Ineth

Their religious code forbids it, probably.

Regarding the art style, the BG2 user interface is arguably nicer, but regarding layout and usability I think IWD2 has the best UI of all the Infinity Engine games... Switchable weapons combos, instead of making simple tasks like switching between a Bow and a two-weapon combo a frustrating multi-step procedure like in all the other IE games. Verbose character sheets with info logically organized into multiple tabs and convenient listing of all the base and bonus values that add up to effecive values, rather than only having a tiny scrollable textbox with incomplete, inconsistent, and inconveniently organised statistics dumped into it like in all the other IE games. Nice big full-body portraits on the character sheet screens.

I actually never found the time it took to cast buff spells as a huge problem. A slight annoyance, yes, but at the same time it was satisfying to know that it provided a just punishment for players who engaged in unrestrained rest spamming - which, lets face it, was a far too convenient cheese tactic in the IE games... ) What I did hate about buff spells though, especially in IWD2, was that some of the long-duration ones ('Stoneskin' and 'Armor', I think) covered characters with a monochrome gray color from head to toe. So if I cast those spells at the beginning of each day and once more when they ran out, the affected characters would look like walking gray statues during most of the game. Not good for immersion or identifying with your characters.

It seems to me though like you may be beating a straw man here, because in what existing cRPG that has buff spells were you ever confronted with an encounter that truly matches this description? I don't see any evidence that the existence of buff spells would lead to such a scenario. In the Infinity Engine games, each particular encounter could be won in many different ways, heavily influenced by the particular party makeup and carried items. Having buff spells memorized was just one more factor that allowed one to gain an advantage. Meticulously orchestrated combat tactics with un-buffed characters, would still almost always trump inattentive selecting-whole-party-and-clicking-nearest-enemy with highly buffed characters. Agreed. In fact I think that in the past, cRPG's haven't developed the idea of "chess match" like combat encounters nearly as much as they could have. It would fit in perfectly with the turn-based or realtime-with-pause gameplay of these kinds of games. Maybe it was a matter of AI technology not being advanced enough, but Project Eternity - coming out in 2014 - should not have this limitation. Especially since some games in other genres achieved such an effect quite well (for example the awesome Frozen Synapse).

For the most part I agree with the OP, but I very much reject this particular notion: Irenicus Dungeon was a pretty darn well-designed cRPG dungeon. If you equate playing through it with "suffering", then why are you playing this kind of game in the first place? Now I completely understand that many prefer to skip this dungeon when replaying BG2 for the 10th time, because if you already know everything in advance then a dungeon that relies more heavily on atmosphere and story than on advanced tactical combat opportunities will loose it's appeal. However while replayability is nice, it should not dictate level design. To suggest that Irenicus Dungeon was nothing more than a tutorial for weaker players, and more capable players should have been "spared" from going through it even on their first play-through, is to my mind quite absurd. It was an important part of the overall BG2 experience, and as I mentioned at the outset, a far above average cRPG dungeon in its own right.