Baldur's Gate: The Zero Reload Saga

A strange thing happened when I loaded the game up.

I had made my last save for the night in the mephit portal room. A few seconds after the screen faded into view, four mephits appeared, one in front of each portal…and then half a second later and through no doing of my own, they all simultaneously dropped dead.

I’ve never seen this bug before, but that isn’t saying much given that I haven’t been here in two years.

In other news, Jaheira levelled up again, this time in Fighter. This is much less exciting, because Fighter level-ups tend to be synonymous with “crushing disappointment”.

We’re all familiar with it. You’ve been grinding through the game for what seems like, and probably actually has been hours, slaughtering monsters left and right and harvesting that sweet, sweet Quest XP wherever you can find it…and then, just when you’re about to give up hope, you hear it. The soft, soothing, ethereal, sparkly little noise that lets you know that someone in your party is about to become just a little bit more awesome. And after all that, what you get when you click the button is this:

“Breath saving throw reduced by 1.

Additional hit points gained: 2.”

Which, incidentally, is precisely what I just got here. God damn it, Jaheira.

We’re beginning to run out of inventory space as well. I’ve had to start cramming things that I’m not going to be using down here into our quick slots in order to make room, as well as wearing the odd item of jewellery I’ve picked up. The completely non-magical jewellery that confers no bonuses whatsoever. Such indignity.

I had Yoshimo hide and snipe the escaped clone while she was fighting the assassin, then back off once she turned hostile to hide again. Getting ready for a backstab here, but…damn it. As soon as he’s within sight she casts Detect Invisibility.

Now, this is something I’ve always hated the game doing. If you’ve got a character concealed by any means, be it invisibility or stealth, and you get within range of someone who has any kind of illusion dispelling magic memorised, they will immediately start using that magic as soon as they “see” you, even if they aren’t initially hostile.

But that’s just it. They shouldn’t be able to see you, so how would they know to cast it? Are we supposed to believe that every time this happens, it’s mere coincidence? That all these enemy spellcasters just happen to unerringly think “Hmm, maybe I’ll check and see if there are any invisible people running around” whenever you’re walking by?

Try it yourself. Go into the Adventurer Mart while invisible. I guarantee that Ribald will cast True Sight as soon as you get inside.

This is one of the (admittedly few) examples of the AI “cheating” in this game. There isn’t even much point to it, because if you’ve got a thief skulking around and someone suddenly starts casting a spell for no apparent reason, you know that your cover’s about to get blown and you should retreat until the spell’s been cast/wears off.

To be fair, in this particular instance, the woman’s just had several arrows plunked into her tender flesh seemingly out of nowhere, so she did have ample reason to suspect that someone might have been trying to get the drop on her. That doesn’t excuse all the other times this happens, though.

But my, this is a lot of complaining for an enemy that didn’t give the party any hassle. After Yoshimo quadruple backstabs her for (sigh) 33 points of damage, we pilfer the key from her poorly cloned corpse and move on.