Baldur's Gate 2: Shadows of Amn, part 2

There was only one place in the Promenade that sold things other than weapons and armour (though they sold that as well), and that was a shop just to the left of the crumbled remains of the exit to Irenicus' dungeon. It had a nice look to it, with interesting curios in the multi-level décor, and a surprisingly obvious dig at the old Dungeons and Dragons cartoon series, with pictures of two characters from that show on the wall, with text describing their deaths.

In front of those posters was a woman who sold some special items that made more reference jokes. I'm not sure how many of them were specifically references to Planescape: Torment and which were just integrating the Planescape campaign setting in general, but she was selling Dak'kon's Zerth blade and Vhailor's helm, both of which specifically mentioned the Nameless One in their descriptions, and there were items referring to the Sensates and the Mercykillers. I believe this vendor is one of the "bonus merchants" included in one of the patches I installed. The items are very expensive, but that's good, because this game needs a money sink.

There's a great deal of humour in this game, in dialogue and absurd situations, and I love it.

The circus tent

The circus tent was undergoing renovations as a TARDIS, apparently, containing a caverous space with an elegant bridge over a bottomless chasm, leading to a lavish arabesque building. There was another genie there to greet us. Three genies already! If doppelgangers were the big recurring theme in BG1, it's looking like genies are the theme in BG2. Amn seems to be the D&D equivalent of Arabia (and, unless I miss my guess, Minsc's descriptions of Rashemen sound like that's the D&D equivalent of Russia). This genie asked us a riddle, and unfortunately this riddle was actually a mathematics problem (a weakness of mine), and I apparently miscalculated and got it wrong, but surprisingly enough he gave us a second chance with another, much easier riddle, then let us pass.

A character named Aerie was there, in the form of an ogre, inside the main building. I already knew the name before playing the game, so there was no doubt that I should believe her when she said she wasn't really an ogre (because the master of this place is an illusionist), but even if I didn't know her already, she sounded so earnest I'm sure I would have believed her anyway.

The way everyone in this place was talking, I was preparing for a major boss fight, especially when one creature explicitly offered my party time to rest after a fight, and prepare for the final room. It was a surprise when the supposedly powerful wizard (who had supposedly created all this architecture in this pocket plane, and bound all these slaves) went down so quickly and easily. I guess it was all sound and fury, signifying nothing.

So Aerie joined my party after talking to her dear uncle Quayle, the gnome wizard I never picked up from BG1, and she seems like a cheerful, upbeat girl, and romanceable. And a cleric! So I'm concerned that she might make Viconia superfluous, and I really want to have Viconia, since I liked her so much in BG1.

The genie from the tent showed up again when I investigated the magic lamp I acquired during the adventure and obtained the control word from a malicious "man" named Jafir. Jafir seemed certain that if I got a wish from this genie, I would end up in as much trouble as the one who used it to create the things in the pocket plane, but perhaps this is where my high wisdom comes in. The genie offered a selection of quest-specific wishes, as well as a secondary list which appears to be the usual list you'd get if you used the Wish spell, all of which seem to be combat-focused, and disappointingly limited, but it is one of the larger lists of options, and it's understandable given the nature of this medium, as opposed to the free-form wishes I imagine you could make in a pen & paper session.

The combat wishes weren't useful in this situation, of course, so that left the quest wishes. Perhaps my wisdom wasn't quite high enough to give me a really good wish option, though, because none of the options were very satisfying. I could free the genie, attempt (and fail) to wish for more wishes, resurrect the insane gnome who caused all those deaths to "give him a second chance" (but no option to resurrect the people he killed), send the genie to kill Jafir, or try (and fail) to kill Irenicus and rescue Imoen -- the genie claimed something was interfering with his powers on those last two options. I love the fact that the genie uses the classic line, "Your wish is my command!" when granting a wish! I ended up freeing the genie, for lack of any better options.

Chapter 2, and names again

Chapter 2 began surprisingly enough shortly after I left Waukeen's Promenade. I hadn't even taken two steps when some rogue named Gaelan approached with a vocal tic causing him to exclaim "Coo!" every few sentences, and said he could help me find Imoen. And although I was wary of following a vaguely shady rogue into his house, which he suggested, the game actually transported me into it automatically, despite him saying "You can decide for yourself if you want to come in when we get there."

But despite the forced action, it set out the goals of the next chapter nicely, telling me to raise 20k gold, and suggesting a few places to look for work (or in other words, quests).

Then Chapter 2 began, and to my dismay I learned through both the chapter narrator's speech and one of the voiced cowled wizards that Irenicus is meant to be pronounced "eye-REH-ni-cus", which doesn't sound anywhere near as good as "eye-ruh-NYE-cus".

Now, Gaelan advised me to not spend any money until I've raised the necessary amount, but by this time I had raised enough to pay off the government to allow me to cast spells in the city, and that was priority one for me, as a sorcerer, so I went as quickly as possible to the Government District, through several minor encounters on the streets.

Companions

I actually came across my old friend Viconia upon entering the district, being treated to the same kind of hospitality she was enjoying when I found her in the first game, except that instead of the firing squad, they had set up a cosy stake to roast her on.

After the fanatics were dead, she said she would wait for me in the graveyard after I'd freed up some party space. I'll probably have some space soon. One of the mod-added party members (Chloe) is starting to wear out her welcome. There's just the issue I mentioned before, that I already have a cleric, and I like her. Then again, Aerie's also a mage, and Viconia is a much more powerful cleric, so perhaps I'll try it out with both of them. I really have a lot of party members with healing spells this time. Even Minsc can cast a minor heal now, unlike in BG1.

Speaking of Aerie, though, she's suddenly started bringing up her handicap rather often. She's a winged elf, but she was crippled by her former captors, who kept her in a cage so long her wings started getting necrotic, and they sawed them off. But I got the impression that this had happened quite a while ago, since she said she'd been under the protection of Quayle for some time, and the wounds had clearly long since healed over, so why is she suddenly getting more and more upset about them? I'm being nice to her about it, but I'm having trouble believing this aspect of her character. Jaheira, on the other hand, is being quite cruel to her about it, and it's clearly because she was getting interested in me herself, though she hadn't said so yet. Her attraction was clear from the little hints given in her interjections, but I'm not interested in romancing Jaheira. Her personality is rather abrasive and domineering, and she shouldn't be falling for someone so soon after finding her husband dead, in my opinion.

Anyway, after finding the person to bribe to allow me to cast magic and asking around to see if anyone had more leads on Imoen (unsurprisingly, they didn't, though I did pick up a rather vague quest from them to find a missing outlaw named Valygar), I spoke to a boy named Delon outside who was begging for some help with some strange creatures attacking his village of Imnesvale, with rumours of an ancient witch returning to curse the place. Ah, just the sort of thing I wanted! As much as I like exploring the city and talking to people, I was looking forward to some regular adventuring again. I guess I didn't need to spend that money on a magic license yet after all, if I'm going outside of the city. Ah well, no matter. I expect an excursion out there will make all that money back pretty quickly anyway.

The Umar Hills

Imnesvale was an interesting place with its own side quests, and plenty of people to talk to. Opinions differed amongst the townspeople as to what kind of creatures were attacking them. The bartender promoted the ancient witch hypothesis, and was only too happy to provide me with a copy of his book about it, which was a reference to the Blair Witch Project. What made it really funny was when I snooped around in the containers behind his bar, I found that they were all filled with dozens of copies of that book!

Other villagers blamed a band of ogres for the killings, and still others believed a pack of large wolves was responsible. I did a little scouting around, and found the ogres, but they convinced me they were peaceful, so I left them alone. I found some caves, as well. One of them contained an unexpected monster -- a mimic. They're the monsters that disguise themselves as treasure chests to lure unsuspecting adventurers close and catch them off guard. On killing it, I obtained a vial of its blood, but it had no obvious use, and the description mentioned uses that weren't immediately applicable, but I kept it in case there was a use for it later.

In the other cave was a werewolf, gnawing on some human bones. Mystery solved, eh? Except she said that there was someone worse that was controlling her kin, and he's the one responsible for the recent killings. My experience with werewolves is rocky, to put it mildly, but I know from Tales of the Sword Coast that werewolves aren't automatically evil, so I gave her the benefit of the doubt.

A diary from a fighter named Mazzy was in one of the houses, and I recognised the name as a potential party member, but from the sound of it she was some kind of fighter, and I don't need any more of those. I explored just up to the point where I found the temple that the town quest seemed to be leading to, and turned back, because I didn't feel up to the challenge of a dungeon crawl at the moment. I went back to town to report all this.

In town, I found a few side quests that I'd missed when I went on the scouting run. Simple local concerns such as paying a man for a lucrative secret involving some chickens, and buying some ale for a small group of teenagers. There was the option of also buying them some weapons, but that had the potential to end badly, so I stuck with the ale.

It's strange that they'd need someone to buy it for them, though. What else is there to drink in these towns? For much of human history, in many regions, fermented beverages were the standard drink for everyone, children included. Fermentation renders the drinks sterile, and thus wines and beers were safer to consume than water in places with poor sanitation. The only other things I can think of that they might have drunk would be fruit juices or fresh milk, but in a society without refrigeration, both would have to be obtained fresh, since fruit juice would quickly ferment into cider or wine anyway, and milk into cheese.

So, I bought the boys their ale. There'll be no cholera deaths on my watch!

Outside a house, I met a young man who wanted me to convince a girl's overprotective father to let them go out together. The father turned out to be a Cowled Wizard who was working on building a big stone golem to use as a guardian. He was unreceptive to my speaking on the boy's behalf, despite the pleas of his daughter, but he offered me a fetch quest to get him a needed ingredient for the golem. As it happened, it was the blood of a mimic, which I already had with me, so it was a quick and easy bit of XP and reward.

Now, it was pretty obvious that this was a thinly-veiled Frankenstein plot in the making, so I began positioning my party strategically as the wizard began to activate the golem. Surprise, surprise, it woke up hostile and out of control, and we managed to beat it down without the wizard or his daughter getting hurt.

He was shaken and relieved at the narrowly averted tragedy, and decided that perhaps he was wrong about knowing what was best for his daughter. It ended with the two lovers joyfully running off together with the wizard's blessing, and all was fine. I imagine there were different endings if one or the other or both were killed in the golem's rampage. This was one of the more enjoyable quests in this town.

I happened to find Valygar in this area, too, from the other quest given at the government building, and in a little plot twist it turned out he was being framed because of his anti-magic stance. His story sounded genuine, and it seems the Cowled Wizards just wanted his dead body to use as some kind of genetic key to open up a sealed sphere that had teleported into town recently. So, to finish up that questline, it looked like I'd have to add him to my party and go on another dungeon crawl. Again, I decided to put it on hold for now, and head back to Athkatla for a while.

Baldur's Gate 2: Shadows of Amn, part 1

I think most people interested in reading this have probably already played the game, and are just curious to see someone else experiencing it for the first time, so for the most part I'm going to leave my spoilers unhidden. But first a brief hidden list of what I already know, since I had encountered a number of spoilers myself just from reading about this game series, I know that Sarevok somehow reappears in this game (even though he crumbled to dust last time I saw him), there's some kind of betrayal to expect from Yoshimo, there's a vampire named Bodhi, Irenicus is doing something that involves stealing souls, and that a couple of characters from BG1 have died offscreen between the last game and this one.

For BG2, I imported my character from the final save of BG1, but I realised too late that I hadn't been carrying the Golden Pantaloons that I had been advised to bring along, along with a few other items that are supposed to follow you into BG2. I did find the Helm of Balduran after all, though, which Minsc had been wearing. Oh well, I'm not going to worry about the pantaloons. From what I understand, all they did was eventually give you some cheat/god gear which I wouldn't use anyway.

I did have to make some edits to my character after importing her, though. Firstly I redistributed some of my stats using Shadowkeeper (no cheating either -- I removed as many points from some stats as I added to others) so that I'd have a decent amount of wisdom for the Wish spell. But even after reading up on stats for sorcerers, I'm confused about which stats are good for the class, if any. Later D&D editions say that charisma is the main stat for sorcerers, and that intelligence and wisdom do nothing (aside from the aforementioned Wish spell). But elsewhere I've read that charisma doesn't do anything for sorcerers in BG2, so I'm left thinking that sorcerers don't actually have a stat that affects their magic ability. I also went ahead and changed my name to a more classic fantasy name (after briefly experimenting with a comedy name which appears in most of these screenshots), and also picked a different voice set -- one of the few imported from Icewind Dale that worked (the sultry one). It's still Theseus' ship, right?

Next, the portraits. As much as I liked the cartoony style of the portraits I used for BG1, they didn't exist for all characters, and there just wasn't as much variety as there are for more realistic portraits, so I decided to go all-realistic this time. I changed almost all of the portraits. You can see some of the alternate portraits I'm using in that character record screenshot, a couple of which I collaged together myself. Minsc is the only one in my current party that remains unchanged. I don't really see any reason to change it, anyway, though it could benefit from better contrast and more colour saturation to better match the other custom portraits.

Finally, mods. I'm using quite a few mods, some of which are even new companion mods. Perhaps I should have opted to play it without extra companions the first time, but I have a feeling I'll be playing this game several times through anyway, so why not? I'll still keep at least half of my party occupied by default characters, and I'm sure if I don't like some of these new NPCs, I can uninstall them, thanks to WeiDU.

So, my installed mods are: Disable Startup Movies; Widescreen Mod v2.2; BG2 Fixpack; Banter Accelerator; NPC Flirt Pack; Unfinished Business; IEP Banters; Separate Avatars for Female Dwarves; Ascension v1.41; NPC Friendships; BG2 Tweaks.

And new NPCs: Allison, Alora, Auren Aseph, Chloe, Fade, Keto, Saerileth, Sarah, and Tashia. Alora is a recreation of my favourite thief from BG1, though I should really swap her out with someone else once I find another thief, since I'm currently without Imoen.

I also started with the Imoen Romance mod, but I quickly found it to be...unwelcome in my game, and uninstalled it before I reached the end of the dungeon.

"Just like old times! Well, except for the torture and all..."

Imoen showed up to join me, just like in Baldur's Gate 1, except she's a bit more shaken and disturbed by whatever torture Irenicus was putting her through. Probably something similar to what he'd been doing to me in the first cutscene, but the narrative suggests that my character doesn't remember any of it aside from that last interrupted one. Irenicus' monologue is a bit ambiguous about how much I'd gone through, since he says at the beginning "It is time for more experiments" (emphasis mine), and yet he also seems to be discovering my untapped power and potential for the first time. Possibly when he says "more" experiments, he's talking about the experiments that he's been doing on everyone else, and this is the first time he's started working on me.

Minsc and Jaheira were in cages in the same room, and they both hailed me automatically. Some of this seems like concessions to people who may not have played the first game, with all the dialogue explaining (if you claim not to remember) that they're old adventuring friends, and what happens with Minsc. It seems that no matter what you do or say, Minsc will take it to mean you're intending to abandon him, making him angry enough to go berserk and bend the bars open just so he can strangle you. He recovers quickly, though, and comes to the conclusion that you must have intentionally made him angry so as to get him out of the cage. This is a bit of a forced "choice" on Bioware's part, and I'm not sure why they thought it was necessary. There is an option to dismiss him from the group after this, but I didn't try it to see if he would actually leave or if he would refuse.

Jaheira's cage at least required a key. She said "If you're strong enough, maybe you can break it open", but even with Minsc in the party, I couldn't find any way to attack or bash the lock as you can in Planescape: Torment, and it was one of those "unconventional locks" that Imoen can't pick. The key was easy enough to find, and I freed her and invited her into my party. I didn't run with her in the first game, but that was mostly because I didn't like Khalid. Besides, even if Khalid were with her this time, it would be cruel to just leave her in the cage, and it would be stupid to not accept her into the currently shorthanded party once she's free.

While having Imoen scout ahead for traps (just like old times, if by "old" you mean "last year"!), there was an interesting but odd encounter with a genie named Attacker -- er, sorry, Aataqah -- who greeted Imoen by name, and seemed glad to see her. Interesting that the genie spoke directly to her, and expressed disappointment that I (the main character) wasn't around to talk to. Other times I've spoken with NPCs using someone other than the main character, the dialogue simply assumes that it's the main character talking, despite the name showing as the currently controlled character -- and sometimes that character will argue against herself with interjections!

Aataqah presented us with a hypothetical variation on the Prisoner's Dilemma, but he didn't seem to like my answer. His response indicated that he assumed my choice was for some other reasons than my actual ones, which is the same problem that plagues many so-called "personality tests" online, where intent and motivation are never considered. I liked Minsc's answer better, anyway.

Name pronunciations

I now know for certain how to pronounce the character's name "Khalid", since Jaheira's voiced dialogue includes her pronouncing it "ka-LEED". So far, I do not know how the name of our adversary Irenicus' name should be pronounced, but it reminds me of the name of the theologian Irenaeus of the Classical period. His name has a number of variations in English, but I'm partial to the ones that sound like "ear-uh-NAY-us" and "eye-ruh-NAY-us".

So, based on Irenaeus' name, I will assume, until/unless I hear it pronounced later in the game, that Irenicus' name should be pronounced "eye-ruh-NYE-cus", since it's the better-sounding of the possibilities.

The dungeon in general

Aside from quickly gathering more loot than my party can carry, I don't see why anyone would want to skip this dungeon. It actually seems pretty fast to go through, with a large variety in its décor, and some parts of it are entirely skippable, as I discovered by accident when I found myself outside without having used any of those trap-disarming rods I had picked up earlier. I had to reload to explore the other path (I had thought the side passage would lead me around into a control room or something) so that I wouldn't miss any of the content. I also almost entirely missed the elemental plane of air, as its doorway was not very well-distinguished from the rest of the walls around it. I probably would have missed it if not for it being marked on the map.

The encounter with the dryads was probably the most interesting part, as it seems to shed light on what's going on with Irenicus, and included some nice character development. They say that he brought them there because he wanted them to inspire emotion in him, and that he feels something missing. They also told a little about the (heavily trapped) bedroom of a woman of whom he seems to be mourning the loss. I'm guessing he trapped the room to ensure that no one disturbs the way she left it, and not because she usually preferred sleeping in a trapped room.

I'm assuming this is the same woman who was involved in the forgotten cloning experiment, in the room full of tanks containing partial and whole clones of one specific woman. That room, like many in this dungeon, was a tantalising tease, raising interesting questions and issues that I hope are foreshadowing for what's to come. Clones, vampires, and forgotten gods feature noticeably here, as well as portal travel to other planes.

I might even wonder if there was some significance to the library scene, where Imoen commented on the "dusty old tomes all over, bookcases nearly spilling..." Nearly? Books were piled up in, on, and around the bookcases, but strangely, the single desk in the room had nothing on it at all.

Earlier, I had found the room of tanks that were keeping some people alive, though most seem to have gone insane from the extended isolation. The one in the other room, Rielev, who could actually hear me and respond was the most effective in creating pity, and this is helped greatly by the voicing. He was a former servant of Irenicus, and Irenicus had been trying to find a way to cure whatever was killing him (or had killed him), and restore his youth, planning to give him immortality as a reward for his service, and keeping him alive in a tank in the meantime. But, like everyone else in that area, he had been forgotten, and was slowly going insane over an unknown number of years.

"Master! I no longer wish to come back! Let me slip into the oblivion that has been denied me! Please!"

Jaheira preached unwelcomely about how wrong and "unnatural" it is to try to preserve life, and unfortunately there was no "Shut up, Jaheira!" option. No one would want to keep enduring the situation he was in, but the problem was not that he was being kept alive; it was that he was being kept trapped in a small prison with no contact with other people. What if his tank could have been moved to the dryads' room? There, he at least would have had the company of three sympathetic creatures for as long as they were all trapped there. Regrettably, there seemed no obvious way for him to survive outside of the tank or to be moved, so death seemed to be the only option I was able to give him.

Doppelgangers again

Well, only one this time. A fat old man was imprisoned in a cell with glass windows instead of bars, and I went ahead and freed him, though I did think it was rather strange that his cell was outfitted with so much furniture, and containers that held pretty good weapons and gear. He insisted on tagging along with us to find the exit together, and I kept an eye on him.

I don't know if it was coincidental or intentionally scripted, but it turned out that he decided to drop his disguise and declare our stupidity at having fallen for his ruse at the same moment as the party encountered a group of hostile dwarves, but it worked out pretty well that it happened at that time. Jaheira had recently leveled up, and so I had just been reviewing her druid spells, and noted that she had a "charm person or mammal" spell memorised. I wasn't sure what a doppelganger qualified as (their hissing and their disdain for simians like us seems to suggest something vaguely reptilian), but I tried it out anyway.

It worked, and he was charmed, so I sent him into the group of dwarves to soften them up for a little while, before throwing a skull trap into the group, and cleaning up the weakened stragglers after that.

A nasty surprise on exiting the dungeon

So, my heavily-laden party finally emerged from Irenicus' dungeon, looking forward to selling off all the junk gear we could carry in the nearest town and to stock up on necessities. It actually took a lot less time than I was expecting, considering people have apparently found it too bothersome to keep running through on replays, judging from the existence of a popular mod that skips that part of the game. I was really expecting something more akin to the Circle Tower segment of Dragon Age: Origins, which I loved, but which was very long.

Anyway, in a scripted sequence, where my party is unable to act while events unfold, we see Irenicus fighting off the last of the invaders, and then he greets us before Imoen throws a magic missile at him. He responds with another spell (much less lethal than the ones he had just been using on the invaders), and then the bloody Ministry of Magic shows up and says they're both expelled from Hogwarts for their unauthorised use of magic!

So the result is that they took Imoen away to lock her and Irenicus up in Azkaban. I've lost one of my favourite characters, and I don't know how long it'll take to get her back. I hate that kind of plot twist! They did exactly the same thing in Planescape: Torment with Morte! Taking away a character from the party with me frozen in place unable to do anything but watch it happen.

Looking around, I found that we had actually emerged from the dungeon inside a major city. So...all this torture and hideous, Mengele-style experimentation was happening right under a busy marketplace? I'll have to see if they explain later how this had all been going on under the noses of the Cowled Wizards all these years.

So after selling off all the unnecessary loot in the many shops on Waukeen's Promenade (who all seem to sell nothing but weapons, armour, ammo, and other adventurer-centric items -- even the one in the fruit shop!), I learned that I could obtain a license to cast spells in the city if I go to the government district. As a sorcerer, I don't want to run into the same kind of trouble Imoen got into before I can rescue her. Strangely enough, I had actually cast Identify on a couple of items, and no one got angry. Maybe that one's not flashy enough to notice.

There seemed to be one major thing to do in that location other than buy/sell gear and rest up, and that was to investigate the trouble in the circus tent. And that's for another post.

Planescape: Torment, part 1

After finishing Baldur's Gate and its expansion, I wasn't sure which game I might focus on next. I ended up dabbling with several, including Classic Adventures, a total conversion for Baldur's Gate 2 that I'm writing about for a future post, as well as Planescape: Torment, Icewind Dale, and Arx Fatalis. This post will be dedicated to Planescape: Torment.

This was one of the games from my X-mas list this past December, and it was the highest priority on that list. My time playing it has confirmed that priority to be warranted. It is an excellent game.

I'll begin with a brief overview of my impressions of the gameplay, interface, and graphic design, to get all that out of the way first, since I have harsh critiques in those areas. My praise will come afterward, in regard to its well-deserved reputation as a very well-written game. Some of it is extremely moving, especially as accompanied by the beautiful character theme songs (especially Annah and Deionarra's themes).

My setup

I own the GOG version of the game, so that means no CD-check to deal with. Installation went smoothly, and was followed by the mods as listed in this mod installation guide. The Bigg's widescreen/high rez mod, Ghostdog's UI mod to fix up the UI for the higher resolutions (and to make the font more readable), The Ultimate WeiDU Fixpack for bug fixes and spelling/grammar corrections in the text, Qwinn's Unfinished Business patch for restoration of some additional content that was cut from the game as released, and finally Qwinn's PS:T Tweak Pack, for some convenience tweaks (stackable rings/scrolls/etc.), banter acceleration, and other things.

The graphics

The primitive 3D graphics are very unappealing -- especially the character models. They have not aged as gracefully as BG and Icewind Dale, which used hand-painted artwork for the characters. The backgrounds aren't as bad, aside from everything being overly busy in texture and lacking specular highlights. I suppose lack of specular highlights is better than "default" specular highlights, which is responsible for so much early 3D looking like smooth plastic, but properly done specular maps can work wonders in the richness and appeal of a surface, and such functionality was basic to all 3D rendering software of the time.

I was able to replace the large portraits in the character database section of the journal (and a couple of the NPCs) with beautiful, hand-painted artwork of the characters drawn by various independent artists, for everyone except Dak'kon, Nordom, and surprisingly Morte. For some reason, finished paintings in a similar style focusing on those characters are proving elusive, even after hours of searching. Ignus is one of the few that doesn't necessarily need to be replaced, since he's just a man on fire.

I've been given permission by three artists to use their Planescape character paintings in a portrait replacement mod for everyone to use (The Nameless One from a detail of a painting by Samizé, and Fall-From-Grace from a painting by Eleni Tsami, and Annah from a painting by Michele Chang). There are also a number of NPCs, such as Fell the Dabus, and some general townspeople, which have open permission from the artist Phaere to be used in mods, and there are a couple of pieces of official game concept art that I think I can use as well, such as one for Vhailor, and the wererats, and one of the creatures. My plan is to release a version 1 of the mod containing this allowed art and the official art, and hope to be able to find appropriate (and allowed) art for the other main characters for a more expansive version later. This will replace both their portraits in the NPC journal, and their face icons in their stat screens. I may also go ahead and replace their paperdoll graphics with the portraits, since they don't actually change to reflect worn equipment anyway (aside from TNO wearing the Dustman robe), and those figures with harsh black shadows in front of bright primary coloured backgrounds is rather off-putting. I thought perhaps they were trying to establish some kind of colour-coding for each character, but then why is TNO's orange background so similar to Dak'kon's orange background?

The "animated" portraits at the bottom of the screen, however, are posing more of a challenge, and my first release will probably not change them.

I'm sure they had high ideals for these animated portraits when they decided to do them, but the result is frankly terrible, as if major concessions had to be made, and they didn't have time to just scrap them altogether. Bad, very unconvincing single-frame "blinks" make up the bulk of their "animation", while the rest is occupied by occasional unclear actions which simply distract from the gameplay when they occur. For instance, Grace occasionally moves into a profile and places her hands together as if to pray, but then immediately returns to her normal position, or Ignus occasionally seems to yawn and stretch, with the flames behind him suddenly coming to life for the brief time he's moving, before freezing in place again. If they had simply gone with the still-image method that the rest of the Infinity Engine games had used, they would have been much easier to replace with more appealing hand-drawn artwork. I hated them so much, I actually went and investigated the BAM file format, educated myself about their purpose and use, and downloaded some tools to modify them. My attempts were partially successful, but they became glitchy if the characters took enough damage. I'll have to try a slightly modified method.

Positive aspects of the interface

The journal and quest tracking system is very well done. I might say it's better than the one in Baldur's Gate, since it's separated into categories to create more of a knowledge database as new things are learned, with characters you meet, a bestiary of monsters, and the usual diary entries and current/completed quest sections. The only thing it's missing is a user notes section, as in BG, where you can type additional information for future reference, or for role-playing purposes. This would be especially useful in this game, since there are many more puzzles, scattered clues, and items that may be useful later. I also think I may have forgotten about a stash of items or two (which, in hindsight, is pretty appropriate for this game). In Baldur's Gate, I tended to store items I didn't want to carry with me in the chest by the door in the Friendly Arm Inn, but the only place that feels like a "home base" in PS:T (the little crypt near the mortuary where you can rest for free) doesn't have a storage chest inside, so I stashed items in a few different locations. Setting things on the ground outside of a chest seems to risk letting those items disappear.

Of course, what I really should do is simply get a real paper notebook for these games, since most games don't have that BG-style user note section anyway. Some games don't even let you make notes on the maps, although PS:T does have that function. I've written notes here and there on little notepads and scraps of paper, but I think I'd like to keep a more permanent set of notes as I play.

Unfortunately, I couldn't find any way to make random NPC comments appear in the dialogue window, as they can in BG, or certain other technical information that tends to appear over the character's head and then fly away out of sight when I might have been distracted by something else on the screen.

Complaints about the interface

Despite finding the game to be a positive overall experience, I find the interface to be slow and clunky compared to Baldur's Gate or Icewind Dale. The interface departed from the intuitive and simple to use action bars that previous games enjoyed, in favour of a very counter-intuitive system wherein right-clicking would pause the game and pop up a radial interface, from which you then choose from several sub-menus such as "use item", "cast spell", or "use special ability". Confusingly, right-clicking on a character's portrait does not, as I would have expected, bring up the context menu for that character -- instead, it brings up the context menu for the currently controlled character, because it doesn't appear to matter at all where you right-click, just that you right-click. Worse, even though pressing the space bar pauses and unpauses the game in any other circumstance, it does not unpause the game when the menu is up, even if you already issued your command. You have to right-click again to make it go away, or hit escape or enter.

This is horrible interface design. Aside from the inconsistency in the functions of keys depending on context, why the need for submenus at all? Space on the screen is not at a premium here. If you're auto-pausing the game anyway when you bring up the menu, why not expand it, letting it take up all the screen space it needs to show all options on the screen at once?

Also, why a radial menu? Radial menus make sense when you're using a game controller, and you can point the analog stick toward the action you want to take. They could even make sense if you could press the arrow keys to select an option when it pops up. But here, it seems to have no function whatsoever. I tested every key on the keyboard, and found none that would act as directional selectors for that radial menu.

Movement in the game is also worse than Baldur's Gate. Characters pause noticeably between you clicking on your intended destination, and their departing for it. Pathfinding seems to take much longer here than it should, especially on a modern system.

This game also complains if I try to quit the game by hitting Alt-F4, which is nevertheless the fastest way to quit, bypassing all the menus and "are you sure" prompts. BG only gives one such prompt if I use it: "Are you sure you want to quit? Boo will miss you." PS:T first gives me a warning that since my desktop is set to higher than 16-bit colour, movies won't play in windowed mode (needless to say, when attempting to close the program, this is of little concern to me) before giving me the "are you sure you want to quit" prompt.

And the rest is praise

An elderly man was sitting alone on a dark path, right? He wasn't certain of which direction to go, and he'd forgotten both where he was traveling to and who he was. He'd sat down for a moment to rest his weary legs, and suddenly looked up to see an elderly woman before him. She grinned toothlessly and with a cackle, spoke: "Now your third wish. What will it be?"

"Third wish?" The man was baffled. "How can it be a third wish if I haven't had a first and second wish?"

"You've had two wishes already," the hag said, "but your second wish was for me to return everything to the way it was before you had made your first wish. That's why you remember nothing; because everything is the way it was before you made any wishes." She cackled at the poor berk. "So it is that you have one wish left."

"All right," said the man, "I don't believe this, but there's no harm in wishing. I wish to know who I am."

"Funny," said the old woman as she granted his wish and disappeared forever. "That was your first wish."

--A little story told by Morte in Planescape: Torment

I was unfamiliar with the Planescape campaign setting of D&D, though I knew about some of the planes that one might travel to, and that the plane where Baldur's Gate was located is called the Prime Material plane. This game takes place mostly in a "city of doors" called Sigil (so far it hasn't been explained if there's any intended significance to the name, but sigils have nothing to do with doors), where there are doors/portals leading to every other location imaginable, though they will not open unless you have the "key", which can be anything -- even abstract things like a memory, a thought, or a gesture. A couple of quests, in fact, revolved around finding keys that people had lost, so they could return to their homes. Most of the doors don't look like doors, though, in case you're picturing a city with actual doors covering every surface. Instead, any space that's bordered on all four sides by something can become a door under the right circumstances.

Anyway, I like stories where magic doors to distant places can be opened almost anywhere if you either have the key or know the time and place, like in Neverwhere, Time Bandits, Pan's Labyrinth, The Lost Room, etc. (and in some of those cases listed, it was one of the few things I liked about them). Unfortunately, as a gameplay mechanic, it made me worry about whether I should sell anything at all, and instead just cart around as much junk as my party could carry, just in case some item might open a door somewhere. Eventually I relaxed, and started selling stuff off.

Character build

You play as a predefined character -- a human male with a past. I've criticised other games for this, so why not this game? It helps that this character has no memories, and the game establishes that each time he loses his memories, he tends to develop a different personality. Thus, I as a player am creating his new personality from scratch. The game has a recurring theme of "What can change the nature of a man?" Well, losing all your memories would probably do it.

In this regard it also makes sense that you cannot choose your class at the beginning of the game (you start out as a fighter), as having a class means you have training in those class-related disciplines. In this game, if you want those disciplines, you'll have to find someone willing to train you.

This is a game where you get a lot more out of it (or at least a different experience) if you invest in certain stats. The descriptions of the stats indicated that Intellect and Wisdom are very important for regaining lost memories, and since I prefer to play mages anyway, I invested heavily in those stats. I couldn't become a mage until about a week into playing, of course, for the aforementioned reason.

It also helps that this game has long, detailed dialogue options, which sometimes also take into account your favoured stats. This engages the role-player in me. Having a good selection of detailed responses is the primary element that raises it above games that only offer brief responses of no consequence, especially those that are presented as mere summaries.

The intellectual stats also play an interesting role in dialogues, as you can get hints that people are lying, or get opportunities to shame/embarrass people who mistake you for a brainless oaf or otherwise underestimate your intellect. Your wisdom can also stop you from saying the wrong thing in a conversation that might lead to an unwanted (perhaps violent) resolution, though you're free to disregard the warning if that's what you actually want. I hear Fallout 1 and 2 make heavy use of stat-related differences in dialogue options as well, which is something I really like.

As it turns out, the recovery of memories from high Wisdom gives you more than puzzle pieces to the mysteries of the game's story, but also rewards you with items and special abilities, as you remember locations of old secret stashes, or forgotten arts (such as how to raise the dead).

The puzzles

The first puzzle I encountered in this game was an ancient copper earring. Examining it gave a description, suggesting it bore further examination, and it had a "use" button. In Baldur's Gate, various items have such buttons, but these had always been limited to things like expending charges on an item that buffs your stats or similar things. But this item's description also included a helpful note explaining that the "use" button in this game allows you to manipulate items through dialogue prompts. Interesting! This adds another new dimension to the gameplay! Through the dialogue, you can attempt to open combinations by making choices such as "Turn it this way," "twist it that way," "do this other thing," etc.

Stats seem to play a role in puzzles as well (giving little indications such as "this way feels right"), and in the ability to answer riddles without being told the answers in-game. It seems that if your intellect isn't high enough, it won't even give you the option of answering correctly, which eliminates the multiple-choice aspect that usually makes riddles in these games easy to beat (since there's usually one answer that makes perfect sense). This could be frustrating if I really did guess the answer and wasn't allowed to enter it, but that's one of the differences between an RPG and some other kinds of games -- the limitations and advantages are based on how you build your character, rather than what you as a player know. In this case, however, I couldn't even guess the answer in reality:

Ahem! Now, think of words which end in "-GRY". Angry and hungry are two of them. There are but three words in the Common Tongue... what is the third word? The word is something that one uses every day. If thou hast listened carefully, I have already told thee what it is.

Although I couldn't guess it (because either my intellect or wisdom wasn't quite high enough), what I was able to do was challenge the riddler to a riddling contest. Unfortunately for me, since I enjoy riddles, this was a section where my character automatically knew the answers, so I couldn't pick them myself. This contest, however, presented some that were new to me, and clever, like this one:

What is the beginning of eternity, the end of time and space, the beginning of every end, and the end of every place?

Answer: The letter E.

The story delivery

PS:T takes its narrative a step further than BG. Aside from having a lot more flavour text in the descriptions of locations (the ones where clicking on an item in the scenery gives you a description of it), it also takes the dialogue from script-style (mostly spoken lines, with occasional descriptions of actions), to full literary style, with the dialogue in quotes, framed with descriptions of actions, expressions, tone, and internal thoughts, as you would see in a novel.

For instance, when you initiate dialogue with a non-hostile NPC in Baldur's Gate, it begins with the NPC's opening dialogue, and then provides you with response options. In PS:T, initiating dialogue first provides you with a description of the NPC, including their appearance, current actions, expression or attitude, and how they may be reacting to your approach. At that point, you are given the option to actively greet them, or leave them alone.

Additionally, during dialogues, you are also often given two versions of the same answer, except that one is marked "Truth", and the other is the same statement, but is marked "Lie". I'm not sure exactly what effect this has on the game aside from the obvious role-playing benefits (you can say something advantageous that you don't actually agree with), aside from the idea that telling the truth is considered Lawful, and lying is considered Chaotic, in terms of alignment. I also understand that making vows in this game is taken seriously, and will affect your alignment one way or another depending on whether you uphold that vow.

That leads me to another interesting difference in this game, which is that alignment is something that evolves via your actions, instead of it being something you decide upon at the beginning of the game. You begin as True Neutral (aka Neutral Neutral), and your actions determine whether your order side swings toward Lawful or Chaotic, and your moral side swings toward Good or Evil. I think it's correct to characterise the "good" alignments like this: Lawful Good characters do good things because it's the law. Neutral Good characters do good things because their empathy moves them to do so. Chaotic Good characters do good things when it suits them to do so. In my case, my actions pretty quickly landed me at Neutral Good, and it has not changed since then. I suppose this means that I've been right to think that my natural inclinations are toward that alignment.

The music

The main theme song makes great use of French horns and strings to evoke a sense of a haunted character with a tragic past. The percussion and certain other instruments also contribute to create an eastern feel to the music, highlighting the exotic and foreign locales where the game takes place. (The end credits theme song goes further with its eastern exoticism in a rather strong departure from the rest of the music, before suddenly transitioning into a surprising electric guitar solo.) The majority of the character themes are variations on the Nameless One's theme, with their own particular flavours.

Deionarra's Theme, the theme of the anguished spirit of a girl whose love had been betrayed by one of my prior, crueller selves, incorporates a heartbreakingly beautiful piano bit which, combined with her dialogue, moved me to vow to do whatever it took to put things right with her. Much of the game, in fact, seems to consist of me trying to clean up the mess left behind by my former selves' actions.

The game calls these previous selves "incarnations," but that's not exactly appropriate. "Incarnation" denotes a singular spirit entering a new body (essentially meaning "into the flesh" in Latin), whereas The Nameless One retains the same body, but is essentially a new "spirit" each time, as a tabula rasa. Although this is not a normal usage of the word, perhaps we could appropriate the word "inspiration" for this, since it literally can mean "the drawing in of an animating spirit" (or also breath, since "spiritus" actually means "breath" in Latin, but that's irrelevant here).

The other standout track is Annah's Theme, which came to my attention shortly outside of the Mortuary, near the Gathering Dust Bar. I didn't understand that it was Annah's Theme at the time, since I didn't know characters' themes play whenever you pass nearby them (or during dialogues with them), and Annah had been standing around outside that bar. I'll reserve my impressions of her and the other characters for the next post, however, since there's a lot to get into, along with my reactions to the story as it progressed, but her theme (which remains my favourite of all of the soundtrack) solidified my admiration of PS:T's music.

That should do as an introductory overview post.

Ruminations on Dragon Age: Origins vs Baldur's Gate

This first section contains a few spoilers for the end of Dragon Age: Origins. Skip to the next section header, where I get into the comparisons, to avoid them.

Much belatedly (a year late, by my reckoning), I decided to go on and finish Dragon Age: Origins (I can't keep just calling it "Dragon Age" without the "Origins" anymore, since there's the expansion Awakening, and Dragon Age 2 coming out shortly).

I had left it just after the Landsmeet, with several unfinished side quests. I wasn't happy with the way the Landsmeet went, since I hadn't managed to "harden" Alistair. If I had, I would have been able to convince him to leave Logain alive. Now, I wanted to see that bastard dead just as well as he did, but I really liked the alternative Riorden presented, in making him a Grey Warden. That way, we'd have had someone to sacrifice against the Archdemon, if he even survived the joining ritual. Really, I couldn't understand why we weren't recruiting a whole army of Grey Wardens, since we were down to 3 in total, and we knew we had to have at least one left alive to kill the Archdemon. Those are not very good odds!

I also disagreed with the whole conceit of keeping the ritual secret for the reason of "Well, who would go through the ritual if they knew it might kill them, and it would shorten their lives?" Come on. Patriotism and honour alone would ensure people lining up around the block to go through the ritual.

Well, in any case, I think Riorden gave a slightly better excuse -- that they didn't have enough archdemon blood to recruit more Grey Wardens en masse, since either Howe or Logain had confiscated their supply, and perhaps destroyed it.

So, because he wasn't hardened, Alistair ignored my protests and chopped off Logain's head in front of his daughter. There went the marriage plans.

To harden Alistair, you have to go through his companion quest, which involves finding his sister in Denerim, and I hadn't been able to find her house, despite tediously running around the Market District many times. I don't know why, but it finally triggered when it was too late. A previous save made just before going to the Landsmeet allowed me to fulfil his quest, but unfortunately I still wasn't able to harden him, because you have to wait for him to strike up a followup conversation in camp afterwards, and if you've progressed to just before the Landsmeet, Alistair won't engage in normal conversation -- he'll just say something about the upcoming meeting without allowing you to say anything to him.

So, the thing that kept me from finishing the game all this time was that I wanted to try to get my preferred situation. So I went back even further to a much older save, all the way back to the brilliant side quest where you have to escape Fort Drakon (a refreshing and occasionally humourous quest, depending on who you select to handle it). After that, I succeeded in hardening Alistair, and thus I would be able to convince him to set aside his lust for revenge for the greater good with Logain.

I probably would have played it the rest of the way through like that, except shortly after I took care of Alistair, the game started crashing -- a lot. It crashed upon opening doors, passing by certain areas of the marketplace, or even opening my inventory. It became unplayable. I tried many things -- updating my graphics drivers, removing all mods, using low resolution settings, and even ultimately uninstalling and reinstalling, and only patching up to 1.02, instead of 1.04. But nothing worked.

The problem must have resided somewhere in that particular earlier save file, because the other one from after the Landsmeet worked fine. So, regrettably, I gave up my perfectionist plans and decided to just continue on without Alistair marrying Anora and with Logain dead. There were still some occasional crashes between then and the end, but those problematic segments of the game (such as the part where Riorden tells you to select the party you plan to take to fight the Archdemon) were able to get through when I lowered the graphics settings (returning them to normal after those glitchy points).

Luckily, even without Loghain, there was an option given to allow you to avoid any Grey Wardens having to sacrifice themselves to kill the Archdemon, and that was thanks to Morrigan's Sexy Ritual, which Alistair appeared to enjoy greatly.

Time played for my main character's save (not counting reloads and backtracking): 145 hours, 48 minutes.

The end game sequence was well done, I think. There were several places where all your companions file past you one at a time to deliver last-minute interactions, before the battle and before the end of the game, and it made for some much nicer resolutions than BG's "okay, you killed the bad guy -- the end!" approach. That's one place where I think DA:O was a clear improvement over Baldur's Gate 1.

Dragon Age: Origins as it compared to Baldur's Gate 1

These two games were made 11 years apart, but it is fair to compare the two, since DA:O was hyped by its creators as the "spiritual successor" to Baldur's Gate.

The biggest advantages DA:O has over the Infinity Engine games are its full 3D graphics (which, though they have their faults, are masterpieces compared to the 3D models in Planescape: Torment), and the fact that it has a developer-made modding toolset, whereas the Infinity Engine modding toolsets had to be made by fans reverse-engineering the formats.

The graphics come at a price, though, and that is in large size and slowness. The loading times are often terrible, perhaps worse the further you progress in the game. Combined with DA:O's tendency to often begin some important cutscene or plot-important dialogue setup directly after loading screens meant that I couldn't just get up to go do something else while it loaded, even though there was usually plenty of time to do so.

Moving around in the game is at a fixed speed, with no way to speed it up to eliminate the tedium of walking around as the Infinity games had. Even the simple act of pulling up the inventory screen has a noticeable delay, whereas with BG it was instantaneous. The graphics also may be to blame for the reduced number of NPCs in the game, to avoid overtaxing the CPU with too many NPCs walking around. Oh, it's better than Oblivion, which had ghost towns that they called "cities", but Baldur's Gate was brimming with NPCs walking around, giving little comments, and making the place feel alive. Taverns were packed with people walking around or sitting at tables, making drunken comments. By contrast, at the Gnawed Noble Tavern in DA:O, I counted a total of 3 occupied tables (and an overkill of 3 waitresses to serve them).

I'll try putting some of the pros and cons in bullet points.

Cons:

• Slower than BG (in gameplay and loading times)
• Bigger (in hard drive space/RAM terms, not scope of story)
• Obsessed with blood
• Humour is too...restrained. Most of the comedy seems more like gallows humour rather than comic relief. There are some exceptions.
• Fewer races to choose from (7 race options in BG, three in DA:O, and soon to be one in DA2!) I have a whole post in progress about the evils of "metrics" in "streamlining" games.
• Fewer spells
• Too much automation for rogues (automatic lockpicking, no careful selection of where to put skill points for rogue skills, etc.)
• Reduced dialogue options
• Lower population in towns
• Auto-resurrecting party members. This is a con because it takes away from a lot of gameplay and world richness. In BG, you would have to either be a powerful priest, or have a resurrection scroll, or go to a temple and pay a priest to resurrect your party member. It made fights much more intense and challenging than in DA:O, where if even just a single party member survives the fight, the rest will stand up again and just need to use an injury kit.
• Following from that, along with making health auto-refill, this made the temples pretty much useless window dressing, since this alleged Maker didn't seem to grant the priests any actual powers (I noticed this the first time I accepted a "blessing" from a Chantry priest, and nothing happened), and they didn't need to offer any healing services or resurrection services, nor even identification of magic items (all of which they did in BG), since there were no unknown magic items that needed identifying.
• The fact that there was only one organised religious group (those following the Maker and Andraste) further detracted from the richness of the world, where BG had dozens of distinct temples.

Other criticisms, such as the ugly hats and poor selection of clothing for mages, don't really belong in this list, because I'm only comparing it to BG here, and you can barely even see the gear on your characters in BG.

[As an aside, I hear that in Dragon Age 2, you're not even going to have a selection of gear for your companions. They say they want to make each one unique as a character. Never mind that usually, characters even in TV series (which may make use of the "limited wardrobe" trope), tend to indicate their progression and rising competence with a change in their personal appearance. (See Growing The Beard and Important Haircut.) I'm glad they're releasing a demo to try, because what I've heard about the changes sounds like they've removed almost everything that attracted me to DA:O in the first place, and which made DA:O my first ever preorder game.]

Pros:

• Full 3D, mostly good looking (and what is not good looking can be improved)
• Excellent expandable toolbars. Put whatever talents, abilities, spells, or consumables you want on the bar, in any order.
• Superior spell and talent system, with indicators letting you always know who's doing what, what's still in progress, and what the cooldowns are
• Preparing to use Area of Effect attacks (such as certain spells, or grenades) shows a circle indicating range of the blast, who will be affected, and whether you will have to move to hit that spot
• Many more active warrior actions (in BG, warriors basically just hit, hit, hit, or used the same kind of items anyone else could also use)
• More active thief/rogue actions, too
• The mana system with mana potions may be a pro or a con -- a con since it makes the game much easier than BG's Vancian magic system, and makes mages even more powerful and useful than in BG, but I'm calling it a "pro" just because it eliminates some of the tedium.

Overall, despite the darker overall colour scheme and the predominance of mud in Ferelden, as well as the more limited spell and playable race selections, Dragon Age: Origins seems to be the best modern game that I know of which can be modded to have more Baldur's Gate-style adventures. Modding can also take care of the lighting and colour schemes, and as we see from excellent quest mods such as Mengtzu's Classic Week, modding can also revive the feeling of fun and humour that were so prevalent in Baldur's Gate, but much muted in DA:O.

Personally, I find the pros and the cons to almost evenly weigh each other out, despite me finding more of one than another, and I'd like to think that some of the shortcomings will be remedied by modders. (All of the story, humour, and graphical critiques can be modified by modders, at the very least.) Additionally, based on what I've seen, DA2 may be sufficiently different that a large number of modders will stick with DA:O for modding, and continue the community projects that have been showing much promise (especially if DA2 does not include a toolset). In the meantime, there are still hundreds of hours of Infinity Engine games for me to enjoy: Baldur's Gate 2 and its expansion, The Icewind Dale series and its expansions (which I've been playing), and Planescape: Torment (which I've also been playing).