I didnt think it was possible to make me enjoy rtwp combat but this game did it. Very fun game, lots of builds to do. The Heart of Winter expac was a lot of fun too, though the Trials of the Luremaster was just ass hard for no reason. Very good backgrounds as well, i was extremely impressed with those.
My team consisted of:
S. T. Deandra – Undead Hunter (Paladin)
Molehill – Dwarvern Defender (Fighter)
Shark Ute’rie – Half-Elf Barbarian (Fighter)
Chief Kickabitch – Human Kensai (Fighter)/Cleric
ShortMediumAtLarge – Gnome Cleric/Thief
Glih Zhee – Elf Wild Mage

I don't want to go too hard on this game because a lot of things I ended up disliking about it are because a lot of the things I found frustrating here are due to it being based on D&D which I think is, largely, the antithesis of fun. So, things like THAC0, or the garbage alignment system, or obtuse/unclear stat systems aren't really Icewind Dale's fault. I can, however, call out how the game doesn't really offer any help if you're unfamiliar with those systems. The vast majority of things in the game don't have tooltips or details to read and the manuals (which don't come with the Steam version! I had to find the GOG version's manual!) don't have anything to help with this either. So, in the frequent case that I was confused about something, the solution was to go google it. I guess the expectation was that back in 2000 you'd either have your 2nd Edition rule book laying around and look it up there or you'd know what forum to go to to find your answer. Don't know how to remove "Chaos" or whatever? Well, too bad. Go look it up. Hope you know where to look! They had the option to put a lot of information in the game itself (both in the initial release and in this Enhanced Edition) and chose not to. It made a tedious experience that much more tedious when I had to frequently alt-tab out of the game to look things up for every other encounter (and not even always find an answer because Icewind Dale seems to be not terribly well-documented, especially compared to other notable CRPGs of the era).

So, with that aside... I still didn't like this very much. It's an immensely tedious game that asks you to constantly wrestle with every bit of tedium and clunkiness and if you manage to do all that you're rewarded with an immensely bland and generic narrative. I found large swathes of this game to be actively unenjoyable and unfun.

The way combat is seemingly supposed to work in this game is that you engage a group of enemies, they wipe the floor with you, and you load the game to figure out what the best approach for your particular party is. At first, I was okay with this. Combat was a series of fun puzzles to try and solve and once you get a wide enough array of tools at your disposal, it starts to become easier to deal with all the things the game can throw at you. But after hours and hours of saving and loading for just about every encounter, it really wore me down. It's just a tiresome loop to put up with for the thirty-ish hours it took to get through the game. On top of that, I found a lot of the encounter design to be very lacking. It seemed like there were largely two types of encounters here: a massive mob of simple enemies or a smaller group of enemies that have some more difficult aspect to them (resistances to particular damage types or strong spells, things like that). Occasionally, they throw a third type at you: a large mob of simple enemies that also have some stronger enemies behind them. It is, again, fine at first but becomes pretty boring when maps are just the same couple encounters repeated a dozen or so times.

Something that makes all that worse is that this game is clunky. I like to think that I'm pretty willing to put up with a lot of Old Game Jank and will cut older games a lot of slack when they don't have all the smooth sleek experiences of modern games but Icewind Dale really tested my patience in that regard. It feels like every way this UI/UX could be clunky, it is. Managing your inventory, casting spells, even just moving your characters around. The pathing AI was a pretty major source of frustration for me because it meant that I was constantly pausing in combat to micromanage each party member's movements but it felt like it hardly mattered because sometimes their AI routine would wrest control away from me and go do their own thing or other times they'd get inexplicable stuck on a wall or an ally or on nothing at all and they'd just sort of vibrate in place instead of doing anything useful.

And, hey, speaking of those party members, they were a pretty major disappointment for me too! When I saw that it gives you a full party of six pre-generated characters, I made the assumption that they were Actual Characters with stories and companion quests because that's how the vast majority of CRPGs work. But it turns out that, no, they aren't anything. They're just as empty as your own created character is. They get a little paragraph of backstory but there's no connections to the areas you go to or the people you meet. They don't have any goals or ideals or motivations or anything. This was extra weird to me seeing as the Icewind Dale games are basically a follow-up to the Baldur's Gate games which do a pretty good job of having interesting companion characters. (Side note that, yes, those games are by a different developer but you'd think maybe Black Isle would've taken note of what Baldur's Gate did well and try to put that in their game, y'know?)

And, hey, speaking of disappointing writing, the actual main plot of this game is some of the most empty, vapid, dull, tabletop adventure writing I've ever seen. There are a couple interesting tidbits here or there in this but the vast majority of the narrative is intensely dull. You're a group of adventurers who headed North in search of the vague idea of "adventure" and got caught up in chasing down some evil that plagues a village but the evil is always somewhere else and then, oops! it turns out the evil manipulated you into doing a thing for them and now you have to continue chasing the evil down to have a final confrontation. So much of this feels like they were stretching for time. There's so little actually important events in the story that it feels like they crammed in as much filler as they could to fill out the game.

It's not completely devoid of good ideas but most of what I did have any positive feelings for is buried pretty deep or not really engaged with. I think it's very interesting how this game pretty frequently reminds you that there were lots of people already living in the area before a bunch of humans moved in to start the Ten Towns and that y'all are extremely not welcome here you fuckin' settler scum but then the game doesn't really do anything with that. You can't do much to criticize or push back on the idea that because the Ten Towns exist everyone else just has to be okay with land being stolen out from under them. It almost feels like they stumbled backwards into it on accident and that's why they only sort-of address it. I also liked this small sub-plot about elves and dwarves fighting a war against orc but eventually falling because they were deceived into thinking they were being betrayed by each other. It wasn't anything terribly original or groundbreaking but the way it delivered that narrative by telling you one thing, suggesting the truth via some notes, and then revealing the actual truth later was significantly more interesting than almost anything else in this game.

I found that a lot of this held true for the DLC/expansion Heart of Winter as well. The narrative was nothing special ("hell hath no fury like a woman scorned" except the woman is a dragon) and the encounter design was the same but with ice monsters and yetis and shit. At least that one was short.

The Trials of the Luremaster DLC/expansion though is truly awful. Apparently, they only did this one because people complained that Heart of Winter didn't have enough content to it. And you can tell because a lot of it feels like it was made under duress. So much of the encounter design feels actively hostile to the player and downright mean. Most of the puzzles they ask you to solve are either dead simple things that are barely even puzzles or obtuse bullshit that the game seems to expect you to trial and error your way through. And there's barely any narrative to it, either. I made it about 90% of the way through it before the hard-as-nails encounters wore me down and I quit because absolutely nothing I had seen made me think that last 10% was going to be worth my time. Just some atrocious game design on display here. The only part of this that was remotely amusing was that one character's dialogue is, essentially, saying that adventurers like you are a bunch of greedy assholes who just want to travel to places to loot them for all they're worth.

I didn't particularly enjoy my time with Icewind Dale. I kept expecting to find something about it that I'd like and at least be able to point to and say "the rest of it may be kinda shit but this one part is worth it!" but I never found that.

CRPG's have made a major impact on me recently. I never got to play a lot of these in my formative gaming years because my PC was utter garbage, I could barely run Math Blaster. But now with a lot of games getting remakes or re releases on modern systems, or with great services like GOG, I'm able to go back and play the classics like this one. I personally think I prefer this to the first Baldur's Gate, which seems to be it's closest counterpart. I think the fast pacing of Icewind just caters a little better to my style. It's also nice that the games simply hold up by and large, even compared against modern interpretations like Divinity or Pillars of Eternity these games still play wonderfully and the only major downfall tends to just be in the menu departments. Small issues for me, if you happen to have a Switch I can't recommend the Enhanced Editions of this, Baldur's Gate 1+2 and Planescape Torment. If not then GOG puts all these games on sale for a couple bucks like once a month so keep an eye out, especially if you are an RPG nut like I am.

Beaten: Aug 10 2021
Time: 20 Hours
Platform: Switch

Well, it's the last of the 2e infinity engine games. This one's core design is something you don't tend to see in western CRPGs much anymore. This is a dungeon-first game, with almost none of the exploration that characterized Baldur's Gate, nor the story heft of Baldur's Gate 2. Honestly, it reminded me most of Planescape Torment.

Now that might be a weird comparison, since Planescape is known for having almost no combat, and Icewind Dale is pretty much combat front to back, but hear me out: Planescape and Icewind are games that compliment each other better than nearly any other set of games. They're distillations of the Infinity Engine's systems into two pillars, storytelling and action. In Icewind Dale's case, the "action" side of things, we have near-pitch-perfect dungeon design, encounter design, and the perfect amount and style of world-building to tie it all together

The dungeons lean more on the side of interesting layouts than maze-like, which is definitely for the best. You feel like you're exploring caverns and decrepit buildings, rather than sweeping back and forth through something that was designed to be disorienting. They can be big and complex when they want to, but for the most part that's not where the interest is. Instead, the encounters are where the focus lies.

The encounters in this game are a thing of beauty. Every time you get into a brawl, it feels very tight and well thought out. Even the bosses are manageable for the most part! When there's a group of enemies, they're fragile enough for an area spell. When there's a tough one, it's beatdown time. When that doesn't work, try some other spells. It's a game that calls you to adapt your strategy over the course of the game, but doesn't seem too interested in frustrating you for not realizing that. You'll be able to tell when you're doing something wrong every time, and more often than not you'll have time to adapt. Granted I was on easy mode, because I'm Bad at these games I love so much lol, so it's safe to say it can be more punishing at higher difficulties if that's what you want.

Those two were largely what I expected. Icewind Dale is known as the combat-heavy Infinity Engine game, and it definitely lives up to that. What I wasn't expecting was the world outside of the dungeons to be so fully realized!!!!

From the small town where the game opens all the way to the last minutes of the game, there's a wealth of characters to talk to, to learn about the game world from. Every place you go feels like it has history, and when you talk to the people there (some of them are even mid-dungeon!!!!) you get to piece together that history. Different cultures tell of long rivalries with others, and the other cultures have their own side of things to learn as well. The way I'm saying it might seem a little basic, and sure it's not as outwardly complex as many rpgs tend to be, but the depth on display here, the texture of the world beneath your feet, it's intoxicating. And in that way only Black Isle (and obsidian lol) know how to do.

I wouldn't start your crpg journey with this game. Hell, even if you've played more modern games, I wouldn't play this before Baldur's Gate. There's not much in the way of a tutorial, and you can and should make your own six-character party when you start. That being said, if you like the other Infinity Engine games but want more content, more rigor, and more of that sweet sweet Black Isle writing, you'd be doing yourself a disservice for skipping this one