![]() ![]() Except IWD2 does this for almost every single new zone. Which brings us once again to padding for time, because IWD2 also abuses that molden oldie game gimmick of dropping you into ambushes upon loading a new zone. yeah, every single door) results in taking "the scenic route around a bush by climbing a mountain" or diving into a CloudKill because you saw your friend outlined by a doorframe. As I complained about BG1, the pathfinding algorithm's refusal to re-check routes and eagerness to abandon a path if it's blocked for even a split-second (e.g. These plus the idiotic pathing makes three, will easily sour most modern gamers on the experience. Then you've got the indistinct low-pixel graphics making it hard to see what you're even standing on sometimes. ![]() Except, IWD being the dedicated dungeon crawl with lots of different weapons to juggle, made it even more of a chore than Torment or BG. Inventory management is a nightmare, thanks to obsolete quest items never getting deleted (leading you to think they might still be useful) the existence as far as I can tell of exactly one bag of holding and four identify scrolls in the entire campaign, and that weird "sticky" item clicking that all Infinity titles suffered from. and here's where I have to start bitching. Merchants are spaced out far enough to make their appearance seem relevant. Limiting heavy armors to no more than +2 by level 15 seems unduly restrictive but certainly made me hunt for the few good ones. Ammo drops were just enough to make my ranger switch to melee or infinite ammo for the easiest fights. You get barrels full of sanctuary and healing potions but few enough of the others to make you ration them a bit, and I was happy to hoard 4 level 7-9 summoning scrolls for use in the final fight. ![]() Resource management stands out, not particularly great (1.5mil gold by the end with nothing to spend it on) but providing a wide array of weapons and fewer freebie consumables as a crutch than other DnD adaptations. Like Bradbury's prophetic view of our futurepresent, Lem's is an Apocalypse bought and sold by market forces and the mindless glut of mass appeal. Though obligated to point out the plot hole of absent libido-depressing mind control chemicals, I can almost accept the villain's claim that past a certain point, once the species' creative capacity was so terminally outpaced by its procreative capacity, little remained possible but to cushion its gradual collapse into itself. but they did so from neglect, greed and myopia, not active malice. This may seem odd, as the ending reveals standards of living to have dropped to 1984 levels. When introducing Lem's Return from the Stars I likened it to the softest, Brave New World sort of dystopia while counting The Futurological Congress as his version of a mid-severity, Fahrenheit-451 variety. ![]() It supports my oft-repeated point that telepathy negates science as the solution to every problem becomes not solving it but making everyone think it's been solved. Though it slightly drags its build-up and rushes its climax, the book retains more than enough punch by its sequential unveiling of just how far denial of reality can drag a society. ![]()
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