Replayed IWD, the EE version. Playing a no bullshit no pointless minigames no crap straight AD&D dungeon crawl is just nice. And it becomes even nicer through years, because for a lot of nice things in say Kingmaker, it still doesn't scratch that itch in same manner.
my party was
fflewddurrpwgrasawyer Jester bard
beorn big silent guy fighter>druid with 5 pips in spears and 2 handed
le evil wizard slayer>wizard with 5 pips in daggers and dual wielding
Macha the beast master dual wielding clubs and with a bow
fighter/thief dwarf named Cheery with short sword, axe and mace and shield
edwinna gnome priest/illusionist
the Jester proved to be surprisingly alright, winning a good amount of encounters even with IWD being filled with undead. He is obviously weaker than standard no kit IWD bard but it is good, because sith warchant isn't something you want if you don't want game be ez. progressing quickly through levels means skull trap and there are enough +attack weapons in game to make even 1 pip bard strong. one of star ones is Hammer Bow, a 4 apr bow you can only get if you kill Emmerich btw. also Bard has cool dialogue with NPCs.
druid wasn't nearly as good as I remember, the spiky plants are ok early but later he mostly poked things with spear using stoneskins and super iwd cleric defence spell (+6ac)
wizard slayer was picked because I didn't want to ruin game with any overpowered kits. he didn't do anything much even in Malavon fight tbh (Cheery just 1shot drow with backstab instead). but overall performed ok
Macha even with heavily gimped kit and equipment (i am not even sure there are non addon magical clubs in game at all) bonked everything and killed Belhifet. EE makes Belhifet immune to all magic i think (?) and modern players were butthurt so one even made mod to "fix" him and his immunity to +2 arrows. little they knew, Piercing arrows actually go through him, so actually ranger shot him dead in a few rounds.
fighter/thief proved to be good tank using ac jewelry and barkskins and items and some +% immunity to damage.
gnomegirl was support.
overall IWD was alright, it holds very well. the biggest problems is itemization with blatantly op items, op gear from addon, and oddly horrible addon dungeons.
Loot is weird one, as random stuff means game loses to BG1 in some respect; BG2 has some op stuff in it, and yet, +apr +stunonhit random swords in IWD just feels very bad even compared to BG2 loot.
I don't know how serpentine linear locations passed through same designer who did tomb, dragon eye, Hand, etc. but I guess hey if linear serpentine way worked for last level of dragon eye its ok to fill addon with them right??
EE has some odd problems with pathfinding I don't remember (like characters getting stuck on each other). also all 'restored content' is pointless shit.
but the king of IWD is of course atmosphere. In particular dialogue. In its day, it probably wasn't something special, but today, in the era of twatterdialogue and games filled with references and shitty self inserts including twitch blogards promoting their games, playing this, you feel at complete peace. You feel good reading normal, in character, fantasy novel dialogue.
fear replaying the game lowered my tolerance for shitty fanfiction dialogue in games to the point that I might struggle playing modern shit, as so far I has been able to close one eye on that if gameplay is at least entertaining.
So I thought maybe I would play IWD2 as well and checked on what modders were doing. Quoting modders, they were doing: "adding recruitable npcs!" and "no more boring illogical puzzles!".
so replaying IWD2 is delayed for unknown amount of time.
