Icewind Dale the Second, Intermission for Fake Longevity

Continued from here.

 

Job the Dwarf Cleric's finally high enough level to cast Raise Dead! Praise be unto Ilmater, no more reloading entire fights because of one unlucky crit!

Sadly, that just brings to the forefront IWD2's other problems, for instance as a case study in the importance of a thorough quest log and in a larger sense, properly communicating the nature of a game's challenges to the player.

The sequel shifted its noncombat focus from trap disarming to puzzle solving. While the puzzles themselves range from trivial to obtuse, they do help break up the hack'n'slash routine so overall a welcome addition. The glacier temple game room was the worst of the lot so far, a clutter of levers you have to pull to remove one boss' immunity or summon a series of random monsters for one of your characters to solo. The first function is almost a non-sequitur except for the boss in question being vaguely associated with said game room in a piece of flavor text... even though she spawns elsewhere... and that still leaves you with no clear definition of the game room levers' effects. The second function could've been simple enough except for lack of a scoreboard to keep track of where you've placed so far in the scores of tiers and sublevels of duels.

A clearer example, however, would be the Fell Wood.

It's a network of zones as nodes from which you can exit in several directions, most false, one leading you further through. Thanks presumably to my Paladin charisma, that dryad was willing to divulge half the route, but you're still left with ten or so unscouted mini-zones whose solutions have to be brute-forced, most of them identical to each other.

On one hand, I love this. Following verbal directions is one of the best golden oldie game mechanics I've repeatedly wished would make a comeback in newer RPGs, after having been supplanted by those idiotic HUD markers for everything for over a decade. On the other hand, revisiting the dryad's information requires you to scroll upwards through an unsorted journal, and revisiting the information on which Fell bits of Wood you've already traversed is utterly unsupported via the interface. Sure, corpses can mark some zones, and you can drop bits of trash loot to mark others, but given both of those decay with time you lose your map-marking progress if you decide to rest.

While both the game room and the twisty forest can presumably be resolved with some pen and paper and brute-force grinding

1) Brute-forced puzzles make as cheap a timesink as damage-sponge mobs.

2) I did not pay for your product only to have you kick me out of it to make my own origami map.

 

Still worse is the duergar / hook horror cave, especially for the ochre jelly fight. Note, it's far from impossible, so long as you know that:

- you can't backtrack once you descend into the cave

- you can't rest anywhere in the cave except at the duergar boss (and even then only by slightly betraying my Paladin alignment)

- hook horrors always spawn extra adds behind you in every fight

- ochre jellies split when damaged

- the key you need to be able to rest is down the ochre jelly hallway, not the hook horror one

That last point can at least be mitigated by rogueish (or in this case, monkish) sneaking and exploration. I buffed my fighter against elemental damage, let him get mobbed and had my ranger pelt the clusterfuck with incendiary devices I'd thoughtfully stockpiled knowing my group lacked an arcane caster for fireballing purposes, while the speedy monk made a mad dash for the back of the cave. You might say, well, you found a solution eventually, so quitcher yippin' Werwolfe. But this was after reloading for three hook horror fights after seeing where enemies pop up with no warning (and thus which character I needed to stoneskin) reloading in a vain attempt to backtrack when I found no place to rest, reloading several times to discern ochre jellies' fission mechanic and resistances by trial and error, reloading more when I found out they keep spawning in from a nondescript spot on the cavern wall.

 

So why exactly am I being punished?

Am I failing for being unprepared? I had the firebombs, I had the right protection spells prepared, I had a passable scout, I had the brute force and the subtlety... but not the information on when to use any of these, because a random hodgepodge of enemies simply materialize out of thin air at you, and you won't find out about them except by trial and error or a third-party cheat-sheet. Not to mention the unforeshadowed and unexplained "you cannot rest at this time."

While IWD2's trendsetting naivete makes its interface lacks and timesinks clearer than most, for one thing such gimmicks still crop up to this day. For another, even when not, they serve as an excuse for designers to avoid implementing puzzles or difficult fights altogether (under the pretext they would wind up equally frustrating) when the issue was never the difficulty but thematic consistency and equipping the player with the exploration / interface tools to suss out and automatically index relevant factoids within the game itself, to scout and prepare for each challenge.

Continued here.