Even though the original was a commercial and critical success, Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn improves on some shortcomings and enhances gameplay. This follow-up to Baldur's Gate is artfully designed with graphics, storyline, voices, features, variety and action leagues above its predecessor.
The interface is the same as the original as you manipulate and use items, move characters and engage in combat with a combination of mouse and configurable hot keys. The journal is slightly different, as you can now create your own entries, and the interface toolbars can be hidden, giving you a larger panoramic view of the action. If needed, pausing the game will bring up the toolbars again.
Amazon.com: baldur's gate 2 ps2. Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn, Collector's Edition Sep 22, 2000. Audible Download Audiobooks. So the whole game can be downloaded to a usb stick as an iso or exe. Directly (eg: C: Beamdog Baldur's Gate Enhanced Edition, or where it.
The mood is darker and more mystical, though many references to areas explored in the first game crop up during play. Character creation, a top feature in the original, is even better. An entirely new race is introduced: the Half-Orc, spawned from human and orc parentage, is very strong but not so intelligent. Three new class additions include the Monk, Sorcerer and Barbarian. The Monk receives a bonus for hand-to-hand combat and fights with kicks and punches, but he cannot wear armor or use two-handed weapons. Sorcerers intuitively learn new spells with each level but can't learn from scrolls, and the Barbarian is strong and fast and voluntarily invokes a berserker's rage. The drawback is that the Barbarian can't use plate mail or specialize.
Specialization plays a large part in BGII and 'kits' offer advancement for each type of character. For example, fighters can become a Berserker, Wizard Slayer or Kensai. The Berserker has traits of the Barbarian class and the Wizard Slayer is awarded magic resistance with spell disruption. The Kensai, also known as 'Sword Saints,' can fight without encumbrance and are trained to become one with their sword but can't wear armor, gauntlets, bracers or use missile weapons of any kind.
Other kits offer advancements for Rangers (Archer, Stalker and Beast Master), Paladins (Cavalier, Inquisitor or Undead Hunter), Priests ( Priest of Talos, Helm or Lathander and Druids ( Totemic Druid, Shape Shifter or Avenger). One notable enhancement is the ability of certain characters to use two weapons (e.g., swords, flail, hammer) simultaneously.
At first impression, the game world of the sequel seems smaller than the original. Baldur's Gate had more than two dozen areas to explore as opposed to only 18 in BGII, but each area is packed with more monsters and locales of importance. Many of the areas are hidden and most are far more interesting than the simple stone and tree images of the first game, though it has its share of simple forests and villages as well. You venture forth into such locations as an underwater fish city, the first Drow city of the Underdark, the elfin city of Suldanessellar, hell and even another plane of existence.
The storylines are fascinating and include a daunting number of quests. Jon Irenicus appears in your dreams as you discover the meaning of your lineage and his dark plan. Some sub-quests take on epic proportions, such as foiling another plan for world domination when investigating the wolf murders in the Umar Hills. Unlike the original, you must occasionally solve riddles to make important advances. Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn offers more than 300 hours of gameplay if you're a gamer who likes to complete every mini-quest, side task and explore every inch of terrain.
Somewhat lacking is the dearth of evil NPCs to play. Throughout the game, you only encounter two evil characters, Viconia and Korgan, and rounding out an evil party with neutral characters diminishes the effect. But, the main thrust of the game is positive in nature and it's easy to understand why less of an evil presence is necessary. In multiplayer, though, creation of an entire band of evil characters is possible.
The multiplayer aspect is easy to use and free of charge. Up to six players can participate via LAN or 56K-modem connection to the Internet.
Characters address you by specific gender and class during the game and even romance can bloom between certain protagonists. The difficulty settings make the game incredibly easy or nearly impossible to defeat and the new monsters are bigger and deadlier (Mind Flayers can mean instant death). Dragons are huge and extremely challenging and counterbalance the usual ogres, orcs and other standard creatures.
Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn is a diversely beautiful and deadly environment filled with amazing characters and a myriad of possibilities. For any fan of the original, this is a must have -- it's just too good to pass up.
Graphics: The hand-drawn characters and scenery are beautiful and the artistic style immerses you in the fantasy world. Gamers with a 500MHz or faster PC can reap the benefits of new 3D rendering features. Running waterfalls look real and enemy characters can be incredibly large. Even some large statues have moving parts.
Sound: The atmospheric music shifts moods to accommodate the action in the game in a nice, unobtrusive fashion. Character dialogue is more plentiful with both friend and enemy interaction. The voiceovers are extremely well done and realistic and ambient sounds are superb.
Enjoyment: There's so much here, boredom isn't a factor. The many new character sets, fantastic scenery, immersive storyline and wide range of spells ensure long play sessions and untold hours of sleep deprivation. Action is intense at times, especially combat sequences when fighting fierce giant dragons and experienced Cowled Wizards.
Replay Value: Although the main quest doesn't change, playing with new characters or online ensures continued enjoyment. So much is hidden in the game, playing through just once is unlikely to uncover everything in the game and character diversity insures unique replays.
How to run this game on modern Windows PC?
This game has been set up to work on modern Windows (10/8/7/Vista/XP 64/32-bit) computers without problems. Please choose Download + Throne of Bhaal - Easy Setup (2.40 GB).
People who downloaded Baldur's Gate 2: Shadows of Amn have also downloaded:
Baldur's Gate, Diablo 2, Icewind Dale, Icewind Dale 2, Diablo, Fallout 2, Planescape: Torment, Neverwinter Nights
Baldur's Gate, Diablo 2, Icewind Dale, Icewind Dale 2, Diablo, Fallout 2, Planescape: Torment, Neverwinter Nights
March 23rd, 2010, 09:52 PM
Preface:
The Baldurs Gate saga, probably one of the most epic stories ever brought to game, blessed by the gaming-gods of Arcadion. It is a HUGE RPG spanning 2 standalone games, each with their own expansion pack; I'm not lying when I say I've spent months in this game, there are so many ways to play, a plethora of spells and abilities and a story that's right up there with Tolkiens 'Lord of the Rings'.
Speaking of Tolkien, wouldn't it be neat if you could have 'The Hobbit', 'The Fellowship of the Ring', 'The Two Towers' and 'The Return of the King' in one bigass book that you could pull out and feel the weight of? Well, I'm not gonna give you just that, instead I'm going to give you 'Baldurs Gate', 'Baldurs Gate: Tales of the Sword Coast', 'Baldurs Gate II: Shadows of Amn' and 'Baldurs Gate II: Throne of Bhaal' all weaved into one, one RPG to rule them all...ok let me rephrase that...you get:
To play Baldurs Gate with BGII interface, engine and graphics.
To play from level 1 to level awesome without having to 'recreate' the character between games.
To start characters in BG1 using the races, classes and whatnot available from BGII: Throne of Bhaal.
To play the first Baldurs Gate game in resolutions higher than 640x480 (1600xsomething is the max I think).
To do it on Ubuntu!
A ton of other stuff. (Really, as in 'a metric ton of ink is necessary to describe all the neat little features of this setup', kudos to the creators of EasyTutu for one awesome project.)
What you'll need:
An Internet-connection
Baldurs Gate
Baldurs Gate: Tales of the Sword Coast
Baldurs Gate II: Shadows of Amn
Baldurs Gate II: Throne of Bhaal
Plenty of space on your harddrive (imagine installing all the games, then multiply by 3, then add some for safety).
What's going to happen?
You're going to install each game with Wine. When that's done you'll patch the second game expansion with it's latest patch, and lastly you'll install Easytutu that'll combine all the games so that you can play through from the beginning of Baldurs Gate to the end of Throne of Bhaal using the Baldurs Gate II interface, in one continuous story, and without annoying cd-swapping. Hey, stop drooling...
Step 1 - Making it easy for yourself
Ok you have 4 game-boxes in your hands, that's a lot of cds. Perhaps if you're lucky you got the DVD-versions then you only have 4 DVD's. To make it easy for yourself do the following:
- Create a folder called 'BaldursGate' somewhere where you have plenty of space and normal userprivileges (for the sake of this howto let it be /home/joeuser/BaldursGate).
- Inside this folder create 4 other folders, one for each game/expansion (for this tutorial call them 'BG', 'BGEXP', 'BG2' and 'BG2EXP').
- Now for the annoyingly tedious thing: backup all the games to their corresponding folders you just created, just go the root of the cd, press CTRL-A and copy the whole thing over, one disc at a time (remember to press CTRL-H to reveal hidden files, just for good measure). Do not worry about overwriting stuff when copying multiple cd's into the same game-folder, they do exactly the same.
- Yep it's a lot of space, don't worry, we'll clean up afterwards.
- If your cd's are scratched then 'get it somewhere ;)'. I'm not much for piracy of luxury-goods, but you're sitting with 12-14 cd's that are very old, chances are one of them are messed up, soo...wink-wink-nudge-nudge.
Step 2 - Installing the games
Now you have to install the games, but they can sometimes be quite picky about having cd's inserted during installation. For me BGII was a royal pain until I figured out how to cheat it. Anyway here's how it goes:
I assume you have Wine installed and working, so in a terminal go:
cd /home/joeuser/BaldursGate/BG
Then, once inside your backed up Baldurs Gate folder do:
wine Setup.exeYou will be guided through installation by the installer. When prompted to choose which kind of installation you want choose 'Custom' and mark ALL the content. The game should then install allright.
At the end an annoying video-sequence will start; kill it off however you can (as it froze everything on my screen I CTRL-ALT-F1'ed to a terminal, ran 'top' and killed the process-id of the video, then CTRL-ALT-F7 back to my desktop.
- Repeat the same procedure for your BGEXP-folder.
- For the BGII-folder we need to trick the installer (at least I had to). If you don't do this the installer will go to 95% then ask for CD 1, you'll try and point it out to it, but it wont work; do this instead:
- In a terminal type:
winecfgIt'll bring up Wines configuration utility.
- Pick the 'Drives'-section.
- Add a new drive-map and point it to your BGII-folder.
- In the same window, click Show Advanced'
- Highlight the drive you just added and change 'Type' to CD-ROM.
- Click apply. and close down the window.
IMPORTANT SIDENOTE: If you ever run into 'insert cd X'-problems, then the above is the way to fix it. If you add a drive this way Wine (or rather the game) will think your backed up cd's are the real cd's = no ingame cd-swapping and NO install problems. As far as I know you anly need to add CD 1 from BGII (for the install only) and the BGIIEXP CD (in order to play the game) this way and everything should be peachy.
Anyway after this little detour you can now install BGII and BGIIEXP using the already covered method.
You should now have installed all 4 games/expansions preferably at the installers default location which would be /home/joeuser/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Black Isle/*.
Step 3 - Stitching the beast together
We are now just about ready to create one mean game. First, though, we need to patch up Throne of Bhaal to the latest patch (only one needed), so go to http://www.bioware.com/games/throne_bhaal/support/patches/ and get it. Run it with Wine and let it do it's thing, shouldn't pose any problems.
Now for the interesting part - Easytutu!
- Download Easytutu here : http://www.usoutpost31.com/easytutu/ , pick the one called 'Easytutu_ToB.exe'.
- Run it with Wine.
- During installation it will ask for your game-installation directories; the defaults should work if you went with the defaults when installing the games/expansions, if you didn't then point the installer to them when it asks. By default the installer will install the whole shamoo to /home/henrik/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/BaldursGateTutu, let it do this, generally just go with the defaults unless you have space-problems.
The Easytutu-installer will now work its wonder. It'll copy all the resources and necessary files from the 4 games/expansions into the BaldursGateTutu-folder, stitch the ******* together, and make it so you use the BGII-interface and BGII-engine for playing the WHOLE thing in one seamless game.
After this you should be good to go. Fire up Baldurs Gate Tutu and give it a whirl (either through the new menu-entry in Applications->Wine->Programs or the old fashion way). REMEMBER: if it starts asking for cd's you need to point out the dir in winecfg using the method previously mentioned. If you did this HowTo correctly, then you should now only need a drive that points to your BGIIEXP-directory.
Issues:
The sound is horrible/the sound freezes the game
So far I've only had sound-issues. Usually this is because of pulseaudio. The fix is thus:
gedit /home/joeuser/.pulse/client.confThen add:
autospawn = noto the blank file and save it.
Open up winecfg and go to the Audio-tab. Make sure Wine uses alsa for sound, not Esound or anything else.
Now, everytime you want to play to game first open up a terminal and do
killall pulseaudioso it wont interfere with the game-sound. When you're done playing do
pulseaudio -Dto get back your sound.
NOTE: This sound-fix actually fixes sound in a lot of games besides this one, it's good to remember. Sometimes though the fix will turn your volume to zero once you bring back pulseaudio, don't panic and turn it up again :D.
Equipping a 2-handed-sword or clicking at Khalid's paperdoll crashes the game! SEE UPDATE AT BOTTOM!
These 2 actions (and probably a plethora of others I havent seen yet) causes the game to crash to desktop IF you've enabled 3d-accelerated graphics in the game-configuration, turn it off and you'll be dandy.
The Main menu is messed up
Yep, it's not a showstopper though.
Cleanup-time!
You safely delete the Baldurs Gate 1-installation in your wine-installation, it's not needed anymore. You can (in theory) also delete the backup 'BG', 'BGEXP' and 'BGII'-folder. In essence, all you need now is the Baldurs Gate Tutu-folder, BG2-installation and the 'BGIIEXP'-folder (the game needs it to run, for verification purposes I guess). I keep the backups around though as it's nice and handy and NOT AT ALL LIKE 12-13 FRIGGIN' CD'S WITH SCRATCHES!!!
UPDATE
Apparently running the game now presents you with a nonsensical error, this can be fixed by using winetricks to install Internet Explorer 7 (don't ask why)
Also, with a vanilla install, you'll only be allowed to run the game properly in 800x600 with 3d-acceleration on. Running it at larger resolution would crash the game when you try to equip a 2h sword, and running it without 3d-acceleration looks pitiful. This can be fixed by installing the Widescreen Mod from the Gibberlings Three found here : http://www.gibberlings3.net/widescreen/
Remember to download the windows version as we're doing this thing with Wine and not GemRB. Put the file in your BaldursGateTutu folder, run it, and fill out the resolution questions, and you should be good to go, fullscreen, 3d-accelerated BG1-to-ToB goodness.
The Baldurs Gate saga, probably one of the most epic stories ever brought to game, blessed by the gaming-gods of Arcadion. It is a HUGE RPG spanning 2 standalone games, each with their own expansion pack; I'm not lying when I say I've spent months in this game, there are so many ways to play, a plethora of spells and abilities and a story that's right up there with Tolkiens 'Lord of the Rings'.
Speaking of Tolkien, wouldn't it be neat if you could have 'The Hobbit', 'The Fellowship of the Ring', 'The Two Towers' and 'The Return of the King' in one bigass book that you could pull out and feel the weight of? Well, I'm not gonna give you just that, instead I'm going to give you 'Baldurs Gate', 'Baldurs Gate: Tales of the Sword Coast', 'Baldurs Gate II: Shadows of Amn' and 'Baldurs Gate II: Throne of Bhaal' all weaved into one, one RPG to rule them all...ok let me rephrase that...you get:
To play Baldurs Gate with BGII interface, engine and graphics.
To play from level 1 to level awesome without having to 'recreate' the character between games.
To start characters in BG1 using the races, classes and whatnot available from BGII: Throne of Bhaal.
To play the first Baldurs Gate game in resolutions higher than 640x480 (1600xsomething is the max I think).
To do it on Ubuntu!
A ton of other stuff. (Really, as in 'a metric ton of ink is necessary to describe all the neat little features of this setup', kudos to the creators of EasyTutu for one awesome project.)
What you'll need:
An Internet-connection
Baldurs Gate
Baldurs Gate: Tales of the Sword Coast
Baldurs Gate II: Shadows of Amn
Baldurs Gate II: Throne of Bhaal
Plenty of space on your harddrive (imagine installing all the games, then multiply by 3, then add some for safety).
What's going to happen?
You're going to install each game with Wine. When that's done you'll patch the second game expansion with it's latest patch, and lastly you'll install Easytutu that'll combine all the games so that you can play through from the beginning of Baldurs Gate to the end of Throne of Bhaal using the Baldurs Gate II interface, in one continuous story, and without annoying cd-swapping. Hey, stop drooling...
Step 1 - Making it easy for yourself
Ok you have 4 game-boxes in your hands, that's a lot of cds. Perhaps if you're lucky you got the DVD-versions then you only have 4 DVD's. To make it easy for yourself do the following:
- Create a folder called 'BaldursGate' somewhere where you have plenty of space and normal userprivileges (for the sake of this howto let it be /home/joeuser/BaldursGate).
- Inside this folder create 4 other folders, one for each game/expansion (for this tutorial call them 'BG', 'BGEXP', 'BG2' and 'BG2EXP').
- Now for the annoyingly tedious thing: backup all the games to their corresponding folders you just created, just go the root of the cd, press CTRL-A and copy the whole thing over, one disc at a time (remember to press CTRL-H to reveal hidden files, just for good measure). Do not worry about overwriting stuff when copying multiple cd's into the same game-folder, they do exactly the same.
- Yep it's a lot of space, don't worry, we'll clean up afterwards.
- If your cd's are scratched then 'get it somewhere ;)'. I'm not much for piracy of luxury-goods, but you're sitting with 12-14 cd's that are very old, chances are one of them are messed up, soo...wink-wink-nudge-nudge.
Step 2 - Installing the games
Now you have to install the games, but they can sometimes be quite picky about having cd's inserted during installation. For me BGII was a royal pain until I figured out how to cheat it. Anyway here's how it goes:
I assume you have Wine installed and working, so in a terminal go:
cd /home/joeuser/BaldursGate/BG
Then, once inside your backed up Baldurs Gate folder do:
wine Setup.exeYou will be guided through installation by the installer. When prompted to choose which kind of installation you want choose 'Custom' and mark ALL the content. The game should then install allright.
At the end an annoying video-sequence will start; kill it off however you can (as it froze everything on my screen I CTRL-ALT-F1'ed to a terminal, ran 'top' and killed the process-id of the video, then CTRL-ALT-F7 back to my desktop.
- Repeat the same procedure for your BGEXP-folder.
- For the BGII-folder we need to trick the installer (at least I had to). If you don't do this the installer will go to 95% then ask for CD 1, you'll try and point it out to it, but it wont work; do this instead:
- In a terminal type:
winecfgIt'll bring up Wines configuration utility.
- Pick the 'Drives'-section.
- Add a new drive-map and point it to your BGII-folder.
- In the same window, click Show Advanced'
- Highlight the drive you just added and change 'Type' to CD-ROM.
- Click apply. and close down the window.
IMPORTANT SIDENOTE: If you ever run into 'insert cd X'-problems, then the above is the way to fix it. If you add a drive this way Wine (or rather the game) will think your backed up cd's are the real cd's = no ingame cd-swapping and NO install problems. As far as I know you anly need to add CD 1 from BGII (for the install only) and the BGIIEXP CD (in order to play the game) this way and everything should be peachy.
Anyway after this little detour you can now install BGII and BGIIEXP using the already covered method.
You should now have installed all 4 games/expansions preferably at the installers default location which would be /home/joeuser/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Black Isle/*.
Step 3 - Stitching the beast together
We are now just about ready to create one mean game. First, though, we need to patch up Throne of Bhaal to the latest patch (only one needed), so go to http://www.bioware.com/games/throne_bhaal/support/patches/ and get it. Run it with Wine and let it do it's thing, shouldn't pose any problems.
Now for the interesting part - Easytutu!
- Download Easytutu here : http://www.usoutpost31.com/easytutu/ , pick the one called 'Easytutu_ToB.exe'.
- Run it with Wine.
- During installation it will ask for your game-installation directories; the defaults should work if you went with the defaults when installing the games/expansions, if you didn't then point the installer to them when it asks. By default the installer will install the whole shamoo to /home/henrik/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/BaldursGateTutu, let it do this, generally just go with the defaults unless you have space-problems.
The Easytutu-installer will now work its wonder. It'll copy all the resources and necessary files from the 4 games/expansions into the BaldursGateTutu-folder, stitch the ******* together, and make it so you use the BGII-interface and BGII-engine for playing the WHOLE thing in one seamless game.
After this you should be good to go. Fire up Baldurs Gate Tutu and give it a whirl (either through the new menu-entry in Applications->Wine->Programs or the old fashion way). REMEMBER: if it starts asking for cd's you need to point out the dir in winecfg using the method previously mentioned. If you did this HowTo correctly, then you should now only need a drive that points to your BGIIEXP-directory.
Issues:
The sound is horrible/the sound freezes the game
So far I've only had sound-issues. Usually this is because of pulseaudio. The fix is thus:
gedit /home/joeuser/.pulse/client.confThen add:
autospawn = noto the blank file and save it.
Open up winecfg and go to the Audio-tab. Make sure Wine uses alsa for sound, not Esound or anything else.
Now, everytime you want to play to game first open up a terminal and do
killall pulseaudioso it wont interfere with the game-sound. When you're done playing do
pulseaudio -Dto get back your sound.
NOTE: This sound-fix actually fixes sound in a lot of games besides this one, it's good to remember. Sometimes though the fix will turn your volume to zero once you bring back pulseaudio, don't panic and turn it up again :D.
Equipping a 2-handed-sword or clicking at Khalid's paperdoll crashes the game! SEE UPDATE AT BOTTOM!
These 2 actions (and probably a plethora of others I havent seen yet) causes the game to crash to desktop IF you've enabled 3d-accelerated graphics in the game-configuration, turn it off and you'll be dandy.
The Main menu is messed up
Yep, it's not a showstopper though.
Cleanup-time!
You safely delete the Baldurs Gate 1-installation in your wine-installation, it's not needed anymore. You can (in theory) also delete the backup 'BG', 'BGEXP' and 'BGII'-folder. In essence, all you need now is the Baldurs Gate Tutu-folder, BG2-installation and the 'BGIIEXP'-folder (the game needs it to run, for verification purposes I guess). I keep the backups around though as it's nice and handy and NOT AT ALL LIKE 12-13 FRIGGIN' CD'S WITH SCRATCHES!!!
UPDATE
Apparently running the game now presents you with a nonsensical error, this can be fixed by using winetricks to install Internet Explorer 7 (don't ask why)
Also, with a vanilla install, you'll only be allowed to run the game properly in 800x600 with 3d-acceleration on. Running it at larger resolution would crash the game when you try to equip a 2h sword, and running it without 3d-acceleration looks pitiful. This can be fixed by installing the Widescreen Mod from the Gibberlings Three found here : http://www.gibberlings3.net/widescreen/
Remember to download the windows version as we're doing this thing with Wine and not GemRB. Put the file in your BaldursGateTutu folder, run it, and fill out the resolution questions, and you should be good to go, fullscreen, 3d-accelerated BG1-to-ToB goodness.