Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 remake

[Menegrothx]

There are two inconvenient things about the system.
1) Every time you get an item that you need to identify, you need to remove level 1 spells, add identifyxN, sleep, identify the items, change back your spells and sleep again. Annoying, but it becomes a routine. (Having keybinds for changing between different spell sets would solve the problem)
2) You dont get to use the whole range of your spells, you have spells you rarely/never use

But this system has positive sides to it too when used correctly.
1)You need to think of optimal spell load out for you different characters and think of what works best in your current situation. And
2)You need to be cautious when clearing a dungeon so you dont run into a situation where all your characters are out of spells and you cant sleep anywhere.
Sleeping itself isn't a bad system but unless you're playing hardcore, it usually means that you'll just load the latest quick save and try sleeping again if monsters ambush your sleeping party.

It's an annoyance and the system isn't perfect, but neither are modern RPGs. It's kind of an instant gratification thing too. Modern games are often afraid to force the player to be cautious or having to do any kind of work that might be considered annoying or tedious. But once you remove all those annoyances like they did in World of Warcraft, many players noticed that by doing so they also removed parts of the ambiance and roleplaying aspect of the game. That feeling of vulnerability and not being able to do everything at once with out a sweat are part of the roleplaying experience and immersion to the game world.

I do agree that it's kind of ridicolous that 85% of your game time comes from your party being asleep, but if people cant adjust to such small problems as -AC being good for you and having to sleep every now and then to replenish your spells then they shouldn't be buying a game like this in the first place. And the people who work on the game certainly shouldn't cater to that crowd.

[MrPopo]

I think the Wizardry style of giving you limited casts per level that can only be restored through a mechanism like sleep gives a good balance. The problem I have with the AD&D style of memorizing is that it removes the incentive to use the more niche spells. For a given level I can take a generic heal, or I can take something more niche that will be better for me in a subset of my potential encounters but will be less useful (if not completely useless) in the rest of the encounters. It becomes hard to justify memorizing the niche spell over the heal. With Wizardry I still have to make the choice between casting heal or the niche spell, but I'm not in the position of having dead spell charges. It rewards correctly identifying the situation (the silence spell will prevent more damage in this encounter than the heal will restore) rather than anticipating the enemy encounters (which quickly turns into an exercise in GameFAQs lookup).

I do agree that it's kind of ridicolous that 85% of your game time comes from your party being asleep, but if people cant adjust to such small problems as -AC being good for you and having to sleep every now and then to replenish your spells then they shouldn't be buying a game like this in the first place. And the people who work on the game certainly shouldn't cater to that crowd.

On the other side of the coin, what value is there in making a system more obtuse than it needs to be? Complexity can be good or bad, depending on how it is applied. Which comes back to my original point. There are good game design reasons for Bioware to use the latest D&D rules over the AD&D rules of BG1&2. But to do so would alienate long time fans. So Bioware has to decide which direction to go with. Personally I think it would come down to whether or not a BG3 would be a continuation of the PC's story from 1&2 (maybe with an import feature) or instead it was something new, like how DA2 doesn't continue the Warden's storyline from DA:O but the effects from the events of DA:O have impacted the world.

[Opa Opa]

Baldur's Gate Enhanced Edition is back on itunes.

Anybody play it? How is it? I've always wanted to play BG but I hate sitting hunched over a computer desk. I'd probably play it on a tablet.