overall feel of BG1 better. BG1 is mostly bright colors. Despite the plot, it has a 'happy' tone to it. It reminded me of the old RPG's and action games from the 80's. BG2 had a very dark tone, both in plot and color scheme. Just about nothing was bright and vibrant, everything had a run down feel to it (which was probably more accurate to that setting).

Don't get me wrong, I loved BG2, but I loved it the way you love a good drama. In a way I'd compare BG1 and BG2 to the Fifth Element and Braveheart. I love both movies, but I find myself smiling a lot through the Fifth Element, where as I'm excited, but sad, through Braveheart.
 
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Definitely getting this, would love to re-play it after all these years, and then perhaps G2&NoTR and maybe VTM:B even ;) retro-gamer-trance, i know..
 
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I think I'm going to try this again. I had a run of really bad luck with this game.

Years ago, I purchased it for my old G4 Mac and played it for a while. I enjoyed it, but I got really busy with other stuff and lost track of what was going on in the game. Then that Mac died. I didn't replace it for a long time because I had a new job I was busy with and was using their computer.

Then a few years back I got a new Mac (I work in design, so Mac it is...) and the Mac version of BG2 won't work on the new Intel processors.

I finally got a hacked Cider version of it running on my Mac (I figured it was OK since I had bought the legal Mac version already) and played it for probably 15 hours before it just started rhythmically slowing down into an annoying stutter. Doing a reload from an earlier save fixed the problem for a while, but it always started creeping back in.

Now I've got a Boot Camp partition and I think I can even play an old one like this through Parallels. I really, really liked this game, though it's pretty damn difficult.
 
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Thrasher said:
The solution to your problem is obvious: get a PC. ;)
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Believe me, I'd love to get a gaming PC... I'm certainly not anti-PC. But as it is I use Macs for work and have a desktop at the office, a company-supplied MacBook Pro, and my own personal MBP. Last thing I want in my life is more computers. And I just don't have room for more at home anyway.

And Boot Camp works pretty well. On my late 2007 MBP I play Divinity DKS on almost full high settings (draw distance turned down, shadow quality reduced, but full textures, etc.) and it runs well. I don't think it would handle Dragon Age, so I haven't tried.
 
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Hm, Personally I think, it it is able to run DKS, then it should be able to run DRagon Age much better - since my personal impression was of Divinity 2 being far more demanding in terms of sys reqs.
 
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Thrasher said:
It had been in development for MANY MANY years, probably for the original Xbox ;)
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Dragon Age was in development for five years. The 360 is not much younger than that, and DA was supposed to be a PC title. It was a third party port for the consoles, and also for the Mac.

That said, it's technically a load of trash. Performance degrades over time, it's not that impressive visually and it's incredibly brown.
 
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It was released December 21, 2009. It was first announced at E3 in 2004. That's around 5.5 years just there. It had been under development for years previously... I bet they were targeting a much less capable platform to begin with, and were... delayed... But that's just a theory...
 
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Man, after 10+ years I can't keep the two games straight, never mind talk about which textures looked best. I'm not even sure if I played Tales of the Sword Coast or not!
 
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NWN 2 is more demanding… still
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To be fair, the launch version of NWN 2 runs worse on my machine than Far Cry 2 does in terms of performance and yields higher CPU utilization but only because it seemed to have some very odd hardware specific performance problems that I think took me a combination of patches and INI editing to iron out. So yeah more demanding but not because of the technology but rather a programmer deciding he hated my graphics card and all who used it.
 
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