They can, I did.
It’s just a megabitch.
Huh, the reason I never played a mage in BG 1 was that you get a perfectly competent mage fairly early on, but it’s almost at the end of the game before you find a divine caster who isn’t completely and utterly annoying. Jaheira’s complaining about you not being good enough because you were too good for her got old, real quick.
Quick question since some here are saying they still play. I’ve got IWD II but it crashes when you open the character view. I’m guessing it’s a video driver issue but is there a generic “patch” or system tweak for playing it on newer (XP SP3) machines?
God, yes. She could go eat a bag of sticks for all I cared about her opinion. 
I’m a woman and always played a female character, so I was just a little horrified when I found out that in BG2, a male character could get into a romantic relationship with her. Ugh!
Not sure about this particular game, but I know that the site Pocket Plane has patches and mods for these games. I found their Icewind Dale 2 page, and there’s an official patch and maybe some other things that might help?
Can’t hurt to check - would be neat to try Planescape as well. Thanks.
Branwen is standing right there at the Nashkel Carnival. You easily can pick her up for the cost of a Stone to Flesh scroll.
Branwen’s not too bad, but I’ve got the hots for Viconia.
BG1 was great for those of us who like thief characters in the party but didn’t want to be the thief. Then comes BGII and we get Yoshimo (and we all know how that turns out) and Jan (who is better suited as a back-up mage who can set traps). So much for a high level thief in the party. Still, while BGII has less NPCs, their stories (once you’ve installed mods to iron out all the bugs) are stronger and IMNSHO better.
ETA: Jaheira brow beat the scroll out of the dude last time I played thru. Not sure if that was due to a mod, though.
As a male, it bugged me that the protagonist couldn’t get into a romantic relationship with Mazzy.
That’s one thing I’d really miss with a HD update - the mods. There were some great add-ons, fixes, and new NPCs developed by the modder community for BG2 and the other related games, and I’m not sure it’d be as fun, even if it did look prettier.
Yeah, Branwen was significantly better than Jaheira, but she was still neutrally-aligned and hence complained about you being too good (just not as shrilly). You didn’t get an actual good-aligned cleric until that dwarf in the mines.
And from what I understand (never actually played it), in BG II, they assumed that the players had dual-classed Imoen into mage, because they had gotten rid of Dynaheir, and so she starts the game that way, and Dynaheir is officially dead. Personally, I never had a problem with Dynaheir, and found that Imoen was really effective as a thief if you took her to high level.
Yeah, Connie’s great but she’s apt to get mad and leave the party if you get too good for her.
I think that’s due to the BG1NPC mod. It also gives you some additional NPC banter plus romance dialog if you choose into install them.
I’ve also been playing through the whole BG trilogy. My character recently made the transition to BGII and I’m considering whether to give Gaelan Bayle his money and rush to Spellhold or level up a bit more in Amn and do some more quests. Decisions, decisions.
I never really understood some people like Baldur’s Gate 2 so much more than Baldur’s Gate 1. What really turned me off BG2 is all of the tedious fights against wizards with fifty bajillion defensive spells (via Contingency or Spell Sequencer or whatever) that you’re forced to strip off with half a dozen different anti-defensive spells. (Yes, I’m exaggerating, but still…)
Reading the news on BG possibly coming back makes me wonder what Wesley Weimer is doing, and whether there’ll be a Tactics-esque mod for the new BG content? The Tactics fights were incredibly exasperating, but a lot of fun when you won.
I would pay good money for a Baldur’s Gate remake that did the following;
-Streamlined party organization a la Mass Effect so you don’t have to have your love interest in the party at all times
-Did something with all the big empty fields that you have to spend hours wandering around in looking for side quests and XP
-Imported your character decisions from the first game to the second
-Cleared the useless spells out of the spell list and added some actually worth using (admit it, you never once cast “Protection From Petrification” or “Goodberries”)
-Gave me a single reason to ever want to have a bard in my party
-Let me turn off subtitles for the voiced-over lines so I don’t just end up clicking past them because I read the dialogue long before the VO finishes talking
Also, if they could find some way to bring David Warner back from the dead to do some more VOs for Irenicus, that would be good.
In Baldur’s Gate 1, I used both of those quite a bit! (Although Goodberries I’d only use at low levels.) I’m curious how you handled fights against basilisks without using Protection from Petrification. Scrolls?
Now Burning Hands, on the other (burning) hand…
Potion of Mirror Eyes. But I didn’t really use either spell in BG2. Nobody used petrification, other than maybe a few magic traps. The magic system was challenging, true, but still had way fewer choices than all of the feats and spells in 3.0/3.5, IMHO. Breach solved most issues. And if it didn’t, then Dispel/Remove Magic generally did. Besides, you could use AoE spells (ah, sweet Skull Trap) to target mages and bypass most of their spell protections.
I’d love a BG reboot to do something about the inventory system. Nothing like killing an hour by sorting and resorting everyone’s arrows/gems/potions, etc…
Mods with unlimited ammo stacking, potion cases, gem bags, and scroll cases solve the major inventory issues. High level mage battles, for me at least, needed high level magic removal. My first playthru of BGII, petrification ruined my Jaheira romance, and I never figured out what went wrong. What a PITA, but mods fixed that too.
Kicking out your love interest also kills the romance. Petrification has the side effect of removing the NPC from the party.
I never could figure out which counterspell to use against which spell.
Exactly. Problem was I didn’t know that on my first playthru, and I’d already pushed Aerie aside for Jaheira. I also rushed the beginning to get to Imoen, and ended up with Nalia disappearing with a bunch of good items. Plus, rushing thru ill-prepared me for all the mage fights.
That was my biggest problem with the story. To best prepare yourself, you need to level up with a lot of the sidequests, but you can get the money to move on very quickly while still underpowered for what comes in Spellhold and beyond. Personally, I think Chapter 2 should have been more linear, and then have the PC given a reason to sidequest after the Underdark.