I found it really interesting that the post declares Dragonspear flopped. How do we know this for sure? It could have made enough to pay for its budget. I mean, at least in theory the game shouldn't have cost that much to make (engine was old sure, but that should mean art costs were on the lower end of the spectrum).
I couldn't find anything to back up this claim, not even any steamspy data to confirm it one way or the other wtf happened to it. BG EE seemed to sell decently on Steam though, which could explain why Beamdog is still alive after its failure. But it also didn't sell THAT well, which could also explain why Dragonspear wasn't destined to be a major success.
In a way, I'm disappointed. I thought it was really cool that a sequel to BG2 could come out in the year 2016. I would like to see direct sequels to some of my favorite titles, like Arcanum, VTMB... But in another way, I'm not surprised?
Of course, I own Dragonspear. I probably shouldn't have bought it, but I haven't actually played it yet and when I bought it I had said, "Whether it sucks or not, I want to support the continuation of this endeavor" - even if Beamdog isn't the right man for the job, this kind of RPG is what I still want to see made today... And yeah, I still haven't gotten around to finishing my BG:EE save, so maybe I'm just not into these games anymore myself? It's sad. Still, I've heard enough negative things about Dragonspear, I guess I can understand why it would have flopped. It's a complicated situation, is what I'm trying to say. These games are from an era gone by already.
And its flop isn't too hard to guess. I mean, let's assume Dragonspear WAS a good game. Let's ignore the SJW stuff for a moment. You still needed to own BG:EE at least to even have a chance at enjoying this amazing sequel to BG. You still needed to WANT to replay IE games, after all these years. I think you could have bought it standalone, but in theory that would be dumb. The whole experience of BG=>BG2 is a great one (but so very long!), adding Dragonspear as a bridge title was a decent idea conceptually - but has big financial failure expectations because it dilutes the number of people who can pick up and play your game; there are a lot of prerequisites to buying a game like Dragonspear. They would have been better served making a standalone title set in the same universe & timeline as BG/BG2. Also, the decision to do a bridge title was a dumb one in another sense - you know going into it that your choices can't possibly matter, since the beginning of BG2 isn't going to change to reflect anything that you do. BG2 is old. It was never designed to succeed Dragonspear. How could it possibly flow well?
I mean, I think they patched in beamdog's NPCs into BG2, but I don't think anything else was done to carry over the continuity. It would've been cool if they'd patched BG2:EE to allow your choices in Dragonspear to affect some of the gameplay? It's neat that there are all these new NPCs and shit, but can any of them hold a candle to Viconia? I just love that you can change her alignment, that she has such a long and growing story, and that there are items you can find in your journey that will last you until endgame.
I love BG2, but then again, I've played BG2 so much, too much, that as a hardcore fan of BG2, that I actually will probably never play it again. There's nothing Dragonspear can do to excite me to replay BG2 another time. BG2 is just too fucking long of a game. Too much mindless fighting, over and over and over! I've probably still not experienced everything the game has to offer, but I just can't play it anymore. I don't have that time anymore in my life. I'm sure a lot of people are like that. They accepted this series was dead and have moved on. It's hard to rekindle something like that. It's already hard enough slogging through the slow parts of BG1 so I can feel like I can properly enjoy Dragonspear. Making the new game the middle child is just really awkward. Not that a direct sequel with the Bhaalspawn would've made much sense either, BG2 ends in a very definitive way that can't be continued.
It also is kind of silly in a sense, to think a direct sequel to an old game can do well. You'll never please anyone with a strategy like that. New consumers want modern graficks. Old consumers want stuff that's faithful to the original. Neither will be satisfied like this.
I wish Beamdog was a little better at what they were doing. What they're doing, doing IE remakes/updates is great because I love all those games so much; but nothing they make is really anything that excites me. Their NPCs aren't really any better than the fan mod ones I can download (which is a joke considering how much of those are poorly written). And the pathfinding in BG1 is still atrocious and obnoxious (would it have been difficult to fix that in an EE? C'mon, it's just A*...)
tl;dr? I'm sad, sad I had any hope for Beamdog, and I really don't think they can make a Torment EE better than they could a BG one. At least BG had its combat going for it. They're going to need to find some actually good writers if they want to take a crack at adding any new content to PST.
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