Baldur's Gate: The Zero Reload Saga

With Lehtinan dead and Hendak having become the questionably legitimate owner of the Copper Coronet, it‘s time to head to the sewers. It’s just not a role-playing game unless you go into the sewers at some point. The act of traipsing through putrid pools of other people’s waste is the proverbial cherry atop the proverbial knickerbocker glory (that’s an ice cream sundae to you damned Yanks); you could certainly enjoy it even if it were absent, but the whole thing would feel somehow incomplete.

Still, at least we’re avoiding the cliché associated with this cliché; there aren’t any oversized rats down here that we have to fight. In fact, I don’t think there are any rats at all. Not a single one. Come on, BioWare. I understand the desire to do things differently, but a sewer without rats is like a sewer without sewage; it’s not really a sewer at all, just a series of tunnels.

In lieu of rodents, we mostly just have hobgoblins. Yeah, remember hobgoblins? They were such a nightmare to fight in the first game. Sure, they were only a couple of rungs above gibberlings on the “Sword Fodder” ladder, but they had those damned poison arrows, and no matter how efficiently you were able to dispatch them, they always managed to tag someone in your party with at least one of them, and you always seemed to be fresh out of antidotes. And of course the friggin’ arrows aren’t poisoned when you use them. Oh no. This poison only works for the cool kids. Are you one of the cool kids? No? Then they’re just arrows. Deal with it. Loser.

Of course, eventually you’d get access to Slow Poison and you didn’t have to worry about antidotes anymore, but the hobgoblins would always seem to end up hitting the people that had it memorised. I don’t know if this was intentionally programmed behaviour or just random chance, but it happened with suspicious regularity. As a result, you were stuck. Nobody could cast the spell because they kept getting “hit” by the poison and interrupted half way through.

I've never been poisoned and I've never met anyone who's been poisoned. I'm not an expert on the matter, so I have to ask; Is that how it happens? Because, you know, I always assumed that it inflicted a continuous state of debilitation, like an illness. You get a nasty swelling at the point of entry or become very sick or, if you’re unlucky, you die. I’m fairly sure that nobody suffering from poison has stood in place going “Ugh! Ugh! Ugh!” and repeatedly recoiling as if having been struck.

I like how it just goes away if you rest, though. That’s convenient. The first game didn’t screw around like that. If you were poisoned and you tried to rest, you woke up dead. The more likely outcome, perhaps, but it was still annoying as hell to have to lug all those antidotes around just to make sure it didn’t happen.

Yes, poison is much less of a menace in this game, which means that in terms of spells that are useful, “Neutralise Poison” is now sitting somewhere at the level of “Infravision.” Seriously, if anyone has come across a poison that was potent enough to actually only be slowed by “Slow Poison” (which is ostensibly what the spell is supposed to do) and required Neutralise Poison to get rid of entirely, please do tell me, because I have never, ever seen one. I’d like to discover that I hadn’t simply been wasting a spell slot all those times I kept it memorised just in case.

As for these hobgoblins, they aren’t a problem. They’re only really a threat if their shamans manage to nail you with Hold Person…which is precisely why we engage Korgan’s Enrage engines first. With this active, he’s immune to paralysis, and he is able to use his throwing axes to draw the hobgoblins over in metaphorical bite-size chunks, whereupon they are reduced into very literal bite-size chunks.