SoD NPC Status
MrBungle
Member Posts: 50
What is the speculation that Imoen will be unavailable as an NPC based on? I think it would be a goodwill gesture of Devs to give us basic information as to availability of NPC's in SoD. Being able to prep a party in BGEE while waiting for SoD to come out might take some of the sting out of not playing SoD over the winter holiday.
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Comments
1) In all the screenshots, trailers, announcement demos, etc., Imoen is never once seen as a party member, even though numerous others are seen in various combinations; and
2) Imoen is nevertheless on-screen at one stage in the announcement demo stream, but as a neutral blue-circled character (i.e. not a party member) who is apparently guiding the party through a particular area (which appears from context to be quite a long way into the game) which she has evidently already explored before the party reached that area.
I started wondering "Where the heck is Imoen?" because of 1), but then when I noticed 2) I realised that it'd be very difficult to make sense of the scene where she acts as a neutral guide for the party if it were possible for her to join the party before that point. Therefore, at least up until that stage, Imoen probably can't be available.
Possibly after that "guide" stage, Imoen could become joinable ... but even so, she's still never shown as a party member, which seems very odd for such a popular and important figure in the story. So my guess is that she's never shown in the party because she's never joinable at all in SoD, except perhaps close to the end (which of course isn't shown in the publicity material) so that we can finish with the canon party which starts BG2.
Adding to my original hypothesis, someone else (sorry, I forget who, credit to whoever it was) pointed out that:
3) it's necessary for the start of BG2 that Imoen has already dual-classed into a Mage, but if she were in our party then it'd be up to us to decide whether or not to dual-class her, so players might somehow mess up the continuity of the story by not dualling her.
Therefore it seems plausible that we'll be told, early in SoD, that Imoen has signed on for some Mage training with someone else, or in any case that she's going off to do something separate from our party (which will eventually turn out to involve Mage training). Then by the time we meet her later, she'll definitely have dualled into Mage (whether or not we dual-classed her ourselves in BG1ee) ready for the start of BG2. I tend to agree that a little more info would be welcome, but we're not completely in the dark.
We know from the pre-release publicity that several BG1ee NPCs are definitely available, because they are shown as party members. These are Minsc & Dynaheir, Jaheira & Khalid, Safana, Neera, Dorn, Viconia, Edwin, and Baeloth. It's also verbally implied (and makes sense) that Rasaad is available to join, although he's not shown. We also know that Skie has some sort of role in SoD, because she's mentioned in a briefly-shown journal entry, but it's not clear whether she's available to join.
Of the other BG1ee joinable NPCs, we can only guess whether or not they can join the SoD party. We've been told that all BG1ee characters can be imported to the start of SoD, but warned that some might not stick around. My own guess is that most (or indeed all) of those not named above will bail out more-or-less immediately, but we'll see when we see.
You can watch a demo here - http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2zdbqm, and here're 2 screenshots from there showing Imoen as a non-party character, with the new portrait (the quality of the video is only 480p)
The better quality can be found in the OP here: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/42408/evidence-for-removed-npcs-in-sod/p1 by @billbisco (copyied from the original beamdog channel while it was available) in the part 3 "Imoen Staying Behind"
This is the Imoen's new portrait (the best I could make with all options available):
"Tis' something most unnatural here, and I want no part of it."
Also, maybe her dialogues shown in the demo were not final and were actually redone up to the "content-complete" phase.
Oh.. She will be TMCSG, won't she? I tend to think that most of all things we saw before "content-complete" are now different, considering amount of passed time.