I never want to play this damn game again!
(but I'm satisfied to have played it once)
That's me at the time of the big final boss fight. Yes, I definitely should have put that last attribute point into DEX instead of STR. Brain fart. Accustomed to playing with a full complement of druid / wizard buffs, I never quite managed to plug that gaping -5 penalty. Still, I ran one of the harder cRPGs on normal difficulty with a group (ranger / fighter / cleric / monk / moi) which not only lacked arcane spellcasting and relied on potions of master thievery for difficult locks / traps but went against my usual caster-heavy preference.
I gambled on paladin / cleric buffs making up the lack of crowd control to help my front line turn the tables, and barely squeaked through with recitation, prayer, strength of one, protection, monk stuns and the occasional volley of cleric / ranger flame strikes. A stoneskinned monk is a happy monk, and that Greater Shield of Lathander won all the hardest fights for me. 30 damage reduction and 40 spell resistance for 3 rounds cockblocked pretty much everything in the game, and DEX penalties be damned.
OP h4x :)
No wonder they took that spell out.
On the whole, this production seems a sad story. By 2002 the Infinity Engine was being phased out by new 3D engines (including direct competition from Neverwinter Nights' Aurora Engine) so it seems IWD2 sold less than its predecessor... despite showing a great deal more attention to detail, and I'm guessing work-hours as well. It was even ahead of its time in including a quick load option in its main menu. Lots more puzzle-solving and multi-step quests, fewer repetitive fights (at least in the second half) and more thoughtful dialogues:
Paladins and monks even get a few dialogue options of their own, and I was pleased to see it restricted me from cooperating with some villains or receiving quest rewards -- but a lot less pleased to see a loading screen hint tell you to just cheat your way past even that minimal roleplaying by having a different party member violate your alignment for you. No thanks. I was less than enthused by finding out the hard way that wilderness lore mostly just added some meaningless flavor text. Upon reaching an army encampment my ranger informs me there are lots of tracks all around. Thanks Hawk-Eye, what would I do without you? The writing picks up noticeably in chapter 6 (the voiceover intro especially stands out) though still not quite to the level of Planescape: Torment or even Baldur's Gate.
Resource management stands out, not particularly great (1.5mil gold by the end with nothing to spend it on) but providing a wide array of weapons and fewer freebie consumables as a crutch than other DnD adaptations. You get barrels full of sanctuary and healing potions but few enough of the others to make you ration them a bit, and I was happy to hoard 4 level 7-9 summoning scrolls for use in the final fight. Ammo drops were just enough to make my ranger switch to melee or infinite ammo for the easiest fights. Limiting heavy armors to no more than +2 by level 15 seems unduly restrictive but certainly made me hunt for the few good ones. Merchants are spaced out far enough to make their appearance seem relevant... and here's where I have to start bitching.
Inventory management is a nightmare, thanks to obsolete quest items never getting deleted (leading you to think they might still be useful) the existence as far as I can tell of exactly one bag of holding and four identify scrolls in the entire campaign, and that weird "sticky" item clicking that all Infinity titles suffered from. Except, IWD being the dedicated dungeon crawl with lots of different weapons to juggle, made it even more of a chore than Torment or BG. Then you've got the indistinct low-pixel graphics making it hard to see what you're even standing on sometimes. These plus the idiotic pathing makes three, will easily sour most modern gamers on the experience. As I complained about BG1, the pathfinding algorithm's refusal to re-check routes and eagerness to abandon a path if it's blocked for even a split-second (e.g. doors... yeah, every single door) results in taking "the scenic route around a bush by climbing a mountain" or diving into a CloudKill because you saw your friend outlined by a doorframe.
Which brings us once again to padding for time, because IWD2 also abuses that molden oldie game gimmick of dropping you into ambushes upon loading a new zone. Except IWD2 does this for almost every single new zone. Difficulty is not the main issue here (ok, after a few repetitions you just know it's coming) but in the event of an unlucky crit it still interjects an extra, gratuitous (and extra-gratuitous) loading screen every time. In a phenomenon I've cited with one of the Infinity Engine's moden imitators, Pathfinder: Kingmaker, IWD2 had plenty of content to keep players busy and satisfy an "epic" adventure length but still, incomprehensibly, padded its length with brute-forced "puzzles" and some redundant mobs in early chapters, plus running back and forth repeatedly within dungeons. The Dragons' Eye proves especially heinous.
I even had to repeat the cambion twins' big boss fight once, not because it's all that difficult in itself but because it hinges on chasing down one summoner endlessly tossing giants into the fight... from two screens away in the fog of war... where you had no chance of finding her except by mindlessly repeating the fight when you notice where all the adds are streaming from.
Little in this dungeon crawl can compete with its newer descendants. Planescape: Torment remains the Infinity Engine title which has best stood the test of time, thanks to its storytelling focus compensating for outdated mechanics, but with IWD2 especially you have to wonder what rendered Black Isle so insecure as to strain at so many varieties of timesink.
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