Baldur's Gate #BaldurGate: Siege of Dragonspear

[Turjan]

I wouldn't defile my gog library with the EE's even if they were free.

That's like this thing that nobody on the Codex would touch Fallout 4 with a 10-ft pole.

You can also pay a bit more and hide it in your Steam library

 

[tormund]

I wouldn't defile my gog library with the EE's even if they were free.

That's like this thing that nobody on the Codex would touch Fallout 4 with a 10-ft pole.

And many never did. Keep projecting though.

 

[Metal Hurlant]

That's like this thing that nobody on the Codex would touch Fallout 4 with a 10-ft pole.

Never played Fallout 4.

 

[Bumvelcrow]

I wouldn't defile my gog library with the EE's even if they were free.

I was once an idealist like you, and then GoG came to me in a dream and told me I could have the EE editions for £2 each. It's actually a pretty good deal, and the EEs are not the abominations they've been made out to be, if you steer well clear of the additional content. It's probably worth the price to avoid the hassle of modding it to work on a modern machine. Yes, I shall burn in the hell of the defilers, but I had a good time with BG:EE over the weekend.

 

[Doktor Best]

I like the zooming, autoloot, and coop is easier to set up. They're worth 2.50 each. Hell sometimes i give more than that to street musicians.

 

[Popiel]

That's like this thing that nobody on the Codex would touch Fallout 4 with a 10-ft pole.

I never played Fallout 3, not even thinking about Fallout 4. So there's that.

 

[Metal Hurlant]

I do have BGEE on Steam. It was a free key since I originally pre-ordered it through Beamdog and I emailed them for a Steam key. I'll have to give them credit for that. Anything that would defile my GoG library goes to Steam which I hardly ever use.

 

[Turjan]

That's like this thing that nobody on the Codex would touch Fallout 4 with a 10-ft pole.

Never played Fallout 4.

Neither did I.

That doesn't change a thing about the point that this site is full of posers.

 

[Turjan]

... since I originally pre-ordered it through Beamdog...

... and then talking about not defiling the gog library...

Kudos for honesty though.

 

[Metal Hurlant]

It's not on my gog library. The pre-order was through the beamdog website where you downloaded the installer and it downloaded the game from their server. That was 4 years ago when they promised so much and delivered so little. Now history repeats itself with SoD and like a daft old sod, I've fallen for it twice.

 

[AwesomeButton]

As long as Mizhena's balls don't touch the GoG library, you are ok.

 

[Immortal]

The novelizations of the older games are canon too, by the way.

So the CHARNAME of Baldur's Gate falls in love with Bodhi, have sex with her and then kills her by mistake in slayer form.

Yes, and also Jaheira rips her clothes to shreds because a spider had landed in her cleavage.

And Drow Transformed Imoen and the Matron mother have a lesbianiac bath together?

And Jaheria and CHARNAME fuck in the pocket plane while cespanar jacks off in the corner?
I made up the cespanar part.. but seriously..

 

[Haba]

At least Jaheira dies for good in the end.

 

[GarfunkeL]

I like the zooming, autoloot, and coop is easier to set up. They're worth 2.50 each. Hell sometimes i give more than that to street musicians.

I bring you wisdom from Taleworlds, the Mount & Blade forum:

Both posters are womyn by the way and going by their posts in other topics, would be qualified as SJWs by our usual gang of retards. Yet they aren't buying SoD or any of the EEs either. Why are you?

 

[damager]

All this talk makes me download and play the original series with widescreen mod. I don't want their strong lesbian companions and dildo fetch quests taint my IE experience.

 

[prodigydancer]

The EEs were disappointing - there's no denying it. IWD EE was relatively bug-free which sparked some hope, that is, it looked like Beamdog finally mastered the engine and would be able to release SoD in a playable state. But seeing the amount of bugs reported in both SoD and BGEE 2.0, I think we're back to square one.

$20 is simply too much for a broken DLC with UGC-grade content.

 

[pippin]

Both posters are womyn by the way and going by their posts in other topics, would be qualified as SJWs by our usual gang of retards. Yet they aren't buying SoD or any of the EEs either. Why are you?

The Mount and Blade fanbase is completely different though. Baldur's Gate fans are more gullible, so to speak. But there's also different elements to consider. I mean, autoloot? Zooming? What the fuck are you talking about? The most annoying aspect of the game, the item stacks, can be easily solved with a mod. And yet these fucks are oh so loud when it comes to complain about decline and that shit.

Edit: This is obviously due to the general perception that you need mods to play games. Unless it's something really critical like bugfixing, you don't really need any sort of mod to play all the Infinity Engine games. Even Bloodlines, that "unplayable buggy mess" of a videogame, is perfectly playable with the latest official patch.

Also I've never played anything IE in multiplayer, but it seems to me it would be extremely uncomfortable. I'd just kill all my companions and hoard all the loot.

 

[Reinhardt]

I'd just kill all my companions

You will be bard and will not kill anyone.

 

[Brancaleone]

The EEs were disappointing - there's no denying it. IWD EE was relatively bug-free which sparked some hope, that is, it looked like Beamdog finally mastered the engine and would be able to release SoD in a playable state. But seeing the amount of bugs reported in both SoD and BGEE 2.0, I think we're back to square one.

$20 is simply too much for a broken DLC with UGC-grade content.

Well, I don't know if it has already been mentioned, but if I remember correctly IWD EE was heavily based on the "Icewind Dale to Baldur's Gate II" conversion by David Wallace (the author of SCS) and CamDawg, which was in a pretty advanced state and which was given for free (again, if I remember correctly) to Beamdog by the authors. Which would explain a lot about Beamdog releasing IWD EE so quickly and in relatively bug-free state.

 

[Murk]

I'm surprised no-one has commented on that 'ho, wench' dialogue. The responses are as cringe inducing as you can imagine.

People have, at least in this thread. Whoever wrote that line must have felt real clever using both "ho" and "wench" in one sentence.

 

[Infinitron]

The EEs were disappointing - there's no denying it. IWD EE was relatively bug-free which sparked some hope, that is, it looked like Beamdog finally mastered the engine and would be able to release SoD in a playable state. But seeing the amount of bugs reported in both SoD and BGEE 2.0, I think we're back to square one.

$20 is simply too much for a broken DLC with UGC-grade content.

Well, I don't know if it has already been mentioned, but if I remember correctly IWD EE was heavily based on the "Icewind Dale to Baldur's Gate II" conversion by David Wallace (the author of SCS) and CamDawg, which was in a pretty advanced state and which was given for free (again, if I remember correctly) to Beamdog by the authors. Which would explain a lot about Beamdog releasing IWD EE so quickly and in relatively bug-free state.

Are you sure you're not thinking about IWD2: http://weidu.org/iwg2/

 

[Doktor Best]

I like the zooming, autoloot, and coop is easier to set up. They're worth 2.50 each. Hell sometimes i give more than that to street musicians.

I bring you wisdom from Taleworlds, the Mount & Blade forum:

Both posters are womyn by the way and going by their posts in other topics, would be qualified as SJWs by our usual gang of retards. Yet they aren't buying SoD or any of the EEs either. Why are you?

Like i said before. It is cheap, i am lazy. I could install classic Icewind Dale, look for mods, install them, hope nothing messes up anything, fiddle with my router settings. OR i could give them some bucks for doing all that for me.

I do not think they deserve 20 Bucks for those enhanced editions, but less than 3 Euros?

And how did they "steal" moddercontent? Did they use those mods without asking the creators? Im pretty sure that would have opened some lawsuit so i somehow doubt it

 

[Telengard]

And how did they "steal" moddercontent? Did they use those mods without asking the creators? Im pretty sure that would have opened some lawsuit so i somehow doubt it

Probably they should say misappropriation, but nobody knows what that means, so nobody does. It is considered improper in scientific and technical circles to take work that has been provided for free and use it to sell for profit, unless the content provider specifically states that the work can be used in commercial products. Usually, in point of fact, they state just the opposite - that anyone can use their work in free work but not in for-profit work.

Enforcing that distinction is a pain in the butt, though.

 

[SionIV]

Not sure if it's been mentioned here yet. https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/52379/trent-osters-interview-about-dragonspear-controversies .


Trent Oster's interview about Dragonspear controversies

An interview with Trent Oster has been published.

About Mizhena

“If there’s an aggressive agenda that’s being pushed into someone’s face, I disagree with that,” Beamdog CEO Trent Oster tells Develop. “It needs to be representative. You need to tackle any social milieu appropriately, and aggressive agenda pushing is incorrect. It’s not the right way to do it. All you do is strengthen the resistance.”

“[The revelation that she is transgender] is what we consider three dialogue nodes deep,” Oster explains. “We put an arbitrary limit on our writers for our support characters of just three nodes deep, just to control wordcount. Siege of Dragonspear is over 500,000 words of dialogue, so we had to put limits on writers so they didn’t create more.

“There’s two sides of the argument [against Mizhena’s inclusion]. One is ‘I don’t want a transgender character in my game’, and while I don’t agree with it, I guess I can understand that perspective.

“The other is that the character goes from ‘Hi, how are you doing?’ to ‘I’m transgender’ in three conversation lines. That’s a really shallow way of telling me a life-shattering event. The transgender people I know are not going to blurt that out as quickly as that – it’s going to take a while, you’re going to have to get to know them.

“Obviously we wanted to explore her story in a broader, deeper way, but the three-line limitation cut it off. If anyone was going to get to the fact that this character is transgender, they had to do it pretty fast. Upon my review of the character, I think that within three lines it’s actually quite well done.”

“We have this character, we have a series of reasons why she is the way she is, it’s obviously captured the attention of a lot of people, so we should expand her story,” he says.

“To us, having a transgender character wasn’t that big a deal,” he says. “In a world where there’s half-orcs – so a human and an orc had an offspring together – and dragons can transform into humans and gods can walk the earth as male or female, whatever choice they make – it just didn’t seem like a big detail to us.

“Personally, I think it shows a progressive world view that we didn’t think a transgender character was a big deal. It was just a character to us, part of the world, helping to drive the story along.”

“I firmly believe that there is no ‘they’, there’s no group with a specific agenda,” says Oster. “There’s just a bunch of individuals – each with their own sensitivities, likes and dislikes – and the internet seems to package people together. You see a tempest in a teapot.

“When a topic blows up on the internet, it’s hard to tell how ‘big’ it is. I think social media has created this echo chamber world, where everyone lives in their own little social group and are essentially self-reinforcing.

“All of my news feeds are centred on video games, so when something happens in that space, it seems huge. If I talk to someone else, they don’t know about it, they’ve been talking about the Panama Papers – and I’m like, ‘what are the Panama Papers?’. Because I’ve been in my little universe and it’s different to theirs.”

About harassment

“When we look at feedback, we listen to our community of Baldur’s Gate fans first and foremost,” he says. “If the internet freaks out about something – well, it’s the internet and pretty much hates everything. If our fans bring it up, though, we’ll take it very seriously.

“If someone challenges me on something in our games, if someone expresses a concern about something, I’m going to take another look and think about whether we made the right decision and should stay by it?”

“It hits everybody in the studio differently,” he says. “For the person directly receiving attacks, its obviously overwhelming – and it makes me really mad. There are few things in the world that truly get me angry. Watching someone close to me get attacked drives me up the wall.

“It took me a long time to draft a statement to respond. I wanted to take the time to calm down, go over it, get back to the core issues that had been raised and address them. I maintain that for a three-line dialogue limits, this was well executed. If we remove that limit, we can execute it even better.

“If other developers ever face this level of harassment, I suggest they calm down, take a step back, wait and then prepare a statement. Tell your staff on where you stand on the issue. If someone hijacked your game and inserted their own agenda, something not approved by the company, you’ve got to figure out what to do from an internal management perspective. But if it’s representative of the company’s views, and you agree with it, you need to stand up and support that person. Personally, I think throwing someone under a bus is a bad thing to do.”

About the Minsc's line

“I had played the game quite a bit and never seen that line, because it’s a rare select line,” he says. “You have a click a lot of times before he fires it off. After the reaction, I sat and clicked on him until the line appeared, and I agreed that, y’know what, this doesn’t actually make sense.”

About refugees

“The fact is, there are refugees in the world,” he says. “Anywhere where there is a horrible conflict, there will be refugees. It fits with the story we’re telling: there’s an army forming in the north, forcing people into the ranks and displacing others – that generates refugees.

“We needed an instigating event to get you our of Baldur’s Gate – otherwise your character just sits there, getting fat. That instigating event is the pressure caused by people fleeing the army in the north.

“Even given the reality of today with Syrian refugees, I don’t think we’d go back and change it because it’s part of our story. To use the usual disclaimer: any resemblance to actual events, persons living or dead… and so on.”

About writers

“We know Baldur’s Gate through and through,” he says. “There’s a number of us here who have been through the development of the original Baldur’s Gate, Neverwinter Nights and other BioWare content – we live this stuff.

“Ultimately, the writers write the dialogue. In order to make interesting dialogue, you take your personal experiences, your beliefs, what interests you and what drives you, and that’s going to feed into whatever character you create.

“Individual writers are going to bring different things to your game. That’s why you have editors, who edit content down to make it fit within the overall game.”

“Ultimately, there’s a story we’re trying to tell,” he says. “Along the way of telling that story, there’s a core cast and there’s supporting characters. And it’s all about telling the best story we possibly can, and making characters that are interesting, believable and engaging. If following those priorities leads you to a transgendered character, or a female or male lead, or a gay or straight character, it’s what’s right for the story.

“My advise to developers would be to be sensitive about these issues – apparently, a transgender character is still a big deal in the modern world. If you’re going to do it, do it well, do it in-depth and do it respectfully.”

http://www.develop-online.net/inter...-transgender-character-was-a-big-deal/0219033

 

[Lilura]

The most annoying aspect of the game, the item stacks, can be easily solved with a mod.

Vorpal item stack beggars.