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Evil Mage! I Counter You With…uh…WTF Is That Spell Again?
There's certain elements of a game, often just one, that make or
break it for its player. For BG2, it's the spells. There's a ton of them –
over 180, and nearly 200 in the Throne of Bhaal (ToB) expansion, just for mages
– and only about half are of the Magic Missile variety. The rest are defensive and
counter-defensive spells, protection magic and the means to shatter those protections.
Whether or not you truly end up liking this game hinges greatly upon whether you are
interested in the strategies involved in mage-to-mage battles. You will have to be
prepared for this. You will also have to get familiar with maximizing the stupid little
Battle Window or whatever gay name it has, which describes to you what spells are cast,
the amount of damage done, etc. It's the only way to tell what spells a mage
has cast. The only point of not shit-canning the little spiral-bound manual for BG2 is in
the spell descriptions. You'll need to become familiar with what protective spells
that, for instance, a Breach spell will dispel. It sounds as fun as I make it initially,
but once you get used to it, it's actually pretty interesting. There's a certain
amount of tension involved in trying to break down a mage's defenses while your
fighters wait, itchy to whack this pointy-hat-wearing fuck into chunks as he works to cast
a pretty fireball on your ass. Actually, what's involved isn't tension,
it's homework. There is an appreciable learning curve involved, and if you're
not down for learning it, this game will rapidly become a never-ending font of annoyance
and frustration for you.
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| Here're just three of the dozen or so counter-defensive spells. After reading their descriptions, can you remember which each is specifically good for? Then here's your Super-Excellent Genius Diploma, Braniac. |
I personally suggest buying the ToB expansion, if not to actually play
it, to have the options of an extended XP cap and the ability to erase spells out of your
spell book. About half of the spells the developers give your characters in the beginning
are useless, and they'll just use up precious slots. Plus, there's way more
spells per level than your mage can memorize (unless you drink a Potion of Genius and
memorize them all, and they'll stay in your book, but I didn't tell you that),
so you have to prioritize, and if you have more than one mage (STRONGLY RECOMMENDED), you
have to divvy them up. I had several sheets of paper with spells scribbled on them, and I
still fucked it up every so often.
The Most Realistic Part of the Game: NPCs
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| Here's one of your NPCs, already equipped with Find Familiar. Note that Find Familiar is a spell that only your main character can use. Thanks, Mr. Funny Fucking Developer Guy. |
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Why? As mentioned previously, their stats are usually pretty lame. If I
rolled up most of these guys' stats, I'd laugh and re-roll. Pardon me if I
don't particularly want a CON of 9 so that I only have about 30 hit points. Leave it
to someone with a DEX of 19 and a STR of 15 to decide to become a fighter instead of a
thief. Also, characters of differing alignments will fight each other if in your party
long enough, like when you hang with both your goth ex-girlfriend and your pal from work
for too long. NPC interactions are actually the best part of this game, and I recommend
switching up your party when you realize your character is stupid and start over, like I
always do. Also, if your reputation is too high or low, NPCs may not join based on their
alignment. They won't leave, though, they'll just complain and remind you about
how much fun they're not having. And they'll all bore you with their own stories
and subplots. "I must go." Fine, fag, leave. WAIT YOU TOOK ALL MY F'ING
SCROLLS GET BACK HERE and then you're off placating them by assisting with their
unimportant problems. They should have called this game The Sims Get Medieval.
However, the most realistic part is in the romances. If you play a
female, you get one choice, the Asshole, and you get to help "save" him from his
assholeness later in the game, hooray for the both of you. They gave up on all the nice
guys when they coded the game (no, really), so they all kind of act nice to you, but never
work up the balls to seal the deal. Watching you make a fool out of yourself for the
Asshole probably turned them off. Male characters get three choices: the Evil Crazy Bitch,
the Sullen Bitch, and the Poor Li'l Thing Who's Just A Selfish Bitch In
Disguise. The verisimilitude at this point is stunning. Except that they're all
elves, further proof that game developers are dateless losers living in their own pathetic
fantasy worlds that they insist on inflicting on gamers. Take your pick, but be advised,
one ends bad if you go all the way through the expansion with it, one is more-or-less
broken from bugs without special patching and careful attention, and the third might be
alright for you, but reminds me too much of every girl I've invariably ended up
dating (and almost marrying, once), so I couldn't handle it. The broken one is
alright if you fix it, but in a way, it's more realistic broken because you end up
wondering why she suddenly won't talk to you anymore, just when things were starting
to go so well. My hat's off to the developers. You can get additional romances (for
original characters from the game or new mods), which proves two things to me: no
one's ever happy with what they get, and most guys want to fuck their sister.
Need Some Help? Of Course You Do.
Playing this game is a serious undertaking, if you really want to get
the most out of it. I recommend getting the most out of it, otherwise you're going to
end up playing a very slow, boring, more confusing version of Diablo with lots of
pointless dialogue. The spells alone will kill you. The patch at baldurdash.org is
strongly recommended, and the site lists all the things it will fix, including my
favorite, shutting up that droning idiot who tells you that You Must Gather Your Party
Before Venturing Forth. PlanetBaldursGate has the most active and most helpful forum for
this and all Bioware D&D games, plus walkthroughs and whatever else you might need.
Should you get stuck at any point in the game, there's at least one right way and
several smells-like-exploits-to-me available to get you through. You can stupidly purchase
the strategy guide from those dim faggots at Versus, too (like I did). Yeah, they probably
make great Ecco The Dolphin strat books, but a game of this size and scope has left
them dumbfounded. It has a good item and spell list, and some other decent features, but
on a whole I wouldn't trust it (and I tried; never trust a strategy guide that uses
the word "insane" -- twice -- on its back cover to describe itself). Also –
and I guess this is a shining spot – all the monsters adhere to the descriptions
given in the pen and paper game. This means you'll have to either dig out or borrow
those books to figure out how to kill some of the monsters, since there are no clues or
descriptions provided in-game or in the manual for any of them. Forget the Versus book,
their descriptions are pathetic.
This game has a small but prodigious mod community worth checking out
if you end up liking this game. I've played The Darkest Day (a large
mod that alters small parts of the whole game, and adds new NPCs and quests) and Ascension
(a smaller mod that alters the final battle of ToB), both from fwstudios.com, both of
which make the game more challenging and different enough to keep your interest. There are
other larger mods (none are very compatible with each other, but Ascension works
well with anything, since it only converts the final battle), as well as NPC mods of which
some are romanceable, as I said. They're all available at fileplanet.com as well as
free sites if you do a little digging, natch.
What's the Verdict?
If fantasy RPGs are your bag, then you'll not hate this game
enough to uninstall it halfway through. It is involving, though, and if Diablo or Dungeon
Siege was just enough hassle for you, forget about BG2. If you enjoyed BG1 enough to
play it all the way through, then you'll like it. It's certainly an improvement.
Black Isle did their best to make a bigger and better game and for the most part, they
pulled it off. After you patch the fuck out of it, it will run along pretty well. Entirely
unlike BG1, it only crashed a handful of times, in the year and a half that I've been
playing it. They obviously spent a lot of time on it, not that we as gamers should give a
shit, but at least it shows in its at-times head-spinning complexity. And you finally get
a chance to kill dragons and the like, stuff your gay college roomie who always had to be
the fucking Dungeon Master never let you fight. This game could have devolved into a
jumbled screaming mess; instead it's more of a barely-controlled chaos full of
fruits, pointless activities that end up seeming far more urgent than they really are, and
a mound of bullshit. They call this fantasy?
 Bill Dungsroman
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