Baldur's Gate #BaldurGate: Siege of Dragonspear

[Havoc]

You guys even know who Ed Greenwood is? Telling him you dont want stuff you dont like in ADND is like telling the pope that you dont like that jesus stuff in the bible and it shouldnt be in there.

Heh, if there ever was a bad analogy...

Don't hang out on GD much, do you.

Joined: Dec 28, 2015

Not yet.

 

[Western]

So I've replied this:

It's 2016, the year where Trump is a serious presidential candidate - you're not going to "clean" the internet by calling out people for bigotry. I think it's fairly clear by now that doing so will fan the flames and rally the opposition.

BioWare simply did what they wanted - they added an important transgender character in Dragon Age: Inquisition and didn't have a single problem.
Beamdog was confrontational from the start and got a huge shitstorm push-back for a very minor character in Siege of Dragonspear.

I'm just being pragmatic - you can achieve more by simply ignoring the "other side".

And I'm 110% sure I'll just get a "YOU'RE VICTIM BLAMING!" reply.

I think Beamdog would have still gotten some flack, even if their tone was less confrontational. Another factor is that Dragon Age is a newer and continuing IP, in the context of the era of the Mass Effect series, Bioware depiction of sex/romance, etc in their games has been par for the course for sometime. You get the feeling they're catering to their audience (or have to an extent created one).

I think that there are a lot of Baldurs Gate fans who aren't new Bioware fans, people that slowly fell off after NWN, Dragon Age and subsequent games. The tone of BG is less 'progressive', rewriting characters, adding polarising memes, transgender issues, hot button political topics, etc, independent of the quality of writing would likely have drawn some reaction, as it could be construed as disrespect of the source material and setting.

I'm not particularly fond of painting over the past or burying it (e.g. progressive writers dissowning Lovecraft) because it contradicts progressive ideals.

 

[Toffeli]

Was I dreaming (or having a nightmare), that there was some news about the rights to original editions were acquired by Beamdog and they would replace them with Enhanced Editions on GOG and such?

 

[Jick Magger]

I think part of the issue is, as other people have said, they are going against lore and the universe they are depicting by ham-fistedly adding the trans character in there. People didn't care about the trans characters in Dragon Age because it is Bioware's IP, and they can honestly do what they want with it since they don't really have any hard and fast pre-established rules against it, and they did get flack when they went against it for Dragon Age II with the whole situation with Lyrium.

Now I'll admit that I am more-or-less unfamiliar with the Forgotten Realms setting and D&D in general outside of Baldur's Gate beyond a superficial level. I do know, however, that this is a setting in which gender and sexual identity should essentially be a non-issue. This is a setting where changing your gender is a simple matter of getting your hands on an uncommon but still attainable magical girdle, or getting a powerful enough wizard or such to do it. Why do we have a transgender person here giving us her sob story about how she thinks she's a man and was brought up "incorrectly" by her parents when literally all it takes to completely fix that issue is a girdle of femininity?

The answer is that the writer simply does not care, and wanted to ham-fistedly sit the player down on a stool while she wagged her finger in front of them and told them about how bad it is for transgendered people in real life. She just wants to lecture people about how fucking morally superior she is and how great she is for highlighting this issue in the one setting where it absolutely should not be an issue.

The confrontational attitude of the dev team certainly does not help. It's not as bad a situation as, say, with Ninja Theory and DmC, where they did pretty much everything outside of saying that they absolutely hated the original series to aggravate the fanbase, but it's definitely caused a lot of unnecessary friction and isolated a lot of their potential consumer base.

 

[pippin]

Was I dreaming (or having a nightmare), that there was some news about the rights to original editions were acquired by Beamdog and they would replace them with Enhanced Editions on GOG and such?

They will bundle the EEs with the originals andcall it a "Definitive" edition in GOG. You will not be able to buy the games on their own.

 

[Ezrite]

They do not see mot understand that it is all in how it is presented. First it is not even that much in character, just a damn statement in the face of political nature. There is 0 consequences to be gay, trans, whatever it might be, in this game. Witcher series done it much better. There is a certain stigma to it or people find it weird. North of Friendly Arm Inn there is a farmer looking for his only son, his only son died to Ankhegs, guess what? Now he loses the farm. Same would be if he had a homosexual son or daughter, the only child. Not bearing children. Their family farm gone, no offense ot you Americans but this is typically a bunch of no good, politically driven fan fiction north Americans writers who read 0 history books about countries who did HAVE middle ages. Sure, Faerun is fantays middle ages but it do not make it less shitty, like the Dark Ages. We see the heroic life of adventurers, heroes and gods but that is a totally diffrent sphere. A fucking shitty farmer, with no education, barely any gold, will have a really bad life. Evil is very real, so is magical plagues and the undead...orcs and other things. So he got all of this to worry about, but then his only son runs off with one of those gay adventurers and his whole life is shattered, wife dead from last orc invasion, daughter got murdered by bandits and the crops are dying, but he atleast got the farm that he been struggling on since childhood that his great grandpa bought after some years of working as a caravan guard. And now his only son, has escaped to live out his gay fantasies with some elven fop. To even think the farmer, the village or the tribal barbarian in the north can even remotely do waht heroes and gods do is very stupid. Hell, there is other cultures to. How do they react? No one even points that out. Like if they ever given us a Drow Elf of the normal kind. They would clearly not accepted some weird human saying he is a female or if there a culture of more masculine mindset they would probably mock this man or a homosexual one. It is also rather silly that these people are a-okay with the dark undertones of orc rape with half-orcs, the male submissive society of the Drow but also killing said creatures cause "They been evil before". Suddenly breaking the normal day mold is okay, if it is "evil". With trickers, manipulation magic and lies all over the place. No one considers that these transgendered are either cursed some how or manipulated or even possessed? It is such a fringe minority that someone in the world probably would think so and the lack of dialogue options shows this is horned in to be accepted, even if you play a 1 reputation, Blackguard half orc of hatred.

If done well, it can be pulled off wihtout complains but when there is no consequences of breaking pattersn, well...then it should not be added cause then it is just added in to either try to brainwash stupid kids or throw a political statement. Farmer Jim-Bobby don't have time to play female. Nobles, heroes, gods always has managed to get away with more shit than the peasants, farmers and soldiers, the lowest in society.

And in all fairness, BG1 had some fucking cheesy dialogue to, like that Aloe Vera comment in the CLoakwood...Atleast it was only cheese.

 

[Roguey]

PoE would be the far superior product if they had just used D&D

You mean like Neverwinter Nights 2?

There's nothing untrue about that statement.

 

[PrettyDeadman]

It's 2016, the year where Trump is a serious presidential candidate - you're not going to "clean" the internet by calling out people for bigotry. I think it's fairly clear by now that doing so will fan the flames and rally the opposition.

It might be distasteful to hamfist your gender agenda into a 17yo old videogame, but inserting anti-Trump sentiments into a discussion about a videogame is a new low.

P.S.

Baldur's Gate IS one of the best role-playing games ever made (what I never finished) whether you like it or not.

 

[Ezrite]

By the way, from the Beamdog people who have expressed their beliefs, one is an SJW (the writer), one is a Sarkeesian fan (Dee), and another is Gaider. Do they have anyone who is not an SJW, I wonder? Are they a company or a political movement?

As far as I know they are just like some kind of "Bioware East" or something so no. Same fucking weirdos. I bet some poor sod got plenty of god ideas but is shut down thanks to the SJW patrol who cannot write a coherent storyline without filling it with shit social commentary and odd references. "What about a real evil p..." "SHUT UP DWAYNE!" "My names Dwight..." "SHUT UP DWAYNE!"

 

[felipepepe]

I think Beamdog would have still gotten some flack, even if their tone was less confrontational.

Probably, but much less. It only became such shit-storm because they set up the stage so horribly. Maybe some people would go "Safana was cooler in BG1", but Beamdog turned it into a war agaisnt SJW when they went "your game is sexist and we'll re-write it to fit our agenda!" themselves. Then Minsc making GG jokes. Asking for positive reviews. Reaching out for Anita Sarkeesian the minute things go south...

It might be distasteful to hamfist your gender agenda into a 17yo old videogame, but inserting anti-Trump sentiments into a discussion about a videogame is a new low.

I'm just saying that people have been calling Trump bigot and sorts of stuff, and he's still the likely nominee... if name-calling doesn't work in the real world, what's the chance of ever working on the internet of all places?

And oh god, I just found this 2014 quote from BioWare on how they did their trans character:

"First, any conversation about the subject had to come up naturally in-game," he said. "A minor character like a shopkeeper would have no reason to explain that she is trans, so either the conversation would never come up or it would come up because her voice was clearly masculine, at which point it would look like a joke to most players, no matter how we tried to write it."

Source: http://www.gamespot.com/articles/how-bioware-created-dragon-age-inquisition-s-trans/1100-6424014/

 

[Toffeli]

Was I dreaming (or having a nightmare), that there was some news about the rights to original editions were acquired by Beamdog and they would replace them with Enhanced Editions on GOG and such?

They will bundle the EEs with the originals andcall it a "Definitive" edition in GOG. You will not be able to buy the games on their own.

Thanks!

 

[Gay-Lussac]

I think part of the issue is, as other people have said, they are going against lore and the universe they are depicting by ham-fistedly adding the trans character in there. People didn't care about the trans characters in Dragon Age because it is Bioware's IP, and they can honestly do what they want with it since they don't really have any hard and fast pre-established rules against it, and they did get flack when they went against it for Dragon Age II with the whole situation with Lyrium.

Now I'll admit that I am more-or-less unfamiliar with the Forgotten Realms setting and D&D in general outside of Baldur's Gate beyond a superficial level. I do know, however, that this is a setting in which gender and sexual identity should essentially be a non-issue. This is a setting where changing your gender is a simple matter of getting your hands on an uncommon but still attainable magical girdle, or getting a powerful enough wizard or such to do it. Why do we have a transgender person here giving us her sob story about how she thinks she's a man and was brought up "incorrectly" by her parents when literally all it takes to completely fix that issue is a girdle of femininity?

The answer is that the writer simply does not care, and wanted to ham-fistedly sit the player down on a stool while she wagged her finger in front of them and told them about how bad it is for transgendered people in real life. She just wants to lecture people about how fucking morally superior she is and how great she is for highlighting this issue in the one setting where it absolutely should not be an issue.

The confrontational attitude of the dev team certainly does not help. It's not as bad a situation as, say, with Ninja Theory and DmC, where they did pretty much everything outside of saying that they absolutely hated the original series to aggravate the fanbase, but it's definitely caused a lot of unnecessary friction and isolated a lot of their potential consumer base.

The writer really doesn't care, she admitted that she adds "diversity" to her writing just for "diversity's" sake, and not because it serves the story being told. The inclusion is hamfisted.

But this all of this shit about how that particular character would never be able to exist in the setting is nonsense. All the characters says is that her parents brought her up as a boy (presumably because she was born as one) and as he developed they all discovered he wanted to be a girl. It's not even a sob story, she doesn't complain about it, her parents didn't oppose her.

Her paperdoll in game is that of a woman, so you can safely assume that she has in fact used whatever method of magical gender bending was available to her, she's not relating her struggle to transition or what have you. The dialogue in question is prompted by you asking about her name and she explains that it's "different" because she picked it herself after becoming a woman in order to reflect her life story (though what the fuck is different in a setting with names like Elminster and Sarevok, who knows).

It's a poorly written character included just to tick off an inclusiviness box, but if there are trannies in Faerun there's nothing *implausible* about this character.

EDIT: The screenshot just so anybody can fact check -

 

[TigerKnee]

I think if you removed the first two sentences, she would just come off as a special snowflake, which doesn't really endear you to the character either.

 

[GrainWetski]

The limited responses make it so much worse. If you could at least question why she would start spouting off about that to a random person, it wouldn't be quite as bad.

"Be gone, foul creature! (attack)"
"Why the fuck are you telling me this?"

And then the retarded accepting responses they have.

Of course, that would mean the character was there for any other reason than a Tumblrina being a bad writer pushing her agenda which means the character wouldn't be there in first place.

In the end, it's just one issue in a sea of them, but it's so badly done that it stands out a lot.

 

[tormund]

Their employees really aren't learning animals. Dee woke up from xir slumber, and this is how first page of BG's steam board looked like few moments later

And of course, bunch of legit owners got themselves banned by Dee.

 

[PrettyDeadman]

The limited responses make it so much worse. If you could at least question why she would start spouting off about that to a random person, it wouldn't be quite as bad.

"Be gone, foul creature! (attack)"
"Why the fuck are you telling me this?"

And then the retarded accepting responses they have.

Of course, that would mean the character was there for any other reason than a Tumblrina being a bad writer pushing her agenda which means the character wouldn't be there in first place.

In the end, it's just one issue in a sea of them, but it's so badly done that it stands out a lot.

As far as I can tell she is telling this story because player asked about her name. Since sex change is very casual thing in faerun, it doesn't sound more outlandish than telling that you have a strange name because you are a foreigner.

'Be gone, foul creature' might be a bad idea unless you add 'die CIS SCUM' or 'die feminazi' to every dialogue with every npc ever so that you can roleplay GG sturmfuhrer or radical feminist too. Why limit player with only option to roleplay a transophobe? Developers need to cover all spectre.

It all makes sense.

 

[Gay-Lussac]

The limited responses make it so much worse. If you could at least question why she would start spouting off about that to a random person, it wouldn't be quite as bad.

"Be gone, foul creature! (attack)"
"Why the fuck are you telling me this?"

And then the retarded accepting responses they have.

Of course, that would mean the character was there for any other reason than a Tumblrina being a bad writer pushing her agenda which means the character wouldn't be there in first place.

In the end, it's just one issue in a sea of them, but it's so badly done that it stands out a lot.

For one thing, Forgotten Realms touches upon themes like racism, but never directly. You can hate drow, but you're delusional if you think that they'd let express hatred towards a character for being a black human, for example. I doubt Wizards would sign off on that. So the tranny bashing option is out of the cards.

Other than that, what I think would really make no sense in the Forgotten Realms is transphobia. What is the point of hating someone when they have literally magically changed their gender? How is she an abomination when she is in fact a woman now, and not just a man who went through plastic surgery to look like one?

Regarding the "Why the fuck are you telling me this?", as I said, the screenshot conveniently showcases the interaction out of context. You get to that part of the dialogue because you yourself asked why her name is unusual, and she talks about her story of having been born a man because that's where the name comes from.

I swear some people will come up with all kinds of nonsensical shit to keep this controversy going on strong.

 

[Havoc]

The basic premise is stupid. Who the fuck asks "what a strange name" in a FANTASY SETTING? In Faerun you have dozens of ethnicies, with their own languages and add to this racial languages. And even PLANAR LANGUAGES. Fucking stupid question from the start.

 

[Cromwell]

The limited responses make it so much worse. If you could at least question why she would start spouting off about that to a random person, it wouldn't be quite as bad.

"Be gone, foul creature! (attack)"
"Why the fuck are you telling me this?"

And then the retarded accepting responses they have.

Of course, that would mean the character was there for any other reason than a Tumblrina being a bad writer pushing her agenda which means the character wouldn't be there in first place.

In the end, it's just one issue in a sea of them, but it's so badly done that it stands out a lot.

As far as I can tell she is telling this story because player asked about her name. Since sex change is very casual thing in faerun, it doesn't sound more outlandish than telling that you have a strange name because you are a foreigner.

'Be gone, foul creature' might be a bad idea unless you add 'die CIS SCUM' or 'die feminazi' to every dialogue with every npc ever so that you can roleplay GG sturmfuhrer or radical feminist too. Why limit player with only option to roleplay a transophobe?

It all makes sense.

If you can read this shit and still feel like that sounds natural to any setting I dont know what to say. Why does the whole game look like they photoshopped all these characters into a stock background of baldurs gate? Thats even mor ehorrible than the writing.

 

[PrettyDeadman]

Transophobia is a social construct which does not exist in Faerun due to (sex change) magic.

 

[Tacgnol]

Regarding the "Why the fuck are you telling me this?", as I said, the screenshot conveniently showcases the interaction out of context. You get to that part of the dialogue because you yourself asked why her name is unusual, and she talks about her story of having been born a man because that's where the name comes from.

There could have been a more natural flow to the issue of gender identity. Most people wouldn't give you their entire life story just because you asked about their strange name.

 

[PrettyDeadman]

If you can read this shit and still feel like that sounds natural to any setting I dont know what to say. Why does the whole game look like they photoshopped all these characters into a stock background of baldurs gate? Thats even mor ehorrible than the writing.

If you wrote a character who changed his name after a sex change, what would you make xer say when asked about xer name?
You don't even have to invent a new character for this. Imagine someone asking Edwina about xer name? What would be xer answer?

 

[Gay-Lussac]

Regarding the "Why the fuck are you telling me this?", as I said, the screenshot conveniently showcases the interaction out of context. You get to that part of the dialogue because you yourself asked why her name is unusual, and she talks about her story of having been born a man because that's where the name comes from.

There could have been a more natural flow to the issue of gender identity. Most people wouldn't give you their entire life story just because you asked about their strange name.

I agree, I even assume most transgenders just want to live out their lives as the gender they identify with, without drawing attention to the fact that their biological sex doesn't match how he or she presents themselves socially.

That said, there's all sorts of people in the world and if someone makes up their new name upon becoming a woman to specifically reference their sex change, then, in that case, it does make sense for them to being predisposed to talk about it when asked.

 

[Ezrite]

The basic premise is stupid. Who the fuck asks "what a strange name" in a FANTASY SETTING? In Faerun you have dozens of ethnicies, with their own languages and add to this racial languages. And even PLANAR LANGUAGES. Fucking stupid question from the start.

Just you wait, mate! IN BG3! There will be this dragon and the player can go "What a strange name! How exotic!"
"Oh yes! It means She-Man-Hood-Elf-Scale-Attack Helicopter-Platform! Of how I identify as a person!"

And then you decide to sit down and drink tea, sex is also an option.

Bad jokes aside, yes, it is very fucking retarded and stupid.

 

[GrainWetski]

Considering Amber's reason for putting in this character is that "straight and white" aren't reflective of the real world and aren't the "baseline", any lore-related reasons you can come up with for this character being so badly written can safely be discarded as pure nonsense.

As far as I can tell she is telling this story because player asked about her name. Since sex change is very casual thing in faerun, it doesn't sound more outlandish than telling that you have a strange name because you are a foreigner.

'Be gone, foul creature' might be a bad idea unless you add 'die CIS SCUM' or 'die feminazi' to every dialogue with every npc ever so that you can roleplay GG sturmfuhrer or radical feminist too. Why limit player with only option to roleplay a transophobe? Developers need to cover all spectre.

It all makes sense.

Yes. Please give me the option to say fuck off to every single badly written NPC in your RPGs.