GameBanshee Forums

I have a couple of small quibbles with the stability of IWD II.

First, even though my Paladin is of sufficient level to have access to clerical spells and has some memorised, I cannot access them. The spell icon does not appear at the bottom of the game window and the hotkey does not work. Curious.

Second, the game locks up my entire system with monotonous regularity, especially after a big fight. It took me about 9 attempts to kill Vrek Vileclaw without anyone dying and when I finally did it, it locked up before I could save! I am running an Athlon XP 1800+ with 512 MB DDR RAM. I have an ATI Radeon 8500 with the latest drivers and a Soundblaster Live 5.1. My OS is WIN XP Pro with the service pack. I set the game up for an "above average PC" and given the specs recommended this should pose no problem. Anyone have any idea what is going on?

Third, although this is not the most challenging game ever from a PC perfomance standpoint, it sucks every erg of processor power I can summon. CPU usage holds steady at 100%.

Having said all that, it seems to be a great game to play. The "normal" difficulty seems to be higher than the BG series. The old full frontal assault tactic no longer works too well, a bit more cunning is necessary, which is no bad thing.

I'm off to storm the horde fortress, if only the game doesn't crash before I'm done.......

you need to right click on one of the boxes/icons and you will receive choices to customize each character's items, spell, and abilities.

so far the game has been great. at first i thought i was burnt out. i was not able to finish por and nwn. they did not draw me in. i am happy to say it was not my fault after all. those games were just boring. iwdii has been awesome.

@Silver Knight
switch the task if the game seems to lock up and switch back. that worked for me. i used a radeon too. maybe you will encounter some display errors after switching the task, but don't worry just press esc and the graphic glitches are gone.

Agreed Jim. I am in ch2 of IWD II and no bugs experienced yet. Also, I heard the latest patch is reliable and fixes most known bugs. I have no problem running it either, I think your computer may just suck I also agree with you silver, regarding the difficulty level. I am loving it, every battle is challanging and requires for me to think out my next move and tactics.

@Silver Knight:
You might also update your version of DirectX, even though it should have installed with the game, it never hurts to download a fresh install from Microsoft's webpage.

I am running a similary system with an Athlon XP 1800+, 256 MB PC2100 DDR RAM, SoundBlaster Live! 5.1, but I run Windows 98SE and I have a Visiontek Xtasy GeForce4 Ti 4200 video card and have had absolutely no compatibility or stability problems. If you don't feel like dropping $200 (USD) on a new video card, you might check with Bioware and see if there are any known issues with the gamd and the Radeon 8500 card or with Windows XP Pro.

Another thing people often overlook is motherboard stability. Are you having any problems with other games? Go to your motherboard manufacturer's webpage and make sure you have the latest drivers for the board; you might also want to flash your BIOS with the latest update. I'd also run WindowsUpdate and see if there are any patches for Windows or known issues with XP and the Radeon cards.

@Silver Knight

I have a SoundBlaster, too, and found that running dxdiag and switching the sound acceleration from full to standard stops a lot of the lock-ups. Another oldy but goody is to periodically empty the cache\data, temp, and tempsave folders.

On ATI cards: check here.