Yeah, still pushing through. I don't love it.
Icewind dale 1 thoughts.
its a grind. The return to 2e is fairly interesting at times. The leveling is interesting. as I noted, character exp tables are not even. which is just fascinating. as they shift.
my party is at 230,000 exp now. fighter/paladin/ranger are level 8. fighter will hit 9 at 250k, pala/ranger 300k. thief is at level 11. cleric is 9, mage is 9. will hit 10 at 250k.
so like the mage started leveling slowly. 2500 for level 2. 5000 for level 3. fighters start medium. 2000 for level 2. but need 32k for level 6, and jump to 64k for level 7, from there they level slower then mages/clerics/rogues. and paladins/rangers even slower still.
mages in2e are also 4hp/level. yikes. they are 6hp/level now. class hp/level also caps out. at 10 they start getting 1 or 2hp/level instead of hit die.
the attribute tables. also uneven.
like str. 8-15 has no effect on combat. str 16 gives +1 to damage, str 17 +1 to hit/+1 to damage.
con. +15 con=+1 hp. 16con=+2 hp for all classes. 17 or more con does not scale at all for classes, that aren't warriors. (fighter,ranger,paladin)
attacks per round mechanics are odd as well.
everyone talks about Thaco, and forgets about this stuff. Thief's leveling fast makes a ton of sense to me. the mage/fighter/cleric balance not as much. mages start out so so weak.
actual game. its extremely linear. not exactly dungeonsiege... but not too far.. 6 man party is nice. constantly resting, and returning to town to sell shit. (probably not worth it to sell shit like I do.) ranger burns through arrows like a madman. slings aren't as bad, as they don't have as high attacks/round.
if you do play, be sure to split it up. 1 bow user, 1 sling user. with mage/cleric,etc using slings. arrows get burned through quick. imho, only take 1 bow user. also in chapt 3 someone sells unlimited +2 bullets, and alot of +2 bullets of fire, but no arrows. slings in general, are quite good. my mage was doing decent work with a sling for a long time.
trap sense in this game sucks. this is something very very few crpgs get right. they usually go one of 3 ways. manual like this game. combined. like iirc neverwinternights, or 100% totally passive. like wrath of the right.
this game has you have to manually click your rogue, turn on trap finding. stand within 10ft of a trap, and wait 1-3seconds for it to detect it. its so tedious. you almost have to know the trap is there. and its not like theirs actual visual tells. also, trap finding breaks stealth. so you can't even stealth ahead, with trap finding on. Game loves to put traps right in the middle of enemies too. any action breaks find trap. looting, need to turn it back on. disarming trap, need to turn find trap back on.
that its fairly short range, and not instant is brutal as well. so you can't really turn it on and just party move. or, you need to put the rogue in the front line if you do, and then still 5ft. stop. 5ft stop. 5ft stop. etc.
games like divinity, nwn iirc are a bit better. happy medium. I think they have passive detect. but hitting stealth, turns on active search, with increases range, and effect. usually instant iirc too. so can be flickered on an off. that said, these games do tend to still just have you moving around in stealth slo-mo nonstop. ugh.. might be nice if games had a "time speed up" effect, when the party is stealthed, so its not physically slower for the player.
owlcats pathfinder games, iirc just make it passive entirely. spot checks are just completely passive. this of course just totally reduces it to a character sheet stat, of yes or no. no real gameplay to it at all. they do create gameplay from it I suppose, by having the mechanisms for disarming, be SEPERATE from the trap. so, you spot a trap, but then need to track the source, which might be in another room entirely, or past the trap, which means manually stepping around it, going forward and disarming it..
this is active with pause, and unit A.i. the A.I. kindof sucks. constantly fighting with it. standing around doing nothing. walking into melee. pathing getting stuck. move order, mage is first one into the room.. i just VASTLY prefer turn based. sometimes Ill give a ranged unit an attack/spell order and they will just like... teleport out of range.
alot of quickloading...
controls are a bit rough. I think your EE adds a bit here. Early days of mouse? programmers couldn't imagine a pc with 2 monitors?
camera move is edge border, or number arrow keys. not arrow keys, only NUMBER arrow keys. if you have a 2nd monitor, it doesn't recognize screen edge. so,every time I want to shift the view to the right, I need to either move my hand to the right of my key board, or take my hand off the mouse, and do it. or, open up the map, click and drag the screen over..
quick save is also Q, and quick load is L in another silly earlygame, ununified design..
Overall, I would probably say icewind dale is not required to play for a modern gamer. it doesn't really stand out as bringing anything super new, or anything. it really is mostly just a combat focused expansion pack for baldur's gate imho.
I must have hit some perfect golden path in the game.