Forum Overview :: Gamerasutra :: I was disappointed by the shift towards polished linearity in Baldur's Gate II.

[quote name="Jerry Whorebach"]It seemed like once you started a quest chain in BGII, you'd visit the associated field maps in a more or less set order, and the maps themselves were designed more like thinly-disguised dungeons - long corridors with scripted encounters between entrance and exit - than actual locations. It felt more like a collection of published adventures, whereas BGI felt more like one of those big wilderness crawls, the kind that give you a single large map subdivided into hexes with maybe a page of description detailing terrain features and points of interest for each one. Perhaps it's a personal thing. In the ideal D&D game that exists in my mind, the most complex part of dungeoneering would be locating the dungeons based on clues gleaned from folktales and archaeology; tracking monsters would involve researching their ecology to identify potential sources of food and anything else they need (water? shelter? heat?), combing the sites of their attacks for game trails or clues to their behaviour; disarming traps would entail examining the mechanisms with an understanding of the physical principles by which they operate. Obviously a "game" like this would be LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE to make on a computer, and probably even harder to make fun, so I'll just stick to Ridge Racer and Lumines and leave CRPGs to people who actually enjoy the various systems and tropes associated with the genre as it exists today (nerds). [quote name="Ice Cream Jonsey"](Best tactics in video games - Baldur's Gate 2 and BioShock.)[/quote] The idiot in me wants to ask "WHAT MAKES BALDUR'S GATE II MORE TACTICAL THAN [insert title of any comparable game, let's say CLOSE COMBAT]?" But the idiot <i>savant</i> in me understands that more tactical != better. The fact that you had more fun with BGII is all the proof you need for this assertion, because that's the whole fucking point of games. The ultimate argument against Close Combat might very well be that a reasonable person could fail to even make it all the way to the end of the box copy before unceremoniously dumping it back on the shelf at Babbages, now suffering from a case of terminal boredom only curable by ten minutes of Blazing Lazers on the TurboGrafx-16 demo unit outside. That being said, the real-time D&D combat in any Infinity Engine game is still objectively terrible, like Command & Conquer with six units and a panic button on the space bar.[/quote]