xiaoleiwen

It has been my dream for having bg npcs visit iwd and interact with the quests there. Hopefully this project is still alive, I can wait

I'm taking Isra in my current playthrough, her Bg1 part is decent but nothing really stand out for me, but I'm impressed with her quests in B2. I just finished two of her quests and now whatever she told me in BG1 have meaning because they are related to the quests in SOA. At the moment I really appreciate Xan, Isra and Adrian come with quests that the quality is as good as vanilla quests

BG1 NPC MOD is a must if you prefer the vanilla npc to have banters and interjections such as BG2. The writing is really good and fit their personality very well. I used to dislike any NPC mod / quest mod because I prefer to keep my games as vanilla as possible (for 18 years) and I thought mod written by non-professionals cannot be good, but after trying some, I changed my opinion because some NPC mod and quest mod are really cool and I will definitely try some more in the future. In my opinion, good NPC mod can give me more motivation to replay because I have finished those vanilla quests multiple times already and nothing new to expect in the vanilla game anymore, but now I can see how a different NPC reacts to the vanilla quests and event. The great works from modders have given me more reason to play BG series for another 10 years~ I finished BG1 and SOD recently with Sirene, Drake and Aura NPC mod. Quite fun and highly recommended for Drake (for personality and good quest relatable to BG2) and Aura (quite fresh to introduce lore of Kara-Tur and Lantan, quest, her inventions and Class Kit). As for BG2, there are a lot of MOD adding friendship / romance to vanilla NPC and some I heard very good. There are modded NPC returning from BG1 such as Xan, Coran, Tiax etc in case you are interested. Some of them are written by same authors from BG1 NPC mod so you can expect certain degree of consistency in the writing. I'm just started my current BG2 playthrough and very impressed with Xan BG2 npc. His dialogues are very fun and the new quests added for him are very lore friendly and have some continuation from BG1. Vanilla NPC will also interact in his quest such as any vanilla quest. There are also banters packs for BG2 vanilla NPCs which you may like. You may have a look here: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/50340/bg-ee-2-0-and-siege-of-dragonspear-compatible-mods/p1 https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/34882/list-of-bg2ee-compatible-mods/p1

No wonder I remember I didn't have weird pathfinding issues (that I experienced since my return to BG last year) when I played the game no long after the launch of EE or in original BG.

reply wrongly but could not delete...

Yes, the premade characters are just to save your time in case you do not want to create 6 characters one by one. There will be no dialogue, all of them are like CHARNAME in BG series. If you want to play a vanilla IWD without any NPC mod, it will be better if you create 6 characters one by one, as you can customize theirs stat, proficiencies, skills etc. In case you you are interested, I plan to start another play-through for IWD this year with the following NPCs. Installed recently and have a look of some of them, first impression is more interesting than those I used in 2015 play-through: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/79347/the-new-light-collective-thread-for-lavas-and-aionzs-mods/p1 I enjoy Aionz's NPC written for BGEE and SOD (Sirene, Drake, Aura), the writing is very good and lore friendly. The NPCs are interesting. I have not tried Lava's BG NPC yet, it will be a good chance for me to try out his IWD NPC first. I finished IWD with this in 2015: https://www.pocketplane.net/icewind-dale-npcs/ So IWD have 15 NPCs from MOD which may offer you BG2 like experiences, and if you install the crossmod banters pack, they will talk to each other like BG2 companions~

Pre-made characters won't really talk and interact. If you prefer to create 6 party members on your own and customize them according to your preference and don't mind that they won't talk to each other and won't interact with the quests / NPC, then playing with own created party is a good idea, you will have vanilla IWD experience. However, if you prefer the experience like BG2, having one charname and 5 companions that will talk to you, have banters with each other, interjections with the quests and other NPC, romance / friendship talks etc, I will suggest to install some NPC mod for the first play-through. That was what I did many years ago, and in my opinion it made my adventure more immersive. I remember I failed to finish IWD (before EE) with 6 custom characters as the game was too quiet for someone like me who played BG2 before IWD. One more thing that I think is good to use NPC mod is, normally the author will try to prevent making an overpowered NPC, so compared to 6 characters created with nearly perfect stat, playing with NPC from MOD may be slightly more difficult because their stat may not be perfect as it has to reflect their personality .