Good topic, Erekose. I hope you get a lot of responses.
It's a funny thing, CRPGs. After BG1 Bioware/Interplay held a lot of focus groups and the key message from consumers was that they wanted a more powerful protagonist, more powerful monsters and more powerful weapons for BG2. People wanted to be able to cast high level spells, wield +3 weapons, and fight dragons.
The timeframe to achieve this obviously flies in the face of conventional PnP roleplaying logic, where it can take years to get to a powerful level. To put things in perspective, in about 100+ game days your wizards attained a level of power that it took Manshoon, the leader of the Zhentarim, over 50 years to attain. By the end of the expansion you will likely be at a level that took Szass Tam, the undead ruler of Thay, over three centuries to get to. So it seems totally illogical that you can go from grunt to god in just under a year of game time, right?
The problem for Bioware is that they need to balance authenticity with commercial reality. The danger of having a number of games with a more staggered levelling process is that they run the danger of getting very old and passe very quickly (plus the game engine may be overtaken by technology which is what is happening with NWN and 3D now). For every PnP D&D aficionado who buys the BG series there are a number of non-D&D users as well, and Bioware need to look after their needs. Unless the designers get very creative with the questing, people will get bored of fighting the same kind of mid-level monsters all the time. And with the lead times involved in designing and producing games like BG2, you'd probably be looking at a 5-6 real year timeframe to run the project to completion which just might be a bit too long for it to still be commercially viable.
I agree that the levelling up in BG2 occurred at a very unrealistic rate, however keeping the commercial perspective in mind I don't think that they really could've done it any other way, unfortunately. This is just my opinion, though, and I wouldn't mind hearing some feedback from the rest of the group.
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Memnoch - Custodian of the Order of the Holy Flame 