Did you know?
Onestep
Member Posts: 225
So this is just a thread for interesting things that people have picked up over the years. While most of the information has been freely available for some time, the game is big enough that you might find something you missed. If not, it's still fun to see just how much detail the developers put in.
Did you know that if you are playing an elf named Drizzt, and your reputation is under 12, Drizzt will attack you? Did you also know that if you kill the three mages guarding the skyship devices in Baldur's Gate, then Shandalar skips the 'asking' part of sending you to the Ice Island? Not surprising, given that they were his daughters. Guy is probably a bit angry at you.
Did you know that if you are playing an elf named Drizzt, and your reputation is under 12, Drizzt will attack you? Did you also know that if you kill the three mages guarding the skyship devices in Baldur's Gate, then Shandalar skips the 'asking' part of sending you to the Ice Island? Not surprising, given that they were his daughters. Guy is probably a bit angry at you.
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Did you know that the alleged curse on the play you get to set up in the theater under the Five Flagons Inn if you are playing a Bard is a reference to the curse some believe is attached to Shakespeare's MacBeth? Actors are often afraid to name MacBeth and call it "The Scottish Play", just like your actors are afraid to name The Sorcerer's Bane and call it "The Turmish Play".
The word 'aerie' is an alternate/american spelling of the word 'eyrie', meaning the nest of a large bird of prey (I gather it's also the name of a company that makes lingerie or some such thing).
"Originally Imoen did not exist in Baldur's Gate. Her character was a late addition to fill a non-psychotic-thief gap in the early levels. There was no recording budget left, so her lines were scraped together from voice-over left from a scrapped demo. The original character was a guard named Pique"
Did you know that if you've advanced the Aerie romance to a certain point before you recruit Haer'Dalis, then she will rebuff Haer'Dalis herself, preventing any kind of love triangle from forming?
Did you know that an NPC in Baldur's Gate, Lord Foreshadow, basically told you about Neverwinter Nights?
WTF you ask? Let me explain...
Here are my assumptions:
# of copies of the games sold: 6 mio
Source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baldur's_Gate
gives "As of 2006, total sales for all releases in the series was almost five million copies.[24]"
Since then various bundled editions, console versions, GOG as well as EE have come out. 6 mio is a conservative estimate, you can also find around 8 mio units with about 2.5 for the console versions:
http://www.quora.com/Baldurs-Gate/How-many-copies-of-each-of-the-games-in-the-Baldurs-Gate-series-were-sold
# of hours played: 100
(typical BG2+ToB run is somewhere around 100 hours if you know the game well and breeze through, 200 for a full walk with most side quests and Heindrich hat recently posted something like 290 or so for his blind run). Even taking into account that many of copies will never have a that kind of playing time a lot of the active players will easily have spent thousands of hours over the last 15 years covering for quite a few idle copies.
# hourly rate: 50$
Just get your washing machine fixed or your walls painted and you'll pay more than that, typical engineering hourly rates are more like 80-100$.
Suddenly those 20$ you spent on the EE don't look like much any more
Did you know that when you click on Jaheira and give her an order, and she says "By your command" in a robotic tone, she is referring to the 1970's campy version of "Battlestar Galactica?" The cylon centurions in that series would always say that when given orders by a commander cylon, in exactly the tone that Jaheira uses.
Did you know that Larry, Darryl, and Darryl, the kobold, xvart and tasloi who offer you their autograph in the Cloudpeak mountains are characters from the second Bob Newhart show from the 1980's?
Did you know that
As for number of hours per copy: yes, that's the biggest unknown / most flexible assumption, but even someone finishing it just once will have spent >200 hours so already covering for a completely idle copy sold. Hardcore players will cover 10 or more copies in 15 years since release. So overall it's a pretty realistic assumption I think.
In the end it doesn't really matter what the actual number is: it's a hell of a lot no matter how you cut it (true for all successfull video games of course).
- Many of the BG1 portraits are made from photos of the team that made the game, and their wives and friends. Cameron Tofer is perhaps most well known as Garrick, whereas old Bioware bosses Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk are Ajantis and Coran. When Beamdog did an AMA on reddit Trent Oster (who is apparently Dorn) named the people behind as many portraits as he could remember.
- One of my favourite BG2 minor characters, Habib Khalid Achmed Allafif who randomly shows up and throws scimitars at you comes from the BG2 production phase when forum members could enter suggestions for minor NPC concepts. No idea who came up with Habib, but I'm glad he was chosen.
- Duke Entar Silvershield - sadly you need to use the Unfinished Business mod or the console to spawn him in the game, but it's obvious he was meant to be in. If you charm him, he will give you a lot of information about the Iron Throne and the situation between BG and Amn. He will also tell you - "since you are his very best friend" - that he has a beautiful daughter of marriageable age. It even generates a journal entry.
- "Peter of the North", the lone guy with baby wyverns in the cloakwood by all accounts is a reference to porn actor Peter North. The dialogue is loaded with "woodsman" and "get between a man and his wood" lines.
- A minor BG character I like a lot, Borinole Mann, will entertain you at an inn with some lengthy, exaggerated and incoherent stories from the good old days. I'm not sure if it's my non-native-English-speakerness, but it took me several playthroughs before I realized his name was, well.. boring old man.
- My pet peeve BG character Aldeth Sashenstar seems to play nice if you save him from the druids and then save his consortium from the doppelgangers, but if you go visit him again in chapter 7 when you're wanted, he will sell you out and deliver you to the guards.. making you wish you'd just let the druids kill him.
Kath Soucie is the voice of Aerie. She also did the voice of Lola Bunny in Space Jam, the voice of undead females in WoW, Amanda Evert in Tomb Raider Legend/Underworld along others?
Jennifer Hale did the voice of Dynaheir/Mazzy, Naomi Hunter from the Metal Gear Solid games, Fall-From-Grace and Deionarra in Planescape Torment, Bastila from Knights of the Old Republic, female Shepard from Mass Effect, Leah from Diablo 3 and many many other voices?
Michael Bell did the voice of Haer'Dalis. He also did Nimbul, Larrel from Icewind Dale, Raziel from the Legacy of Kain games, The Fear from Metal Gear Solid 3 and the Druid from Diablo 2?
Kevin Michael Richardson (one of my favorite voice actors ever) did the voice of Sarevok, the BG1 narrator, Yaga-Shura and Bhaal from ToB but also Goro from the Mortal Kombat film, Deus Ex Machina (talking robot baby) from Matrix Revolutions, Rampage from Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen?
I could post some more works of the voice actors if you found this interesting.
I really don't like the (so far thankfully few) modern games that think they're being so cool and progressive by having Hollywood actors play a character. Voice acting is not the same thing as being on camera, and frankly I think most current Hollywood actors are less talented than your average voice actor.
Ah erm... I said I've played 300+ hrs in total, but that includes MP games, an abandoned BG 1 Vanilla playthrough and my BG EE playthrough.
So for a full saga mostly blind, it was 240ish hours (160 hrs of Blind LP for BG 2 SoA + 80 hrs semi-blind first playthrough of BG EE.)
But yes, BG is very 'value for money' in terms of price vs length of entertainment. About 100 hrs into my LP, I told my friend that I was "nearing the end", cos I had finished SoA, and somebody told me ToB is "pretty short".
A month later and with my LP approaching 150 hrs, I told him that "I am almost done" just one more Bhaalspawn to go (I didn't realise Balthazar was one of the Five). A week later I finally called him to say that I had FINALLY finished, and "it only took another 10 hrs or so".
"WOW! 10 hours is about how long most modern games last". He replied.
Then go with that the average PC gamer comes with a level of computer experience, that shifts the average IQ up a bit. Add to that RPG gamers and it goes up a bit more. considering that there is a direct correlation between IQ and wage, comparing to the "Median" wage makes even less sense. How about comparing to the median IT wage? Then you are talking closer to $50 or higher.
Then add to the fact that fans of the game tend to be rabid fans, calling it Leisure time, and therefore less value add than work time seems a bit capricious. My free time is at a premium and I wouldn't under-cut it on my work time.