BG2 - Last of legend

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I agree, it seems BG2 is truly the last of the great RPGs released in a long time. Nothing beats a great, immersive storyline.

If I'm not wrong, the CRPG genre was going through many years of stagnation before BG1 was released; I seem to recall that a lot of people claimed that it single-handedly revived CRPGs.

In any case, history tends to repeat itself, so keep hoping The time should be ripe soon, for another great CPRG to rise..

 

i pray you are right, though with the constant stream of MMOs being released, it doesnt appear to be anytime soon. companies know MMOs bring in money, doing a single player RPG that happens to have multiplayer, (BG, IWD, Diablo to a lesser extent) might seem like too big of a risk, they'd rather play it safe it seems.

 

Quote: D&D is dumbing a lot of rules to make gameplay simpler, but at the same time they're constantly introducing more varied and complex information. D&D 3e has tons and tons more detail than 2e had.


I have to disagree with you on that bit. On 2ed you had, for example, a 150 page book about The Harpers, while in 3ed you get a few pages. Lots of 100 page + books about cities, organizations and so on. In 3ed you just get a brief description, compared to what 2ed had to offer. As for 4ed, it looks to be more like some playstation rpg converted into pen and paper. "Special attacks" etc, placing slots in skill trees. Stuff like that. I may be wrong of course, but thats what it looks like so far. Stuff that`s dumbed down isn`t a good thing.

 

Most of the cities and organizations in 3e have 200page books on them. Including topics that are more obscure than cities and organizations, not to mention 2 books solely on good and evil (exalted/vile deeds), which explain D&D morality.

The only book that offers a "few" pages on everything is the all encompassing guidebook to Faerun. In the book they actually discuss this very topic stating that they do two things with each increasing year/edition.

#1 - they advance the Faerun timeline 2 years for every 5 real life year that passes between books (or 2 months for every 5 real months), iirc, it might 3 and 5.

#2 - They go into better detail and also - since they continue to push forward in time more information, becuase they cover the past events (everything in 2e) and current events (contained after 2e stopped print) and some future events (which will become past events in 4e).

 

Quote: Most of the cities and organizations in 3e have 200page books on them.


What books are those? I have certainly never seen them, and I own most of the forgotten realms 3ed books. Mostly they are about certain areas, with a few pages describing certain places. It can`t even begin to compare with the 2ed books in any way. You even had lists of the most influental families in the city, what they do, how many members they were etc, in 2ed. I have seen nothing of this in 3ed. Whjat I have seen thoug: is a ton of feats and new spells. Most of them are just a different variant of the ones in phb though. And about 60 percent of the feats makes no sense, its just a bunch of stuff you can do without any training, in real life, turned into feats. I do like playing 3ed though. Don`t get me wrong. But even wizards of the coast admitted that it was a "poor" system\product. Hence the reason why 4ed is coming up so soon after 3.5 came out.


Quote: #2 - They go into better detail and also - since they continue to push forward in time more information, becuase they cover the past events (everything in 2e) and current events (contained after 2e stopped print) and some future events (which will become past events in 4e).


The entire history of the forgotten realms were described in the book you mention. From creation of life and up untill where the game starts. And all it took was 5 pages. Not very detailed is it? The history of the world in 5 pages.
Not even close to what they had in the 2ed books.

 

Hmm, Black Isle/Bioware took a risk as well developing BG1 years ago, I believe the current craze then was FPS/RTS games.

While I agree that most companies will just develop MMOs nowadays; after all, why get someone to pay for a copy of your game when they can pay a monthly fee on top of that as well to play, but well.. just call me an optimist then.

 

Ok... I'm going to play Devil's Advocate here and do something that could very well doom me to the title of heretic on this website.

I was wondering if any of you can tell me what is so great about BG/BG2? When I say that I don't want subjective answers like the graphics and the story. I want answers that can't be chocked up to opinion.

Now before I get branded a heretic... I just want to say that I love the BG series. Even more I love the IWD series. The thing is, I also like NWN and PoR. I agree with most of what these boards say about the games having bugs and stuff but maybe I'm just more forgiving because I still enjoy the games. I'm just trying to find out why all of you insist the BG series is the perfect RPG without resorting to subjective opinions.

.... ok now you can brand me...

 

It's hard to do that, most of the reason we all like the BG/BG2 series is because of opinion.

If you want the facts, they will include the wide variety of paths the story offers (dialogue options, content that is opened up based on class/race/alignment/choice/etc). There aren't very many games that offer as comprehensive a system of choice in a game as the BG series has for many of us on these boards. I hear a lot about other games like Fallout and PS:T, but I've never played them (nor do I ever plan on doing so for some odd reason o.o).

I don't know if you find that to be objective or not, but that's as well as I can put it.

@rawgrim

I don't know what books you own, but I go to the comic shop in my town and there are books on every Faerun Empire (Waterdeep, Neverwinter, Cormur, Thay, etc.), races (Serpents, Dragons, Underdark dwellers - Underdark Gods - Underdark etc., etc.), and so forth. It would literally cost over a grand to buy every Faerun book in 3e :-/.

 

I think that is impossible. Whether I like a game or not is a matter of opinion. For instance I enjoy TM's city/society builders others do not.

Agreed. Also, the fact that BG I & II could be so successfully modded added to the life of the game.

 

First off, someone asked what would be your ideal RPG?

Something isometric, with deep characters and storypaths. I couldn't give a duff about graphics, as long as it's not horrid. Character creation is always fun. I guess 1# would be story and characters, 2# would be different paths you can take in the game. 3# And of course, fun and intelligent game play.

And now Cirrus asked what was so great about BG1/2.

Jesus I could be here all night, I'll try to summarize, and if you agree, please tell me fellow BGers.

1# Story. The games always had rich and unique story, in BG2 it became deeper, you wanted to know more about characters, you could banter with teammates, and romance female companions. What other RPG can you have a child depending on your relationship with other NPCs?

----=== Story Spoilers ===----

Now the villains of BG series are truly the best ever in RPG history (okay some will argue ff7...but serious...we got Sarevok. haha). Firstly in BG2 you have a fellow Bhaalspawn/Half Brother who single handedly nearly evokes a war along the sword coast, an intelligent and powerful Iron fisted style character.

You also have Irenicus, the Five, and Mellisan. All unique and gripping characters.

---===End of Spoilers===---

Aside from that, as soon as you finished you usually wanted to start again with another class, now that is addictive game play.

Also there are many NPCs to recruit, with their own story involvement.

Despite some people saying the graphics being bad, I love them. Clean 2d goodness. Overall, the game is addictive, fun and intelligent, a combination you don't see regularly now days.

 

I'm coming out of a lurking season to try and give my answer: so what makes BG2 fans so passionate about it?

Story: pratically every cRPG I've ever played (not too many, I admit, and PS:T/Ultima VII being exceptions) had, IMHO, a dull storyline. IWD? Check. IWD2? Check. I like those games, but they can't make me feel like I'm a part of that world. There's no immersion in your party at all. No conflict between radically different characters. As interesting as they are, it ends up being an exercise of tactical/munchkin playing.

BG2 has it's munchkin side, but the story was compelling. Why? Because it was a really, really well-done cliché. It's Campbell's "Hero's Journey" all over again, and we know we all love those stories. You had a quiet childhood, then you are forced into adventure, and eventually discover you are at the main part of a world-changing prophecy. You get to face your dark side and choose between good and evil.

Of course, ToB's story wasn't that great, and there are inconsistencies between BG1 and BG2, but it's far from ruining the experience. My point is, the game actually makes you *feel* like the protagonist. BG fans can be so passionate because they actually care about the story.

Characters: the problem with videogames is that well developed (or interesting) characters are very rare. The BG series gave us a dozen. Imoen, Jaheira, Minsc, Viconia, Khalid, Jan, Yoshimo, Irenicus, Bodhi, Sarevok; most gamers who got into BG 1/2 had always strong (and varied) opinions on those characters. And that's good; it means they actually come alive throughout the story, and suddenly they're more than a bunch of stats walking around with a random portrait. My BG parties are based on who I like to take along, not on the most powerful group, and I have to take my hat off to any game that can make me play like that.

Replay Value: say what you will, but I don't think there was ever an RPG that can be enjoyed so many times with so many differences between runthroughs. There's different NPCs, different quests, stronghold, equipment, outcomes, romances... I've been playing this game for years now and I haven't done half of what can be done with it.

Well, I think those are very good reasons. Sorry for the long post.

 

1)Oblivion sucks...BADLY. I cannot believe someone on here decried NWN/NWN2 are "not RPGs but action-adventure games" then went on to suggest Oblivion and Morrowind as good RPGs!?
If I want to move my wrist back-and-forth frantically to get pleasure, I will masturbate. What the Hell does my ability to shake a mouse back and forth and mash buttons have to do with my CHARACTER'S ability to swing a weapon?!

2)3E rules are FAR superior to 2E, regardless of what you think about the sourcebooks for either. AD&D made no sense whatsoever as far as game mechanics went. 3E brought D&D up to date with RPGs from the early 1980s at least and 4E looks to be bringing D&D the rest of the way(getting rid of the silly "fire and forget" magic system is a good start anyway).
If you feel that a particular sourcebook for D&D 3E lacks information about a particular culture or area then so be it but this has nothing at all to do with which rules set makes more sense or is easier to use.

 

Rune, the reason I said Oblivion is a good RPG while NWN/NWN2 are action adventure is because Oblivion, despite the FPS mouse movement (which I really hated tbh), had a solid story, plenty of realm to explore, a world to be immersed in and well... to be honest it was a true cRPG in the same sense as the BG2 series, just with a different gameplay mode (First Person instead of 3rd Person), which has no actual bearing on whether it is an RPG or Action Adventure.

NWN/NWN2 are action adventure because the story is simply a mode by which to get to combat. The game is silly really. I mean, everything that could/should be handled by a diplomacy check, is completely blown out of proportion and turns into a three tier boss fight (World of Warcraft?? what??).

 

I think this sentence by itself sums up exactly why we like BG so much. It is one huge cliché from beginning to end. Whether it's the story, the characters, the interface, everything in the game had already been done before. No game had quite done it that way though, or brought elements in the combination that BG did. I mean, so many of us keep praising Irenicus as one of the best bad guys in any CRPG but... let's face it, the guy is a caricature. A caricature turned into a truly monstrous and yet strangely compelling villain because of one simple little element: David Warner was hired to voice him.

It's all in the little details.

Games like PST, Arcanum, Ultima 4-7, Magic Candle, Wizardry 4, and so on, are the greatest RPGs because they do everything so differently, they consciously set out to do things "like no other game has before". Wizardry 4 has a villain as the PC, and has him summoning monsters to defeat good parties of adventurers. Arcanum starts out with as cliché a story as you can then piles up the twists. PST has all the not-usually-seen weapon types and not a single usable sword (both swords have to be turned into another weapon before they can be used).

BG did things differently. It piles up all the clichés not because it wants to break them, but because this is what the game is really made of. The villains (forget David Warner for now) are all paper-thin (seriously... how long did it take you to figure out, or at least suspect, who was pulling the strings in ToB?). The stories are one "kill foozle to save the world" after the other. SoA is one of the most munchkin games ever released, with ToB delightfully breaking that record. The games (especially SoA) give you this incredible illusion of non-linearity while they have, at heart, a straight-line plot (and not a very original one at that). I think it a testament to the serie's greatness that, in spite of this, we all keep coming back to the game and lauding it as, if not one of the greatest, then at least an excellent and hugely entertaining (not to mention highly replayable) CRPG.

BG2 was the game that made me realise my previous criteria for judging if I like a CRPG or not had to be tossed out the window.

 

As Cirrus points out above though, 'story' in a very subjective aside from whether a RPG is good or not. RPGs are tactical simulations at their core. Some of the greatest RPGs had little or no appreciable story.
Game mechanics is more important to RPGs than story any day of the week.
For one thing, BG's story did not impress me. It did not bother me or anything like that because I do not turn to video games for great storytelling. I read books for that. I pick up Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun if I want rich characters in an imaginative setting. Or Michael Moorck's Elric stuff or Robert Silverberg's Lord Valentine chronicles or...

You get the picture.

While BG may have more impressive storytelling than, say Doom or Nethack this is largely a moot point for me. And most of the alleged "roleplaying" elements such as party banters(save for several memorable quotes from Minsc, Viconia and others) just got on my nerves! As if my game was being interrupted by a maxi-pad commercial every so often.

Don't even get me started on the romance nonsense.

Now don't get me wrong, BG + TotSC was fun enough that I place it amongst my top ten favorite CRPGs for a variety of reasons. Same goes for BG2 + ToB(up until the point where you must leave the pocket plane and march through series of boring 'final fights' with various reincarnations of villains you have already defeated a dozen times. That is where I stop playing and call it "finished").
Even though these games were saddled with AD&D's HORRIBLE game system, the adventures and tactical situations were fun. Also RPGs are kind of like sex in that when they are good they are GREAT and when they are bad...they are still pretty good!

And not all party/RPC banter gets on my nerves. In Jagged Alliance 2(a strategy RPG that is also still going strong today thanks to the open source and modding community) the banter is great. The quotes are usually memorable and/or funny(some of the more obscure ones are absolutely brilliant!) and you could replay the game 35 times and still not experience all of the dialog/quotes. And the banter in that game was not so overdone/intrusive to ruin your gameplay experience. At no time during your march to Meduna are you halted by "Buzz" who suddenly realizes she is not over losing Lynx and that she still has an unquenchable longing for his affections...blah, blah, blah.


But Oblivion and the like are not even bad RPGs. They are not RPGs at all since they rely on the PLAYER's button-mashing/mouse-jerking skill rather than the character's weapon skills and what's more they fail to impress me as arcade/console-styled action-games.

 

RPG = Role Playing Game. Not sure if you knew that, but very few RPG's have the same combat system implemented. "Tactical Simulators" are RTS.

For the record - RPG's can be also be completely devoid of combat in any form whatsoever. Kind've derails the idea of an RPG being nothing more than a Tactical Simulator prettied up.

 

The 3ed rules are basically a tactical simulator, and nothing more. When you can tweak a character to be able to make around 20 attacks per round. Thats 20 attacks in 6 seconds.........If that`s not lame I don`t know what is. Plus you only get XP for killing stuff now (and quest XP). So you have, say a bard, who runs around killing orcs. And thats pretty much the only way he can get better at playing music. You kill something and your music skills improves...........Yeah...3ed makes sense........While in 2ed a bard got XP for playing music at inns and such. Ergo: Getting better at playing music, by playing music........Make more sense? It does to me anyway. The skills and the attack + AC system however is better in 3ed. But the rest is just lame. It seems like its made just to have some fanboys have a Drizzt clone that can`t die in the game. I mean they even removed the fumble rule, added way more HP, way more AC for the characters, and so on. Feels like "god-moding" an rts game, and not like playing a roleplaying game.

 

I have no idea what the official definition of RPG is but to me for a game to be a Role Playing Game I must be able to play a role. Now the role may be limited as it was in my first cRPG, Betrayal at Krondor, or you may have a variety of choices as in the BG series. Is your character a good guy out to save the world in spite of itself? Is he a selfish guy just interested in what he can get? Is he (she) evil wanting to take over the world. Is he a psychopath killing everything that moves? If the game brings these thoughts to my mind I consider it a RPG. But then I manage to do a bit of Role Playing in the city builder games.

In regard to BG II/ToB I agree that the dialogue, great as it was, did become intrusive but that didn't stop me from enjoying the game.

I'm waiting for that game where I can actually talk to the NPCs and tell them to "Shut up for Talos' sake we're in the middle of a battle."

 

@Rawgrim

I think you're mistaking the number-crunchers curse with what the game is really all about. Nakia understands - it's all about being able to choose a role or archetype for yourself and play it. The combat portion is easy to abuse... but only if you care more about fighting than playing - in which case you would never survive any of the campaigns I'm a part of, because it's easy to overwhelm anyone that's on a power-gamers streak.

Not to mention 20 attacks per round is impossible without having 12 arms, 27 dex and epic feats .

This ties directly with the topic too . The BG Series and Oblivion/Morrowind let you pick an archetype - and give you enough options to play through the game with that archetype in a unique way that is not possible in NWN/NWN2, because no matter what class/alignment/etc. you are, you have the same events take place regardless.

 

Yet, besides the Role-Playing part of BG2 (which is far from realistic), The whole lvl-up idea is silly. What - I am killing goblins, and then, one day, when I am sitting on the toilet dish, I suddenly "level-up" and realise I am able to cast more spells, can more accurately use a staff and have more health? Kinda stupid, if you ask me.

The "Bard gaining xp for playing music" is not very realistic either. Because later, at lvl-up, he gains weapon proficiencies, spells and HP based on what? Music playing? Oh great. I have been playing music for 10 years...and I doubt that I've become better with any kind of weapon because of that.

The roleplaying games must be as realistic as possible. Unfortunately, the D&D system is far, far from realistic.

My personally favourite system of character progression is that of Betrayal at Krondor. There is no lvl-up. The additional +HP max come very slowly. Each and every skill improves only by practicing it - for instance, you cannot become better in combat by repairing armor&weapons, or sibging in a tavern, or killing an enemy with spells or missile weapons, or summons. And there is definitely no progression for one character if the other single-handedly slays a whole group of enemies.