First Impressions (spoilers)

Ned Flanders · Post by **Ned Flanders** » Thu Sep 05, 2002 10:17 am

my first impressions now that I've got it

first off, the collectors edition really comes with some worthless cards, a large cloth map of the area, a lot of promotional paper advertisements, and a bonus cd which includes an additional merchant and 11 unique items to be found throughout. I don't know, maybe the new merchant sells all of them, I am waiting to figure it out.

Here's the group that I made:

Chief Hugga Tugga - Male Human Bard
Martina Navritalova - Female 1/2 orc Barbarian (will take 1 level in ranger)
Hank the angry drunk - Male Gold Dwarf Fighter (will take 1 level in ranger)
Wylyure Dauntheir - Female Strongheart Halfling Rogue (will take 1 level in ranger and barb)
Janis Joplin - Female Aasimar Druid (probably will take 1 level in ranger)
Jalynfein Baenre - Male Drow Sorcerer

Basically, I tried to select races providing bonuses in accordance with the chosen class for each; but I guess that's probably what most of us have done.

The Ranger levels are fairly cheezy, however, it happens to be my favorite 2nd edition class and they get boned in 3rd edition so I'm getting even. I'm not even certain how many will dual wield but the weapon profciencies sure are nice.

Additional cheese may be the level of barb for the rogue. Again, it just speeds things up a bit. I like to do a lot of scouting so this should help out. Who knows, by the time I get around to taking a barb level perhaps I will have found an item that will speed up a player. I suppose I could waste a feat slot on dash.

The game looks real good. So far, I am still in the port of targos. Reading the manual and creating a party kept me up far later than I should've been anyway. Thus, there was little time for game play.

I really like the interface. The widescreen format is a step up from the older infinity engine games. I don't anyone who played the other games with the side menus minimized. Will start experimenting with larger resolutions tonight.

One weird thing: I can't seem to play the game twice in succession without rebooting. Things get insanely choppy even in the opening movies if I play, exit the game, and restart it. I'm playing this on a pretty nice machine (1.2tbird, 256 DDR, GFti4200, SBlive, msik7266, win98se) and yes, all drivers are current. Just curious if anyone else has had this trouble. I scanned the readme.txt and didn't find anything, however, I scanned pretty fast. Perhaps I'll give it another look.

Problems: I keep trying to zoom in and out while rotating the screen. Cursed by NWN and Warcraft III.

Complaints: None yet. The inifinity engine games are all winners as far as I'm concerned so I'm certain I'll really enjoy this. Plus, I haven't played enough yet to complain.

What I find odd: I'm not certain how this transcends to true PnP rules in 3rd edition, but the number of skills compared to the number of feats seems awfully lobsided. I think there are more skills and less feats in NWN and levelling up seemed to require some thought when applying these additional attributes. In IWD2, choosing skills was pretty much a no brainer and the amount of feats seemed infinitesimal. Skills took 30 seconds to decide because it was overly obvious what to choose and feats took too long to figure out. I wound up planning out feats to choose for all six characters all the way up to level 30 including the order as new feats are required. It's not really a complaint, however, it just seems a little unbalanced. The amount of skills is so narrow, the game should almost just allocate the points for you because there are only two or three skills you'd use per class.

this is enough for now.

HighLordDave · Post by **HighLordDave** » Thu Sep 05, 2002 12:48 pm

Re: my first impressions now that I've got it

Originally posted by Ned Flanders
One weird thing: I can't seem to play the game twice in succession without rebooting.

Have you checked to see if you might have a memory leak? I haven't had any compatibility problems or game crashes and I don't see too many differences in our systems that would be fatal like that.

Ned Flanders · Post by **Ned Flanders** » Thu Sep 05, 2002 3:04 pm

If it is a memory leak, I'm not certain what it would be tied to. Could be the latest NWN patch or Warcraft III patch. I haven't seen my machine behave in this manner though. It really isn't a big deal, the machine boots up quick; but my curious nature wants to find the answer to the trouble.

Gwalchmai · Post by **Gwalchmai** » Thu Sep 05, 2002 4:37 pm

Re: my first impressions now that I've got it

Originally posted by Ned Flanders
In IWD2, choosing skills was pretty much a no brainer and the amount of feats seemed infinitesimal. Skills took 30 seconds to decide because it was overly obvious what to choose and feats took too long to figure out.

Concerning the skills, I too, found them pretty easy to choose. I think it was partially because I knew that I would have six party members, and felt no need to expend 2 points on a non-class skill. In NWN, I struggled with expending points on trap disarm for my Druid, but it was worth it to get rid of Tomi....

fable · Post by **fable** » Thu Sep 05, 2002 4:43 pm

@Ned, try unloading or removing all the stuff you can that normally runs in the background before you start playing the game. There may be some memory conflicts going on, so that when you stop playing, areas of RAM that should be released are being so.

Ned Flanders · Post by **Ned Flanders** » Thu Sep 05, 2002 4:57 pm

@fable, there's really not much left running in the background aside from a mainboard diagnostics monitor. It constantly runs and will send an alert concerning temperature, voltages, and/or fan RPMs. I'd rather leave that running and reboot than disable it for easier IWD2 play.

Otherwise, the OS is win98SE, and everything else in the system tray is killed. Obviously, something is getting in the way. As soon as NWN and Warcraft III are complete, I try uninstalling those two to see if the conflict is remedied. I'm leaning towards W3 as the culprit.

thanks much for your input.

Ned Flanders · Post by **Ned Flanders** » Thu Sep 05, 2002 5:02 pm

by gwally
Concerning the skills, I too, found them pretty easy to choose. I think it was partially because I knew that I would have six party members, and felt no need to expend 2 points on a non-class skill. In NWN, I struggled with expending points on trap disarm for my Druid, but it was worth it to get rid of Tomi....

Good point. I haven't done NWN solo. I am playing online with others so we're all able to focus on our own class. The problem now though, as we reach the end of chapter II, is that the game is too easy for a party of four. Oh well, nuff said, wrong forum.

HighLordDave · Post by **HighLordDave** » Sat Sep 14, 2002 11:47 pm

I'm in Chapter 5 (I think) and have just returned to Kalduhar. It's very interesting to see some of the same areas that we encountered in IWD re-done to show the same places 30 years later. Many of the same structures are still there, although they have all aged (as should be expected).

When I first saw some of the areas, I thought the developers were being lazy and not making new landscapes, but they have touched them up so much, Bioware probably started over. Plus, they look very good, too.

Maintaining continuity from the first IWD through the second has been very impressive with lots of plot exposition and meaningless banter provided by the in-game NPCs. It's also good to see some of the characters from IWD who may have had only a bit part re-appear and provide some much-needed backstory that adds depth to what is otherwise a hack-and-slash adventure.

The new dragon AI adapted from ToB is also a much needed addition to the game. While being able to kill dragons with loads of Cloudkills prevented me from having to reload a dozen times, it was very cheezy. The Black Dragon in the Chult jungles was a killer. I had to resort to every trick in the book and still had to resurrect half of the party.

Another think I am enjoying is the comparative rarity of high-powered magic weapons and items that would otherwise throw the game out of balance. I remember thinking that in BG2, there were some +3 weapons available (Celestial Fury and the Blackblood club, for example) very early in the game which I thought were not appropriate for 7-9th level characters. I like that I had to wait until Chapter 4 (and 10-12th level) before +2 and +3 weapons became fairly easy to obtain.

I have also run into my first graphics glitch, and it's not really a glitch so much as it's the game slowing down drastically. In one of the dragon fights, it seemed like the game was moving at a crawl. It may be that I need to dial back my graphics settings, but it seemed that the game was looking for more horsepower than my computer could provide. Of course, I may just be spoiled by my Athlon XP and GeForce4 Ti.

Kayless · Post by **Kayless** » Sun Sep 15, 2002 3:05 am

Originally posted by Ned Flanders
Here's the group that I made:

Chief Hugga Tugga - Male Human Bard
Martina Navritalova - Female 1/2 orc Barbarian (will take 1 level in ranger)
Hank the angry drunk - Male Gold Dwarf Fighter (will take 1 level in ranger)
Wylyure Dauntheir - Female Strongheart Halfling Rogue (will take 1 level in ranger and barb)
Janis Joplin - Female Aasimar Druid (probably will take 1 level in ranger)
Jalynfein Baenre - Male Drow Sorcerer

LOL at some of the names.

Though I would advise against most of the single ranger levels you've taken. Your gold dwarf fighter isn't going to have a good dex (since Gold dwarves have a Dex penalty) and if he wears heavy armor then the ranger dual wielding ability is useless. Not to mention the fact that dual wielding really isn't that good for straight fighters anymore. In fact, the only character I would stick the single ranger level with would be the rogue. Guy Fullerton has written an excellent analysis of the mechanics of Two-Weapon Fighting in 3e, that can be found here. Some of it doesn't apply to IWD2's streamlined rules, but the overall assessment remains the same: "For the typical fighter or barbarian (who relies on high strength to deliver lots of damage in a round), attacking with two weapons is a poor choice... Most of the examples of good dual wielding involves a rogue."

Jaesha · Post by **Jaesha** » Sun Sep 15, 2002 4:42 am

Goddammit europoo! We_want_the_game_NOW!!

Sojourner · Post by **Sojourner** » Sun Sep 15, 2002 8:17 am

@Ned - If you haven't already, run dxdiag and switch the sound acceleration from full to standard. This has helped reduce choppiness and crashes in other games for me, especially in Morrowind. (I have a Sound Blaster, too.)

Ned Flanders · Post by **Ned Flanders** » Sun Sep 15, 2002 8:46 am

@ Kayless,

Indeed. I was a mere rookie upon this post. After a little play, the only characters who got the level of ranger was the rogue. My bards next level will be 8 so I am in debate about a ranger level right now. At eight, he could take a level in ranger, gain the bonus feats due to light armor and take weapon finesse for his eighth level feat. His dex is 17 which I could boost to 18 with the level bonus point as well.

@sojourner, will try. thanks. I actually think I had to boost it up to full for some problem with NWN.

Bloodmist · Post by **Bloodmist** » Sun Sep 15, 2002 9:10 am

Originally posted by Jaesha
Goddammit europoo! We_want_the_game_NOW!!

You wouldn't happen to know when it's out in DK, would you?

Jaesha · Post by **Jaesha** » Sun Sep 15, 2002 1:45 pm

It was supposed to be out two_weeks ago!

Bloodmist · Post by **Bloodmist** » Sun Sep 15, 2002 1:55 pm

Originally posted by Jaesha
It was supposed to be out two_weeks ago!

*sigh* Why, why! Do i live in europe.........

Jaesha · Post by **Jaesha** » Mon Sep 16, 2002 1:18 am

Originally posted by Bloodmist
*sigh* Why, why! Do i live in europe.........

Because we have nice beer!

Bloodmist · Post by **Bloodmist** » Mon Sep 16, 2002 9:30 am

Originally posted by Jaesha
Because we have nice beer!

hmmm..... on another board, i met a fellow dane who'd seen IWD2 for 550 kr. in some shop.....

Jaesha · Post by **Jaesha** » Mon Sep 16, 2002 10:27 am

Originally posted by Bloodmist
hmmm..... on another board, i met a fellow dane who'd seen IWD2 for 550 kr. in some shop.....

---WHAA´???

Bloodmist · Post by **Bloodmist** » Mon Sep 16, 2002 11:08 am

Originally posted by Jaesha
---WHAA´???

= Spam Heaven

Jaesha · Post by **Jaesha** » Mon Sep 16, 2002 11:22 am

Spam is good!