Discover Icewind Dale

Continuing the discussion from Discover Baldur's Gate:

We know this game is amazing! Just for the music alone! And I happen to have the enhanced edition, so it could have even gotten better! Also, there is a sequel I’ve never played!OMFG! :slight_smile:

I also have the enhanced edition.

Yeah we should play this through. Ok, I am game for this. Can’t do multiplayer ATM, but we could both have our own parties then make diary logs here for our parties!

A post was split to a new topic: Discover Icewind Dale 2

Oh oh! I wonder if we can share characters. Like I we could incorporate a member from each other’s party. That’d be neat.

We should play it twice! Because I like playing on “look at bad guys and they explode” mode to learn the story. I mean, it is basically a visual novel with a lot of clicking in between, that’s how I like to learn the quests and read the dialog.

Then! We should play through MP! Maybe do it on hard or something, import our favorite characters, depending on how many folks are in.

https://www.gog.com/game/icewind_dale_enhanced_edition

Icewind Dale: Enhanced Edition is currently $5, probably for the winter sale. Costs $20 normally. For reference to folks wanting to jump in on this.

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@tim to keep it simple, when we keep party logs, let’s just start topics in #gaming, or another category. If we ever have to, we can make a new category with special rules on posting and such. But I’m fine having folks pipe in and talk while I’m logging.

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For sure! This is going to be fun.

I might seriously ask you to make me a ‘maiki’ character though, for me to import for my party, first play through. It’d be cool to have you there. :slight_smile:

You know, Icewind Dale is how I stole Thrembode from @kevin! Their based on the wacky, unstable mage. How do you feel about a hilarious glass-cannon? :slight_smile:

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@tim and I have been jabbering about the game, and the gist is: the game hasn’t aged well. The music, timeless. Nearly everything else: meh.

It just makes me want to play NWN, and I hate NWN. :slight_smile:

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The inventory management is just not great, that’s my biggest gripe. And with a party of 6, you’re doing a lot of inventory. I already have 3 kids, I do inventory management all day! :slightly_smiling_face:

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Oh, I know that, I have enough trouble just by myself! With a full party, it is like have six backpacks. You think you have a system, but no human was supposed to manage six backpacks. There are too many variables!

I think the thing that bugs me is: there is a finite amount of encounters generated by the game, and they don’t deviate much (mostly in how hard they hit, and how many of them there are). So that means there are best builds for the playthrough. And I guess it is a limit of the AD&D 2.5-ish system they use, but that doesn’t allow for many of the giving paths to be the “correct” one.

NWN suffers from the same issues, with it’s hard-coded reliance on mechanics that can’t be balanced easily, but at least with NWN a given character has a chance to encounter a variety of content due to the nature of the engine; IWD characters are either good or bad, and that’s that.

Which is to say, hmmm, what did I want out of this? Every time a character levels I roll my eyes, and wished I was playing FFTA. I want the XP currency to be spent on fun options, not a pip in a specialization that gives me a +1 that I can’t tell makes a difference at any scale.

When I think about making a MUD to fill in where NWN is deficient, I just think: well I’d never base a MUD on D&D by the numbers. Themes, sure. But a d20-based combat system is fine for making humans do math, but is kinda silly for a computer figuring out chance.

@tim, what would we need to do to put IWD behind us? A web shrine? Detailed walkthrough? Emotional image board of how the music feels?

If we had a gaming site, what would we want to include? :slight_smile:

I think long pieces describing our experiences with the game.

Plus someone needs to draw us sitting with our backs to one of Kuldahars tree roots, battered from adventure, just resting and having a snack.

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This quest has given me something to think about. I want to kick some of these ideas into another quest, but now… what to do about the “issue” of mage party. Well, I’m not sure yet. The issue thing is an exercise in organizing a narrative, and has no time limit, so it is okay to just sit there, until it’s requirements are met.

It may be that when a Discover quest ends, the marked solution links to further quests that may be of interest, and we just manually build that, human to human.

With that said, to complete this quest I’m gonna say we need the following:

  • Update Wikidata entries for IWD and IWD:EE
  • Create mage.party game pages for the same
  • Create Exploration quest for IWD

I love this idea!

I wanted to point out something I found about this: IWD 2 doesn’t continue the story, and uses a different edition of the game (3rd?!), so the characters don’t port over. That’s good! It means:

  • We can complete Discover Icewind Dale 2 by updating the Wikidata and making a page for it, but also
  • Play it for it’s own, it is not a sequel in any meaningful way (different time, area, characters, mechanics, and it still don’t got no source code!)

I feel good about this, I needed the feedback to figure this out. :slight_smile: