Infinity Engine Praise at GameSpot

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GameSpot has posted an article entitled To Infinity Engine -- And Beyond, in which the author reveals that he has never had any strong feelings for the Aurora-driven Neverwinter Nights and, according to him, the Infinity Engine has encountered no match ever since it was created, except maybe The Temple of the Elemental Evil. Here's a snip:

So far as I'm concerned, though, RPG engines just don't get any better than the Infinity engine. Although it powered only five games over a five-year span (Baldur's Gate I and II, Icewind Dale I and II, and Planescape Torment, not counting expansions), and can't match Neverwinter Night's flexibility in modding or the pandemic number of D&D releases from SSI in the late '80s and early '90s, I still think the Infinity games were perhaps the perfect marriage of form and functionality when it comes to computer RPGs. The graphical elements, even for the first Baldur's Gate game, are still as beautiful as ever, thanks to their reliance on painted backdrops, while the faux-real-time combat system handily meshed the turn-based underpinnings of the pen-and-paper Dungeons & Dragons game with the fluidity and speed of play of any true real-time game. The storylines (Icewind Dale notwithstanding) are also still among the longest and most satisfying of any epic RPGs of recent years, with the Baldur's Gate series being notable for letting you take a party of level-one characters from Baldur's Gate and guide them all the way to Baldur's Gate II: Throne of Bhaal, an expansion pack to the sequel that let some characters reach all the way to level 40.

Read the whole thing at GameSpot.

 

couldn't 'ave said it truer myself. Although I think the NwN games are quite fun, they do not have the same re-playability as ye good 'ol Infinity engine games.

 

I tend to think character building is considered part of the gaming fun in 3E games. As in, with so many feats and skills you give the player to select from the pool, you don't have to bother yourself too much with the character itself. In other words, roleplaying is turning into character building. Stats playing, maybe. While you can choose from a great variety of classes, feats, skills etc, everyone can do it and there isn't really much uniqueness in it. In 2E, you had vastly predefined non-joinable classes (unless you were a non-human and had more than one class), so you weren't so preoccupied by pumping up your stats. The adventure was more important than the character's numerical side. Nowadays, the adventure serves as an excuse to raise your stats. The game is about getting more and more uber, not about finishing the quests and finding out what's next in the storyline.

As for graphics, it's becoming more and more generic. Seeing those generic 3D blocks makes me think of the old games where the graphics was a rough sketch, leaving everything to your imagination after laying down the necessary boundaries. Except in the era of anisothropic filtering and five kinds of eight degree antialiasing nothing is left to imagination and everything pretends to be complete.

As for the sound, everything focuses on realistic effects and ambients. Except the samples are richer than anything you hear in real life, about the same way as grass is greener than in your garden and sky colours are more refined than the colours of the sky. As meticulously crafted, practically hand-made bitmaps are fading into non-existence, so is artistic music.

 

I was happy with the graphics in IE. My computer is not quite 3 yrs old and I need to upgrade the video card in order to play the new games and I'm not that crazy about the new look.

IMO there is no excuse for not having a good story except lazyness on the part of someone.

Music too should fit the game.

Is the new motto of developers:

"Let's spend the money and time on graphics and to Hades with all the rest?"

 

Music I don't care about. I'm more likely to turn music off than to actually sit back and listen to it.

I enjoy good graphics, for an environment that draws in the player. But not at the expense of a plot. There have been games I've rejected purely because the graphics were rubbish, but also games in which I've endured, purely for the plot (Planescape: Torment). The Baldur's Gate graphics weren't bad, and the perspective certainly fitted the games; as much as I like FPSs, a first-person perspective wouldn't have fitted it at all. Graphical beauty is only one aspect of the surroundings; if the perspective doesn't work, the game isn't going to work. The Infinity Engine mastered the perspective, and the games were good. Not that this was the only good bit of them, of course, but it certainly helped.

 

Well, I guess I'll be the voice for the other side. While I agree that the Infinity engine was great, and the games it ran were some of the best in CRPG history, it wasnt the engine that made it so good, but the stories that the engine ran. And frankly I'll take NWN any day. I've had just as good a time with some NWN mods out there as I did with the Infinity engine games, and that was becasue the story telling is good. I also find nothing wrong with the NWN graphics. Ok, so they are a bit blocky, the Infinity engine games camera was so far away from the action. I find the camera gives me the ablity to 'get in' to the world of the game and highten the immersion factor. ANd modding is so much easyer adn better with NWN. I havent liked any of the Infinity engine mods and they take forever to get out because the IE needs so much coding knowledge where as NWN tools give everyone the ablity to be creative, and not just a select few. Also, the ablity to create and customize characters with the NWN engine is fantastic. I think our attachment to the IE is one of sentement. It was the first engine to really do CRPG's right.
I really agree with the article a few weeks ago that the NWN engine is a dimond in the rough and was really a tool set with a game included. I am only now, two years later cracking the OC from NWN because I have spent that much time playing some amazing mods thanks to the toolset.
Sure I loved BG and BGII and IWD and IWD2 and the untouchable Torment, but I'm also glad that we have moved ahead, not only with gameplay but with the man on the streets ablity to be creative by using the tool set to make the community better.