NWN2: Baldur's Gate Reloaded

Baldur's Gate Reloaded is a fan attempt to recreate BioWare's Baldur's Gate in Neverwinter Night 2's engine. Largely a successful one, too, considering the scale of the undertaking. There are various bugs, even in Patch 2, but nothing that prevents finishing the campaign. At least, I did not meet such.

Some annoyances I encountered, though, include how Khalid started initiating dialogue about twice per each map like if I'd tried to kick him out. And in the Tales of the Sword Coast part of the game, half of spell names and descriptions were replaced by some lore stuff, from items or something, which made choosing spells bit difficult. Luckily that was fixed once I got out of the werewolf island and Durlag's tower.

Oh, yeah. Getting in to the expansion part was rather challenging in the first place. In Baldur's Gate, Ulgoth's Beard and the tower are there right from the start, but in BGR, you have to talk to a town crier in Baldur's Gate's gate district for the maps to appear. Too bad the guy was not anywhere to be found. Apparently, he likes to spawn only at a certain hour, and I was able to finally get him after resting repeatedly in the district.

It is impressive how fully the original game is in the mod, though. Maybe even needlessly so. I feel that they could have dropped the unimportant houses from Beregost and Baldur's Gate as the Electron Engine's loading times are way slower than the Infinity's on a modern day machine. Still, I had to explore them all for that little extra gold. Although the +2 arrows found later sell for ridiculous amounts of gold, making any excessive loot gathering not worth it.

Even though in D&D 3.5's rules, the difficulty in BGR was surprisingly similar. There were some differences, though. At least in the early game, where the fights against single spellcasters seemed bit trickier. Also, the belt-thieving ogre I have always liked to kill before going to Friendly Arms Inn, had been replaced -- for whatever reason -- with an ogre magi. One of the QA people in the credits actually had "I was against the ogre magi" (or something similar) as his nickname, which I found amusing.

The ogre spawned at half health but had Prismatic Spray and ninth level Magic Missile, which means instant kill for a level one character. Luckily he cast his spells in a random order, and you can completely avoid the effects of Prismatic Spray if you're lucky. With the help of a critical Smite Evil and a potion of haste, Imoen and my paladin character were able to beat the ogre magi after a handful of reloads.

Bugbears also had had their short swords replaced with two-handed swords, more than doubling their damage output. I countered them by picking the dinosaur companion feat for Jaheira. Later on -- while still the best animal companion -- the dinosaur started to become less useful, though, as it tended to drag behind, arriving too late for fights, as well as often blocking the way for the rest of my party.

There were buffs for the player side, too, though. Partly because BGR comes packed with various little mods, which add quite a bit character customization to the game. From anime hairstyles to dozens of prestige classes, feats, and spells. Among other things, the missing divine feats from Neverwinter Nights were added. They made Paladin/Divine Champion multiclass so good in the game, and respectively not so good in NWN2 were they're missing (without mods).

I found that multiclassing my Paladin to Divine Champion so early wasn't maybe the wisest thing to do after all, as someone had added additional Divine Spirit feature for the class, which, for instance, at level five gives you two additional Lay on Hands uses per day. Those combined with how the Cure Light Wounds Bhaal power had been buffed to a similar effect, Divine Heal, made my paladin quite the healer. The Cure Poison ability was an improved one, gaining the ability to remove diseases and ability score loss as well. The last power -- Divine Power or something -- was just outright overpowered, giving a bonus to each stat equal to your character level for a duration. It synergized really well with the Paladin abilities and made the end game rather easy.

The thing I found most questionable in Baldur's Gate Reloaded, was how they decided to use the engine's "cinematic" dialogue system. It felt quite out of place to see NPCs mouthing lines that had not been voice-acted, and way too often you could not even skip them. Changing Minsc's class to Barbarian and Dynaheir's to Sorcerer on the other hand was quite alright, though.

I guess before playing the mod, you should ask yourself why would you play the game in an inferior engine. Because even though NWN2 has the 3D and all, I think controlling your whole party in the original game is much more pleasant. And it does not even look all bad, especially when modded to Baldur's Gate 2's engine. Of course, there is also the Enhanced Edition, but of that I do not know anything about. All in all, Baldur's Gate Reloaded is pretty good. I found it quite enjoyable to play the story through once more with the third edition ruleset.

There is also a similar recreation of Icewind Dale. I wonder if that is any good.