Tower of Deception for BG2

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Well, as I've previously spotted a couple of tiny errors in the Xan mod, I'm sure Kulyok has some faith in my modest abilities.

I do look forward to see what Kulyok has provided - she has excellent dialogue creation skills.

(I've emailed you.)

Cheers,
Luiz.

 

Oh, yes, your typo hunts are always very welcome.

I've emailed the files to Valiant yesterday, so I guess you'll be able to have a go at them eventually. (It's not as there're *many* additions, though).

And, yeah. Great mod.

 

Well, I've really gone to town on the dialogue files, Kulyok. I hope neither you nor Valiant take exception to the fact that I've made so damn many suggestions! But I hope my blatherings and observations will at least be of some help as you both work to improve the "face" of what is already a very, very impressive sidequest mod.

Cheers,
Luiz.

 

Don´t worry, Luiz, no offence taken so far...

ADD: I was looking on dialogs, just a few minutes ago, and I must say: what a research!! Many changes, totally lost in it... Now I really don´t know which one to use, hehe...

Thanks, Luiz, I will consider all dialogs. It will take some time, of course, but I don´t want to rush it. I must rewrite them, according to your all your notes you´ve made...

Once again, thanks. Val

[ May 14, 2007, 16:50: Message edited by: Valiant ]

 

I finished playing this mod a couple of days ago. I specifically started this current game to get to TOD, although I will now continue my party to the end of TOB.

I was very impressed with almost every aspect of this mod. The graphics were wonderful. It was great to be able to play some new areas that had completely new and fresh area maps that caused me to have to explore VERY carefully, not knowing where every trap and bad guy would be.

I hope that in a future release of TOD the "copied" dialogs can be tweaked or rewritten so that they are not so obviously copies. That would be a very nice tweak that would provide a final bit of polish to an excellent, excellent mod.


I guess I wish that the big nasty sword didn't have such a high INT requirement. But since I don't happen to have a greatsword wielding character in my party at the moment, it was hard to get all bothered by not being able to wield a sword that neither my archer PC nor my NPCs cared to wield in the first place. (Then again, I suppose if I really, really, really wanted to wield it, one could always use SK to edit one of their characters to have the right INT.)


I enjoyed how the initial mage and the cleric both had their own little portraits. That was a nice touch that added a little more personality to their characters.

I didn't have any serious problem dealing with the Astral Shard at the end. Oh, I missed the dialog clues and tried hacking it and hitting it with lesser magics with no effect. Then for yucks, I pulled everyone back and fired off a fireball, and voila!


Oh, one thing that I never figured out... PM me if there's some spoiler you'd like to protect...

What was the story with those two frozen "women"? I was afraid to try anything too severe to unfreeze them. I tried a burning hands scroll I happened to have, to no effect. So, I just left them as is and moved on. Was there something I missed here? Were they of any importance?


All in all, TOD is a wonderful mod!!! Two big thumbs up!!!


Side comment: Regarding soloists... IMHO, and it is just *my* opinion, D&D isn't meant to be a solo game. It's meant to be a party game wherein the makeup of a good party is designed to cover as many contingencies as possible and no single character has to be the perfect, do-everything character.

If a solo fighter is having trouble defeating a given situation, frankly, that's what the "dumb" fighter gets for not bringing along a mage. That said, it's not a bad thing to provide a way out for the poor, dumb fighter, although I think it might have been a little more subtle to have left the "backdoor key" to defeating the astral shard somewhere other than on the body of the shard's guardian.


Regardless, let me be clear. This is a great mod and well worth playing. I only wish that there'd been more to it.

 

@crucis: thank you for playing it, I´m glad you liked it. It was made for the players, so I´m always happy when some of them give me a positive feedback. And about those two dryads - I´ll send you a PM.

About the sword - that will be one of my updates, I will decrease required INT and will reduce its proficiences (it´s overpovered a little bit at the moment). I faced this problem from my testers already...

Once again, thanks.

Oh, dialogs are already rewritten, thanks to Kulyok, now I´m just waiting for all translations. They will be presented in V3, along with a few other cosmetic touches.

 

hey guys, it sounds really interesting so I just wanted to ask if this mod would encounter a problem with any of the following mods:

banter pack
unfinished business (without edited crooked crane)
jedi/sith kits
amber
quest pack

or will it run smoothly?

 

I just completed a complete BG2-SoA/ToB run with a few more mods installed. Of your above list, I had the banter pack and the quest pack installed with no problem. I intentionally did not install UB just to avoid all risk of problems.

I happened to have the Yasreana mod NPC installed, as well as the BG2 Tweak pack, and IIRC a couple of lesser mods.

And I had no problems with ToD. It's a WONDERFUL mod. I only wish that there was more to it.

 

awesome, thanx crucis. I'll start downloading it asap

 

Nice mod - I just finished playing it with a lvl 9-11 party. I thought that the reward to difficulty ratio was perhaps a tad high, but then again I had just been playing a few of the improved IA battles, so in hindsight I probably should have shifted the difficulty level up a bit. I though that overall it was incredibly well presented and it all felt continuous with the original game. The puzzles were good and I particularly liked the bit with the frozen dryad and the mage. A +5 sword seems like a tad much to me though, this might be partly due to my low level party and gear (mainly +1/+2 weapons, lilacor, and Flail of Ages), but perhaps scaling the bonus down to +4 would make it more continuous with the rest of the game.
Oh and trapping the entry to that lich servant guarding the sword would have been good - I ran as soon as my party needed healing (he let off 2 abi dalzims I think) and he didn't follow. Locking the player in with him would prevent iffy hit and run tactics.

Overall I thought it was a fun, well polished mod and definitely worth the experience (I might hold of using the sword until later though)

 

@Stu: Yes, while I haven't played IA as yet, given what I've heard about IA's difficulty, TOD may seem a bit easy. But if you're not using any difficulty-enhancing "tactical" mods, TOD's difficulty seems to merge wonderfully with SoA's overall difficulty.

I will say that I was not overly fond of the final reward uber-sword. Didn't particularly like the BAM and found that the stat minimums kept it from being used by any except the most uber-powerful (in terms of stats) PC's. However, all of that said, I still loved the TOD mod and would highly recommend it to anyone.

 

Yeah, I had a sneaky suspicion that the difficulty would be spot on with the original game.
Btw - all those +2 weapons on the 2nd floor and not a single longsword! The one +2 weapon I could have used!

What 10 intelligence and 15 strength - your just annoyed that Minsc cant wield it! Keldorn's fine with it though, although there is a bit of redundancy with Carysmer (if I ever beat the IA Firkrag).

 

Guys, thank for your feedbacks, but don´t worry - already started to work on v3, which will include a few minor corections about the sword (generaly it will be toned down a little bit), and also some other changes. And a brand new NPC will be added to fight with...

Stay tuned.

@crucius: Haven´t you liked the sword´s BAM? it takes me two hours to make it look like it is now...

 

Valiant, regarding BAMs, I guess what it comes down to is that I prefer the cleaner, more realistic looking BAMs for most weapons (swords in particular) in IWD1 and IWD2 vs. the somewhat cheesey, strangely colored BAMs for many weapons in BG2.

Your sword's BAM is not much cheesier than the Equalizer's BAM or many other sword BAMs in BG2. I guess that it's just a matter of taste. I like the sword BAMs from IWD1/2 where most blades are nice and have straight, clean edges and are steely gray/silver with only a little bit of embellishment for the hilts and handles.


Oh, and BTW, don't get me wrong. The idea of a powerful Greatsword for fighters isn't a bad idea. It just needs to be twaeked so that its stat minimums don't prevent most decent PCs of the appropriate class and alignment can carry it.


@Stu: IIRC, Valiant's greaetsword actually had something like a min INT requirement of ~15. It the mins had been 10 INT and 15 STR, that would have been no problem. Almost everyone, short of Minsc , would be able to wield THAT weapon.

 

@crucius: no no, no offence taken so far, I just thought you don´t like it because how it is made or something, but now I see it is because your own personal tastes, that you prefer IWD1 or 2 style. No problem. And yes, it is made from Equalizer BAM,it is obvious, a part of it...

Either way, the sword will be toned down, but not to +4. Another way... and the requirements will be touched as well... It is true indeed that they are a little bit high...

 

I rather liked the bam - i thought you did a good job with it!

My copy of the sword did have an intelligence requirement of 10 and a strength requirement of 15. Keldorn (Strength 17 and Intelligence 12) could wield it fine. Different version of the mod perhaps?

 

Stu, I'll have to go back and check, but for some reason, I thought that the sword had a requirement of 15 INT (and 15 STR), but I could be wrong. I didn't have a character in the party who wanted to wield any greatsword, so I didn't give the weapon a second look. But for some reason, I thought that the usability requirements were limiting, and I seem to remember that no-one in my party met those requirements.


And I do think that Valiant did a perfectly decent job on the sword's BAM, it just that I don't like the BG2 weapons BAMs' general look and feel in the first place. As I said before, I simply like the look and "feel" of the more realistic looking IWD1/2 style weapon BAMs. This is no dig at Valiant. Just a matter of personal taste.

 

Yes guys, it is possible that you have diferent versions of the sword. In V2, the sword´s requirements has been toned down a little bit, and it was renamed from Callandor to Warblade Of Twilight...

 

I was using the "Warblade" version, IIRC.

 

Ah - I've got Callandor, my bad then.