So I strapped on my wellies and rubber trousers and decided to try wading through Baldur's Gate II some more. And yes it's still ****. I'm reminded of one of Yahtzee's reviews where he says a game has two hypothetical developers. While Terry came up with lots of great ideas, Gonad would come along and **** them up completely.
The latest annoyance :-
I've finally reached part 6. I return to the city for the final confrontation with Bodhi. A messenger comes up to me and says that Nalia is needed in the graveyard for her father's funeral. Well I was going there to stake Bodhi anyway so it's not a problem. I get to the graveyard and Bodhi is at the entrance. The game then takes control and kidnaps Aerie. Nothing I can do about it. The game just suddenly decided that without casting a spell or anything Bodhi was able to take her and teleport in 4-5 vampires for me to fight.
Then I'm forced to go to the funeral anyway when I'm one (wo)man down, where I find Nalia's ex seems to have some strange infatuation with her (or more likely her money) and trouble is brewing there. I go into the crypts and kick the **** out of Bodhi but find Aerie is already a vampire and I have to kill her. Apparently though I can resurrect her if I go to the temple of some Sun god I cleansed earlier.
So since I'm supposedly meant to be having a romance with Aerie, she's of course my top priority. So off I go. Halfway to the temple I get "Waylaid by bandits and must defend myself" The battle lasts about 30 seconds cause any bandits stupid enough to attack me after I've been through the underdark is looking to be eating a sword sandwich very quickly. At this point Nalia's ex turns up, says she's under arrest and without so much as a chance to do anything other than pick between a few script options Nalia is suddenly gone leaving me with half her inventory on the ground. Which now means I have to DROP items in order to actually have enough space to carry her stuff. And now thanks to the game's railroading I'm down to 4 characters in my party without every having had a chance to do anything about either disappearance.
But to me, this is the kicker. I'd just defeated a whole bunch of bandits. This guy and a single guard tracked me down in the middle of the wilderness somehow to threaten me with trumped up charges. There are 5 people in my party, all quite high level. Is there any reason why an adventuring party wouldn't simply stick a sword in both of their stomachs and walk away knowing everyone would think they were killed by bandits? I mean I could understand if they tried to arrest me in the city (which quite frankly is how the game should have handled this) but we're miles away from civilisation. Who's going to know?
Oh and is if that isn't bad enough apparently when the game needs to railroad you *cough*Lord Jierdan's quest*cough* True Seeing suddenly doesn't actually dispel illusions.
