Icewind Dale 2 Complete

I never was a fan of Icewind Dale. I remember abandoning the game after playing it for a while. It was shortly after it first came out and I had just finished Baldur's Gate and expected more: more story, more immersiveness and less linearity. It felt like a hack'n'slay-game in comparison. Now I decided to give Icewind Dale 2 a try and am quite happy with it. The combat is tough and very strategic. The amount of sidequests is just right and so is the layout of the different areas. It just almost never gets boring. It is still true, though, that, like its predecessor, it lacks the open world that Baldur's Gate offered. Somewhat like Neverwinter Nights 2, the game and it's storyline more or less run on rails and it is almost impossible to derail the whole thing. But while I disliked this fact about Neverwinter Nights 2, I actually like it about Icewind Dale 2. It never gives you the feeling of being forced to do something when you acutally want to do something else. Its like every curve of the railroad seems reasonable, every change of speed justified, every stop just in time. This is a hard thing to accomplish in game-design, I assume! Even apart from that, the storytelling is good: You have to act like a hero at times, but on other occasion, you need to make questionable decisions. All of them seemed natural enough for me. This adds to the overall atmosphere of the game and makes the story believable. I didn't finde any obvious flaws. It's challenging but well balanced, polished, well thought-out, features an intriguing enough story and runs reasonably well even on newer machines. If anything, it is time-consuming as it is surprisingly long. What starts of as a simple mercenary mission step by step becomes a deep story with some surprising twists. I would compare the game to the german title Drakensang, which is somewhat reminiscient of it here and there - and is equally long and winding.

Masterpiece!

Next step in saga, new class and penalties, new quest and some new features, overall good sequel.

If IWD 1 was an "Infinity Engine party-based Diablo, but boring", IWD 2 actually attempts to create a sense of grand adventure in lieu to its contemporaries, and occasionally even shows the wit and creativity that outdoes them. But it overstays the welcome and gets progressively more broken and obnoxious as it goes. It's the only game on Infinity Engine to adapt the 3rd edition D&D rules and the team at Black Isle used them so nicely you can almost feel them being sad they couldn't have all these new systems 3 years prior when working on Planescape: Torment. I'd argue, that the usage of skills/skill checks and classes is superior to Neverwinter Nights, which also used 3rd edition and released a couple months prior. Perhaps this change, or maybe the experience of the team, lead to the creation of many genuinely fun scenes and moments in this game. Each Chapter feels very different, some quests are incredibly fun to go through and are less linear than anything in IWD 1 and even though the game is still focused on combat, loot and dungeon crawling (this time even potion bottles are constantly available, just like Diablo), it feels less dumb and mind numbingly boring. Heck, even the plot is somewhat nice and main villains, as lacking as they were (and sounding like Evil Aristocrats), have an interesting backstory to them. But it all falls apart. It starts with a couple of terribly obscure (mostly due to engine limitations) puzzles, then tries to do lots of things that the engine can't handle (scripted scenes that look like they failed even if they work and fail while seemingly working), then doubles down on terrible combat and unnecessary backtracking, then just doesn't end hours past the point it should've. Also, the game tends to break at "unsupported resolutions" even without any mods. Unlike IWD1, it's not forgettable, you can see the influence on future Obsidian titles (and PoE), but the game is too flawed to be enjoyed properly and too long for its own good.

Largely linear game with a big focus on combat. The encounters are fun and exciting, however, this game could have easily been a solid 4 if I did not have to resort to using the console to get out of a game breaking bug in Ice Wall area in chapter 2. I had to use console commands to get my characters past a door that should have been open as I had fulfilled the prerequisites to open it. The door stopped being interactable and I couldn't even see it using the 'alt' key. I have played all the previous Infinity Engine games and this is the first game breaking bug I have come across that required me to use console commands. I am very, very disappointed.