Caedwyr

We've completed Baldur's Gate 1. Only a few bugs cropped up and people have generally enjoyed all the modded content, when we can even notice that there's modded content. We're moving on to Siege of Dragonspear and will get to see how the bridging episode plays out. This is going to be completely new for all of us, so it should be interesting.

I put that down as a quick note to myself. I've added the details to the thread over on Beamdog.

Correction on the Northern Citadel quest, it requires that a character use a Restoration scroll. Also, Pique says he is giving you an item, but the player does not receive anything. Details of both on the Beamdog thread for Northern Tales of the Sword Coast.

We're at Baldur's Gate now and are all madly working on the sidequests that can be found there. I appreciate the density of the city, but the Atkatla city map is a big improvement in that it actually names the districts on the map and makes it much easier to navigate around the city.

Yes, BG complete is the original versions of the game. When reviewing mods see if they support the original versions or only the Enhanced Editions.

Another thing that would be nice is some crossmod between Brandock and Helga npc mods for BG1. They are both encountered close to each other and it would be nice if the two mods recognized this. Even if it is just Brandock mentioning that he heard voices talking which led him to approach everyone.

Yeah, if you go digging into some of the forums, you can find a message from me saying I am holding off my next playthrough until Delainy is done. Then I didn't play the game for 15 years.

Another possible party member, though this one is pretty obvious. Delainy/Duryale from the Isle of Balduran.

Another character that would be interesting to see expanded is Left from Romantic Encounters. An intriguing character and I really liked the chain of dialogues with him.

That would be what I need to do. Thanks.

I've done the bandit camp and almost all the sidequests available to me prior to doing Cloakwood. I have still to do the Isle of Balduran sidequests and there's a few bits of Northern Tales of the Sword Coast to tidy up, but everything but the main story is almost done now. A couple of random thoughts on NPCs you encounter that could be expanded one day. Note as an aside for why Gorion can't be raised, to be consistent with the lore of D&D and the Forgotten Realms it just needs to be clear that the corpse is too badly mangled to support life after Raise Dead is cast. Resurrection is something that could be viable if the PC carried around pieces of Gorion's remains, however turning the body into some form of undead creature (Tamoko could raise Gorion as a skeleton) or trapping the soul would work to prevent this. There's probably room for a mod out there to add a long term quest to the BG1 game where you are trying to get Gorion brought back, but won't be able to do it until the skeleton that gets raised (during the cutscene, or mentioned via dialog later). Since it requires a level 7 cleric spell to do this and costs about 10,000 gold I can see this being something that you are rewarded with at the end of the game. You could actually allow Gorion to rejoin the party at the end of BG1 and he'd be about the right level for SoD (he's a level 9 mage). Then you can kill him off in the transition to BG2 or have him trying to track the PC down and meet up again during that portion of the game, should you feel like writing a whole NPC mod for him. Tamah from Romantic Encounters seems like an NPC that could become a party member. I'm not sure if she's bugged in my game, since she is now sitting in the Feldpost Inn and my journal says that she is interested in any messages from Camryn, but she doesn't react to any of the "thicker than normal" books I've found during my adventures. Bjornin the paladin. Greywolf, an interesting alternative to siding with Prism (and Isra) if you can convince Greywolf to join you in delving into the Nashkel mines for a share of the treasure. Dalton from Durlag's tower if you free him.

Yeah, I'd be interested in your own take on Valen. Weimer's original mods were good examples at the time, but the writing wasn't really to my tastes. I'd be a lot more interested in someone's new take on the character that wasn't tied directly to Weimer's version. You can be inspired by some of the ideas of the previous mod, but you also have a lot more creative freedom to do your own version. I'd probably skip the update/addon to the existing Weimer NPC mod, but would give a standalone take on the character a closer look. Then again, there's probably people on the other side who are looking for an update to the classic but may not be interested in something new.

Here's the install order and list of mods I'd suggest to use as a basis for your install. At this point, if a mod doesn't appear in Project Infinity, feel free to skip it. I've also left out anything that appears to have a slight conflict or oddness in the in-game text. Once you've had a chance to go through this list, feel free to ask about any specific mods you haven't included yet. Install Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition Install Baldur's Gate: Siege of Dragonspear Install Baldur's Gate 2: Enhanced Edition Create a temporary folder somewhere to help organize your various downloaded mods before you install them. I'm going to go with the following structure for now .../Documents/BGEET/Install With the following subfolders BG1 BG2 Download and extract the mods to these two folders. You are going to want to make sure there is a Setup-Foldername.exe and a Foldername for each mod in these folders. Project Infinity may have some additional steps here and you should follow them, but doing this will help organize things and makes it simpler if you choose to do a manual install. If doing a manual install, what you'd do is copy the contents of these folders to the .../Baldur's Gate - Enhanced Edition and .../Baldur's Gate 2 - Enhanced Editions on your computer, wherever you've installed the games. You'd then go through the install order listed below, running each Setup-Foldername.exe file one at a time, making sure to hit enter to close the ms-dos window or manually closing if that doesn't work between running each Setup-Foldername.exe file. For Project Infinity, you'd want to follow the instructions for the program in assembling a saved install order. I wanted to use some mods that didn't support Project Infinity and I've been around long enough that I'm more accustomed to babysitting an install, but it meant there were a couple of days where doing it manually meant I was babysitting an install for over 6 hours. Project Infinity means you can just start the install and come back the next morning without having to babysit the install. Thus, if this is your first time doing a serious bunch of modding your game and you don't want to go for the simpler approach of just grabbing a couple of mods and trying them out, then I highly advise figuring out how to use Project Infinity. There's a thread here on these forums where you can ask for help. Install to the BG1 game in the following order

You gave enough info on the Beamdog forums, so I think I can put together a recommended install order framework for you to work with.

The first thing you want to figure out is what type of modded experience you want. Do you want to try out a few of the better rated mods, but otherwise keep most things like the vanilla game, do you want to create a curated list of the most popular/quality mods that represent a plethora of options in the game, even if you don't end up doing all the content in a single playthrough, or do you want to go for a mega-mod-everything-goes install? Depending on what you want myself @Cahir, and @4udr4n can probably give you some advice since we've all gone through the same process recently, albeit each using slightly different approaches to what we select and how we've built our installs. To expand on things you may want to consider, in my personal game I'm using it for a bookclub with some friends so one of the goals was to have a lot of different options available so people end up having divergent experiences. This means I've actually installed a lot more NPC mods than I would normally do on a personal modlist. However, one of the outcomes of this is it has made the game world feel more alive with all the various NPCs available for adventures. This is in the BG1 portion of the saga though, so depending on how mod NPCs are introduced it may end up feeling less lively and more intrusive once we reach BG2.

We're supposed to have completed Chapter 2 (Nashkell Mines) by this weekend. There's been lots of sidequesting and I've been impressed at how well the various mod NPCs and mini sidequests have blended into the original game. The ones that have stood out the most have been the BeamDog NPCs. They haven't stood out as a net negative, but they do come across a bit more like some of the other older mod NPCs that the author really wanted you to notice their hard work and use their NPC.

Yeah, and I agree that spears are much more thematically appropriate for his character. I'd probably actually choose the "give him Spear proficiency" option if it was available.

While the spear is cool, there are a lot of decent halberds available early on in BG1, so that might be the better fit.

General comments. AionZ, @Skitia and @Lava do some really good mod work. I am really enjoying all of their NPCs. Skitia's characters I'm actually saving to have in the party seriously for my next playthrough when I'll be able to include the BG2 versions that continue the NPC's journeys.

A few more comments on mods that I have some experience with so far in my playthrough. Verr'sza - An evil Rakshasa NPC you can gain as a party member. Definitely an evil NPC party member that is well written and voice acted. I only had him around for his intro quest which rewards a couple good items, but not overpowered. I'd like to do a longer playthrough with this NPC, especially a CHARNAME that embraces their heritage. BGEEClassic Movies - Does what it says. I had it add the missing movies and chapter and dream screens. No real issues there and the playdoughy video graphics don't stand out too much compared to the rest of the game, plus add a bit more flavour in for different locales. BGQE - This adds a bunch more small mini-quests similar to many of the ones in the base game, and the quality and consistency in style makes it hard to tell where one ends and the other starts. So far I've played the Beregost Family Quest, Babysitting Quest, Undying Love Quest, Drunk near Beregost Quest, Many Little Paws, Warm Place for Noober, and Brage's Sword. This mod is a must-install for me for games of BG1. BG1 Romantic Encounters - Adds a bunch of romantic encounters and situations to the game. Some of these are obvious insertions, but others are nice subtle additions. I liked the Childhood Friend, Girdle of Gender Reactions, and Camryn and Tamah encounters that I've played so far. I don't mind having the options available, but a number of the more romantic encounters could probably do with a bit more lead time before immediately jumping to the romantic dialogue options. Still, no regrets so far for having installed this. It doesn't take over the game and adds a bit more texture to the game world and its denizens. Ascalon's Questpack. Another staple quest mod for BG1. So far I've played A Job Well-Paid, A feast for the Gnolls, Of Wolves and Men. These integrate well into the base game and should be included in pretty much all installs.

I've worked my way north and discovered a few more NPCs. The additional mod NPCs do a good job of filling in some areas which were largely empty in the original game with a bunch of little mini introductory quests. Tenya Thermidor fits in well with the base game as far as tone and feel of the little quest and dilemma it presents to the player.

I am experiencing some random crashes (sometimes at zone transitions, sometimes when moving characters, sometimes when opening inventory or changing record pages), but after the game is reloaded everything works fine. They don't seem to be time based either or trigger off anything happening in game. I'm making sure I save often, so recovering from the crashes is pretty easy. In the Baldur's Gate portion of the game I also ran into a weird bug where I removed Imoen from the party and then asked her to rejoin. She gave her line about rejoining, but didn't rejoin the party. Talking to her again she repeated her line as though I had just removed her from the party. I tried telling her to go to the Nashkel Inn, and she spawned there, but the bug persisted. I ended up CTRL+Q her into the party and everything is working fine. I have no idea which mod might be causing this issue and it hasn't happened for any of the other NPCs. The huge number of NPCs is actually really nice for bringing the world to life, even if they never join my party. It gives a bunch of flavour to the world and makes it feel like adventurers are pretty common (which the original game told, but didn't quite show in the same way). I am in Chapter 2 and I am working on clearing some sidequests before heading into the Nashkell Mines. My current party, and the party I think I'm going to end up going with is Minsc Dynaheir Drake Imoen Sirene Grey Minsc is good as always and I'm enjoying the BG1NPC project content as well as the odd dialogue that gets added in from some of the quest mods I have installed. I am actually probably going to go with a dual wield build for Minsc instead of his classic 2 hander build, since Sirene has the 2-hander build on lockdown and there are not a lot of sword users in my party. Dynaheir is okay. I'm not planning on romancing her, but the BG1NPC project dialogues are very much pushing me in that direction. I'm not 100% sold on the types of responses her dialogues have. I feel like the mod author is really trying to push one particular characterization of CHARNAME that doesn't really match the type of voices CHARNAME has in their interactions with other NPCs or quests. This results in it feeling like CHARNAME is putting on fake faces and trying to please everyone. Still, the content itself isn't bad and there's some good characterization of Dynaheir, just sadly at the cost of pigeonholing CHARNAME. Drake is good. I like his background, he's got good interactions with CHARNAME, and is a real bro. He also is a good contrast to some of the other priests and paladins that show up, especially the NG and LG ones which tend to be holier than thou. I like the take on what a Neutral Good character can represent, which means that when he speaks up in response to a situation it tends to have more weight than other NPCs that just speak up reflexively because they are on Team Good. Well done. I do wish the custom special abilities for his Priest of Tyr kit had portrait icons or some sort of graphical feedback when they were active. Imoen. Some of the writing for her in BG1NPC feels like it is trying too hard, but on the whole she's okay. She can be a bit one note and I'm hoping later content will reveal some more sides to her character as she moves out in the world as an adventurer. Sirene is pretty good. I'm probably going to be doing the romance with her. Right now I can get a good reaction out of all the flirts, but she isn't interested in things developing further, so my guess is that her relationship development is contingent on certain plot events. I'll fend of Dynaheir a bit longer. Grey is also good. There's some decent integration with various quests (Albert, Brage) and it's nice to have a dog friend around. Having to kick a party member out and reinvite them in order to manipulate Grey's inventory can be a bit annoying, but I don't have to do it too often and the sidequests seem to generally treat Grey as though he were a party member.

As for bugs, Sirene and Tenya Thermidor, both installed on BG1 before the EET mod is installed have some issues where their dialogue text for battle cries has gotten mixed up. There weren't any issues during install, so I'm guessing both are not quite as compatible with EET as the install guides say and that some changes would be needed to get them to work smoothly with EET. Unfortunately, I'm not sure if the issue is with either of these mods, EET, or another mod I've installed. My suspicion is that if Sirene BG1 and Tenya Thermidor were both made natively compatible with EET (install them after the EET conversion), it would clear up issues like this.

Another small bug, possibly for @CamDawg since I think this is actually something in the base game for BG1:EE or BG2:EE CMISC52.bam (wyvern head) and CMISC54.BAM have black selected as the transparency colour. This causes problems in the enhanced editions, which tend to use Green (0,255,0) as their default transparency colour. Changing the black transparency colour to green fixes the graphical issues. These are all located in Data\GUIICON.BIF

Nah, it's entirely understandable, and so far the language hasn't prevented me from understanding anything that has happened, it is more about tightening up the language and trying to make it flow more naturally. I just appreciate that you've provided an English translation of the mod. I had the first discussion session for my book club last night. We had played up to the start of Chapter 2. General consensus was that Grey was completely indispensable and the option to pet him was a significant plus. People were also pleasantly surprised that he could act as a 7th party member when not in the current group. No one had kicked him out, so I had to tell them about this feature. He's pretty well liked so far.