Enhanced? Nope. Baldur's Gate I & II: Tweaked Edition is what we actually got.
cryocore
Member Posts: 121
First off this isnt a hate thread. I actually like what been done here,, but in no way are they deserving of the title "Enhanced". They are in no way bad. Far from it in fact, but both stand as prime examples of wasted opportunity.
- The UI is still clunky and absolutely no effort was put in to make it more functional and user friendly.
- The Graphics have seen very little work (actually did a side by side with my GOG editions, and the so called improvements are either so subtle as to be virtually unnoticeable, or actually non existent).
- Sound is virtually untouched (although env effects do seem slightly better)
- New NPCs are ok, but add no value and certainly dont improve the game in any way.
- The Black Pits are insulting. Vapid pointless garbage that was nothing but a waste of time, money, and effort. their inclusion is an embarrassment, and not worthy of anyone's time (either developer or player). The time wasted on these pieces of dross would be better spent on enhancing, bug fixing, and polishing the core game.
The things that should have been done have not even been attempted, and before anyone replies with "they couldnt", ALL of these things could be done.
1: New UI. Modular, and enhanced with a cleaner interface and improved functionality (e.g expanding widows, improved hover interaction, moveable segements, and resizable). Maybe animated portraits, or some other visual polish.
2: Improved sprites. While making them 3D meshes to work in game would be asking a bit much, someone actually redesigning and polishing the sprites should have been a no brainer. The omission is frankly unacceptable. Some new animations at LEAST should have been included.
3: Improved spell effects. See above.
4: Improved backgrounds. While the original artwork is still amazing, there could have been some additional work in adding some flair to the animated sections, again though nothing was done.
5: Improved FMV's. The utterly appalling low rent motion comics in BG1 were a real low point, and the untouched movies from BGII is just lazy (or maybe erring on the side of caution after the response to the first game). Having the team create new fully animated hi rez versions of the original movies should have been a priority.
5: Player Character assets. many more portrait and voice options should have been included.
I am extremely grateful that the game works "out of the box" on my Win8 machine, and the native widescreen support and the Zoom ability are fantastic. The new kits are great, and all the rule fixes and refinements are also hugely appreciated.
There are other minor things I would have loved to see, but they're a personal preference thing, and not things I would expect to see, despite being things I would have liked to see.
I reviewed BGIIEE for GP and gave it 9/10. 8.75 of that is because Baldur's Gate II is still an amazing game, the other .25 is for the tweaks made. This could have been more though, and no one should be looking at this as how to enhance a classic game. Failing to do the minimum should not be rewarded.
I understand that a lot of hard work and real effort went in to these games, and I sincerely appreciate it, for the most part what was included is exceptional. Its what isnt here that I take issue with. You had an opportunity to REALLY make an impact, and you didnt. Mine like many other positive reviews highlight that the majority of that positive score is due to the core game and not the "enhancements". In fact many share my opinion that there isnt actually enough in here to earn the title Enhanced Edition. This is just one man's opinion though, and many people love everything you've done, I only wish I could feel the same way. When you're charging over twice the asking price of the vanilla editions, you better be backing that up with something worth that extra cash... that sadly isnt the case at this time.
What we have here is a strong base, now build some enhancements on that base and deliver the Enhanced experience that the game deserves, and I know you're capable of.
- The UI is still clunky and absolutely no effort was put in to make it more functional and user friendly.
- The Graphics have seen very little work (actually did a side by side with my GOG editions, and the so called improvements are either so subtle as to be virtually unnoticeable, or actually non existent).
- Sound is virtually untouched (although env effects do seem slightly better)
- New NPCs are ok, but add no value and certainly dont improve the game in any way.
- The Black Pits are insulting. Vapid pointless garbage that was nothing but a waste of time, money, and effort. their inclusion is an embarrassment, and not worthy of anyone's time (either developer or player). The time wasted on these pieces of dross would be better spent on enhancing, bug fixing, and polishing the core game.
The things that should have been done have not even been attempted, and before anyone replies with "they couldnt", ALL of these things could be done.
1: New UI. Modular, and enhanced with a cleaner interface and improved functionality (e.g expanding widows, improved hover interaction, moveable segements, and resizable). Maybe animated portraits, or some other visual polish.
2: Improved sprites. While making them 3D meshes to work in game would be asking a bit much, someone actually redesigning and polishing the sprites should have been a no brainer. The omission is frankly unacceptable. Some new animations at LEAST should have been included.
3: Improved spell effects. See above.
4: Improved backgrounds. While the original artwork is still amazing, there could have been some additional work in adding some flair to the animated sections, again though nothing was done.
5: Improved FMV's. The utterly appalling low rent motion comics in BG1 were a real low point, and the untouched movies from BGII is just lazy (or maybe erring on the side of caution after the response to the first game). Having the team create new fully animated hi rez versions of the original movies should have been a priority.
5: Player Character assets. many more portrait and voice options should have been included.
I am extremely grateful that the game works "out of the box" on my Win8 machine, and the native widescreen support and the Zoom ability are fantastic. The new kits are great, and all the rule fixes and refinements are also hugely appreciated.
There are other minor things I would have loved to see, but they're a personal preference thing, and not things I would expect to see, despite being things I would have liked to see.
I reviewed BGIIEE for GP and gave it 9/10. 8.75 of that is because Baldur's Gate II is still an amazing game, the other .25 is for the tweaks made. This could have been more though, and no one should be looking at this as how to enhance a classic game. Failing to do the minimum should not be rewarded.
I understand that a lot of hard work and real effort went in to these games, and I sincerely appreciate it, for the most part what was included is exceptional. Its what isnt here that I take issue with. You had an opportunity to REALLY make an impact, and you didnt. Mine like many other positive reviews highlight that the majority of that positive score is due to the core game and not the "enhancements". In fact many share my opinion that there isnt actually enough in here to earn the title Enhanced Edition. This is just one man's opinion though, and many people love everything you've done, I only wish I could feel the same way. When you're charging over twice the asking price of the vanilla editions, you better be backing that up with something worth that extra cash... that sadly isnt the case at this time.
What we have here is a strong base, now build some enhancements on that base and deliver the Enhanced experience that the game deserves, and I know you're capable of.
18
Comments
The UI is fine the way it is and animated portraits are completely unneeded. Not to mention impossible as they are not permitted to modify the art of the existing characters.
Also to claim that this game is not enhanced simply because it isn't as enhanced as you would have liked is just silly.
I see how Black Pits is the kind of feature that would help market the game, tho it really wasn't my cup of tea either; hopefully it didn't cost relatively much manpower though.
Considering the resources available to them, Im mostly happy n thankful for what the team has achieved.
But on the topic of Improving things... The backgrounds, when they were told to leave the existing parts of the game as they were, I assume this carried over to the background images and all that...
The sprites, I don't think they got their hands on the sprites to actually do anything with them, nobody kept that artwork around or something... And new animations for what exactly? They all already have all the animations they really need in terms of gameplay...
In my opinion this is the worst idea ever. I hate the Neverwinter Nights 2 or Dragon Age style character depictions where the characters all have horrible, bland, unchanging expressions on their faces. The great portraits are one of the most endearing parts of the Baldur's Gate series, and I would be against any change other than additional portraits and more options for NPC portraits.
But again, these are all personal preferences.
The same can be said about any NPC or mod, depending on what you value in the game. Also, the new NPCs come with a fair bit of new content. Just trying to troll now? This could have been at the top of your post, as many of your points come across as it. This is a totally fair point that you are obviously entitled to. The way I see it though, this was always a long-term project. The history of the BG games is such that they've been played for more than 10 years, in many ways due to the modding community; but the series has also been officially "dead" for a long time, with no hope of alterations to the engine or further official adventures or improvements being released. For all the skill of modders, there's always been things out of their reach.
With the EEs, the state of the BG series changed from "dead" to supported and evolving. The engine has received upgrades to allow for things that previously weren't doable, the game is getting patched and changed up, and more content is being planned. Things like these may not be immediately apparent with the "launch day review" impact perspective that you seem to express, but in my opinion that's never been the point. I agree that there's still work to be done and improvements to be made, but for all intents and purposes the EEs are shaping up to be the definite version of the BG series. I believe as time goes by both players and modders will shift over to them more and more.
That said, I have a hard time agreeing with some of the most vital design choices made, like how most of the new gameplay content is either arena-style combat that is very different from the original game tonally and in design, or require you to hire one of the new NPCs in order to access it, in a game that already had enough NPCs for several full-party playthroughs. That makes no sense to me.
Bugfixes are great, except that the modded and community-tweaked versions of BG1 and BG2 were already mostly bug-free, and all the enhanced editions did was introduce a different set of bugs, a lot of which are still in the game. A lot more testing and bug-fixing would have been required before the release of each game.
And of course, there's the movie fiasco in BG1:EE with some of the most awkward animations I've ever seen, in scenes that were clearly not suitable to be converted to the new art style (the intro and the outro come to mind), and half the original movies actually being removed from the game. I'm glad they decided not to touch the movies in BG2.
However, there are also many improvements without which I almost cannot play these games anymore. For example, the transparent menu screen backgrounds and the borderless action bar are invaluable to me - I could never go back to the original GUI. Also, the externalizations are very useful for modding. These are improvements that are definitely worth the purchase price for me.
I suppose I sounded rather harsh in this post, much more so than how I intended, but I'm just trying to be honest here. Once again I stress that I have a lot of respect for Beamdog and I'm glad we have the EE's, I just wish a lot of it had been done differently.
@cryocore: One thing you may wish to consider is the question of how much you can change an existing game before it ceases to be that game. Animated portraits? Modular UI? These things exist in many contemporary RPGs, to varying effect, but that doesn't mean they're an essential feature that needs to be backported to older games, any more than it would be necessary to revise the EEs so that they used 3rd or 4th Edition rules.
I tend to agree that the Black Pits are somewhat extraneous - maybe I'd feel differently if the story tied in more directly with the core campaign (similar to, say, the way "Storm of Zehir" and "Mask of the Betrayer" both explore the aftermath of the NWN2 storyline in different ways), and admittedly BP2 does offer a bit more in terms of subquests and variables... but at the end of the day, it's a combat simulator in a game that has no shortage of combat whatsoever.
I'd also point out that the NPCs have at least one value which is consistent regardless of your personal opinion about each character: they're new, and their presence adds variety to a game that's old enough for people to recite their favorite parties by heart. Speaking as someone who has always enjoyed Evil runs of the BG games, I can certainly tell you that Dorn adds a lot of value to my playing experience; likewise, Neera, Rasaad, Hexxat and Baeloth can create new combinations and variations, which in turn requires new strategies for playing the game.
IMO the biggest outrage is the new NPCs. Thankfully I can just ignore and/or kill them as I please.
Thus, given BG EE and BG 2EE are clearly an improvement on BG 1 Vanilla and BG 2 Vanilla, I see the term 'Enhanced Edition' as totally justified. 'How much' enhanced is open to debate, but it certainly is enhanced. And Honestly, Baldur's Gate Tweaked Edition probably wouldn't sell many copies :P
That said, I wish Beamdog would eliminate all the bugs on BG 2EE. Reading about all the bugs that came with BG 2 EE kinda disappointed me. I know pretty much every new game released nowadays are full of bugs on release, but I hoped Beamdog would have done better. I didn't plan to play BG 2EE immediately just encase of this (even though I pre-ordered), but I had hoped to be pleasantly surprised.
While I don't think that the new NPCs are bad, as users, shouldn't we be the ones to decide which NPC mods to use?
Yes, mods exist that fix all that. I've installed many of the mods, and some are brilliant. What Beamdog did was create a stable, updated, improved version of the BG series that bypasses the need to run Weidu or hack a .ini file (and keep your fingers crossed while playing that nothing crashes).
The ease of use ---while keeping the magic of the original releases--- makes it well worth what I paid, IMO. I don't think they ever pledged to deliver a completely different game!
I feel that I got what I paid for (being able to run the game on modern hardware with ease) plus some extras (which are fairly substantial), so I'm happy.
Me, I'm just happy the EEs exist at all. If a few years ago someone told me that by the end of 2013 I would be waiting on new patches to Baldur's Gate II, I'd ask what they were smoking.
1) I was semiserious (you can tell when I'm semiserious by the smiles
2) This has nothing to do with the quality of the new NPCs. Besides, I said several time (including in this very discussion) that they are not bad and I quite like them.
3) I'm more concerned about the new NPCs upsetting the balance of the original game (by adding overpowered NPCs, e.g Dorn, or overpowered items, e.g. Rasaad, etc.) than their quality. Yes, there are even more overpowered NPC mods out there, but they are not forced upon you.
4) #3 it's not really a problem for me, because it would be quite easy to make a WeiDU mod to disable the new NPCs (e.g. for Dorn I could just replace 'HasDLC("DORN")' with 'False()' in the script AR2301.BCS, etc.). The only reason why I didn't write such mod yet is that I'm too busy playing the original games at the moment
5) As alternative to #4, it is also very easy to make a mod to nerf their stats or items, or just ignore them altogether.
6) Whether the new official NPCs are better or even comparable to some of the NPCs from mods, it depends on individual tastes. I don't think that Saerileth is better than Rasaad (or Chloe better than Dorn), but I wouldn't be too surprised if there was someone out there that prefers the former to the latter. My point is that liking or not an NPC is subjective and may even not have anything to do with how well they are implemented or written.
I don't expect reviewers to hold off until the series is "finalized" though - their job is to call it as they see it - but on some level you also have to separate between 'reviewers' and players making relatively uninformed posts that in parts come close to trolling.
That said, the evolving and renewed state of the game is, even on-going as it is, a boon. People who never played BG before have played it, and (maybe more important still), people who previously knew nothing about the Infinity Engine are coming out of the woodwork and learning how to create mods and discussing how they'd like to be able to customize their BG experiences. Good for the game; good for the community.
Its different in a game like PS:T which has a very limited pre-set cast.
As for the Black Pits, never played it and probably never will. Don't really see the point of it. If I wanted to create my own custom party and fight wave after wave of monsters, I'd just play IWD. Yes. Frankly, it's a decision that makes little sense to me. It reminds me of those games where you can't skip the cut scenes--the devs are so in love with their work they just can't let you miss it. So if you want to see any of the new content, you have to take the new NPCS! Not exactly high praise...