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subtledoctor

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About subtledoctor

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  • Mods Worked On
    Might & Guile
    Faiths & Powers
    Tome & Blood
    Combat Skills & Proficiencies
    SubtleD's Tweaks
    Will to Power
    NPC_EE
    Mac Weidu Launcher

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  1. Uh-oh, bit of a problem. I finished Korlasz’ crypt, then went back to the palace and talked to Belt, told him I needed to rest for a bit. Sirene, Brandock, Neera & Imoen all told me they were going to go off on their own. Okay, here we go, time to start SoD! Right? Right? Well, not exactly? The screen faded to black but instead of waling up to the attack on Imoen, the game just kicked me out to the main menu. I want to be like, “excuse me? This is EET! I don’t do main menus.” Sigh. This transition is so fraught every time I play. What’s going to happen to my companions? What’s going to happen to my equipment? Will anything be lost? Do I need to do anything to prepare? Last year I installed both Transitions and EndlessBG1. That time it was complicated and nerve-wracking and buggy. I only installed EndlessBG1 by itself this time, hoping it would be simpler and more reliable. But perhaps not… Oh well. All the more incentive to make my own transition mod.
  2. Playing the end of Black Hearts, then The Undercity/Sarevok, then Korlasz’ crypt, feels a bit off. Black Hearts does such a great job adding some meat to the end-game right before Sarevok, it makes me want to move Korlasz’ crypt to the same place in the sequence. It’s a bit weird that I give Sarevok’s sword to Belt, and then I am searching for that sword not five minutes later. And the plot point of “clear out the remaining former followers of Sarevok” is weak. And, finally, the way you save the Dukes even though you are a wanted murderer, and Belt immediately forgives you and teleports you to the thieves’ guild, has always felt unsatisfying. And suddenly I see a way to improve the sequence: have Belt say he doesn’t know where Sarevok went, and you’ll need to ask around a bit to find out. And after a rest a messenger can tell you they have located one of his followers, and send you after Korlasz. And only after defeating Korlasz do you get Sarevok’s location, and maybe a magical ward to open the way into the (otherwise inaccessible) maze and Undercity. Would just need a few altered dialogues and global variables. Then back to the palace, and then the “Champion of Baldur’s Gate” sequence, and then the transition to SoD. I also had thoughts about whether and to what extent the dukes should really trust you, keeping in mind that eventually you will need to leave the city in disgrace. And maybe we should keep it a bit ambiguous, even at this early stage. And then I had a devilish idea to take some threads from The Calling mod, and the Brandock mod, and Durlag’s Tower, and spin them together into a little thing. And then I started thinking about what the transition to SoD would look like in this scenario, and in my head I ended up rewriting, like, all of SoD. Because the whole “Caelar starts a war and causes untold death and misery and famine, and risks an invasion from hell, to save her favorite uncle” is in fact pretty damn weak. Maybe better to make the Crusade a bit more directly tied to Sarevok, and make it less Hephernaan’s plot and more Irenicus’ plot. And then that got me thinking about this idea - you could basically slash SoD in half, make it a shorter transition to SoA, and use whatever was cut out of it in a mod to improve ToB - to bring the dumb ToB storyline a bit more in line with the Sarevok story from BG1. Maybe in fact make it one big story instead of two disjointed ones, and bring SoD into it as well. And now my brain is spinning. In short I have two small ideas for mods, and two or three rather huge ideas. The big ones still need fleshing out, and maybe never will be. But maybe the small ones will materialize.
  3. That link actually says the drow should have no MR at all if they have been out of the Underdark for more than 8 weeks… (Also a 20% XP penalty and limited to level 12. Just to nitpick a bit.)
  4. Using different poisons that you can unlock in any order is the perfect application for a ‘ki pool’ group of innate abilities.
  5. I spoke too soon! Had a scripting bug in the last interaction with Illasera. I don’t want to spoil anything, but I’ll just say that a green circle turned blue, and I did not get a final dialogue for the mod. So that’s a third bug. But to be honest I can’t say for sure it wasn’t due to some mod interaction in my fairly aggressive install. And honestly I was perfectly satisfied with the mod having been finished at that point. So, still A+, best mod in the list. Those three bugs are totally fixable, I could probably even do it myself with a spare hour or two. Yeah, well, I didn’t want to use this space to point fingers, but yeah, Lava’s mods are among the worst offenders in this area. They are very creative, but their sense of how to balance loot is quite bad. There is one BG2 mod where after leaving the tutorial dungeon, without a single combat, you can go through a couple dialogues and get a dagger +4. Like, the excitement of finding a good magical dagger is basically removed from 80% of the game. I know it’s not intended this way, but it actually sucks fun out of the game. Like I say, I am at the point of making my own personal mod to tone down Lava’s items. But I don’t want to focus too much on Lava. I’m pretty sure some of my other OP loot comes from other mods. I have, like, half a dozen +APR items. I hate it. I firmly believe all +APR items should be purged from the game. Including Belm.
  6. Langchek.tra only needs a single string, @10, which should be the word “Duration” as it appears in spell descriptions in each language. I noticed it has many more strings, but those are not necessary and I think I deleted them in the latest commits.
  7. Yes but those issues with Transitions are predominantly issues it has with EndlessBG1. Which is fair criticism! (As I said I choose to only use EBG1.) But that is different from saying “it’s buggy and should be avoided.” (By contrast, I think it is totally kosher to talk about Transitions bugs in that mod’s forum where they are relevant and can be addressed by the author.)
  8. Just that any doofus like me can, with Weidu, get the benefit of that without even trying. Whereas, with another language I would have to intentionally set that up, and 1) hopefully I don’t forget, 2) hopefully it’s not too much extra effort, and 3) hopefully I don’t screw it up. That’s a lot of hopefully!
  9. Finished Durlag’s - was fine. As I mentioned elsewhere, some mods really add a crap-ton of OP equipment. Between that, and my added caster flexibility of 5E spellcasting and unlimited 1st-level spells, I could do the entire dungeon without resting. Sigh. I wish it was easier to get the experience of modders’ wonderful creativity, while somehow preserving the scarcity of magical artifacts that originally helped make BG1 fun. I find it is mostly quest modders who introduce these bad items. Just an example of meddling in areas that are not where their strengths lie. Maybe I’ll make a meta-mod specifically revising the item from certain mods… (Actually, I’ve already started that, it is in my personal end-of-order “finish up the install” mod… I just haven’t published it.) I also finished Black Hearts, and it is So. Damn. Good. The work on the astral fortress is fantastic, the writing is great, the fights are very good. I love it. I think it has overtaken BST to become my single favorite BG1 mod. Normally I hate the conceit of “you are a bounty hunter/assassin, go fight things for money” but Black Hearts minimizes this to the point that I didn’t mind it. And, shockingly, I quite like the magic items added by the mod. The only issue is all the Thayans who carry droppable Rings of Protection, magical armor, and magical weapons. I would remove the rings, tone down the armor, and just make them higher-level or give them some interesting abilities. That, and fix the buggy scene with Nerys and phantom Illasera… aside from those things, I have no notes. It is damn near perfect.
  10. My guess, without looking too deeply into the code, is that doing so would take some amount of time and effort, which Lauriel does not have to put into making such improvements.
  11. I think you are a bit unkind to Transitions, because it competes with your mod. Every mod has bugs. Every one. Have you seen the SCS boards? I don’t think a reasonably bug-free version of SCS has existed since v31, or maybe v28. Are you going around telling people not to use SCS? I’ve played with EBG1 and Transitions together, and my take is, the combined juice just isn’t worth the squeeze. As in many other instances, you have two mods affecting the same parts of the game; players should probably just choose one or the other. For me, I have chosen to install EBG1 and not Transitions. But I won’t trash-talk Transitions. Lauriel has some goods ideas there, it’s a shame they aren’t around that much to continue to fix and perfect the mod.
  12. AL|EN you are being very coy here… the thread is already on the third page.
  13. I believe it is an average of your classes. So, yes, dual-classed characters get screwed, especially if you do a very early dual. (Doesn’t particularly bother me, since dual classing is so brokenly powerful.)
  14. For whatever it’s worth, I just fought Aec in my current game. I have Spell Revisions, SCS General AI but not Smarter Fiends, and aTweaks PnP Fiends but not Fiendish Gating… and Aec went down just fin. SR may have affected the combination, though.
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