Finished Baldur's Gate 1 for the first. Which one (SoD, BG2, or IWD) to play next? Also, mage or sorcerer?

It took a while but I was able to beat Baldur's Gate 1 (on xbox one) finally. I skipped quite a bit once I hit the actual city as I wanted to see through to the story's end but was getting antsy. Anyways, beyond having to switch to Story mode during the final boss fight (I was playing on easy, still pretty difficult imo), I had an absolutely fantastic time as a Cleric.

So now, I've got a few decisions to make. I don't want to be a Cleric anymore because I want to start tossing out magic spells as my main weapon so I've decided to switch up my character to either Mage or Sorcerer. Which one of those two do you prefer for maximum fun-age?

Also, once you beat BG1, it automatically tosses you into Seige of Dragonspear. Should I play that first or go straight to BG2? Or should I practice my RTwP skills by playing through Icewind Dale first to get better. I've put in a total of about an hour each into BG2 and IWD and I can't decide them as they're both interesting, and canonically SoD is next up.

Help me decide.

I never played SoS or IWD so I can't comment in that. I'll just say that if you loved BG1 you are in for a treat with BG2. I love me a good RPG city, and I think BG2 has one of the best RPG cities ever made.

@wollywoo I really liked the city of Baldur's Gate too, however once you finally arrive, a ton of story stuff gets laid out, and momentum and the urgency of the story kinda forced me to just do the main quest. It seemed a bit silly that some dude was asking me for a special ring for his girl, all the while I got a giant conspiracy happening to drop all that for the person.

I'm definitely going to stop and smell the flowers more going forward now that I've finished the "appetizer" game.

Siege is all original content from Beamdog and I kinda find all of their original stuff mostly bad? I would skip it and just move on to BG2.

IWD is extremely story light, you just sort of create the whole party and trudge through an adventurer. It's not my preference when it comes to those games but it does have a lot of just the combat if you find yourself wanting it.

Baldurs Gate 2 is amazing and I'd highly recommend it.

If you're intimately familiar with which arcane spells are best and why then play sorcerer if you want the strongest of the two. The downside of not being able to change your spells won't matter. If you don't know them that well then play mage so that you can correct any mistakes in selection you make. Mage also is generally less broken than sorcerer too if that matters to you, but in the end all mages and sorcerer's are hilariously strong.

@mezza: after struggling through at least the first half of BG1 as a cleric, I'm ready to indulge in a power fantasy playthrough with a wizard character throwing bolts and balls. I purposely haven't looked at the "correct" spells yet as I don't want to cheat. However, I also generally only play through these huge games only once (even though I think all day about what type of new character I could roll, etc. I never follow through with it as I just don't have time to replay things a second time) so I'm leaning towards a regular mage now... but the convenience of having my spells ready as a Sorcerer pulls me in that direction.

Real excited to keep going with this series.

BG2 is just fantastic, hands down. Not too convinced by the extra characters added in the Enhanced Edition by Beamdog, both in terms of story and the discrepancy in production quality. You won't miss out by skipping them, in my mind.

I thought Siege of Dragonspear was terrible, just like all of Beamdog's original stuff, sadly. I would recommend skipping it.

BG2 is my favorite of all of those games, not including Planescape (if only because Planescape is mostly its own thing). Other fast answers: You can't really go wrong with a mage or a sorcerer. You should play the BG2 expansion, it's not perfect but you get ridiculously overpowered and the villains do too and I found that fun. And finally, if you thought BG1 was tough, Icewind Dale will definitely give you the business, IIRC. Still, worth playing if you like the mechanics of AD&D ruleset.

BG2 would be my suggestion. Icewind Dale is a lot more of a dungeon crawler, so you could play that next if you love the combat.

Regarding Mage vs Sorcerer, if I'm not mistaken sorcerers are more flexible in that you don't have to memorize spells in advance, you just have a set number of casts per spell level.

@rahf: luckily, I'm one of those players that don't switch out characters. My suicide squad/reservoir dogs gets filled out and they stay the entire time no matter what. So I'm a pc, Khalid, jahiera, imoen, minsc, dynaheir for life which is why when I snuck a peek at BG2 last night, it blew my mind.

I thought beamdog only did the enhanced editions of these games which have seemed pretty cool enhancements having not played the original eiditions.

People seem to hate SoD but I think I'd feel bad if I don't play it on my probable one and only play-thru.

@norm9: yeah I definitely recommend mage then. There's some setup involved in their flexibility, but it's better than realizing a bunch of spells you chose are actually obsolete or inferior to others later on. There are some spells that are better at lower level but scale terribly at higher levels, some that are completely pointless because they are roleplaying spells taken directly from the D&D books, some that are unexpectedly strong, and others are incredibly powerful in a few choice situations but lose usefulness outside of that. With all the room for error it's usually best to leave it adjustable as you go unless you understand the give and take of any permanent sorc selections you make.

Just be cautious on your choice of school. That's the only mage decision that can hurt you later on that you can't change.