Review RPG Codex Review: Baldur's Gate: Siege of Dragonspear

[Fairfax]

Icewind Dale was mostly bug-free. Arcanum, on the other hand...

And does anyone know how well SoD sold? Did Beamdog make a profit off it?

Steamspy has no data on DLC. The game did get Steam Achievements added, including SoD. The most common SoD achievement is "The End of Korlasz - Dealt with Korlasz, the last follower of Sarevok". Don't know how early that is in the expansion, but 0.9% of players have it. Roughly 4,042 players.
Even if we assume that's 1/10 of the people who bought the expansion (random, optimistic number), 40k is terrible.

 

[Manmower]

IIRC, Korlasz is the end boss of the 1st dungeon you're dropped in at the very beginning of the game.

But yeah, 40k is abysmal. Beamdog really needs a competent writer or two, SoD suffered so much from Amber's inanity.

And one thing that boggles my mind is how in the hell did they manage to produce maps with blurrier backgrounds than the old BG?

 

[Infinitron]

I don't think BG:SoD has sold that many copies. I also don't think lack of Amber Scott is what would have saved it. There is not a huge market for expansions, and there's especially not a huge market for expansions to 17 year old games.

Before anything else, the #1 thing this game needed is to be released as a standalone title.

 

[Fairfax]

40k was a sort of "best case scenario" example. I doubt it's anywhere near that right now.
SoD might've been their experiment to pitch BG3 to WOTC/Hasbro. In that regard, it's a complete failure, but then again, SCL happened, so who knows...

 

[felipepepe]

Before anything else, the #1 thing this game needed is to be released as a standalone title.

This. The are selling it as a "DLC", but it's way to expensive for that. AND it requires me to own BG:EE, which I don't. So I need to pay R$ 72 if I wish to play it. I can buy Stardew Valley 3 times with that money.

Seems like they arrogantly went in like "we have a killer product, let's use it to sell more BG:EE copies!".

 

[Manmower]

Infinitron, I disagree. The writing is ultimately what buried the game.

It wasn't bad, but neither was it good, let alone amazing. They should have gone all-out, and hired at least 2 more writers. Crafted a ToB-esque expansion of similar production value, but non-linear. Added interesting NPCs, not lulzy gnomes and tryhard female guard captains. Again, the xpac wasn't bad, but neither does it offer anything that would justify its purchase. Hell, if I was Trent Oster, I'd have paid Zeits or MCA to draw up the critical path and the companions outline.

 

[Athelas]

Hell, if I was Trent Oster, I'd have paid Zeits or MCA to draw up the critical path and the companions outline.

I'm sure they'd be ecstatic to quit their jobs in favor of the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to work on a game series that spawned such unique characters like Aerie and Minsc.

 

[Manmower]

I'm sure they'd be ecstatic to abandon their current jobs in favor of the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to work on a game series that spawned such unique characters like Aerie and Minsc.

Devs of their caliber can write a critpath over the course of a single weekend, don't kid yourself. And money's money - lots of people freelance.

 

[MRY]

[E]ventually confronting May Farrow's husband - now a powerful abomination which feeds from guilt.

Wait a second.

Just so I'm perfectly clear . . . the lost Holy Grail of the Codex is about a quest to stop Woody Allen? What the actual devil?

 

[Manmower]

Doesn't MCA always say it's about the execution, not the idea itself?

Spoiler

Can any of you fine gentlemen tell me how to disable automatic updates to my e-mail? The Codex is raping my inbox.

 

[pippin]

Before anything else, the #1 thing this game needed is to be released as a standalone title.

This. The are selling it as a "DLC", but it's way to expensive for that. AND it requires me to own BG:EE, which I don't. So I need to pay R$ 72 if I wish to play it. I can buy Stardew Valley 3 times with that money.

Seems like they arrogantly went in like "we have a killer product, let's use it to sell more BG:EE copies!".

They couldn't sell it as a new product for issues with the edition BG1 uses and everything. If they had made an IE game with 5th ed. they could have done it as a new game.
Last time the estimate was 3k copies. I think it will sit at 5k, with small bumps every 4 or 6 months, when sales happen.

 

[Manmower]

Last time the estimate was 3k copies.

There's no way it can be that low. Even vaporware and half-finished early access garbage manages to break 5k, regardless of quality. Are you sure it's 3k, and not 30k?

 

[Xzylvador]

Because playing the same fucking game over and over again sucks.

Wasn't there this game running for GOTY 2015 with a pretty short playthrough time but its creator said this wasn't a problem because it offered so much replayability?

I could be wrong though...

Pretty sure it didn't win.

 

[pippin]

Last time the estimate was 3k copies.

There's no way it can be that low. Even vaporware and half-finished early access garbage manages to break 5k, regardless of quality. Are you sure it's 3k, and not 30k?

Judging by achievements and other stuff, people were guessing they sold around that number. Consider it's a DLC, it wasn't discounted,it requires a game not everyone has and probably won't ever buy, and the fact that it barely made it to page 5 of Steam's top selling items on release day. And that's not considering the bad buzz about the tranny. I'd say 3k is a safe bet.

 

[Manmower]

I'd say 3k is a safe bet.

Christ, they're fucked. Irrevocably. SoD was supposed to be their BG3 springboard. No way in hell are they ever getting it approved now.

But hey, at least they tried to be :incloosive:

 

[MRY]

Last time the estimate was 3k copies.

There's no way it can be that low. Even vaporware and half-finished early access garbage manages to break 5k, regardless of quality. Are you sure it's 3k, and not 30k?

BGEE went from 371 simultaneous users to 3756 simultaneous users upon the DLC's release. So, just on Steam, within the first week, it sold >3k, and that's assuming* that everyone who bought it was playing at the same time.

(* This is not remotely true. Maximum simultaneously players usually is a small fraction of purchasing customers.)

 

[Infinitron]

You're wrong pippin, that estimate is only a lower bound.

 

[pippin]

Yeah, sadly we don't have a way to properly know the ammount of copies sold by a DLC, so everything is like guess work here. I remember it held high positions at GOG, but apparently you don't really have to sell that much to get there. Besides, the record is still held by both Original Sin and Witcher 3, which were among the top 15 for months after release. I wouldn't be surprised if there's actually a lot of people buying it from GOG, after all it's "their" kind of game, the site practically started as a way to sell Fallout and the IE games among others.

Last time the estimate was 3k copies.

There's no way it can be that low. Even vaporware and half-finished early access garbage manages to break 5k, regardless of quality. Are you sure it's 3k, and not 30k?

BGEE went from 371 simultaneous users to 3756 simultaneous users upon the DLC's release. So, just on Steam, within the first week, it sold >3k, and that's assuming* that everyone who bought it was playing at the same time.

(* This is not remotely true. Maximum simultaneously players usually is a small fraction of purchasing customers.)

Personally I was guesing the SoD owners considering these numbers, but then we have the fact that the EEs were discounted but SoD wasn't (a very dumb move to be honest, almost every game at least has a 15% discount on release day/week). Beamdog were over estimating their reach imo. They probably haven't considered that people buying the EEs did it for the games themselves and not because of Beamdog. Didn't one of their bosses expected SoD to sell like 1mill copies? That would mean every Steam owner of BG1EE would have to buy SoD, and that clearly didn't happened.

 

[Manmower]

Didn't one of their bosses expected SoD to sell like 1mill copies?

 

[Infinitron]

No, the game's lead designer said he'd be thrilled if it sold 1 million copies and thought it was plausible. That number would include mobile, not just Steam/PC.

 

[Manmower]

No, the game's lead designer said he'd be thrilled if it sold 1 million copies and thought it was plausible. That number would include mobile, not just Steam/PC.

Mightily ambitious of them. Not even PoE broke 1mil, and that was a brand-new game set in a fresh world with a clean IP.

 

[Infinitron]

No, the game's lead designer said he'd be thrilled if it sold 1 million copies and thought it was plausible. That number would include mobile, not just Steam/PC.

Mightily ambitious of them. Not even PoE broke 1mil, and that was a brand-new game set in a fresh world with a clean IP.

Well, PoE is also more than twice as expensive as Siege of Dragonspear. People tend to forget about that part of the equation. Not that it matters this time.

 

[Bubbles]

Personally I was guesing the SoD owners considering these numbers, but then we have the fact that the EEs were discounted but SoD wasn't (a very dumb move to be honest, almost every game at least has a 15% discount on release day/week).

Yeah, I think BG:EE should have been free or near-free on SoD's launch, and SoD should have had a launch day discount.

By the way, Steamspy's ownership numbers of BGEE went from ~480k pre-SoD to ~530k post-SoD. The base game even briefly made it into the Steam top 10, owing to the 75% discount; meanwhile, the DLC was far behind.

That's more than enough to account for the surge in simultaneous users on launch day, without forcing us to assume that SoD sold tens of thousands of copies. In fact, it means that SoD cannot have sold anywhere close to 50k copies, since it was always far behind the base game.

You can also look at the metrics another way: the SoD launch patch added achievements to the base game, and the earliest base game cheevo is sitting at 6.6%. That means that about 35k people have played through [warning: heavy spoilers!] Gorion's death since SoD came out, which is quite respectable; conversely, fewer than 3k have actually finished the base game since then. That makes me think that many of these new active players are in the middle of a base game playthrough, and not an expansion playthrough.

 

[ZagorTeNej]

I'm sure they'd be ecstatic to quit their jobs in favor of the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to work on a game series that spawned such unique characters like Aerie and Minsc.

Eh you do realize BG2 is one of Ziets' favourite games and that on several occasions he talked about cool concepts for a sequel (such as a divine-level campaign where the player starts off as a deity)?

 

[Manmower]

Any news on what Trent and his lepers are up to right now?

EDIT: