Will there ever be another Veeky Forums-related video game on par with BG2?

mage/priest >>>Edwin>mage(conjurer)>>priest>>>all
So, Aerie waifu best waifu.

You know, you made a reasonable point, albeit one i disagreed with. But then you had to go and say Aerie was best gril? No.

Viconia DubsVir

I DONT EVEN UNDERSTAND HALF THOSE WORDS

THIS MAKES ME ANGRY

Oh God, I remember this one. While BGII was an improvement in every sense of the word, there's one part that struck me as kind of weird.

I always assumed my dude romanced Imoen in the first game. I mean, they're childhood friends and the road looks pretty goddamn lonely after a while. Also, they're about the same age (though Imoen's implied to be younger.) The revelation in BGII makes me glad it wasn't canonical, or that would have been fucked.

Also, Siege of Dragonspear is really bad.

In BG 2 we start getting power creep, that becomes unbearable in ToB.
In BG bandits do not get magical upgrade and first level sleep is good for any bandit.
In BG 2 and ToB random grunts eats couple 20d6 damage exploding skulls like nothing.

Internal working of world begins to cry from rape.

That is why I like Morrowind, it does not scale at all to player.

Good thing they fixed the personalities of those problematic characters.

That is canon now. It is never going away. The old personalities are obsolete, retconned.

Whoever assigned these labels was nuttier than squirrel poop. Jaheira was married, Aerie offers to fuck you, and Viconia doesn't want to romance you if you're not a guy. Make up whatever shit you want to fill in the corners, but don't contradict what we actually see.

I don't know what 75% of them mean.

>Also, Siege of Dragonspear is really bad.
Goddamn, I forgot all about SoD and I played it on release.

That's not even close to being a fair assessment. The last few years have been wonderful for isometic, traditional crpgs.

Tides of Numenera and Divinity original Sin 2 both look like wonderful games in all regards so far. I wouldn't be surprised if at least one of the two wasn't just as good as the Baldur's Gate games were, especially given how phenomenal an overall product Divinity Original Sin was back in 2014

Actually, in BGI, you were about as tough as tissue paper. The only strategy that really worked was to give everyone ranged weapons and send one luckless bastard forward to kite the enemy/tie them up in combat.

I remember those days, and how the guy in front of the Inn (who casts Mirror Image and Horror) felt like an unstoppable bad-ass.

Well, by the time of BGII, my dude was the hardest nut in the entire party. The first time I played it, I was a Paladin who specialized in two-handed swords but favored Saverok's chaos blade. That was solid, but it was also really boring.

The second time, I played a Kensai/Mage and just fucking exploded everyone I ran into.

The Jaheira romance was also fucking weird. I mean, it's not that she isn't attractive (I assume) but there's the age factor to consider. She's old enough to be your grandmother. Also, your husband just died, woman! This is not a good time for anyone!

Divinity: TOS

>The revelation in BGII makes me glad it wasn't canonical, or that would have been fucked.
Well you are not real siblings, you are both children of Baal.
Saying that CHARNAMExImoen is kind of incest is like saying that two random people is incest, because we all are "children of one God" by Christian belief.

There was Imoen romance mod for BG 2 but I heard it was creepy bad written shit.

Just because someone offers to fuck you does not mean they need an orientation that specifies attraction.

Aroflux means you fluctuate between feeling or not feeling sexual attraction. Jaheira being married does not mean she can't occasionally just not feel attraction.

Thank god for Amber Scott and the new expansion to fix the old canon of the game, while introducing it to a new generation that does not abide by the binary!

Nothing will ever match BG2 again. Your retroclone can't be as good as a good game made during the era itself.

> There was Imoen romance mod for BG 2 but I heard it was creepy bad written shit.

It's insanely creepy and bad, but that's besides the point. The point is that Imoen's your half-sister, no matter how physically impossible that might be. You really don't want to fuck your half-sister.

That's insane, though. Nobody's horny 24/7, so by that definition everyone is "aroflux."

And if Jaheira had highly variable feelings where romance was concerned, she woukd not have sworn to love a half-elf for the rest of his potentially long-ass life.

>Your retroclone can't be as good as a good game made during the era itself

Maybe you won't find them as good as the best games made during the era, but the last few year's outings have certainly and by all merits been as good as the good games of the time.

I know you're just joking, but still, get hit by a truck.

D:OS was already a better game from a mechanical standpoint famalam so all D:OS 2 needs is to be roughly on-par writing wise to be better.

>not going for best girl

I didn't really like PoE. Mechanically it was fine, I guess, but the characters were a bit bland, the story was whatever, and the worldbuilding was center stage despite it being a boring generic fantasy world. Faerun is also a generic fantasy world, but I liked how in BG2 the world you're in is basically unimportant. All you need to know is that twenty years ago the god of murder fucked a ton of women.

That seems both reductive and a bit disingenuous. Nothing's necessarily stopping these "retroclones" from being as good as the games back then since they're not beholden to the same things that hold AAA titles back, and in my opinion a good number of them have come close enough already.

Nothing really trumps the feeling of getting out of the first dungeon and seeing how frickin huge the world map was and how densely everything was populated but having gone back to BG2 recently the nostalgia goggles got taken off.

These games had problems and not just the mechanics but the writing as well. Planescape Torment aged a lot better in my opinion.

This. After the escape from the prison the whole main story of BGII felt like a massive chore so I never mustered the interest to actually play it through.

I did enjoy leaving Jaheira to rot though. Fuck her and her omnipresent authority figure bullshit, walking from one end of the screen to the another is not too much to ask.

What I meant was that a retroclone is like a movie made today that tries to imitate what movies were like in the 80s, like The Expendables. It just doesn't work. Those movies/games were made under a different mindset that you can't properly replicate. Your retroclone might be good (though I hate the Expendables), but it won't be as good as the originals.

You want me to get hit by a truck for telling the truth?

A retroclone may have similar code, but it's a fundamentally different kind of project compared to a game that does something new for its time and isn't stuck in a death spiral of nostalgia. We don't need carbon copies of games from 20 years ago because the originals still exist.

Comparing a game and its retroclone is like comparing a person and a wax statue of that person. Of course they look similar because that's the whole point of imitation, but the imitation has no life.

While I disagree, that's definitely fair.

I would really recommend checking out Divinity OS and its sequel though. I wasn't a huge fan of POE, but Divinity OS does a lot mechanically that really feels like a natural evolution of older CRPG mechanics rather than just trying to ape what was successful in the 90s.

Your SJW joke is getting old.

Who? All of the new stuff added with the enhanced edition is fan fiction tier crap anyways. BG1+2+Tutu is where it is at.

The writing of Torment aged better, but the user interface was clunky even for its time and has only gotten more intolerable. Seriously, it's harder to play than Fallout 1.

>But then you had to go and say Aerie was best gril?

The thing is that I always run a very Good-aligned party. So romancing Viconia is pretty much a nonstarter: she'll "break" before I can progress the relationship to any real degree.

Yeah...thankfull (maybe) I got into Baldur's Gate via the novelization of Baldur's Gate II (hence the "maybe", 'cause Christ was that novel awful) before playing any of the games. So I already knew about the Imoen thing ahead of time.

Otherwise I am certain I would have "romanced" Imoen as well.

>Also, Siege of Dragonspear is really bad.

Eh, I enjoyed it.

>felt like an unstoppable bad-ass.

Tarnesh? Please. Imoen's Wand of Magic Missile and Xzar's Larloch's Minor Drain is the answer there. Since you know Tarnesh is coming you can pause the moment he turns hostile and get Imoen and Szar to unload those on him. They'll interrupt the Mirror Image as he's casting it. Then you just wail on him. He's a mage, so he's even more tissue than most.

...mind, I learned this through trial and error and if he *does* get that mirror image off then you're FUCKED.

>The only strategy that really worked was to give everyone ranged weapons and send one luckless bastard forward to kite the enemy/tie them up in combat.

Eh. I usually found 3 archers and 3 melee to be sufficient. My ending party is usually
- CHARNAME (thief with a bow)
- Imoen (dualed into Mage as early as possible since there's no reason to wait whilst I'm a thief)
- Corran (the God of the Bow)
- Yeslick (for melee)
- Branwen (also for melee)
- Ajantis (so much melee)

Generally worked out fine once you throw appropriate buffs, Summon Monsters, and judicious Dispels into the mix and were stocked up on the right potions.

Having said that...yeah, you are made of tissue.

I've heard good things about it. I'll check it out, thanks.

It's not a matter of horniness, it's being simply incapable of feeling any sexual desire for someone no matter how hard you try. That is aroflux, sometimes you want to fuck someone and other times you just aren't in the mood. You might say that's "normal", but thank goodness we have labels for this type of stuff now!

Of course she could have married someone that would stick around for a while, just because you aren't feeling attraction now does not mean you don't know you'll feel attraction later.

As a transwoman, Jaheira must go through periods like that.

>She's old enough to be your grandmother.
Age doesn't count if she's an elf.
>Also, your husband just died, woman!
Rebound.

>lithoromantic
I too wish to romance rocks

I think my point of disagreement is the idea of these games having "no life" to them.

There's a number of them that are blatantly trying to ride a nostalgia train, but I don't feel it's entirely fair to dismiss the entire crpg renaissance as cynical attempts to "clone" the older games in the genre. A few other anons have been been mentioning Divinity OS, which I think is the best example of that: it's very, very clearly a passion project from Larian and they do enough with it that it feels like a fresh experience even if you did grow up playing BGII on the daily.

It's not fan-fiction "crap", it's 100% canon and any changes to the original game are how the characters should have been.

It's like insisting the ending of ME3 was shit when Bioware actually expanded on the endings to give a satisfying conclusion to their epic trilogy.

>Actually, in BGI, you were about as tough as tissue paper. The only strategy that really worked was to give everyone ranged weapons and send one luckless bastard forward to kite the enemy/tie them up in combat.
Only until mines of Nashkeel, then you could tank a bit. Still best tactic was memorise sleep as much as you can and spam it. One spell wins most of encounters. And if you found ring of wizardy it was easier.

I represent my argument:
>Saying that CHARNAMExImoen is kind of incest is like saying that two random people is incest, because we all are "children of one God" by Christian belief.

Hhhhooolly shit Saerith. Never played with her. Never want to.

The only mods I install in BGI are the Banter Pack for Bantery Goodness, and a mod that puts Eldoth in that area between Beregost and the Friendly Arm so that he's easier to recruit. Not that I ever do, but it's the principle of the thing.

How many characters do people actually remember from BG?

I can't even tell if this is bait

10/10 love for your craft shines through

Genderbend Edwin was best girl.

Is Pilars of Eternity any good?

Stuff that was broken stayed broken but BG should never have been anything but a turnbased D&D clone and that's only become more apparent with time.

Lithoromantic doesn't mean you want to romance rocks, you idiot.

It means you fuck like a rock.

You sort of lie there, on the side of the road, not moving, just hoping some crazy pervert is going to run up to you and rub their genitals on you.

A kinda funny story: I replayed BGII just a few years ago and was confused that it was missing a fuckton of content that I remembered from when I was a kid, but investigating has since revealed that the content I thought was native to the game was a bunch of stupid mods I had installed during my original playthrough and my memory conflated with base game content in the decade since I last played it.

The first one, not including Enhanced Edition characters?

Imoen, Montaron, Xzar, Khalid, Jaheira, Garrick, Kagain, Edwin, Minsc, Dynaheir, Branwen, Xan, Kivan, Ajantis, Corran, Eldoth, Yeslick, Quayle, Tiax, and Skie are all characters I interacted with enough on a regular basis to remember clearly.

Never when I was playing BG2 did I wish that the game was uglier and worse-written with more pointless fiddly bits.

Oh, that's strictly recruitable NPCs, by the way, not NPCs as a whole.

Well, of course that's what you do. Any movement on your part might be seen as a microagression

Is the majority of people trans, or homosexual or some variation thereof now according to SJWs?

I don't understand: is this supposed to be representative or reflect the demographic that plays these video games and watches modern tv shows? Have they never been out of their internet echo-chamber and seen how human society actually is IRL?

...who? Google search is just giving me the actress who played Peter Pan's daughter in "Hook".

That's how you know it's the greatest bait of all.

Didn't really enjoy Baldur's Gate. Gameplay wasn't my style. I'm a retro Final Fantasy guy

It's not. It's cultural subversion by the Left to try and make these insane things seem normal.
>c-c-conspiracy theory!
It's the truth, not a theory.

One of the primary writers for Siege of Dragonspear and primary writer for some of the new characters fit for a modern audience? I think she was also the one that wrote the personality upgrades for Jaheira and Safana, two characters that just don't really "work" in the modern age.

...

She's the one who had a weird boner for Safana, and evidently forgot that her actions in BG2, given that her attempts to rewrite her personality in SoD mean the character must have had severe brain damage or schizophrenia at some point.

- Imoen never once gives us a hint of her romantic or sexual inclinations
- Minsc is not trans. Rashemi culture wouldn't allow that. He also has the mind of a child. I doubt he even understands romance.
- Never played with Korgan, cant' comment.
- Never played with Mazzy, can't comment.
- Jaheira isn't trans and I don't even want to know what aroflux means, but I doubt it's applicable.
- Yoshimo never once gives us a hint of his romantic or sexual inclinations. I don't know what transmasc is, but I doubt it applies.
- I don't know what demigirl is, but it seems wrong given that she's the most womanly of your romantic options apart from many Jaheira. She is also emphatically not panromantic. Trust me, I tried.
- Edwin never once gives us a hint of his romantic or sexual inclinations. He is also not genderfluid, he hates being a girl as I recall.
- I don't know what nonbinary is, but I doubt it applies to Aerie. She is also not asexual, she's the first one to offer sex to you, no prodding needed. And she is definitely straight. Trust me, I tried.
- Haer'dalis isn't bigender, he's a tiefling. That's racist of you.
- Never played with Jan, can't comment.
- Nalia is straight. She never gives any hint of romantic or sexual feelings for females.

What happened to Anomen? Actually, on second thought, nevermind. I hate him.

Can someone give me an example of why the imoen mod is shitty? I keep hearing about it, but nobody ever gives real details about WHY it's bad beyond "It has bad writing" and "Look at this bad thing, that's what it's like."

Anyone want to explain what makes it so horrible?

The canonical five companions, Xan, Branwen, Eldoth, Arkanis, Alora, Skie, Safana, Montaron, Xzar, Edwin. That's from BG1.

The issue is, it was hard to justify writing a lot of material for characters in BG1. There was always the potential for a party member to get petrified and exploded, or for him to get gibbed in combat and permanently removed from the game. Cone of Cold could literally destroy half your party permanently.

By BG2, even your dual-classed priests could cast Raise Dead, and so it made more sense from a design perspective. Dual and multi-classing also allowed characters to fill multiple roles, which made it possible to have a much smaller pool of companions to draw from. You can devote more writing/development time to each character.

> You really don't want to fuck your half-sister.

> Not loving the person who understands what you're going through
> Who loves you so much she won't leave even if you do things that horrify her
> Who is one of the best Good-aligned mages in the game
> Who has stuck by you since you were starving in the woods outside Candlekeep
> Not breeding with her and creating a new super-race of babies that can cast Draw Upon Holy Might 1/day

Don't talk about my waifu ever again.

Fuck man, I always used to be a liberal atheist (and I'm still an atheist), but this SJW crap redpilling me hard as fuck.

What the hell happened to common sense and normality? Why does everything we do and enjoy have to interpreted through some marxist/feminist lens?

>lenin would have a conitpction on all the pointless gender-identity bullshit intefering with the role of the professional revolutionary

SHE'S YOUR SISTER.

It falls into the waifu-baiting genre of mods, like most romance mods. If you're into waifus and you like Imoen, the current version (as of 2015 or so) is alright -- it fills in the gap between Spellhold and the last chapter, so Imoen now has things to say about any given situation. She also forms a friendship with Aerie, and has regular banters with other party members. I play with it installed, and I'm reasonably pleased with it. Even if you don't fuck her, there's a friendship path as well.

Historically, though, the mod was shit. It had a lot of dwarf rape in it, and a hidden "relationship points" system, and you had the option of trying to rape Imoen and getting a bad end. Combined with the fact that she's your half-sister, a lot of people write the mod off entirely.

Oh definitely and Marx would probably just laugh at it, but that doesn't change the fact that modern SJWism, especially 3rd wave feminism, relies heavily on marxist ideas.

We all seem to have forgotten that Jan is GNOME SCUM

Look at this turnip-munching little shit, thinking he's all high and mighty with his blaster master and shit. He's nothing. Nothing!

GNOMES

>and a hidden "relationship points" system

In fairness, that's how all the main romances in Baldur's Gate II work as well.

Yes, and?

Don't think we're not on to you

I'm not denying it, Marx, to me, is a fountain that can be draw from for a great many things.

Communism is probably the most prone to violent factionalism, too boot, and the modern world just allows for weird, uneducated people to congregate in safe places and become madmen

IIRC, it just had a hidden timer to prompt the conversations, and certain responses would trigger the next one to count down.

FF7, now that was a hidden relationship value that caught me right the fuck off guard.

It's Jan FUCKIN Jansen, best thief in BG 2

Did you even see what website you were on before posting that?

I see. So most people are like the guy I responded to above that are just memeing because >muh incest morals

Thanks user. You've been helpful.

It doesn't matter what you're examining; if it can be examined through a critical theory lens, it must be examined through a critical theory lens. In critical theory, nothing is apolitical, and nothing not actively pushing a leftist frame of thought can be praised. As of the 1960s, nothing not radically leftist can be praised. If it's to the right of you, it's your enemy.

That's why they're in attack mode at all times. If nothing is apolitical and nothing is to the left of you, that means that everything is to the right of you. If everything to the right of you is your enemy, then the world is your enemy.

And isn't it only used for ONE specific scene in the Gondola at not!Vegas?

If the Left was represented by fat NEET women, I can understand your concern. They toootally have control of the media.
Sigh, you tinfoil hatted freaks make the Right look bad.

Yes.
Replaying it as an asshole, expecting Tifa and seeing Barret instead is one of my more vivid memories in vidya.

>Did you even see what website you were on before posting that?

...yeah, that's a good point. It is kinda' hot. Speaking of...

Remind me, in the IRM, can Imoen be romanced by a female CHARNAME?

That seems fun, let me join your game!

What's weird is how black and white these people are

>some political opinion section in my local newspaper

>man on the right is a smug asshole

>woman on the left talks about how she was talking to a neighbor about how the tea party is racists and he said he thinks theres more to it, she broke out in sweat and quickly walked away and told all her friends

>her mother said she has to get along with people she doesn't agree with, she said no, its not that era anymore, you can't be friends with the enemy

>now she awkwardly rushes to her car everytime she sees her neighbor

They usually warn you if there's a way to end the romance through dialogue, or removing them from the party. It doesn't take much to realize that telling Aerie to put a fucking sock in it about her wings is going to make her not want to date you. You don't win points, you just either push the romance along or end it.

Side note: the only way to sleep with any of these bitches is to be a complete doormat, even when they hiss and complain and screech about their wings, or their dead husbands, or giving fat Calishites blowjobs. There's no option to tell them to go fuck themselves that they'll respect.

Yeah, in the awful novelizations she's a lesbian who fucks Phaere in the Underdark, so I think the mod makers decided she'd be bi to reflect that.

If you fuck Phaere, she tells you that she would have had a hard time passing that ass up, too.

I found it pretty disappointing overall, combat whilst it looked nice was too easy, characters a bit meh (plus some of their quest triggers were bullshit). Didn't feel expansive enough either. I'd rather replay BG than PoE.

I had a co-worker who almost stopped talking to me and heavily insinuated that I was intellectually challenged, when I said we shouldn't let refugees into Europe.

I thought it wouldn't actually be like that, but it seems like assuming that you are intellectually inferior if you have right-leaning views is like knee-jerk reaction for them.

>she's a lesbian who fucks Phaere in the Underdark

Fun fact: I first learned about Baldur's Gate and D&D as a whole through said novelization. And while even at the time I didn't think the novel was very good, it influenced me to make me pretend that my BGI character was a dark elf, since drow seemed pretty cool to me. Specifically a CG drow thief.

I may well be the last person on the planet who got into playing drow without having been exposed to Drizzt first.

Welcome to our Brave New World, don't you feel like society today is a happier, more tolerant place?

>- Never played with Jan, can't comment.
You poor fool, he's one of the best characters in the game.