Baldur's Gate Siege of Dragonspear was actually OK

[Mr. Magniloquent]

I recently replayed Baldur's Gate because I wanted to check out Siege of Dragonspear and compare unmodded BG to Kingmaker. I played the EE because I wanted to evaluate that as well. I'm also running Linux, so it's simpler. I have to say I was pleasantly surprised. Baldur's Gate holds up very well. I enjoyed it every bit as much as I remembered. Dragonspear was very enjoyable too, and not just because I went in with low expectations.

The Good:

Dragonspear does two things really well. Combat and dungeon design. They flimsy plot is mostly a pretext for large scale fights, and I enjoyed them greatly. I replayed many of the encounters simply because they were fun. Beamdog also tuned the encounters very well. They expect the player to understand the game. Beamdog doesn't pull any punches, and frequently dishes them out. They also brushed up on the vanilla AI. It's not SCS, but that's probably for the best. The enemy forces are well composed and cooperate cohesively. Dungeons and general areas are well designed, expansive, and have a lot to do. Quests require some attention and don't involve too much backtracking. The areas also look great and don't appear out of character despite being made well over a decade later.

The Bad:

Despite the areas looking good, the player will need to disable all of Beamdog's visual "enhancements". Their changes can push the sprites out of the scenery. The plot is also terrible. It should have been a stand alone module like the Black Pit, as it's all but entirely irrelevant to The Saga. Shoehorning Irenicus in was dumb, and the age of the voice actor shows painfully. There is definitely some SJW shit in here, but it's not as much as reputed. The tranny is bizarre and beyond the pale, but I found most of the SJW crap in the beginning. Beamdog annoyed me by forcing the player's hand heavily with a refugee crisis. Once you get past the initial act, all of that goes away. The last thing that's so/so would be the items. The game throws consumables at you and encourages their use, which is good. The bad is that much of the equipment is designed with a highly specific kit in mind, making most of them vendor trash. The plot ends on a sour note as it drags itself out on a tangent after the final boss. It's absolutely banal and contrived and left me begging for the credits to roll.

The Ugly:

The goddamn NPCs. Rather than let you play with any of the team you assembled in BG1, they eliminate nearly the whole lot of them. You're then forced to recruit the leavings in a manner that's easy to botch if you choose the wrong dialogue choice. The many new NPCs are all try hard, obnoxious, juvenile, and sex crazed. Seriously. Every fucking NPC in Dragonspear is trying to have sex with the MC. The only thing more egregious is how fervently Beamdog tries to convince the player how wonderful the antagonist is to the point of limiting the character's dialogue to 1) Fawning adoration 2) Grudging respect 3) i'M a PsYHcoKIlleR! Thankfully, Beamdog lets you skip through all of the cut scenes.

Verdict:

Overall, I still had alot of fun. Combat in the IE engine is still crisp and fluid. If Beamdog does understand one thing, it's combat. All of the annoyances are easily moved past with a spacebar, and you get back to exploring the well made areas and engaging in the many great fights. Should it be part of the BG Saga? Absolutely not. Was it fun? Definitely--at least when it's not trying to beat you with the threadbare plot. In the end, I wanted more IE dungeon crawling and combat, and Dragonspear delivers this in spades.

*Edited for grammar/spelling

 

[Harthwain]

Every fucking NPC in Dragonspear is trying to have sex with the MC.

Romances!

 

[Pink Eye]

>The many new NPCs are all try hard, obnoxious, juvenile, and sex crazed
Funny. Baldur's Gate 2 had the same sex crazed NPCs too.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Everything except the writing is good. The writers destroyed what would have otherwise been a decent game.
Nice art, encounters, dungeons, etc.,

 

[Mr. Magniloquent]

Everything except the writing is good. The writers destroyed what would have otherwise been a decent game.
Nice art, encounters, dungeons, etc.,

Another anecdote about the dungeons, was the use of traps and minor puzzles. They all had a good flow, and the player needed to stay aware to avoid bad situations. My party's thief got frequent use of all their skills throughout the entire module. It's just a crying shame that they force Safana on the player whilst making her an intolerably obnoxious caricature.

 

[octavius]

I think the good encounter design in SoD was primarily thanks to long time modder aVenger?

 

[AwesomeButton]

Everything except the writing is good.

It's also too linear for what I would expect from a BG game.

 

[Red Hexapus]

Another anecdote about the dungeons, was the use of traps and minor puzzles. They all had a good flow, and the player needed to stay aware to avoid bad situations. My party's thief got frequent use of all their skills throughout the entire module. It's just a crying shame that they force Safana on the player whilst making her an intolerably obnoxious caricature.

I agree. Played it finally not so long ago and utterly detested what they did with Safana...

 

[DeepOcean]

The module has one of the most amateurish starts a module can have, everything on Baldurs Gate is just awful amateurish and should had been cut. However, the module gets alot better after you leave Baldurs Gate. I have to confess that for a few hours, on the Baldur's Gate outskirts area, I thought this module was starting to be good, because some of its side content in that area is actually good, I really liked that to actually kill the lich, you need to find its phylactery, same with a vampire, you need to stake him and for the first time ever I found the immunity from domination the barbarian berserk useful for something on the Illithid dungeon that was also really good. Avenger, wherever you are dude, you are a really good dungeon level designer.

HOWEVER, the retardation that makes the begining awful returns in full force right after that little reprieve. I mean, there are some people out there that claim that they are zen masters and can ignore the smell of the feces that are everything not related with combat but I dont have that power. I mean, I can easily deal with boring and uninspired stories because of combat, after all I survived ToEE to enjoy the combat but on this module, if it was just that, boring and uninspired, it would be okay, but it was a fanfiction written by an edgy overweight SJW goth girl on Tumblr, that was the level of the main content writing for most part, when it reaches "man, this is offending my intelligence" levels, I just quit.

I mean, damn..., there are plenty of better games out there that dont demand my patience that much and for the most part the garbage waste of time/good content ratio was too high for me.

 

[Max Heap]

The music is quite enjoyable. Not as good as Hoenigs work but overall quite alright:



Of course none of that helps if you have an abysmal retard of a writer who felt like it was appropriate to push his personal trite agenda not just between the lines (which is common) but slap you in the face with a bunch of dumb characters that are generally awful. It's not just that one character. The companions are pretty bad as well.
Also their art is inconsistent with the rest, which is - interestingly enough - very telling of the attitude some of those team members apparently had towards the original game. They simply did not understand the importance of coherence while adapting a classic.

Next to a bad programmer a shit writer is probably the worst that can happen to a game.

It's a problem you see a lot these days. It's not just Dragonspear.
The most prominent example seems to be TLoU2, but I would rather go with Horizon: Zero Dawn - which was both visually and technically very well done, while being a somewhat original setting. And then it was fucking ruined by completely moronic dialogue writers.

Writing is like a bottleneck of quality. And most modern writers can't even come up to a level of quality that was once considered standard. I believe it is a generational problem and the media those writers grew up with. I believe in literally every creative field - from writing, to art, to product design even - there is a process of ongoing specification that narrows down sources of inspiration.
As a result media becomes self-referential and ultimately uninspired. The gaps are then filled with gimmicks (for example memes or politics).

From a more abstracted point of view, you can see the same phenomenon in game design as well - best explained by the example of MMORPGs: First you had a very unstructured field and you get stuff like Ultima Online or Meridian or Everquest - drawing inspiration from novels, movies, tabletop games, etc etc. And then things become more specific and suddenly you have a thousand WoW clones and every single one has to go through a checklist of allowed features.

The only way to counter this issue as a creator is to completely detach yourself from similar works and to actually go back to a wider range of potential (classic) inspirations. You'll need a good hand at balancing experimental results though or you'll risk becoming a pretentious avantgardist snob that doesn't produce anything of value.

In short: Read a wide range of classic, original works. Go from there and keep inspiration from derivative works at a minimum. If you want to improve on anything try trimming things down in a sensible way instead of adding to the heap of concepts. The key word here is entropy. If your work conveys the same information as another but in a simpler way, that's the way to go. Otherwise: Fingers off!

You will quickly realize this is contradictory to many modern currents in language, which generally seek to broaden meaning in everything and make things applicable in inconsistent contexts - ultimately leading to nothing but confusion and conflict.

 

[Parabalus]

The itemization is pretty good, which is also mostly true for all the items added in the EEs.

Thankfully all the SoD items can be modded into BG2 so you can see them there.

 

[octavius]

Writing is like a bottleneck of quality. And most modern writers can't even come up to a level of quality that was once considered standard. I believe it is a generational problem and the media those writers grew up with. I believe in literally every creative field - from writing, to art, to product design even - there is a process of ongoing specification that narrows down sources of inspiration.
As a result media becomes self-referential and ultimately uninspired. The gaps are then filled with gimmicks (for example memes or politics).

From a more abstracted point of view, you can see the same phenomenon in game design as well - best explained by the example of MMORPGs: First you had a very unstructured field and you get stuff like Ultima Online or Meridian or Everquest - drawing inspiration from novels, movies, tabletop games, etc etc. And then things become more specific and suddenly you have a thousand WoW clones and every single one has to go through a checklist of allowed features.

The only way to counter this issue as a creator is to completely detach yourself from similar works and to actually go back to a wider range of potential (classic) inspirations. You'll need a good hand at balancing experimental results though or you'll risk becoming a pretentious avantgardist snob that doesn't produce anything of value.

It's so very problematic that nearly all the classics were written by white men (most of whom should be canceled, of course, in the name of tolerance).

 

[Gargaune]

Yes, SoD is a pretty decent piece of work on the whole, it's poorly written but competently designed. I wouldn't have minded seeing more IE content from Beamdog, seeing as they would've realised they'd need to improve their writing but they had their dungeons in excellent order.

Shoehorning Irenicus in was dumb, and the age of the voice actor shows painfully.

My biggest problem with writing Irenicus in was that it sort of undercuts his appearance in SoA. Instead of facing this strange, unfamiliar weightlifting wizard, you're captured by the guy who's been hounding you for months. There's also a bit of that relative to the setting of SoD's final act, which takes the legs out from under the locale for your final confrontation with Irenicus in SoA. And since I got going, I also wish that SoD didn't completely fill the gap between the two main games, but that might be personal preference.

The last thing that's so/so would be the items. The game throws consumables at you and encourages their use, which is good. The bad is that much of the equipment is designed with a highly specific kit in mind, making most of them vendor trash.

I thought the loot design was very good, actually. A lot of stuff is geared towards a specific kit but plenty still has benefits for other classes, which was an interesting development.

It's also too linear for what I would expect from a BG game.

While I also felt it was a bit too linear, I think the fairest comparison would be to ToB, rather than the original BG or SoA. In which case it gets a pass.

 

[Aarwolf]

It's also too linear for what I would expect from a BG game.

This. Especially if you play it straight after BG1, which was for me much more free form experience and I really like it.

The ending and the transition to BG2 also felt weird. I got my own party and then, all of the sudden, almost everyone was like "I have to go to do my things, thx, bye" and I had to stay with canonical Irenicus dungeon party.

All in all SoD should have been seperate module, not something crammed inbetween BG1 and BG2.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

All in all SoD should have been seperate module, not something crammed inbetween BG1 and BG2.

Probably a licensing thing

 

[Gargaune]

All in all SoD should have been seperate module, not something crammed inbetween BG1 and BG2.

Probably a licensing thing

Some of that might've been going on, yes. Due to WotC's licensing limitation on deprecated D&D editions, SoD had to be an expansion to an existing game. In fact, I distinctly remember a dev acknowledging the overabundance of "humour" and blaming its density on the shifting scope of the project - apparently they first intended on making a small questline DLC, then they expanded to making a full, standalone game, and then they had to scale down to making a BG1 expansion.

 

[Dorateen]

The best part of SoD was the Dwarves of Dumathoin quest. And the game integrates a party creation interface right into the start, so you don't have to take any of the NPCs. It plays more like Icewind Dale than Baldur's Gate and that's a good thing.

 

[Jvegi]

SoD is shit.

/thread. Ban OP.

 

[Russia is over. The end.]

codexers are saying that SoD is ok...

Codexers would eat shit for breakfast if it had Obsidian/BioWare/Bethesda logo on it.

 

[Imrahil]

I agree with most of what the OP wrote, except for the title. Just because it has some decent parts (items, big combats, good side quests) does not make the sum of its parts even "OK".

The plot & story being absolutely horrible cannot make up for the good stuff. The fact that it doesn't tie into either BG1 or BG2 in any real meaningful way, even to the extent of bridging the gap between them (you're still left with "And then we all got captured randomly & wound up in Chateau Irenicus") which was supposed to be its whole purpose. It actually diminishes Irenicus in a way. And the whole Skie plot felt stupid & completely OOC for her. Also, it's a minor complaint, but shows how little thought they put into the resolution: a Cleric couldn't wield the Soultaker dagger anyway - no matter how silly that 2nd Edition rule is in hindsight, it was still a rule.

Skie was just the most egregious example of the butchering of existing characters' behaviors & personalities. Safana was also horribly treated by the writers. Even when they tried to explain Imoen's development into a Mage, they handled it in the worst way possible - just removing her from the party & sidelining her. They tried to explain that by pointing out she was needed for the sequel, but you could still get Khalid killed "too early" for example, so that reason doesn't actually work.

The other thing I had a big problem with was throwing our mid-level party up against several of the big hitters from BG2, which is 1) unrealistic & 2) undercuts meeting them for the first time in BG2: an Illithid, a Lich, a Dragon, for example. Icing on the cake was Belhifet - a demon, in his home plane, who our IWD 15+ level parties often struggled with.

 

[AwesomeButton]

BTW, can SoD be played in Multiplayer?

 

[MrMarbles]

Writing is like a bottleneck of quality. And most modern writers can't even come up to a level of quality that was once considered standard. I believe it is a generational problem and the media those writers grew up with. I believe in literally every creative field - from writing, to art, to product design even - there is a process of ongoing specification that narrows down sources of inspiration.
As a result media becomes self-referential and ultimately uninspired. The gaps are then filled with gimmicks (for example memes or politics).

From a more abstracted point of view, you can see the same phenomenon in game design as well - best explained by the example of MMORPGs: First you had a very unstructured field and you get stuff like Ultima Online or Meridian or Everquest - drawing inspiration from novels, movies, tabletop games, etc etc. And then things become more specific and suddenly you have a thousand WoW clones and every single one has to go through a checklist of allowed features.

The only way to counter this issue as a creator is to completely detach yourself from similar works and to actually go back to a wider range of potential (classic) inspirations. You'll need a good hand at balancing experimental results though or you'll risk becoming a pretentious avantgardist snob that doesn't produce anything of value.

In short: Read a wide range of classic, original works. Go from there and keep inspiration from derivative works at a minimum. If you want to improve on anything try trimming things down in a sensible way instead of adding to the heap of concepts. The key word here is entropy. If your work conveys the same information as another but in a simpler way, that's the way to go. Otherwise: Fingers off!

You will quickly realize this is contradictory to many modern currents in language, which generally seek to broaden meaning in everything and make things applicable in inconsistent contexts - ultimately leading to nothing but confusion and conflict.

You nailed it That last bit is about conceptual overreach, and thankfully there is a growing number of people worried about it.

You also mentioned going back to classic inspirations. That could mean all sorts of media, but I've also often wondered whether this new generation of writers has actually done any serious reading in their liives. I mean, it must be hard to crank out all that shitty fanfic dialogue after going through a couple of shelves of classical literature.

 

[razvedchiki]

no shit.

 

[Gargaune]

BTW, can SoD be played in Multiplayer?

It has a Multiplayer button on the menu, so I guess so. Never clicked it, I don't multiplay.

 

[Chippy]

OP post is proof that covid, covid vaccines, librul properganda, marxist education in the west, soy in our food, fluoride in our toothpaste, Joe Biden winning the election, Netflix, mainstream media, the catholic pope, the church of england, and the sissyfication of porn is starting to have far reaching consequences.

Apparently the effects of the above have even reached the Codex. Next thing the Codex will be saying that Chris Avellone upvoted SOD because he really admired Amber Scott as a writer.