It's true, it's reasonable to say there are a lot of exploits and broken stuff in the original games. Especially when taking into consideration what each person considers to be "exploit" and "broken". Simple examples: Edwin, kensai mage, kensai thief, assassin being able to do 500+ backstab damage repeatedly during times stop, triple Bolt of Glory spell triggers that would kill Demogorgon in a couple rounds, completely invulnerable to absolutely everything blade that can make 9 attacks per round each dealing 30+ damage (which also cannot miss if during time stop), etc. In fact, just the fact that thief can "quaff potion of invisibility" and backstab every round is broken enough for many.
This is true whether it's vanilla BG or BG modded with Spell Revisions, Item Revisions, SCS, improved enemies, etc. Vanilla BG just have more "low-level" exploits that are mostly just oversights and bugs, which are fixed by fixpacks and other mods.
The cool thing about these "exploits" in the BG games is that, some (or most) are rather advanced and can be quite obscure, you can only find out by playing the game a lot, understanding how things work (or by reading guides) and being clever about it. They make you feel like you're smart and that you've just discovered something really cool. These exploits can be absurd, but in a good kinda way; you're being smart with the mechanics. It's also not quite to the point that you can completely disregard all other factors in combat.
Another thing, is that enemies can do many of these things to you too, but the devs were just forgiving about it when they made the game. There's also a reason why it doesn't feel quite so frustrating when enemies use these mechanics against you, and that's because there are countermeasures to everything. Even the most broken/absurd thing can be completely negated by something else. You just need to understand what counters what, and be smart. Here's where mods like improved enemies and SCS come it, I suppose.
And then there's the kind of exploits that blatantly sit there begging you to use, and trivialize encounters while allowing you to disregard most if not all other mechanics. You don't feel "wow I'm smart" when using these. You don't feel good when winning encounters using these.
My point is, even among broken and absurd mechanics, there's still the good kind and the bad kind.
Last edited by Try2Handing; 07/07/21 10:02 AM.
