Originally Posted by Vitani
I am sure we all remember BG differently but I am willing to make an assumption that most of us remember it fondly but still have in mind it was...20 years ago. Yes, that long if you played it shortly after it's release.

It's nice to throw around nostalgic sentiments but I find most of my childhood games obsolete in many ways now. I remember the magic of it all when it was new a shiny but returning to it after 20 years sure feels like returning to your childhood home...except it's empty, dusty and filled with cobwebs because nobody lives there anymore.

So what "feel" are we talking about? Nothing is going to feel the same way it used to and it shouldn't - gaming changed, the mechanics changed but a good story is still a good story. I mean...just look at the disparity between BG and IWD. Same game but the amount of players who dropped IWD in favor or BG is huge.

That leads me to believe it's not the game mehcanics that ultimately make or brake the game, because I for one am willing to brave the worst of it just to experience the storytelling.


I don't know about you, but I still play original NWN and I've played BG2 recently, as well as more faithful imitations such as PoE (which was a failure of storytelling and writing, not mechanics and engine), so I feel like this argument is disingenuous. Would I want to play IWD again? Not really, because it was more about hack & slash and that doesn't age as well. But I don't agree that combat in BG2 was atrocious and fundamentally flawed. DOS1, DOS2, and BG3 have a fundamental flaw, IMO, of being turn based and requiring you to sit around doing nothing in larger fights. Smaller fights aren't horribly long, but they're long enough to break up the flow of the dungeon or mission you're on. If you're killing goblins in a village, no longer can you have hordes of weak enemies rush at you, because that would take too long. Or you can, but then you force the player to suffer through a really boring slogfest. In BG2 or NWN you can just autoattack your way through in "real time" while the computer handles the complexities of initiative and turns.

In BG1, BG2, IWD, NWN I didn't have to wait for 100 enemies to complete their turns before I could play, every single round. In DOS1, DOS2, and BG3 I do. If they fixed this (and some other stuff), then I would be thrilled. The frustrating thing is they already had an example of a successful transition from 2D to 3D D&D in the original Neverwinter Nights (which had separate issues with writing & is hideous to look at), and bad examples (NWN2, Dragon Age Inquisition) so it should've been pretty easy to determine what needed to change, fundamentally, to support D&D.

It's like Larian assumed that because DOS1 and DOS2 sold well, people like everything about it compared to games like PoE. IMO, there's just a greater audience for 3D games instead of isometric and people have been putting up with some of the Divinity engine's flaws because it's more accessible to them as a game. There's also the issue of expectations. I like both Divinity games and Baldur's Gate games, but I have different expectations and wants from them. It's like if someone sold me a Star Trek game but it was really just a reskin of Kotor, with most of the same mechanics. If I liked both, I'd probably still enjoy playing it and it'd still be a good game. But it wouldn't be Star Trek.