Is IWD II dying?

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I see that the Icewind Dale forum is losing popularity, so I suspect so is the game. Why is that? I personally liked it(maybe because it has more fight and less babling, unlike BG:SoA, and I'm not a very patient person), but is it because there is only one way to finish the game? It's not so open-ended like Baldur's Gate? No character interactions? Why? Come on let's hear it.

 

If you think IWD ll is dying than go and check out the Pool of Radiance ll forum. Talk about dead

 

IWDII is a fun game to play a couple of times but without mods to expand it(ie:tougher Targos) it is not challenging. It was not as well written as BGII. There is a lot of past discussion of this. IMO BGII/wTOB is the best of this type of game. I loved IWDII but it doesn't hold up to BG series.

 

hmm to be honest : the maps + the storylines are GREAT and as good as in bg2. but it suffers from no npcs and straight on storyprogress.

 

IWD2 may get a boost now that Greyhawk: ToEE is out. Don't get me wrong, I preordered ToEE and am really looking forward to it. But IWD2 has two things ToEE doesn't - real-time combat and levels beyond ten. I think that after awhile with ToEE, no matter how much better it is than IWD2, players will start to feel nostalgic for the "other" 3E CRPG.

 

I feel a lot of things were done wrong in IWD2. One thing I thought was the lack of good items to increase your AC. In the latter part of the game enemies are getting +18 to attack, each attack and my AC's are in the lower and mid twenties. And when you get to HoF they're getting anywhere from +30 to +80, that's just ridiculous.
I also felt there wasn't enough items and feats worthy of epic levels which really takes away from the HoF experience. It seemed like the most effective way to fight in HoF was to summon up your beefed up creatures and have them fight for you; not my favorite way to fight.

 

I think lack of replay value is what's killing the game. When I finished IWD2 I'd seen about 99% of what it had to offer (due to the incredibly linear storyline) and didn't have any great yearning to try it again. When I finished BG1 & 2, I started playing again a few days later just to see what I'd missed out and try different ways of playing. But the replay value in IWD2 is zilch which means that unless you're a real glutton for punishment you're not going to be playing the game over time and time again the way you did with BG.

 

The game got boring. Just running around empty landscapes killing Orcs, Goblins etc for half the game wasn't even remotely interesting. BG2 had some city involvement, and varied the areas a lot. For most of the IWD games, you just walked around in the snow.

You're right on two and wrong on two points. IWD suffered because you created your own party. Now whereas maybe this could be a good thing to create the party you want - it offered no surprises or change to the normal "Now let's try this class/race combo" routine.
Another thing, was that you couldn't just walk round aimlessly and spend time in the city gambling, wenching ( ) or brawling, doing side quests, but you more or less had to go on with the story.

You said the Maps are great? What Map are we talking here? The areas? I thought most of them were bland and boring.

No they weren't. There was no roleplayability at all in my opinion, and the storyline itself was so-so. It didn't really make me (or my character) feel special in any way, like BG2 did well, like Ps:T did perfectly.

All in all, I was majorly dissappointed, and I think these are the reasons the IWD series never did well.

 

That was quite a bombardment Gopher... but sadly I must agree. IWD really had a lot of potential, but if the guys would spend as much time on it as they did on the BG saga...

 

Sorry, I just needed to get that off my chest

 

I liked IwD1. 2 just felt like a Barney video.

 

i think most of you did not didnt really deal with the game. it was possible to get ac76-78 ...

and gopher : the talking options for certain classes were much more interesting than in bg saga. i count this as roleplaying. and *I* liked the outdoorscenery.

 

Bloodtitan, obviously you can never have played a real Role playing game, because IWD2 was not a roleplaying game. It was about as un-roleplayish as you can get.

Heck, even NWN was more of a roleplaying game!

And it's fair enough if you liked the scenery, but I'm saying that most people probably didn't like it, because they'd already played the more interesting sceneried BG2.

 

I agree completely with the fact that IW2 isn't as interesting as BG2&ToB. IW2 lacks with interaction with other NPCs, romances and side quests spice up the main story, and personally, those things make me play the game once and again.

But IW2 is still a good game. I liked IW more the second time I played it; I'm sure that the same will happen with IW2. They are linear, OK, BG are too depending on the point of view (after all, you are forced to track Irenicus to the very end and you must do some things unavoidable..).

Summing up; IW2, as it happened with IW, has limited role playing, and you have to seek for it. However they both are great games and I recommend them to everybody; Tough fights, powerful party, good (and linear) story, puzzles, monsters, spells, good items and a fiendish difficulty level; enough to keep you interested and enjoy.

 

A powergamers dream

 

I do think that the BG series can not be compared to the IWD series. They are different in nature and different in scope and size and different in development cost and number of people which have participated in development.

BG2 has truly epic size, much more detail, much more variety and much more to explore. The truly leader of the genre. The only game which beats BG2 is PT:Torment in NPC-interaction, story-line and exploring depth, but PT:Torment falls short in every other game-aspect, mainly fighting.

So, if someones looking for BG2 replacement, the adress is NWN, not IWD. And even if for most NWN is a disappointment. And the OC is a big disappointment.

IWD 1 was, in my opinion, a great game. The perfect dungeon-crawler. And the story-line got my very involved too. IWD2 is weaker then IWD1, but still a good game, in my view. IWD2 is still a great dungeon crawler, even if there are annoying chapters which really get on my nerves (Time-Trap). But it was a dam hard for me at first to kill those goblins and orks from the first chapter. So, it was the hack-and-slash challenge it was supposed to be.

IWD2 dying ? Yes, I think so. The whole game is smaller, so it had from the very beginning a shorter life-span.

 

Bah! The timetrap was the best part of the entire game! But yes there were annoying parts in the game, for me mostly ice temple and fellwood.

 

The above posts prove there are no perfect games, RPG or otherwise. We each like what we like. I liked IWDII but the the best is still BGTOB.

 

never thought this topic would get so hot..

so anybody wanna officially declare IWD II dead?