Victoria 3

I'm in a short-ish-blog-post kick lately, so let's keep that going! I just started my first game of Victoria 3, the latest in a long line of gifts generously given by my brother. Victoria 3 is yet another grand strategy game from Paradox, the makers of Europa Universalis, Hearts of Iron, Stellaris, Crusader Kings and other games of that ilk.

 

 

Starting a new one of these games is always an interesting experience, as certain elements will feel very familiar, but there is still a huge learning curve for the game as a whole. While I may revisit it one day, I was never able to really get into Hearts of Iron IV - I love the idea behind the alternate-history and minor-power scenarios is apparently offers, but the actual gameplay never really clicked for me. So far I'm feeling better about dipping my toes into Victoria - it still feels daunting, on the verge of overwhelming, but for whatever reason I'm finding it a gentler onramp.

 

 

One reason I've been looking forward to Victoria is that its time span, the century from 1836 to 1936, happens to be the era I've been most interested in for the last decade or so. It was the birth of the modern world, of industrialization and capitalism and socialism and railroads and telegraphs and airplanes and electricity. It's the setting of The Birth of Plenty and Against the Day and The Communist Manifesto.

 

 

Just launching up the game, I can immediately tell that it's more modern than my mainstays of Europa Universalis IV and Stellaris. It feels slow to boot up the game and launch, but it's very pretty. Yes, you're still panning over a map of the world and looking at Excel spreadsheets, but they are pretty spreadsheets. And the event-style interactions that pop up here are very attractive, often with some parallax that brings a feeling of depth and motion to what's still a static image. As with the popups in EU4 the images don't always match the text - I would see, like, a group of men in turbans while reading about Swedish industrialists - but I'm not complaining, they still add great atmosphere.

 

 

From what I've seen so far, the laws and technology look a lot like what Hearts of Iron has, an almost Civilization-style tree where you follow from prerequisites to unlocked techs, unlike the more abstract single-pathed advancement of EU4. Unlike EU4 but like Stellaris, Vic3 also has "pops", discrete representations of the people populating your empire, which in turn drive systems like factions, ideologies, needs and so on. But so far the Vic3 pops seem to be presented pretty differently in the UI: in Stellaris you could directly see individual pops on your planet, in Vic3 I've only see the rolled-up summaries of overall numbers.

 

 

Following the game recommendation, I'm starting off with Sweden, which seems like a great choice: they're at peace, are pretty friendly with their neighbors except Denmark, are decently large but nowhere near as sprawling as Britain, have a decent existing base of infrastructure and a ton of choices for growth. I'm finding the tutorial very helpful; I particularly like the buttons "Tell Me How" and "Tell Me Why", that patiently walk through the series of buttons to click to find a particular switch to toggle, and also explain the game concepts that are impacted by this mini-mission.

 

 

So far my focus has been getting a handle on the economy; another thing that's attracted me to this game is the idea that industrial, technological and social advancement are more prominent than military conquest, which aligns with my preferred activities in these games anyways. The economy here seems pretty different from the other Paradox games but I'm digging it so far. There's the overall national economy, which you can slightly influence over the long term but don't directly control: people are automatically finding jobs, migrating, setting prices for things, achieving a certain standard of living, etc. Then there's the smaller sphere of public spending which you can immediately impact through things like adjusting the tax rate and setting public salaries. So some stuff you can immediately act on but has only a minor effect, while other things take a long time to organically grow but ultimately have a far bigger impact.

 

 

The game seems to actively discourage budgetary surpluses, which I found really interesting. There's a cap on how many reserves you can store in your treasury, and exceeding that amount won't benefit your nation. This violates my normal gaming instinct of "Make Number Go Bigger", but it does make sense, both gameplay-wise (spending money today will grant your nation immediate benefits, while saving it will postpone those benefits into the future) and historically (the indebted nations like Britain were the most powerful nations). I'm at a point now where my people are still considered poor, but I can't spend all the money my treasury is taking in even after slashing taxes and boosting spending. Not the worst problem, I guess! But peeking ahead, future laws and reforms will unlike things like educational systems and health care, which I'm eager to fund with my socialist Scandinavian krona.

 

 

Not much story-wise to share just yet. I've researched Railroads, built a few farms, made friends with Prussia, adopted Private Schools and Church Hospitals, and recently adopted Wealth Based Voting, which makes my constitutional Monarchy considerably more dynamic. In general I'm trying to boost the Intelligentsia, and maybe some Industrialists and/or Trade Unions and/or Petite Bourgeoisie, to unlock some more interesting-looking Laws; but in the meantime the Clout is dominated by Landowners and the Church, so I'm trying to maintain overall societal stability while managing a transition.

 

 

If my other Paradox games are an indication, I'll probably keep poking away at this Sweden game for a bit while I get a handle on the interface and at least some understanding of the main systems, then will embark on a "real" game at some point. It's early days yet, but so far I am enjoying them! 

Clowning Around

Just a quick post on a relatively quick and fun read: I devoured Dave Barry's memoir Class Clown over the course of about a week. I've been a fan of Dave's humor writing since I was a kid. Growing up, my family had a collection of his books, which I would read and re-read and return to over the years. My favorite was "Dave Barry Slept Here", a satirical textbook history of the United States, and to this day I still remember a ton of it, including The Monroe Doctrine ("1. Other nations are not allowed to interfere in the Western Hemisphere. 2. But we are. 3. Ha ha ha!"), the Hawley-Smoot Tariffs, "We all go heppin down the wiff-bane", the French and Indian War (which America didn't realize it was supposed to be involved in until several years in, by which time the confused French and Indians had started fighting one another), and so on. It's one of those things along with Weird Al where as I've grown older I've belatedly come to understand the full joke behind something I already thought was funny.

 

He was also a columnist, writing for the Miami Herald but syndicated nationally. I don't recall whether his columns were reprinted in our local paper or not, but I definitely know that in the years since then I've always enjoyed his "year in review" wrap-ups along with any other pieces I see from him.

The memoir is written in his voice and is very funny. He does touch on some sad elements related to his parents early on in the book; despite the limited space available in a book, he gives a fully rounded view of them, emphasizing their love and amazing actions and enormous influence on his humor, while also unflinchingly sharing the struggles they endured and ultimately succumbed to. Other than that and a brief mention of how much worse the political and media landscape has become since the 2016 election, this is a consistently upbeat and amusing book. As he says, and I have no reason to doubt him, he's been lucky to have one of the best jobs in the world.

Dave liberally quotes from columns throughout the book. When he experienced some major event, like appearing on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson or writing for the Oscars with Steve Martin, he definitely got a column out of it, and he'll excerpt from that column here. Probably 90% of those were new to me; there were a few I recognized from one of his books or some other writing, but those also made me chuckle. I think the hardest I laughed during this book was his description of attending a French sommelier competition, which I don't recall having ever heard about before.

I got a big kick out of this book, and definitely recommend it to anyone who already enjoys Dave's writing. It's amazing to see how sharp and funny he is today years after officially retiring. It also reminds me that he's written a lot of books since I was a kid, none of which I've read before now, so there's an unexplored trove of light, hopefully fun and funny books out there for me! 

Solstice

And, just to put a bow on it, I've wrapped up Heart of Winter, the ancient expansion to Icewind Dale. In some ways this feels similar to Tales of the Sword Coast in that it's an expansion that can either be played as part of the main campaign or at the end. But this experience is a lot more locked-in, and tells a focused story while you're in it as opposed to the more wandering feel of TotSC.

 

On the whole, it feels like a literal "expansion" to Icewind Dale, in that it continues forward the feel and gameplay of the main entry as opposed to changing flavors. You're still in the icy North, visiting tiny hamlets, exploring large lairs and fighting enormous armies of baddies.

 

One thing I neglected to mention in my previous post is that these games have reminded me of just how much I love (and miss) 6-person parties in RPGs. It makes the game feel much more tactical and not just strategic: you can build a proper front line, need to manage your space, try to block out encroaching enemies, and scramble to adapt if you get flanked. I went with a pretty standard loadout for these campaigns with three frontliners, two missile fighters and one useless bard. I know from experience that you can run many other types of parties - in Baldur's Gate 1 it can be fun to run with six archers and nuke down all the enemies from range. I do really think we lost something when RPGs moved to smaller parties; each character gets to shine with more powerful individual abilities, but we've lost the sense of space and positioning and the "shield wall" from those older games.

 

 

I was fairly impressed by the graphics in this expansion, which seem really good for the era. There's one particular cave where creepy eyeballs appear out of nowhere, blink ominously and then fade away. Throughout the game we get various ghostly apparitions, along with the very colorful spells that Infinity Engine did so well.

 

 

For my playthrough, I chose to start a new Heart of Winter campaign from the main title screen, importing characters from my final save from Icewind Dale.  This proved to be slightly tricky, as the Level 1 NPCs I rolled for the start of Icewind Dale also appeared in the party-selection menu and it wasn't very easy to differentiate the inexperienced from the veteran versions. It took just a little trial-and-error to get the whole party set up. Everything imports pretty cleanly, including inventory and spells, with the notable exception that all containers are removed: gem bags, potion bags, Bags of Holding. For the most part I didn't miss the items in those containers, but losing the containers themselves was slightly annoying as I had to do some old-fashioned inventory wrangling. One thing that did bum me out was losing my Potions of Wisdom that I'd been carefully stocking; in the expansion I eventually learned the Limited Wish and Wish spells, but never found any Potions of Wisdom for loot or sale and so my high-level mage wasn't able to safely cast them.

 

MEGA SPOILERS

The specific reason why I disliked losing my containers is because I got zapped to the Luremaster's castle almost immediately after starting the expansion. This is just random bad luck, if I had happened to wander east instead of north I would have hit some shops before visiting the tavern and been able to get new containers.  The Luremaster segment is good story-wise but mechanically it felt rough to be immediately thrown into it without any option to back out (short of loading an earlier save - if I had been underleveled and hadn't kept multiple named backups, it could have been a permanent game-over for me). The Luremaster section seems to have harder enemies than anywhere else in the game. Besides not having access to things like Gem Bags for managing loot, it also doesn't sell many consumables like magic arrows and bullets, and despite coming into the expansion with a huge armament I was nearly empty by the end with no hope of restocking.

 

 

 All those gripes aside, I did really enjoy how unique the Luremaster experience was. It's easy to compare it to Durlag's Tower and Watcher's Keep in that it's a fairly large, optional, stand-alone crawl with its own separate story. But Luremaster brings some big differences: unlike the others, you're locked into the experience from the start and can't dip in and out. The antagonist is especially interesting, and it's cool to gradually get to learn his story: he's an adversary but not necessarily a villain. The puzzles feel decent for this era and game engine.

 

 

By the time I beat the Luremaster, I officially had a Very Powerful Party, and didn't feel very challenged for the whole rest of the game. A big turning point had been getting Iron Skins and Stoneskin on two of my front-liners. There's some magical attacks in this game, so they don't block everything, but the vast majority of attacks are physical and your ranged attackers can usually interrupt enemy spellcasters, so while I wasn't reckless I also didn't feel much need to buff before fights. Looking back, I think the hardest fight in the whole game for me was Yxunomei near the end of... Chapter 2, maybe? That was the only battle where I really needed to do a lot of buffing and laying out some cheese.

 

 

The actual story is cool, though. The backdrop is a tense standoff between the native "barbarian" tribes of the North and the Ten Towns, settlers from the south who have built a small set of trading villages. I think the game pretty overtly references real-world tensions with indigenous people's ownership of land being usurped by powerful outsiders, and how that gets more complicated many generations in to a dynamic.

 

 

As you eventually learn, there's an even older dynamic at play: the great ice dragon Icasaracht  originally ruled these lands before being defeated by humans, and has seen descendants of those same humans being displaced by invaders. The sword that originally killed her kept her soul from being reborn, but the sword was removed at some point. Her spirit merged with that of Wylfbane, a respected chieftain of one of the northern tribes, and brought him back from the dead. Due to the ancient animosity between the tribes and the dragon, the hybrid Wylfbane claimed to have been possessed by the spirit of Jerrod, a legendary hero we've learned of from the original Icewind Dale.

 

 

Wylfbane calls the tribes to a council. The Ten Towns are nervous, anticipating an attack. As traders and craftsmen, they don't have a military to defend against the tribes should they choose to fight. You enter the game around this point to try and negotiate a peace with the tribes. You eventually learn Wylfbane's true identity and reveal it to the tribes. Most of them rebel against her, though the Dragon Clan remains loyal. You eventually hunt down the dragon and kill her. Along the way you've met a woman known as The Seer who helps you, and you eventually realize that she's the one who is narrating the animated scenes between chapters, much like Belhifet narrated the main campaign.

 

 

END SPOILERS

Heart of Winter ended up being longer than I expected, I got nearly two weeks of gameplay out of it. I was going to say that I recommend picking it up, but I think it comes for free with any copy of Icewind Dale you can buy in 2026, so definitely play it as part of the game. For me it worked well as an expansion past the end of the main campaign, and I think the difficulty is tuned to this level, but in the unlikely event I replay Icewind Dale I'd at least try it during the course of the main game. More snow, more ice, more monsters and weapons and XP, along with some juicy Level 9 Mage Scrolls: What isn't there to love? 

Rosy

As was foretold, I have finished Philip Pullman's latest trilogy, The Book of Dust. The final volume The Rose Field is the longest entry yet. A lot happens in it! Let's jump right into some

 

 

MINI SPOILERS

The Rose Field picks up immediately after the end of The Secret Commonwealth, without a time-jump like there was between the first two books. We're pretty firmly in Lyra's world throughout the whole trilogy, primarily following the story of Lyra and Malcolm, but an increasing number of ancillary characters pop up, along with returners from The Secret Commonwealth and a few cameos from His Dark Materials.

This book felt more like The Golden Compass. The Secret Commonwealth had more of a focus on the mundane-ish world of universities, business, politics and religion, while The Rose Field had more monsters and mythical beings, as well as the return of witches and angels and other supernatural elements.

In particular, there's a great long-running side-plot about griffins: we meet some individual griffins, learn about their society and ambitions. This eventually leads into a fantastic assault on a sorcerer's fortress built into a volcanic mountain. This story feels pretty stand-alone, but the characters in it are all very well-drawn, as are the factions and rivalries and things.

I was slightly surprised by how rarely the people in this book referenced the events of His Dark Materials. There are a couple of times when Lyra mentions how she "went north", but she shares (and thinks) almost nothing about the other worlds she discovered. It seems like a really huge deal that The Authority was killed in The Amber Spyglass, but it doesn't seem to have made any impression on Lyra or the Magisterium. That isn't necessarily shocking or a huge problem - I interpreted Lyra's reaction as a PTSD walling-away, and the Magisterium might be cruising along on institutional inertia - but it felt odd to not even reference it in these books.

MEGA SPOILERS 

 I'm not complaining that the trilogy ends here, but as I was getting to the last 50 pages of this book I started to assume that we were in for a fourth novel. It felt like there was way too much stuff to wrap up, and a bunch of new things that dropped immediately before the end of this book, most especially the discovery of the Rose world. It does end, and a lot of stuff isn't wrapped up or explained. It's fine not to know, but to me this felt more like a Neal Stephenson ending where the author runs out of pages, as opposed to a Murakami novel that is peppered with deliberate lacunae.

I won't recount all the loose ends here, but a few that stand out to me include the Asian research station. We get a nice little story over a few scattered chapters about the survivors, the rebuilding, reconnecting with someone who went to the Red Building, an attempt to sell the station, and.... nothing. There's Alice's second life in London as a disavowed Oakley Street spy passing on secret messages; but I don't think we ever learn what those messages were about, or anything that Oakley Street has actually done since passing on the writing stones. There are intriguing insinuations that Thuringa Potash has been involved in the corruption of the Rose World, but their exact role is very unclear. I also was expecting to better understand exactly how the Red Building was staffed: were the guards from the other world maintaining a sort of embassy in Lyra's world, or was this an ancient Lyra-world operation that reached into the other world? And what exactly did Ionides and his lady-friend do in the Rose World? It seems positive, but there's zero indication of what actions they took, and what impact if any that will have on traffic between the worlds.

This book and The Secret Commonwealth seem to have been teasing a Lyra/Malcolm romance. It seems like it gets ejected at the end of The Rose Field, which I'm happy with. There's a suggestion that Malcolm reunite with Alice, which makes me much happier, especially given their bond in La Belle Sauvage. I do wonder what the point of this romance-suggesting was, though. I thought it just made the reader feel uncomfortable and it didn't seem to resolve into anything meaningful.

It was weird to have Bonneville kind of redeemed at the end. He was a very pathetic and put-upon character throughout this book, which had made me feel some sympathy towards him even though he still seemed like a terrible person. It seems like Ionides set him up to be a very effective assassin. I suppose it's never too late for people to turn to good.

Speaking of the assassination, it felt extremely anti-climactic for the Magisterium to lead an army of all of Europe across half of Asia and then never do anything with that army. After all that logistical maneuvering, a couple of soldiers blow themselves up and Delamare gets shivved, The End. There's so much deception swirling around Delamare and I'm still not completely clear on what the purpose of the army was: did he intend to invade the other world? It seems like huge overkill to just blow up the opening when a handful of soldiers have managed all the other portals.

END SPOILERS

There's kind of an explicit wrapping-up of values near the end, but even to the characters in the book it seems a bit tenuous and tentative. The idea of "Imagination" has loomed large over the last two volumes, with characters struggling to even define what it means, to understand why it is important, where it comes from and why it might disappear. I think that, between this trilogy and His Dark Materials, we're left with an impression that as humans we need a combination of imagination and rationality, that the interplay between the two are key to being complete people.

I did enjoy reading this series. It's been a while since I read the first trilogy; I didn't like this one quite as much, but I'm not sure how much of that is due to the books themselves and how much is due to myself. My favorite was La Belle Sauvage, which works really well on its own. Taken as a whole, these do a good job at further fleshing out Lyra's world, adding more mystery and ideas and some great adventurous tales peppered with some almost cinematic scenes. Not a must-read, but a good read.

Firegust Glen

I've been enjoying a bit of a blast-from-the-past lately. I finally picked up the Enhanced Edition of Icewind Dale. This game originally came out around the same time as Baldur's Gate, and along with Planescape: Torment was part of a cluster of AD&D Infinity Engine games from different companies that shared the same underlying game system but had significantly different approaches to game construction. As I've belatedly come to think of it, it's like having three very different Dungeon Masters offering you seats at their tables.

 

I've been aware of Icewind Dale for decades, but haven't been very interested in it. It has a reputation as a combat-heavy game, mostly focused on builds and tactics. There aren't recruitable party members and very little freedom in the story. Those were the aspects I loved most about Baldur's Gate and Planescape, and I figured I'd be frustrated by the lack of those elements.

 

 

However, over the years I've heard many positive things about Icewind Dale. In particular, that its combat is far more entertaining, and that the art and music are some of the best of this era. So when the Enhanced Edition recently went on sale during the Steam Spring Sale, I decided to pick it up and check it out. I'll note up top that I agree with the overall impression of the community: while lacking in the story-oriented aspects of roleplaying, its fights tend to be more interesting, and a lot of the visual design and the score still hold up really well.

 

 

The game starts right off the bat with a bit of a wall to climb: chargen. I can easily spend 15 minutes or more rolling a character, and with Icewind Dale, you are rolling six of them. While I was getting up to speed I followed a very helpful gamefaq which guided me in my choices. My overall party was:

 

 

Samantha was the leader. The only single-class character in my roster, she was a half-elf Skald Bard. As with my original Bhaalspawn Cirion, she almost never fought, and just hung in the back while strumming on her harp. She did have some buffing and summoning spells, though, and would occasionally charge up the party prior to an encounter. She wielded a longbow that she never fired, and a scimitar that she never swung, but some of the scimitars give pretty decent bonuses just for holding them, such as to Luck or AC.

Cora was an elf, multi-classing as a Ranger and Cleric. She could use a Flail, but mostly wielded a Sling from the back-row. Her spells were oriented around buffing the party: Bless, Chant, Prayer, Recitation, Protection from Evil, and so on.

Tessa was another half-elf, and a triple-class Fighter/Mage/Thief. You don't need many Thief abilities, and still level quickly enough even splitting XP three ways. I maxed out Find Traps early on, which is the only really important skill. I maxed out Pick Locks next, which is only very occasionally useful. By the end of the game I had close to 80 in both Move Silently and Hide in Shadows, which would have been useful if she was a backstabber, but since she was primarily an archer it didn't really matter. She had an eclectic mix of spells, including disrupting spells like Magic Missile, some debuffs like Sleep and Web, and some protective or utility spells. Mostly she was a very effective archer, getting in lots of powerful attacks from a distance.

Everyone else was a dual-classed human. First was Doris, who was a Kensai through Level 9 before dualing to Druid. Druids regain XP pretty quickly for lower levels, so I felt comfortable waiting a bit longer before dualing. Kensais are notoriously squishy, so I focused on her Dex and gave her any AC-boosting items I could find that she could wear (there are not many). She mostly wielded Scimitars, sharing hand-me-downs with Samantha. I didn't get a ton of utility out of her Druid spells, but more Heals are always convenient. Barkskin helped a bit early on, and Ironskin helps enormously later.

Then was Mary, a Fighter through level 7 and then a Mage. Mary wielded a long sword with a shield, and eventually swapped her full plate for mage robes. Mary's spells tended to focus on ones that helped her combat, including Stoneskin, Magic Mirror, and more.

 

 

Finally was Trixie, a Fighter through level 7 and then a Cleric. Trixie swung a mace with a shield, and got to keep her full plate. Like Mary, she focused on spells that directly helped her in combat, such as Strength of One, Draw Upon Holy Might, Holy Power, and so on.

I was definitely doing some munchkin-ing in this game. I avoided any plot spoilers, but did carefully plan my party in advance. One thing that threw me off were the comments about "sitting out" levels. Basically, if you were originally a Fighter and later became, say, a Mage, then every time you Level Up you get the normal Mage spell slots and stuff. If you get a Weapon Proficiency as a Mage, then you can only spend it on weapons Mages can wield, like Daggers or Quarterstaffs. After you regain your Fighter abilities, though, you can spend weapon proficiencies from your Mage level-ups on Fighter-only weapons like Two-Handed Swords. Anyways, I noticed that online guides would remark about "sitting out" levels even after you had raised your second class high enough to get back Fighter abilities. I eventually realized why this is - even if you can put a pip back in, say, Long Swords, the game won't let you put more pips into that specialization than you could if you were a Fighter of the same level. Basically, you can't become a Grandmaster at a lower level dual-class than a single-class Fighter. It all works out in the long run, and you earn XP much more quickly later in the game, but it did mean running with slightly weaker characters for longer than I'd planned. I was glad to slightly stagger my duals, with Doris remaining a Fighter for a few more levels, and Mary and Trixie coming back into their martial strength while she was Druiding.

 

 

As I often and cheerfully complain about, 2nd edition AD&D feels like a really clunky and unintuitive system. If I hadn't cut my teeth on these games, I probably would find them impenetrable. Beyond the complexity, though, I did find myself longing for the modern quality of life improvements we've gotten over the years. One major example is magic and healing. In these games, by far the best way to heal from damage is to use healing spells; sleeping for 8 hours will only restore 1 HP, or a few more if you pay for a room at an inn, while a healing spell can heal far more. But you don't really want to be casting healing spells in the heat of battle, you want damage and buffs. So there's this whole rigamarole where, if my party is injured, I will:

1. Erase all of my cleric's memorized useful spells.
2. Fill up all the slots with healing spells.
3. Rest for 8 hours to memorize those spells.
4. Cast the spells on my party.
5. Repeat steps 3-4 as necessary.
6. Erase all the healing spells.
7. Restore my original useful spells (from memory).
8. Rest for 8 hours to re-memorized the useful spells.
9. Continue questing until I'm banged up enough that I need to heal again.

That did ease up a bit later in the game; you get to a point where there are enough spell slots that you can just walk around with heals, and I'm fine with resting a couple of times. But it did feel like an annoyance early in the game. But, again, maybe that's on me - plenty of players will cheerfully have their characters sleep for weeks until they are fully healed, which is ridiculous from a storytelling perspective but actually significantly faster in real-world time.

 

 

I should mention here that, unlike Baldur's Gate, I never encountered any ambushes while traveling between map regions. I'm guessing they just aren't implemented in this game, though it also might be something that happens on difficulty levels above Normal. I usually avoided resting in areas with enemies around, but I think I did get ambushed once or twice that way.

 

 

Speaking of travel: the travel distances in this game are very long, often encompassing multiple days, unlike the hours of Baldur's Gate. But I think that the game assumes you rest while traveling, while BG assumes that you don't. So that was a difference: in Baldur's Gate you'll sometimes arrive at a new area with an exhausted and sleepy party that needs to rest immediately, while in Icewind Dale they'll be chipper, albeit at the HP and spells that you left the previous map with. I'm really glad you don't get exhausted, because there are a few places with scripted fights at the very entrance to a new region, before you can even save your game.

MINI SPOILERS

The characters are pretty decent, less compelling than those in Baldur's Gate but a bit more colorful than I'd been expecting. The voice acting is pretty good. I'm pretty sure they shared some of the voice actors with Baldur's Gate; one of my PCs sounded a ton like Imoen, and others also seemed familiar. A few key NPCs have fully voiced dialogue, which worked out pretty well and didn't overstay its welcome. Some of the villains have really over-the-top, campy, scenery-chewing deliveries, which can be fun if you're in the right mood.

 

 

I did love the look of this game. I'm pretty inured to the standard fantasy tropes of forests and castles, so it was really compelling to see the snowy and icy expanses in this game. Even the interiors felt pretty unique. The Severed Hand is a really interesting structure that you climb up in, unlike the descent into dungeons that tend to define these games, and it splits into a variety of separate towers near the top. Dorn's Deep was probably my favorite visual area of the game. It's a bit like the Mines of Moria, but filled with streams of lava, which gives everything a great red glow.

 

 

The chapters of the game each start with a storybook, which was a pretty nice presentation. In general these sorts of graphics have aged far less well than the in-game sprites have, but I think it helps that the FMV is just showing static pages in a book, illuminated with a flickering candlelight. Overall it seems a bit blurry but not bad. 

 

 

One mechanic of Icewind Dale that changes things up is the random loot generation. I haven't read too in-depth on this, but from what I understand, instead of a certain boss dropping a certain item, in some cases he/she/it will have, say, a 25% chance of dropping one of four different items. Or you might roll from a random table to find what specific item you get. This means you may never see a specific weapon in your game; and it also might mean you get duplicates of the same item. Going in pretty blind, I was happy with how things worked out, though I can see how this could be a source of frustration on replays. For example, I never came across any Elven Chainmail, and I later read that it's only available as a random drop in one specific encounter, so most players will make a hard save before entering that area and reload until they get it.

 

 

Overall I felt pretty powerful once I finished my dual-classing. My overall setup was three melee dual-classed Fighters in the front line, variously protected with things like Mirror Image and Iron Skin, while I had two ranged fighters and spellcasters in the rear, and Samantha uselessly strumming her harp. (Okay, okay, the Skald Song is actually really good and I'm glad that I have it.) But by the end of the game my mages only got to about the 5th circle of spells, while I think my divine casters got to the 6th. I think that even single-classed wouldn't have gotten much further as the total amount of XP for the fighter class levels is less than a single later caster level. I haven't yet played the Heart of Winter expansion, though, and I'm curious how high up I'll go. There's also a mode called Heart of Fury that significantly boosts enemy strength and also the XP they grant. From what I gather, veteran players will import their end-game party into a new Heart of Fury game as a sort of New Game +, so it's probably good that there's new power levels to look forward to with that setup.

MEGA SPOILERS

Again, this game doesn't really have any branching plotlines or choice-and-consequences. There's the typical Baldur's Gate choice between "I'll help you because I'm nice!" or "I'll help you if you pay me!". And there are some cases where you can choose between showing mercy, tricking an opponent or killing them. But the storyline is pretty static.

Here's my overall impression of what happens:

 

 

As we learn in the prologue, many years ago there was a war between the native barbarians of Icewind Dale and the human settlers who were moving in. During that war, one of the leaders opened a portal to the Abyss and demons began pouring out. The two sides stopped fighting each other to face their common foe. One of the humans, a cleric of Tempus, sacrificed himself to close the portal. This led to an uneasy peace.

Some time later, elves and dwarves created an alliance against their common foes the orcs. The dwarves made high-quality equipment, and the elves enchanted it. The dwarves wanted to sell the equipment, but the elves forbade it. A drow trader was able to break into the vaults, stole some equipment, and sold it to the orcs. This caused the elves to believe that the dwarves had betrayed them. The two sides grew estranged, and orcs overran both of their respective fortresses.  

An ancient demon, Belhifet, has been struggling for a while with another extraplanar entity, Yxunomei. They both want an ancient artifact called the Heartstone Gem, which has been wielded by a druid in Kuldahar to hold back the cold and support a comfortable environment for human settlement. Yxunomei manages to steal the gem, and starts using it for Reasons that I never really understood. Belhifet is plotting to get the gem and use it to reopen the portal to the Abyss: this will cause the world to be overrun by demons and fuel the Blood War.

As part of Yxunomei's machinations, people start getting kidnapped from villages, goblins are seen roaming around, and the winter is getting worse due to the gem being stolen. This is where the game starts. Your group of adventurers agrees to join an expedition to discover the source of the trouble.

You kill Yxunomei and take the gem, but Belhifet murders the druid of Kuldahar. You then travel to the Severed Hand to see Lyssan, the ancient elf who commanded the garrison before being driven insane. He reveals that the secrets you seek lie in Dorn's Deep. You travel there, where you learn that someone known as Brother Pelquin, supposedly a priest of Ilmater, has been building up an army and turning the resources of the dwarves to war. You defeat his lieutenants but discover that his main army has marched on Easthaven and destroyed it.

 

 

Teleporting back to Easthaven, you rescue the villagers and confront Pelquin, who is revealed to be Belhifet. This is a really long fight! And really annoying! He clears any buffs you have at the start, and the battlefield is littered with traps, so anywhere you step you'll take damage and dispel any buffs you have gotten. He also has two Iron Golems with him, who hit hard and fill the field with poison gas clouds. He can only be hit with +3 weapons, hits like a truck and has a buttload of HP.

 

 

Eventually you (hopefully) defeat him, which leads into the final storybook sequence showing the triumphant heroes carrying the day. The narrator grows increasingly agitated, and you gradually realize that the narrator is, in fact, Belhifet himself. Pretty fun twist!

I never looked up any strategy or anything for the last fight. I stayed laser-focused on Belhifet, but if I were to do it again, I think I would try and take down the two Iron Golems first, after which I think it would be much more feasible to kite him around with a melee fighter while my ranged fighters and casters engaged him from a distance. I might also see if it's  realistic to have the thief detect and disarm the traps on the map - it feels like there are a hundred of them. If you could clear them, though, you could bring up buffs during combat, which would be a huge game-changer.

One pretty major difference in game rhythm from old-school to modern games is how side quests are handled. There are very few side quests in general in this game. A lot of them are immediately opened and closed: you'll talk to someone, they'll say to fight the monster in the basement, you go into the basement, fight the monster, and return for your reward. But on the other extreme, there are a bunch of quests related to a dilapidated garden in the Severed Hand. You're supposed to fetch various things, including pure water and seeds and animals, to restore the garden. All of these are in future maps. When you find one, it is a LONG journey back to the Severed Hand and up through the labyrinthine maze to the garden again, just to drop off the item and get some XP and make the long and convoluted journey back again.

 

 

Even more annoying, several of the required items are in what turns out to be the last region of the game. I was planning to finish clearing Dorn's Deep before returning to the Hand to drop off my goods; but the last encounter of the Deep zaps you all the way back to Easthaven, and you can't re-enter the world map from there and must proceed to the final boss. Having this experience gave me a fresh appreciation for why modern RPGs give a clear signal of passing the "point of no return" - it wouldn't just be a matter of reloading for me, I would need to redo huge chunks of gameplay if I went back to finish those side-quests.

END SPOILERS

Despite my various gripes, I did have a blast playing Icewind Dale. The combat is satisfying and the unique setting kept me engaged. The EE also comes with the Heart of Winter expansion, I'm looking forward to playing that next!