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The charming ones get the chicks (and the guys, and the familiars… and the pets)
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You can have up to 6 party members (including yourself) in BG2, and additionally, mages can have familiars and rangers can have pets. These creatures, according to Smedstad, won't take up a party slot (just like charmed creatures won't), and you will have control over them just like you do with party members. A mage's familiar will have the same abilities in BG2 as in the pen and paper game.
The game's interface will be filled to the brim with options and goodies. The hotkey system will let you assign keys to frequently used actions, even setting aside one key for firing your bow with normal arrows and one for various types of magic arrows. Combine this with the previously mentioned pause system, and you can bet BG2 will be easy to get into and start slaying creatures, the only difficulty coming from the intelligence of the monsters you face and the puzzles you encounter.
If you're really into character customization, you can import your own character portrait, such as a one eyed llama. It may not be representative of your character on screen, but you can always explain to friends that's what you were before you were polymorphed into a gnome. In the inventory screen in BG, there were "paper dolls" of your characters that you could dress up in various types of robes and armor, and invite family members over to help play dress up and say "oooh" or "aaah" a lot. The paper dolls have been redone for BG2, but you can still dress them up like before. As if all that weren't enough, you can always import digitized speech for your character. I'd never want to sit and listen to my own voice throughout the game… it'd make me vomit. Now if I could somehow get James Earl Jones to do voiceovers for me and say things like, "RESISTANCE IS FUTILE" or "LUKE, I AM YOUR FATHER" in his Darth Vader voice, then this feature would really benefit me.
The graphics in Baldur's Gate 2 suit the game well, and while they aren't fully 3D accelerated, they do what a game's graphics should do: look pretty, run smoothly, and invoke fear in the hearts of the weak when large monsters attack. Each character will have twice as many animations as in the original Baldur's Gate, so not every character will suffer from the "I should have visited a restroom the second my bowels shifted, now look at me try and walk" syndrome.
The backgrounds are going to be 2D, but other features such as water and fog of war will be enhanced by 3D acceleration. BG2 will use OpenGL to display the 3D effects, but there are also 2D versions of the effects for anyone without a 3D card. The max supported resolution will be 800x600, although those of you that like to think you're "l33t h4x0rs" can always go into options, pretend you really know what you're doing, and bump the resolution even higher than that (up to a max of 1600x1200). Since the higher resolutions aren't supported however, the game's interface won't display properly.
Those of you who played Planescape-Torment may have noticed in addition to character dialogue, there was plenty of narration too. In BG2, Smedstad tells us there will be some examples of this "flavor text," but not as often as was in Torment; he also added: "Stylistically the two games are quite different."
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