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Post your worst Enhanced Edition pet peeves here


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I have some mods underway, and the more involved and original I make the features, the more often I run into the necessity of making them for the Enhanced Edition. It's the technology. What the classic engine can do and what the EE engine can are not as different as night from day, but as the Bronze Age from the Iron Age. Small mods may shift to accommodate sometimes, but my big mod just has to be for the EE. The problem - many people hate Beamdog's take on the games. Now, there are some things about the EEs that can't be changed or would be difficult to change, like the interface. Nobody has recreated the original stone interface. Some features go deeper than this, but a large measure of Beamdog's changes are superficial. They took away Safana's scimitar proficiency and gave her the wakizashi, that sort of thing.

I want people to play my mod. And I want to be able to realize my ideas. So, even if I can't win over conscientious objectors to the EEs who will sooner slit their throats (with a scimitar!) than reconsider, I want to chip away at the smaller changes and make a general case for coming back, or rather forward, to the EEs. Here it is important to know just what annoys people the most. One notion I have myself is to move around Beamdog's NPC. There is no reason to delete them, and they are not bad at all, but they ought to be made less intrusive. This is for me to do, though. Here I would like to know what people hate about the EEs the most. Yes, what do you detest? What wakes you screaming on your pillow? Safana's wakizashi? That you can pay Taerom extra to make the ankheg plate in one day? That one almost wakes me

It shouldn't be difficult to roll back some of these changes gradually. It would be perfect to make this a collaborative project, with several modders working to undo some features side by side, but if not, I can at least make the notion of playing the EE a little more palatable.

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Ah, the price of progress.

Have you seen The Gray Stone Mod for BG1EE? It's wonderful that the UI for the EE can be modified to suit one's tastes.

As for the campaign changes, they are superficial and can be modded to be as they used to be, if someone feels strongly enough about them.

I really enjoy the more advanced engine beneath the EE Infinity Engine games after many years of dealing with the limitations of the older games.

Also, Argent77 has made a Convenient NPCs mod for those who prefer having a more classic experience in that regard.

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What does that one do, Convenient NPCs? It comes without a readme. But I have in mind more modest changes for Beamdog's NPC - getting them out of the way, not swapping around their classes or portraits. I don't see how that could be justified without ruining immersion. As for the Gray Stone mod, judging by the screenshots at Beamdog's, it just recolors the current blue-stone background to be gray, it doesn't bring back the old stylish buttons or anything else. I think someone has reproduced the original BG's interface for the Trilogy or for BG2, one of those, a few years ago, but not for the Enhanced Editions. That said, there are some changes from the classic game that are not going to be reproducible in EE no matter how we try, other changes are hard-coded, but the majority probably can be rolled back, and they should account for the bulk of the widespread animosity towards the EEs. Assuming, in naive honesty, that people actually have strong reasons to hate them and don't just stick to the original because it was the original, period - or simply don't really care for the games anymore.

If they do have actual reasons and those reasons aren't hard-coded, let's roll them back. But what are they? That's why I made this thread to find out what pisses people enough to snub the EEs. I have my own picks, if you want to know. Most of all I dislike powerful freebies from Beamdog, like a scimitar +2 just lying on the ground in Cloakwood, and hand-holding and "ease," like with the example of letting players pay extra to get that plate done in one day, because, you know, today's players have the attention deficit disorder and can't wait a little. For me as a modder, though, the stake is not getting people to play the EEs, I don't work for Beamdog, but getting them to experiment with all available toolset functions, discuss them, share results, make adventures, just come back to liking AD&D and fantasy again instead of rolling up Charname for the umpteenth time and plowing through the same yada-yada spooky Bhaalspawn "Die Irenicus DIE!!!" plot.

Edited by temnix
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1 minute ago, Azoth said:

I see that a lot of effort has gone into that mod, but I don't like the idea of customizing a playing experience piecemeal. It's like cutting out the upper right corner of a painting because you like the colors there the most. Beamdog's NPC, just like Bioware's NPC, are whole personalities with their own stories. Take them or leave them. I think they are pushed to the player and that their quests and dialogues are painfully belabored, maybe because Beamdog was so worried about making them fit in. Fewer words would have smoothed their passage. But sure, argent's mod is one possible step to making the EEs more palatable. But now I'd like to hear what really grinds people's gears, like the change to Montaron's proficiencies! Gaaaaah!

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My personal pet-peeves with the EEs were always the mechanical changes for the sake of "exploit" removal or for the sake of "PnP rule lawyering." (in quotes to denote non-sensical notions... i.e. presence of exploits in a non-competitive single player game...) I don't have issues with real bug fixes, though... as long as they don't remove options from the game.

I also have to mention, because it's important in this discussion to know from where I'm coming from: I'm not a DnD P&P fan, never was and never will, and I don't care for changes that only change things to "conform" with PnP rules... I prefer the computer games to be kept separated from the P&P rules when there's a justification for doing so.

 

I've come to terms over the years with all that, but I still reach the state sometimes of wanting to install my GOG copies of the classic versions and play those.

Sadly, the enhancements *are* real, the new engines are *really* better and the new QoL stuff is hard to give up, can't deny that... so it's harder and harder to go back to the originals... and besides, I'm a strong fan of EET and can't use that on anything other than the 2.x+ versions, sadly.

As some examples of things I personally hated to see changed (I can't remember all of the top of my head now but I'm sure there are many more...) are: Sunfire bypassing magic resistance ("fixed" in EEs), the summon limit in BG1, the forced mandatory cooldown on exiting stealth after successful backstab, Spell Shield blocking anti-magic rays from Beholders, the removal of the possibility of using several projected images under chain contingency, the cap on the scaling of the Skull traps, etc. 

I personally never used some of these while playing the game in "serious" mode, but the fact that you could do it gave the game some emergent properties and enabled the use of creative solutions to encounters... and more importantly it was fun to do and discover that you could do it... and the more you remove the less interesting the game becomes (to me at least.)

Some examples that I'd have hated to see done and would have been a deal breaker to me if they'd have been enforced: blocking quickslot items from projected images/simulacrums, and the full ranger/cleric nerf (this one is undoable using the baldur.lua config.)

IMHO, the best option would have been: stick to be completely faithful to the original games, and then add/provide an optional bundle for game mechanical changes for the people that wants them.

And besides all  that... the new UI system is really really really clunky and slow... you can feel it if you were used to quickly menuing and transferring items around and putting items in containers... there's a big delay (still in the milliseconds range, but noticeable if you're used to the old UI) now when you start to drag stuff from inventory and also when dropping it. And the stuff  you pick up stick on the mouse in weird positions which makes putting stuff in containers, for example, less precise and annoying.  It has been getting better, it was much worse immediately after the 2.0 patch, for example.

 

But oh well... it is what it is... as long as I can still do some crazy stuff in the games (which I often do just for fun...) I will still like them... I mean, EET as a platform is too much to give up... and even more so in the future when IWD-in-EET and IWD2-in-EET are finally included! :)

I don't honestly mind the EE NPCs myself, I've learnt to ignore them when I'm not on the mood to deal with them, and in the end, they're just like any other mod added NPCs that I've had to deal with over the years!  (Though, I do wish Neera was a bit out of the way so I don't have to go roundabout first time reaching Beregost in BG1:p)  

One thing though, IMHO I do think they would be so much palatable to people if they had a silent option (or, even, a less talky option...) not due to the fact that the voice acting is bad (it isn't... ok fine, maybe for some...) but just because they stand out so so much compared with the rest, at least in BG1.  Sound balance and general sound equalization for their voices feel off compared with the other NPCs.

 

Edited by Leeux
remembered another reason :)
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Those are all good points, I think. And way beyond anything I could fix myself, even little by little. These technical details: Sunfire, Skull Trap and so on. I don't think I ever noticed or known about those exceptions, loopholes or call them what you like, but I don't know now if I just never cared back then or if I played and enjoyed them silently. I did enjoy the original powerful Sleep. Perhaps over the years the experience of playing the game has dulled because these little sources of fun have been chipped away, and I just never noticed. Or maybe, after all, what I always wanted was a role-playing game, where I could take my imaginary personality on a path, and these details just never mattered to me in the first place. To me BG was, at first, just something strange and unusual - remember the hype in the press that surrounded it in 1998! during development! a rebirth of the role-playing genre! - and afterwards a compomise, when I could not get as much real, live, tabletop role-playing experience as I wanted.

It was a... well, a toke of opium, I suppose. I mean, as soon as I tried live role-playing, and especially after I read up on AD&D sourcebooks in those last years leading to the Millennium and the Third Edition, I realized that this was where imagination could unfold. Because all you needed was a pencil and paper, literally, and people to recite your worlds to! Any worlds and places you could imagine! Floating islands! Portals in the heart of volcanos! Lurking ghoul cemetaries! There was no limit, and no reason for any limit. Today I know that the Second Edition of AD&D was just an update of the First, and that the real, good, simple and gritty game had been the original D&D. I had no idea about the history behind then. But it didn't matter - I could create my worlds with any rules. I wonder what happened that after a while it became no longer possible? Maybe THIS world has moved in another direction, away from all fantasy.

I wish there was a way to get players to put up with the EEs, though, even today. For the sake of mod ideas.

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2 hours ago, subtledoctor said:

Wait don’t scimitars and wakizashis use the same proficiency??

Yes, also Ninjatō.

On topic: my main gripes are technical; I wish Beamdog had implemented IWD2's simplified spell duration, and hadn't overloaded version 1.0 structural resources, which have a history of different versions per game/engine version.

Edited by Endurium
Clarified "they" = Beamdog
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