Icewind Dale gameplay and mechanics

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I had heard this game played just like Baldurs Gate, but I was not aware it was THAT similar. Well, I guess that is good anyway.
My take: Improved graphics over the first one, but inferior to second's. Music is the same epic style - which is great.
All the rest plays the same, the layout, menus, battles... Well, you get the idea.

 

Well there is a few differences, but you wont notice many of them

(example a NPc is completelly unable to join as a partymember.)

The main difference you will notice is style. Icewind dale is much more action and strategic than Baldurs Gate wich is more exploration/adventure inspired.

 

Yes, something that strikes me as very different - and inferiour by the way - from Baldurs Gate, is the total linearity/lack of exploration so far - I am at the lizard men cave.

 

IWD is a much more linear game than Baldur's Gate, but I'm not going to say that its a decidely inferior thing to be. It may be, in your opinion, but my take is a little different.

First of all, Baldur's Gate sometimes presented you with too many options, and too much world. By the time you get to Baldur's Gate itself, you're going to be presented with half-a-dozen sidequests, several new areas to explore, and a wide variety of new NPC options. The plot momentum that had been building from the Bandit Camp, through the Cloakwood and the Mines sputters and dies.

That doesn't include the huge areas of nothing... I enjoy exploring new areas, but some of it is just gratuitous, and as a player without a walkthrough, you don't know that a secret or important thing won't be located in yet another screen of endless forest and hills.

IWD also, because of this linearality, scales to your ability a lot better. Yes, you're more or less herded along in the plot, but unless you're playing a completely ineffective party (a group of 6 single-class wizards... no melee ability, and almost no money for all the scrolls you need to buy, and a limited availability of necessary magic items), the challenge more or less scales with you... there will be difficult fights, but those are usually the ones you messed up on, or the ones designed to be difficult. In BG, a lot of this scaling is gone; it is not difficult to wander into the Ankheg area and have your party completely annhilated. More realistic? Sure. More fun? Debateable.

IWD does allow you the exploration aspect; it just controls it a bit better, and doesn't make it a huge timesink in the game. The Severed Hand is great for exploring, and its at your level. There's a few options for exploring in Dorn's Deep. Additionally, while you're not wandering, the game's pace means that you're usually hurried along to new areas every hour or two, real time, giving you someplace new to explore all the time.

Linear game-making can be really bad; the Companions of Xanth game, for example, usually only had one solution to any given problem, and a lot of other linear games will only let you advance in singular ways... but I don't think IWD's linear nature makes it inherently inferior to BG.

(Now, there are some aspects of the story that BG does better, but that's another post altogether).

 

I see your point. However, I do not mind linearity, at least when it come downs to console RPGs, but when I picked IWD, I was hoping for something open ended and that values exploration, because that is what makes these games apart, or so I think.
I am at the Dragons eye, not soo far I admit, but still I would want some free side quests by now. It just feels limitating.
By the time I advance further in the game I will let you know.

 

Most IWD side-quests tend to be of short duration; you might not even notice them if you have the right party (like the ogre in the tower; I didn't know about alternate solutions there for a while because my druid was so often my face character).

 

If you get thruogh Dragons Eye, it's only the beginning....

 

MrNexx i agree with what you said, but i would also like to point out that i alos really loved just that imense freedom in BG1

but yeah, IWD1 i would say is a better/easier start game heh. Its still fun, and i find it easier to play iwd1 than BG1 nowadays, becose i dont have ot wander around for 14 hours just to find the basic items i "need"

 

Yep, that's how I feel too... I play these D&D games on a LAN with a friend of mine, and for us it's good that IWD (1 and 2) is so linear... It's always clear to us which way to go. In BG, we're always arguing where we should go...

 

Yep, that's how I feel too... I play these D&D games on a LAN with a friend of mine, and for us it's good that IWD (1 and 2) is so linear... It's always clear to us which way to go. In BG, we're always arguing where we should go...

Haha. You know, this is not the game's fault!