This game is obscenely good.

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Now I don't know about "better characters" I would trade Minsc for Myron any day of the week.

I have a love hate relationship with Fallout 2 though. There are some really good things that it brought to the game but the whole cultural reference thing was just too silly (Blues Brothers, Rocketman, Monty Python's Flying Circus, Holy Grail, etc).

Still, both Fallout 1 and 2 allowed you to play a non violent character (and still level up, I once reached level 19 in Fallout 2 with a non violent guy). They allowed many things like double crossing employers and creative use of explosives. There were several ways to complete quests.

And last but not least some quests actually went deep below the surface so it would take into account many things to get the whole picture. Thing about the

Spoiler

Bishop/Lynette/Westin connection

in Fallout 2.

Last but not least, I can't think of any game in which

Spoiler

you could blackmail a doctor then go back to get healed and get a dialogue in which good old doc would tell your character how stupid he was for asking him to fix him up...

My character died because I had thought the game wouldn't keep track of such a minor thing. I didn't reload, I was so happy with this turn of event that I didn't want to reload but started over with a new character.

 

Nonsense. Viconias sarcasm is way better than spell-chucking.

 

Personally, I think that what made BG2 so great was, in a way, it's lack of technological advancement. The other Infinity Engine games had already established things like the combat system, the graphics engine, which allowed Bioware to focus on improving, rather than inventing.

To clarify, BG2 was never about introducing new stuff, but rather about perfecting things that were already there. The graphics aren't technically that much better from Bg1, but everything is more detailed - more work seems to have gone into each frame. The dialogue system is the same as in Bg1, but the dialogue is better. Same goes for the combat, and for nearly every other aspect of the game.

To me, Bg2 represents the PC RPG at it's absolute peak - it was the best game that could possibly be made in it's genre. Following it, every game in the genre had to try some new angle (Like NWNs multiplayer and editor, or KotORs Star Wars setting and third person perspective), because there really wasn't any point in trying to best BG2.